I, Mona Lisa (2 page)

I lifted my skirts and dashed down the stairs full tilt, grateful that I encountered neither Zalumma nor my mother. Breathless, I arrived at the carriage just as the astrologer gave his driver the signal to leave.

I put my hand on the polished wooden door and looked up at the man sitting on the other side. “Please stop,” I said.

He gestured for the driver to hold the horses back and scowled sourly down at me; yet his gaze also held a curious compassion. “You would be the daughter, then.”

“Yes.”

He appraised me carefully. “I will not be party to deception. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Hmm. I see that you do not.” He paused to choose his words carefully. “Your mother, Madonna Lucrezia, said that you were the one who requested my services. Is that so?”

“It is.” I flushed, not knowing whether my admission would anger him further.

“Then you deserve to hear at least some of the truth—for you will never hear the full of it in this house.” His pompous irritation faded and his tone grew earnest and dark. “Your chart is unusual—some would say it is distressing. I take my art very seriously, and employ my intuition well, and both tell me that you are caught in a cycle of violence, of blood and deceit. What others have begun, you must finish.”

I recoiled. When I could find my voice, I insisted, “I want nothing to do with such things.”

“You are fire four times over,” he said. “Your temper is hot, a furnace in which the sword of justice must be forged. In your stars I saw an act of violence, one which is your past and your future.”

“But I would never do anything to hurt someone else!”

“God has ordained it. He has His reasons for your destiny.”

I wanted to ask more, but the astrologer called to his driver, and the pair of fine black horses pulled them away.

Perplexed and troubled, I walked back toward the house. By chance, I happened to lift my gaze, and saw Zalumma, staring down at me from the top-floor window.

.  .  .

By the time I returned to my chamber, she was gone. There I waited for half an hour until my mother called for me.

She still sat in the grand hall where she had received the astrologer. She smiled when I entered, apparently unaware of my encounter with him. In her hand she bore a sheaf of papers.

“Come, sit beside me,” she said brightly. “I shall tell you all about your stars. They should have been charted long ago, so I have decided that you still deserve a new gown. Your father will take you today into the city to choose the cloth; but you must say nothing to him about this. Otherwise, he will judge us as too extravagant.”

I sat stiffly, my back straight, my hands folded tightly in my lap.

“See here.” My mother set the papers in her lap and rested her fingertip on the astrologer’s elegant script. “You are Gemini, of course—air. And Pisces rising, which is water. Your moon is in Aries—fire. And you have many aspects of earth in your chart, which makes you exceedingly well balanced. This indicates a most fortunate future.”

As she spoke, my anger grew. She had spent the past half hour composing herself and concocting a happy falsehood. The astrologer had been right; I could not expect to find the truth here.

“You will have a long, good life, wealth, and many children,” my mother continued. “You need not worry about which man you marry, for you are so well aspected toward every sign that—”

I cut her off. “No,” I said. “I am fire four times over. My life will be marked by treachery and blood.”

My mother rose swiftly; the papers in her lap slipped to the floor and scattered. “Zalumma!” she hissed, her eyes lit by a fury I had never seen in her before. “Did she speak to you?”

“I spoke to the astrologer myself.”

This quieted her at once, and her expression grew unreadable. Carefully, she asked, “What else did he tell you?”

“Only what I just said.”

“No more?”

“No more.”

Abruptly drained, she sank back into her chair.

Lost in my own anger, I did not stop to think that my kind and doting mother wished only to shield me from evil news. I jumped to my feet. “All that you have said is a lie. What others have you told me?”

It was a cruel thing to say. She glanced at me, stricken. Yet I turned and left her sitting there, with her hand pressed to her heart.

I soon surmised that my mother and Zalumma had had a terrible argument. They had always been on the most amiable terms, but after the astrologer’s second visit, my mother grew cold each time Zalumma entered the room. She would not meet her slave’s gaze, nor would she speak more than a few words to her. Zalumma, in turn, was sullen and silent. Several weeks passed before they were friends once again.

My mother never spoke to me again of my stars. I often thought of asking Zalumma to find the papers the astrologer had given my mother so that I could read for myself the truth of my fate. But each time, a sense of dread held me back.

I already knew more than I wished.

Almost two years would pass before I learned of the crime to which I was inextricably bound.

APRIL 26, 1478

I
n the stark, massive Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli stood before the altar and fought to steady his shaking hands. He could not, of course—no more than he could hide the blackness in his heart from God. He pressed palms and fingers together in a gesture of prayer and held them to his lips. Voice unsteady, he whispered, pleading for the success of the dark venture in which he found himself entangled, pleading for forgiveness should it succeed.

I am a good man
. Baroncelli directed the thought to the Almighty.
I have always meant others well. How did I come to find myself here?

No answer came. Baroncelli fixed his gaze on the altar, fashioned of dark wood and gold. Through the stained-glass windows in the cupola, the morning light streamed down in golden rays, glittering with dust as they glinted off the golden fixtures. The sight evoked unsullied Eden. Surely God was here, but Baroncelli sensed no divine presence, only his own wickedness.

“God forgive me, a most miserable sinner,” he murmured. His quiet prayer mingled with the hundreds of hushed voices inside the cavernous Church of Saint Mary of the Flower—in this case, a lily. The sanctuary was one of the largest in the world, and built in the
shape of a Latin cross. Atop the juncture of the arms rested the architect Brunelleschi’s greatest achievement:
il Duomo
. Dazzling in its sheer expanse, the huge dome had no apparent means of support. Visible from any part of the city, the orange brick cupola majestically dominated the skyline and had, like the lily, become a symbol of Florence. It stretched so high that when he first set eyes upon it, Baroncelli thought it surely touched the Gates of Heaven.

