“She’s not so young,” Botticelli responded. “She’s more than fifteen.”
Leonardo pleaded with his eyes for Giuliano’s mercy.
“It’s a beautiful painting.” This was Antonio Pollaiuolo. “I think it’s Leonardo’s best to date.”
“It’s no wonder,” Giuliano went on, ignoring my son’s silent and desperate request. “He knows her very intimately.”
Everyone made loud exclamations of feigned shock and moral outrage.
“This is a bit dangerous, Leonardo,” Filippo Lippi said. “She has a rich husband.”
Leonardo had turned an alarming carnation pink.
“
And
a lover,” Botticelli added. “Silio Ficino’s friend Bernardo Bembi.”
“Ginevra and Bembi are
Platonic
lovers,” Leonardo said unexpectedly, then fell silent, shocking everyone with his veritable admission of guilt.
I was pleasantly dumbfounded. My son was sleeping with a woman—admittedly a questionable choice considering how prominent was her husband and how notorious her “love affair” with Bembi. But Leonardo’s lover was not a prostitute . . . and not a young man, either.
“All of you tell me,” Leonardo said, clearly shifting the attention away from himself, “is it any more scandalous than Giuliano keeping a mistress . . .” He paused dramatically. “. . . and getting her pregnant?”
There were shouts and whistles.
Giuliano pouted in Leonardo’s direction, outdone but not unhappy with the revelation.
“To the happy father!” Botticelli cried, raising his glass in Giuliano’s direction.
Leonardo smiled with pleasure at his small victory. Then Sandro lifted his glass in his direction.
“To Leonardo, whose safety from two jilted men we pray for!”
Everyone laughed and raised their glasses.
“Salute!” they cried in unison. “To Leonardo!”
CHAPTER 17
“Silvery Water,” Lorenzo pronounced.
“Divine Water,” Silio Ficino countered.
“Mercury,” Pico della Mirandola intoned with the seriousness of a tutor, “was first known as Water of the Moon.”
“Milk of the Black Cow,” Lorenzo offered.
“Never heard that one,” Vespasiano Bisticci said as he moved to light the charcoal burner under the cylindrical glass
kerotakis
.
“Wait!” I ordered. I had been perusing an open manuscript that looked to be a thousand years old. I went to the apparatus that stood on the workbench in the center of my alchemical laboratory and placed a small quantity of metallic powder on a screen at the upper part of it.
It was the middle of the night and this a surreptitious gathering of men leading double lives.
I gestured for Pico to quickly close the top orifice with a solid hemispherical cover.
“Seed of the Dragon,” Lorenzo suggested. “It is by far the most poetic.”
“
Bile
of the Dragon describes mercury better,” Pico insisted.
“Depends on the dragon,” Bisticci quipped.
Everyone laughed at that, but the moment the bookseller put a flame to the charcoal, we all crowded around the
kerotakis
and quieted. Five sets of eyes fixed with utter fascination on the glass cylinder and the quantity of quicksilver puddled at its closed bottom.
As it heated, it began bubbling. Ficino was visibly trembling. I could hardly hear the sound of breathing in the deathly quiet attic room. Then suddenly the silvery element vaporized, leaving nothing behind at all in the bottom of the cylinder.
Though we could not see under the solid cap at the top, we knew—or at least hoped—that the vapors were attacking the metal powder.
“Now we must be patient,” I told everyone.
“How long?” Ficino asked.
“I’m not sure. The text does not say how long
melanosis
takes to occur.”
“We’re fortunate to finally have a laboratory for our experiments,” Silio Ficino said, smiling at me.
“You’re looking very dubious, Pico,” Lorenzo said, addressing his friend.
“I am not convinced of the value of practical alchemy,” he replied. “The great excitement about seeing minerals changing colors. I thought we all agreed that true alchemy is the transmutation of the spirit, not of base metal into gold.”
“We do,” Bisticci agreed. “But is there anything more fascinating than watching a substance, by the simple application of heat or the addition of another substance, change from black to white to the iridescent colors of peacocks’ feathers, to yellow, then purple, then red?”
