The Malice of Fortune (18 page)

My mouth was not a palm’s width from his. I whispered, my own words giving me a little shudder, “This is your moment.”

I could feel the slight warmth of his sigh. When he closed his eyes, they trembled beneath the lids.

He opened his eyes again. And in them I saw only compassion.

I shut my own eyes as if praying. “Niccolò, I am a liar, a thief, and a whore.” I made this confession in my own infinitely weary voice. “And whomever I love is cursed by Fortune, because out of malice toward me, she snatches them away.”

I hoped he would heed this warning. Yet he was still there. “Dry yourself,” he said. “Put on your clothes and get under my coverlet.” I vaguely wondered why he had not brought the much thicker coverlet from my rooms. “I’ll find some
minestra
we can heat over the brazier.”

When Niccolò shut the door behind him, I cringed at the dull thump. In the silence that followed, I observed that if I died in the Romagna, the confession I had just recited would be my sole epitaph. Of all that I have made in this life, of all whom I have loved, you alone would live on. But as a prisoner in your grandfather’s house, to remember me only with questions. And anger.

It was that thought alone that gave me the courage to step from my cold bath and begin to climb, hand over hand, from the pit of Hell into the healing oblivion of sleep.

By the next day I had begun to recover my reason, as well as my purpose. I obtained a good fifty pounds of wax candles for Camilla’s funeral Mass, which we held in a lovely old Benedictine church near the center of the city. We buried her in the shadow of the church’s bell tower, where the gravestones were ancient, crowded together like an old woman’s teeth. But before we put my precious girl in consecrated ground I took Niccolò aside, into the dingy arcade of the stone-carver’s shop that opened right onto the cemetery, where they were chiseling her stone with a verse I had chosen from Petrarch: “There comes from her a brave and lovely soul, that put us on the straight path to Heaven.”

I opened my cape and took something from around my neck, pressed it into Niccolò’s cold hand and asked him to place it in the coffin.
I could not look inside that oak casket, but neither did I want my angel’s mortal remains to be absent any token of her family.

“You can look at it,” I told Niccolò as he closed his hand around this little necklace. “It is a cameo portrait I had carved of my Giovanni, when he was a baby.” During our vigil, I had told Niccolò many things about you. But I had not told him who your father was.

Niccolò studied me for a careful moment. When he started off, I pulled him back. “Dearest Niccolò,” I said, looking at him directly, “when His Holiness sent me here, he kept a hostage at the Vatican to ensure my cooperation. My Giovanni. My little boy is the pope’s surety for my obedience in this errand. I should have told you. But now I know that the well-being of your little daughter is also at stake in all this.” And I knew how desperately he missed this baby girl. “I can no longer ask you to risk your hopes for her, even for the sake of my son.”

Niccolò pursed his lips tightly. Steam drifted from his nostrils. I wasn’t certain what sentiment he was at pains to contain. But after a moment he turned, to pick a path among the jagged gravestones.

When we were finished I said to Niccolò, “I cannot go back there.” Of course I meant the place where Camilla died. I took his arm and we walked up the street to Imola’s central square, where people of every sort had gathered: sufficient workmen in rough cloaks to dig a canal, yet their numbers were almost matched by the foreign merchants and wealthy townspeople, their collars, lapels, and caps trimmed with sable or ermine, many of them accompanied by pages and
bravi
in bright-colored hose and short padded jackets. The ladies were out as well, not just the candle-shop girls but
cortigiane
with jewels glittering in their hair. Valentino’s ruddy-faced soldiers were everywhere, wearing their steel helmets and leaning on their German pikes.

“They believe something is about to happen,” Niccolò said. “They are hearing rumors that Valentino will soon leave Imola.”

“Are they true?” If so, I would probably be sent back to Rome, to a yet more bitter fate. “Where would he go?”

“Here is my prophecy,” Niccolò said. “When Vitellozzo Vitelli is finally conceded all the terms he requires, Valentino will be obligated
to decamp from Imola and take his army south, to join the armies of the
condottieri
and prepare plans for the spring campaign. And when this reconciliation takes place, we Florentines will lose everything—money, life,
libertas
.”

“Are you so certain Valentino will allow Vitellozzo Vitelli to devour Florence?”