Baroncelli dwelled in a far lower realm this particular morning. Though the plan had seemed simple enough to be foolproof, now the painfully bright day had dawned, he was overwhelmed with foreboding and regret. The latter emotion had always marked his life: Born into one of the city’s wealthiest and most eminent families, he had squandered his fortune and fallen into debt at an advanced age. He had spent his life as a banker and knew nothing else. His only choices were to move wife and children down to Naples and beg for sponsorship from one of his rich cousins—an option his outspoken spouse, Giovanna, would never have tolerated—or to offer his services to one of the two largest and most prestigious banking families in Florence: the Medici, or the Pazzi.

He had gone first to the most powerful: the Medici. They had rejected him, a fact he still resented. But their rivals, the Pazzi, welcomed him into their fold; and it was for that reason that today he stood in the front row of the throng of faithful beside his employer, Francesco de’ Pazzi. With his uncle, the knight Messer Iacopo, Francesco ran his family’s international business concerns. He was a small man, with a sharp nose and chin, and eyes that narrowed beneath dark, disproportionately large brows; beside the tall, dignified Baroncelli, he resembled an ugly dwarf. Baroncelli had eventually come to resent Francesco more than the Medici, for the man was given to fits of temper and had often loosed a nasty tongue on his employee, reminding Baroncelli of his bankruptcy with stinging words.

In order to provide for his family, Baroncelli was forced to grin while the Pazzi—Messer Iacopo as well as young Francesco—insulted him and treated him as an inferior when in fact he came from a family
with equal, if not more, prestige. So when the matter of the plot presented itself, Baroncelli had a choice: risk his neck by confessing everything to the Medici, or let the Pazzi force him to be their accomplice, and win for himself a position in the new government.

Now, as he stood asking God for forgiveness, he felt the warm breath of a fellow conspirator upon his right shoulder. The man praying just behind him wore the burlap robes of a penitent.

Standing to Baroncelli’s left, Francesco fidgeted and glanced right, past his employee. Baroncelli followed his gaze: It rested on Lorenzo de’ Medici, who at age twenty-nine was the de facto ruler of Florence. Technically, Florence was governed by the Signoria, a council of eight priors and the head of state, the gonfaloniere of justice; these men were chosen from among all the notable Florentine families. Supposedly the process was fair, but curiously, the majority of those chosen were always loyal to Lorenzo, and the gonfaloniere was his to control.

Francesco de’ Pazzi was ugly, but Lorenzo was uglier still. Though he was taller than most and muscular in build, his fine body was marred by one of Florence’s homeliest faces. His nose—long and pointed, ending in a pronounced upward slope that tilted to one side—had a flattened bridge, leaving Lorenzo with a peculiarly nasal voice. His lower jaw jutted out so severely that whenever he entered a room, his chin preceded him by a thumb’s breadth. His disturbing profile was framed by a jaw-length hank of dark hair.

Lorenzo stood awaiting the start of the Mass, flanked on one side by his loyal friend and employee, Francesco Nori, and on the other by the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati. Despite his physiognomic failings, Lorenzo emanated profound dignity and poise. In his dark, slightly protruding eyes shone an uncommon shrewdness. Even surrounded by enemies, Lorenzo seemed at ease. Salviati, a Pazzi relative, was no friend, though he and Lorenzo greeted each other as such; the elder Medici brother had lobbied furiously against Salviati’s appointment as Archbishop of Pisa, asking instead that Pope Sixtus appoint a Medici sympathizer. The Pope turned a deaf ear to Lorenzo’s request and then—breaking with a tradition that had existed for generations—
fired the Medici as the papal bankers to replace them with the Pazzi, a bitter insult to Lorenzo.

Yet today, Lorenzo had received the Pope’s own nephew, the seventeen-year-old Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio, as an honored guest. After Mass in the great Duomo, Lorenzo would lead the young Cardinal to a feast at the Medici palace, followed by a tour of the famed Medici collection of art. In the meantime, he stood attentively beside Riario and Salviati, nodding at their occasional whispered comments.

Smiling while they sharpen their swords
, Baroncelli thought.

Dressed unostentatiously in a plain tunic of blue-gray silk, Lorenzo was quite unaware of the presence of a pair of black-frocked priests standing two rows behind him. The tutor to the Pazzi household was a youth Baroncelli knew only as Stefano; a somewhat older man, Antonio da Volterra, stood beside him. Baroncelli had caught da Volterra’s gaze as they entered the church and had glanced quickly away; the priest’s eyes were full of the same smoldering rage Baroncelli had seen in the penitent’s. Da Volterra, present at all the secret meetings, also had spoken vehemently against the Medici’s “love of all things pagan,” saying that the family had “ruined our city” with its decadent art.

Like his fellow conspirators, Baroncelli knew that neither feast nor tour would ever take place. Events soon to occur would change the political face of Florence forever.

Behind him, the hooded penitent shifted his weight, then let go a sigh which held sounds only Baroncelli could interpret. His words were muffled by the cowl that had been drawn forward to obscure his features. Baroncelli had advised against permitting the man to assist in the assassination—why should he be trusted? The fewer involved, the better—but Francesco, as always, had overridden him.

“Where is Giuliano?” the penitent whispered.

Giuliano de’ Medici, the younger brother, was as fair of face as Lorenzo was ugly. The darling of Florence, he was called—so handsome, it was said, that men and women alike sighed in his wake. It would not do to have only one brother present in the great cathedral.
Both were required—or the entire operation would have to be called off.