The Madonna of the Almonds (21 page)

The mob murmured again, and Simonetta dare not breathe.

‘’Tis true,’ said a pardoner at last. ‘So it says in the scripture.’

‘Aye,’ said the tavern keeper. ‘I’ve two young lads myself. ’Tis best that they be spared. Their sire has paid for his sins.’

Simonetta could not look at the charred body of her friend. But she took her hunting knife and cut the boys down, her skin prickling with fear that the mob might stop her. She longed to cradle her boys, but such things could wait – she held each harshly by the wrist as they keened and cried.

The crowd began to melt away, but the baker lingered, his eyes magpie-bright at the thought of the golden hand that the fire had not touched.

‘Let the crows peck at him,’ she said dismissively, but he lingered still. She forced him to ask.

‘And the hand?’

Simonetta thought fast. ‘I will give it to Father Anselmo. Meet it is that the Infidel’s gold shall be put to Godly use.’

‘She’s right,’ said the pardoner, her greatest advocate. ‘Why
should you have it? If it goes to the church it will benefit all, not just your greedy purse.’ He dragged his friend away, but both made a sketchy reverence to the lady before they left, a mark of their new-found respect. Simonetta, sickened by the admiration of such men, flashed a gracious smile. Lest she was watched, she pulled the boys into the house, and as she crossed the threshold her legs gave way, and she collapsed, at the feet of Isaac and Veronica. She clutched Isaac’s arm. ‘Now you may help him,’ she said. ‘Wait for a moment, to be sure they are gone. But then cut him down and lay him out and do such rites as your faith demands. He deserved a better death, but all shall be done right now he is gone. I must put the boys to bed.’

She let Veronica help her bathe and settle the white and silent boys. She thought of the time she had held them after their mother had died, and knew it would take time to quiet them. But the shock of the night’s events had taken their toll. She kissed their closing eyes and this time, she made no assurances that all would be well. This time she made a promise that she knew she could keep. ‘I’ll look after you.’

Simonetta went down to join Isaac by the great tree. He had already dug a trench for the body, black in the white earth. She shook with cold and emotion, her mind struggling to countenance what had happened. How could her greatest friend be here and gone in the blink of an evil eye? And by her own hand? Manodorata now lay under Isaac’s
magpie cloak, waiting for internment. From the lie of the fabric Simonetta could tell that the arrow she had shot had been pulled from his chest. She was glad that Isaac had taken this office upon himself; that she would not have to see the protruding shaft of her handiwork. She damned herself for cowardice, and watched while the falling snow turned the pied cloak to pure white.

‘It is fitting,’ said Isaac.

Simonetta blinked away the snow. ‘What is?’ For nothing seemed to fit this night: the world had turned upside down. The snow gave the illusion of stars dropping from the sky and she felt that she was falling into infinite space. ‘What is fitting?’

Isaac pointed to his friend’s body. ‘The shroud is now white. The correct colour for a
tachrihim
, the funeral wrappings of our people. God is at work.’

Wordlessly Simonetta di Saronno rolled back her golden sleeves and took the second shovel. She was moved that Isaac could think of God at such a time, when He seemed to have deserted his faithful servant, and taken him from his innocent children. Suddenly she saw in her mind’s eye the image that Manodorata had described to her when first they truly talked, here under these trees. The flaming, pierced heart that Saint Agostino held in his hand, the Saint that had blamed the Jews for the death of Christ. The image seemed, now, to have enormous impact, and import, but Simonetta’s spinning mind could not make sense of it. She
knew only that when she saw such images again, she would know the burning heart, pierced by her own arrow, that beat in the Saint’s hand. She would know it for the heart of her friend. She kept her peace and they worked in silence, joined, soon, by Veronica. Together they dug as the snow fell. Something metal sang on Simonetta’s spade and the earth turned up a golden ring. She rubbed it on her gown and it showed clearly in the moon white night, a star with six points.