“Or to test Aristotle’s theories that the four elements may indeed change form?” Lorenzo added. “Philosophy is the pinnacle, Pico, but experimentation is glorious. Come, admit it. You’re just as curious as the rest of us.” Lorenzo turned to me. “Where do you stand in this argument, Cato? It is your laboratory, after all.”
I had recently “killed off” my master and uncle, Umberto, who had graciously left his apothecary to me.
Now my eyes fell on a small but lovely painting I had hung near my furnace. It was one Leonardo had recently gifted me—the figure of a beautiful old woman in flowing red garments, her hair pulled up in a knot on top of her head. I nodded toward her.
“That is the Chinese goddess of the Stove,” I told my friends. “She is the divinity in charge of cooking and brewing medicines.”
“
And
alchemy,” Bisticci added. “She is the goddess of Alchemy. I have a painting of her in one of my manuscripts from the East.”
“Where does one science leave off and the other begin?” Lorenzo mused.
“Some call vegetal alchemy the Small Work, and mineral the Great Work,” Pico told us.
“No, no,” Bisticci argued. “The Great Work is something altogether different. It is finding the elixir to prolong life for eternity.”
“You’re
all
wrong,” Lorenzo insisted. “The Great Work is a
sexual
phenomenon. The mystical and physical and ecstatic melding of the male and female souls into one.”
“You’re a hopeless romantic!” Ficino cried.
“That I may be,” Lorenzo answered, “but we do have reports of Nicholas Flamel and his beloved wife, Perenelle, achieving that state of grace in Paris on January seventeenth, 1382.”
The celibate Pico rolled his eyes. “And where, pray, would a male adept today find a female adept with whom to . . . meld?”
“Point well taken,” Lorenzo agreed. “But one can always live in hope.”
“Look!” Bisticci cried.
We all turned back to the
kerotakis
to see a dark liquid dripping down the inside of the glass cylinder. With delicate fingers, Silio Ficino removed the small dome on its top and turned it over. We peered down at its concavity.
There was an unmistakable black substance coating the inside of the dome.
“We have achieved
melanosis
,” Bisticci intoned triumphantly. “First changed mercury into vapor, and that vapor changed iron powder into
melonin
. It is the first step toward transmutation.”
Everyone was silent, awestruck. Even Pico held his sarcastic tongue.
“This day we become brothers,” Silio Ficino declared, “in an extraordinary fellowship stretching back two millennia.” He closed his eyes. “Let the secrets of the universe open themselves to us.” Then he took the dome and held it under a torch on the wall window, examining it closely. “What is the next procedure, Cato?” he said.
I moved back to the manuscript and followed my finger across the page. “Calcination,” I told them, looking up from the book. “The next color we wish to produce is white.”
Lorenzo beamed at me and I found myself smiling back. Then our gazes locked and I knew suddenly that this joy was something more than the shared success of our experiment or even admiration for my skills. I grew flustered and turned away to watch Bisticci clap Ficino on the shoulder and embrace Pico.
But the moment had seared itself into my mind and memory. It terrified me and thrilled me all at once. There was something between Lorenzo de’ Medici and Cato the Apothecary. It was comic. Tragic. Magnificent. Impossible. He was feeling something for me as I felt for him.
And there was nothing, nothing in the wide world that could be done about it.
“All right,” I said, willing myself to calm. “Someone go fetch the double-necked beaker.”
CHAPTER 18
I had never in my life straddled a horse, nor even sat to the side like a lady upon one’s back. After all, I had never been a lady, and once a man, was a pretended invalid. But Lorenzo, determined as he was to have me go riding with him, insisted on finding a way that I—with “the head of my leg bone still a feeble thing”—should find comfort on the back of a horse.
He took it upon himself to consult both a physician and a saddle maker, and then one day, quite to my surprise and chagrin, presented me with a deeply padded contraption with a high back for support, and short stirrups in the Spanish Gineta school, which, the doctor had told him, would hold my injured hip at a painless angle. All Lorenzo wished was that I would try it. If it pained me, he would press me no more to ride.
I was a weekend guest, once again, at Villa Careggi, though this time Lorenzo’s “first” family was in attendance, the members of the Platonic Academy nowhere to be seen.