‘Rebecca’s,’ said Isaac. As Simonetta nodded she felt a sob squeeze her throat like a cold hand. At length they were done and they laid Manodorata in the cold earth. Isaac intoned the last words and the
tehillim
psalms, as Manodorata had once done here for his dead wife. Simonetta did not uncover the body, but before they began to fill in the earth she knelt and felt beneath the shroud for the golden hand. She slipped Rebecca’s ring onto the cold metal and felt it warm under her touch at once, almost as if he were still alive. Hot tears began to slide from her eyes. For although flesh would perish in time, the two golden symbols of the husband and the wife would lie in the earth forever. She vowed, here and now, that this grave, under this tree, was the nearest that the hand would ever come to Anselmo’s coffers, and Simonetta knew the priest would approve.

They filled the grave and the black mound turned to white in an instant as the snow fell relentlessly. Veronica took Simonetta’s arm to lead her inside, gesturing that
they should leave Isaac be. The tutor nodded to his mistress briefly, and touched her shuddering shoulder once. ‘Get you inside, lady,’ he said. ‘In the absence of his family I must be the
shomrim
, guardian of the dead. I will bide here a while and keep watch, and pray.’

Simonetta nodded. She was suddenly deathly tired, but not sure she would ever sleep again after what she had seen. She walked to the house arm in arm with her maid – her friend – and climbed the stair to rest with the boys lest they should need her in the night.

She was physically and mentally shattered by what she had done. Her hands shook and her teeth chattered despite the warm of the chamber. Her knees trembled at each step, her stomach churned and her throat threatened vomit. Had she been called upon to set an arrow on her bowstring now, she could not have done it. And yet in a moment of cold dispatch one short hour ago, an instant of rapid thought and speedy execution, she had killed someone. She had shot her bolt through a flaming heart and the fact that that heart was dying seemed to mitigate her actions not at all. Was this really what Lorenzo had done, on a daily basis, when he was away from her side on his lengthy campaigns? She had taken a life in mercy but he had done it for glory, and victory, and political gain; all much much more flimsy motivations than her own. In an action that surprised herself she pressed her shaking hands together, bent her weakling knees and moved her chattering teeth in prayer. She had
been a stranger to God for some months now, and had, after the shocking, sickening events of this evening, admired Isaac’s steadfast faith without understanding it. She had not prayed since Bernardino had gone. She knew she need not ask pardon for the taking of a life, for she had done it to end Manodorata’s pain and save his children. So she did not pray for forgiveness, nor even for the soul of her friend. That could all come later. No, Simonetta suddenly felt she had thanks to give for a miracle; for the freak fall of snow that had damped the kindling that was to make the death- fire for the boys. The teachings of scripture came back to her and she remembered Saint Lucy had been saved from the fire as the faggots would not light. She remembered, too, Saint Apollonia, who willingly submitted to the fire, just as her friend had done. The tales were suddenly at her fingertips, as if they had been waiting – just out of her memory’s reach – to be welcomed back and beckoned into her chambers like long-lost friends. She looked out of her window at the moon and stars and spoke, hands clasped, to those Saints; one who lived in Paradise without eyes and the other without teeth. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

Bernardino became well used to the rhythms of the Canonical hours. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline. They sounded like footsteps; the steady tread of the single syllable – Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones – breaking into a trot of double ones – Vespers, Compline – at the close of the Holy day. Race the sun as it falls, rush to cram in our devotions before the night’s end and prayers begin the new day with the dawn. And yet there was never any rushing here, no hurrying, no urgency. Bernardino knew how long he was taking on each piece only by the prayers sung by the sisters. He became used to the quiet of the place; the thoughtful nuns walking in the gardens, or digging the herbs, or reading aloud from scripture. He inhabited a world where there were no harsh words, no awkward passions. Here there was no utterance louder than a prayer, no sound above the whisper of a long habit on the pavings, no assault to his ears beyond the modes and cadences of the plainsong. He felt the balm of his friendship
with Bianca as a natural progression, a natural continuation of his friendship with her brother, a benign sequel to a sinister birth. He smiled a secret smile when he thought of how the two bars of the lineage resembled one another, of how the legitimate and the illegitimate both shared much from their father.

Bernardino set forth for another day of decorating this quiet world, another day when the osmosis of the religiosity that surrounded him would seep into his skin. Since he had prayed the other night he had begun, tentatively, to talk to God when Bianca was absent. So as he looked for his friend on this day, the day he was to begin the panel depicting Saint Catherine, he felt imbued with a sense of peace. And quietude. He was surprised, therefore, to find the Abbess pacing and agitated. She broke the egg of his calm, and took him at once to that other world, a world of violence, passion and death.

‘What is it?’

‘I need your help. Will you come?’ Bianca’s tone held an urgency and direction he had not known.

‘What is the matter?’ Bernardino was perplexed.

‘There is little time,’ said the Abbess. ‘A friend is in grave danger. It is well you wear the robes of our lay brothers. Dressed thus, you will be safe in the crowd.’

‘What crowd?’ Bernardino was grateful for the disguise – he had set foot in the city a very few times in the last
months – needful excursions only to meet his patron and buy pigments, for he was conscious that the Cardinal might still seek him. As if echoing his thought the Abbess said, ‘I know that you risk your life if you leave these walls. I would not ask it of you lightly. Will you come or no?’

Bernardino only thought for a moment. He had a certain amount of natural courage, but a great deal of natural curiosity, and was suddenly galvanised with a desire to see what had come to pass in Milan. ‘Of course,’ he said.

Without further explanation Sister Bianca led him through the herbarium and out of the gatehouse in the old circus tower. They made their way slowly down the Corso Magenta for the street was crowded, and the people that milled around had the uneasy buzz of a thousand bees. Bernardino was suddenly moved to look back at the frontage of the monastery, with its Ornavasso stone façade and marble mouldings, as a child might yearn for his home as he crept, snail-like, to school. He felt an odd sense of foreboding and vulnerability now that he was outside of the safe haven of the convent walls. The sun had barely risen behind a lid of sickly yellow grey cloud and shone like the dim orange lozenge of a comet that presages contagion or war. Bernardino drew his hood about him and turned from the ugly faces that seemed to leer after the calm and Godly countenances of the sisters. He plucked the sleeve of the Abbess.

‘What is this coil? Where are they all going? Where are
we
going?’

‘To see an execution. Come, we may be too late.’

‘Tell me as we walk then. Who is to be dispatched?’ Bianca seemed visibly distressed, and Bernardino bit his lip at the flippant choice of words.

‘The Countess of Challant, a great friend of mine and of my family.’

‘Of your father? Then surely he may intercede?’

‘It may have gone too far for that. Her death is demanded by the people.’

‘By the people? Why?’

‘They have taken a moral stance against a woman known to be a libertine. A woman whose sin is to love more than one man; in truth, more than two.’

A knell sounded in Bernardino’s chest. Here then, was proof of the censure that awaited women that loved freely. His own rival for Simonetta’s heart was dead, and yet Lorenzo’s ghost had been enough to divide them forever. Simonetta was derided by the people of Saronno, and here in Milan a lady’s passions could buy her death. ‘How did this come to pass?’

Bianca unfolded the tale, as they walked through the streets, guided like leaves in the current as the mob streamed past the Duomo. ‘The Contessa di Challant was the only child of a rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and she was a girl of such exquisite beauty that, in spite of her low origin, she became the wife of the noble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth year.’

Bernardino had heard of such matches. ‘How old was the husband?’