Even more delightful was the presence of Leonardo, who found great pleasure in Giuliano’s company. The feeling was mutual.
It was hardly dawn when loud pounding woke me from sleep—I had again been given the room that let on to the loggia. In my nightshirt and bare feet I dragged myself to the bedroom door and, opening it, found Lorenzo and Giuliano bursting with lust for the day.
“Dress yourself for riding!” Lorenzo cried. “Or shall we do it for you?”
“I think I shall do it myself,” I said, feigning outrage and slamming the door in their faces. I heard laughter from without, and sagged with relief to be alone for the task. I quickly made water and re-bound my breasts, very tightly and all the way to my waist, as I had no way to know what the jouncing of a horse might do to those appendages. I put on breeches and sturdy boots that Lorenzo had provided me with, and a broad-brimmed hat, so that when I was done—though there was no looking glass in the chamber—I imagined myself as a very different young man than the tunic’d, red-capped scholar that I normally was.
The sun had just peeked over the eastern hills when the three of us reached the stables. It was with the greatest joy to be greeted by the sight of Leonardo pulling tight the cinch round the belly of a stunning bay stallion, and dressed for the ride.
A stable boy led out two horses that I quickly recognized—one was Morello and the other Giuliano’s favorite, Simonetta, whom he had named after his first mistress. Now that he no longer “rode the woman,” he would say, he enjoyed fond memories on the back of her equine namesake.
A moment later an elderly stable hand brought out an old girl already wearing the special saddle that had been made for me.
“It’s been a long time since you’ve ridden, Uncle,” Leonardo said. “Do you think you’ll remember how?”
Frankly, I was terrified. I braced myself for both the lies I would have to tell and the experience of opening my legs to straddle a huge moving beast.
“You will all forgive me if we go at this slowly,” I said. “Very slowly.”
“No, no, Cato,” Lorenzo assured me and grew immediately compassionate. “We will pretend as though you have never ridden before.” He gestured to the old stable hand, who brought forward a step-up. “Is it your right or left leg?” Lorenzo asked.
“My left.”
“Good. Then you should have no trouble lifting your right over the back of the horse. Try that.” He came up the steps with me, and, guiding my left foot into the stirrup, grasped me by the waist and slid me up and over the saddle.
I grunted once for effect and sympathy.
“Are you all right?” Lorenzo cried with alarm.
“Yes, yes. Just a tiny twinge.” But I was well settled in the contraption, and the high stuffed back felt wonderful. Indeed, the spread of my legs over the back of the horse, while an unusual posture for a woman, felt quite natural, even comfortable.
The stable hand fixed my right foot in the other stirrup, and the steps were pulled away. I looked down from my mount to see three beloved faces beaming up at me with utter delight. Lorenzo and Giuliano were triumphant. Leonardo’s expression was priceless. I could not tell if he was on the verge of laughter or tears, but he was shaking his head from side to side, muttering, “Uncle, Uncle . . .”
“Let’s be off then,” Lorenzo cried, and mounted Morello in a graceful sweep.
Leonardo and Giuliano swung up into their saddles and, flashing a wickedly competitive grin between them, raced away together, neck and neck, leaving Lorenzo and me in the dust.
“He’s still such a boy in some ways,” he said, putting the reins in my hand, “but having him rule at my side, that has been a real joy.”
Lorenzo trotted away, beckoning me to follow. I felt the horse move under me, a rhythmical sway, and was surprised to feel hardly more fear than I did bouncing on the seat of my cart. I knew that the mount Lorenzo had chosen would do me no harm. I did my best to pretend I was learning to ride once again, and not for the first time.
My old girl caught up to Morello. “Giuliano is a wizard with numbers,” Lorenzo continued. “Something I am most assuredly not. I’ve happily given over much of the banking business to him. As for the provisioning and organization of our feasts and spectacles, I leave that to him as well, and he thrives on it. Do you not agree he is the darling of Florence?”
“Everyone does love him. It seems to me that you perfectly complement one another.”
“That is true. Where I am weak, he is strong. Where I have neither interest nor time, he is fascinated and consumed with those details.”
Morello picked up speed and my horse followed. I was proud of my steadiness and carriage on my first day of riding.