Bianca smiled, and the furrows of her brow cleared, shortly to return. ‘Old enough to be her grandsire. He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented the house of my father but none other. She played with me as I grew with great kindness and gaiety but was kept from other society. Her ancient husband told my friend Matteo Bandello that he knew her temper better than to let her visit with the freedom of the Milanese ladies. Upon Ermes’ death, while she was little more than twenty, she retired to Casale and led a gay life among many lovers. One of these, the Count of Challant in the Val d’Aosta, became her second husband. He was captivated by her extraordinary loveliness, but they could not agree together. She left him, and established herself at Pavia. Rich with the wealth of her father and first husband, and still beautiful in her middle years, she now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy. She took numerous lovers.’

Bernardino, jostled by the crowd, thought that the Countess had found herself the ideal life, but sensed a sting in the tale. He had to hold the sleeve of the Abbess’s habit in order that they might not be separated, that he might hear the rest.

‘Two of her lovers must be named. Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; and the Sicilian Don Pietro di Cardona. She tired of the Count of Masino, but Don Pietro loved her
with the insane passion of a very young man. What she desired, he promised to do blindly; and she bade him murder his predecessor in her favour.’

Bernardino was shocked that the libertine had turned murderess. He was unsure of the Abbess’s intentions but had to shout to voice his queries. ‘But Sister Bianca, it seems that this lady did indeed have an evil influence. Can you, a servant of God, defend such a woman? Can you hope to intercede for her?’

‘We are all sinners, Bernardino. But no man has the right to take life, only God. If she is now killed, then the Duke Sforza is no better than Don Pietro the murderer.’

‘So the murder was carried out? What came to pass?’

‘At this time she was living here in Milan. Don Pietro waylaid the Count of Masino, as he was late one night from supper. The Count was killed: but Don Pietro was caught. He revealed the atrocity of his mistress; and she was sent to prison. She is now held in the Porta Giova fortress, the castle of the Sforzas, and awaits execution this very morn.’

‘Then what can you do?’

‘I hope to buy her freedom. For, although she acted wrongly, I believe she has atoned and it grieves me that she may pay for the actions of another. Though I wear a habit I am still a woman and it burns my heart that a woman may be killed for what a man has done, however strong her influence. I hope to appeal to her to become one of the sisters, to live her life in repentance in the circle of
our cloister.’ The mob stopped for a moment, and the Abbess faced him. ‘You see, Bernardino, when I think of the Countess I don’t see a libertine, nor yet a murderess. I see the gentle lady that played and laughed with a lonely child in my father’s house.’

The crowd slowed at the Duomo where vendors sought to sell to the unwary. There were images of the Countess, a reputed beauty with yellow hair and a comely face. Bernardino and the Abbess lowered their heads to push through the press of people. Peddlers sold Holy water to bless the body and the more enterprising thrust fistfuls of yellow horsehair in their cowls, purporting to be hair from the Countess’s head. On a wooden thrust stage, players wearing grotesque masks reenacted the tale of lust and murder, with the two lovers sporting huge phalli of papier-mâché at their groins. An actor with a long yellow wig stroked them lasciviously, before the dusky Sicilian killed the Neapolitan, who flung rolls of red ribbon into the crowd to mimic blood. At the finish, a huge silver axe fell on the Countess’s white neck as more gore ensued.

The crowd reached a pitch of excitement that was at once disgusting and disorienting to Bernardino after his months of peace. He knew well why the Abbess had wanted protection on such a day, for couples openly pressed themselves on each other in a libidinous expression of their excitement, and he saw a lone maid fight off a circle of men that cat-called and pulled at her clothes. He raised his
eyes skyward and saw the Saints standing atop the gothic pinnacles of the Duomo, sorrowing as they looked down, themselves players against the sickly saffron backdrop of the sky. He too began to feel disquiet that a high-born lady was to be murdered for the sins of her lovers and pressed forward urgently.

They neared the ramparts of the great red Porta Giova fortress, its battlements like the wards of a thousand keys that served to keep the Sforzas in and the city out. But not today. Today the great gates of the Torre del Filarete clock tower were open, and the crowd streamed though, beneath the baleful eye of the coiled Sforza serpent that adorned the castle arms. Poised to strike, thought Bernardino; poised to kill. Today the
paghe vive
guards, salaried soldiers employed to guard the castle, uncrossed their pikes to let the multitude through. Inside the great parade ground of the Piazza d’Armi was crammed with citizens, all jostling for position. Sister Bianca took Bernardino’s arm, and pulled him to the outer reaches of the crowd, leading him up a flight of stone steps at the Ghirlanda curtain wall. Here a figure in bright blue silk loitered, waiting. The figure knelt at the sight of the Abbess and kissed the garnet ring.

‘Greetings Matteo,’ said the Abbess, ‘were it not such a dark day this would be a meeting of minds indeed. Matteo Bandello, a great writer, meet Bernardino Luini, a great artist.’ Both men bowed and eyed each other curiously. One who was a stranger to Holiness wore the habit of a brother,
but was more handsome than any monk had a right to be. The other, ugly and ill-favoured, was in fact a monk but wore the finest clothes that ever complimented a courtier. The writer’s eyes fairly shone with lively intelligence.

‘I hope we may have an opportunity to speak later, for I have admired such of your work as I have seen, Signore,’ said Bandello.

Bernardino, never a great reader, could not respond with glowing reviews of Bandello’s novellae. But the fellow had already moved on; his quick mind working, his hands gesturing, as he resumed the urgency of the day. ‘Have you got it all?’ he questioned the Abbess.

‘Yes,’ replied Sister Bianca. ‘15,000 crowns.’

‘From the
Monastero
?’

Even at such a time she smiled. ‘Hardly. From one who knows the Countess and wishes her well.’

Bandello nodded. ‘Alessandro Bentivoglio. Your father was ever the true noblemen, such largesse is typical of his generosity.’

Sister Bianca smiled her strange half smile, and whispered back rapidly. ‘And the diplomat; he knows that I must act for him in this matter – that it would not do for him to be seen as partisan. The Countess has offended the people greatly, and my father cannot afford to so do. Nor can the Duke: is he here?’

Bandello shook his head. ‘Not he. Francesco Sforza will not risk his neck among the crowd, for all his wartime campaigns.
Yet you may be sure he watches, from the safety of the Rocchetta.’ In explanation he nodded to the safe, windowed portion of the castle. ‘The Rocchetta can be reached only by drawbridge, which as you see, is drawn up. Let us hope that the name of the moat it crosses is not prophetic.’

‘The name?’ Bernardino questioned.

‘
Fossato Morto
. The moat of the dead.’ Bandello gave a ghoulish grin and took the heavy leather bag from the Abbess. ‘Well, let us try what may be done with this purse. Wait here. I will come again.’ They watched as the blue figure climbed the ramparts and disappeared into the great round tower named for Bona of Savoy, the long dead chatelaine. Below the Ghirlanda wall the crowd grew restive and chants began to relay around the courtyard – hymns fought with filthy tavern songs as the crowd awaited the bloodletting they had been promised. Bianca closed her eyes on the scene and her lips moved in prayer. Bernardino felt unsettled enough to interrupt her devotions. ‘Could not an escape have been attempted?’ he whispered.

The Abbess did not open her eyes. ‘It has been tried. There are many passages that lead from this castle to safety – one out into the Barco hunting reserve and thence to the country, and the other leads to the Monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie.’

‘Santa Maria delle Grazie?’

The Abbess opened her eyes. ‘You know it?’

‘Yes. My Master’s great work, the
Cenacolo
, hangs there.’

She nodded. ‘The Last Supper. I have never seen it. Yet there is a secret covered causeway that connects this fortress to that place – it was built by Ludovico Il Moro himself, as he made nightly trips to visit the body of his dead wife in the chapel there.’ Tis said that you can still hear the old Duke’s sobs in the passage at night.’ The Abbess crossed herself. ‘A sevennight ago the Countess attempted to make her escape to the monastery by that route, but she was betrayed. The purse is our only hope now.’ She closed her eyes once again and began to finger the beads of the rosary at her waist.