“If only I were less so. Vitellozzo is the conspirators’ dance master—the Orsini and Oliverotto da Fermo only step where he points. Three years ago the Republic of Florence hired Vitellozzo’s brother Paolo to retrieve our seaport of Pisa from rebels whose paymaster was the Duke of Milan—the very same
impicatto
who previously invited the French into Italy and made us all servants in the House of Valois. With the walls breached and our infantry waiting to rush into the city, Paolo Vitelli took it in his mind to suspend the attack, a decision that was unaccountable—unless one took account of the bribes he received from the Duke of Milan. The Pisan rebels repaired the walls, and we are still without our seaport. Some men among us had the courage to see that Paolo Vitelli was executed for treason—and since then Vitellozzo Vitelli has kept no god before him except the destruction of Florence.”

We had approached one of those open-air kitchens with a big iron grill set over a great pile of glowing charcoal. A cook wearing an oxhide apron attempted to entice us with several eels skewered on a spit.

“I believe that in order to achieve this peace of his,” Niccolò went on, shaking his head at the vendor, “Valentino will be forced to put a secret codicil in his treaty, offering Florence to the Vitelli.”

I stopped and turned to him. I had previously considered the destruction of the Florentine republic a possible consequence of Valentino’s treaty; it had never occurred to me that the sacrifice of Florence might well be a condition for it, absent which Vitellozzo Vitelli would not even sign. This revelation was heralded by a shrill ringing in my ears: Florence herself was the “additional concession” Vitellozzo had all along intended to extort, in the most unspeakably cruel fashion.

“And you understand,” Niccolò said, “that Vitellozzo Vitelli and Oliverotto da Fermo will enter Florence under the same terms they offered Capua.”

“Capua?” Even in the Trastevere the name of this fortified city, which bars the approach to Naples, had recently become familiar among those who gossip about events. And the very name had become fearsome.

“Valentino led a considerable army against Capua last year,” Niccolò replied, “on instruction of his father, the pope having contrived a scheme to deliver Naples for his French and Spanish allies, who contributed their own troops to the campaign. Although Valentino was nominally in command, most of the soldiers at Capua were Gascon and German mercenaries hired by the
condottieri
. When the walls were breached, the city was put to the torch and the many thousands who could only cower in their houses were forced into the streets to be speared, hacked … Men … women … children. Without discrimination. Without mercy.” Niccolò shook his head as if refusing to see these things. “We see how the duke now hangs his own soldiers for looting, and he is to be credited for keeping them from the throats of the Romagnoles. But he will not be able to restrain the
condottieri
and their mercenaries, even if he wishes. He could not at Capua. When Valentino completes this treaty with the
condottieri
, they will drag his soul down into Hell.”

My ears still ringing, I said, “Perhaps Valentino believes that his pursuit of peace and justice for all will erase the stain on his honor.”

“And my most profound fear,” Niccolò said, “is that the duke can only secure that peace at the cost of another Capua.”

Continuing our melancholy progress, we reached the aged Civic Palace at the far end of the piazza. Just beneath the rusticated stone façade was a small circle of laborers and workmen, wrapped up in mud-colored cowls. They had gathered around a street-corner storyteller perched atop a wine crate, his limbs jerking about like a marionette’s while he strummed his lute and recited the oft-sung
cantafavola
of Ginevra degli Amieri—a Florentine lady buried alive by her rich husband, who thought she had died of the plague. The song peddler sang the husband’s lament, wonderfully miming his insincere grief, before he even more persuasively played Ginevra on her bier, this as
he remained standing with his lute in his arms; he closed his eyes and became so still that the crowd stirred uncomfortably, then gasped and cheered when his eyes suddenly flew open and darted about an imaginary tomb. To similar effect, he enacted Ginevra’s escape from that crypt, followed by her determination not to return to her husband’s house. Instead, in this second life, she found refuge with a poor man whom she had always and truly loved.

When it was over and we had made our way out of the cap-waving crowd, I whispered to Niccolò, “You know that Plato believed that when we die our souls are born into new bodies, and that we are free to choose our next life, although often we are guided only by our desire to avoid the mistakes and evils of the previous.” This comforted me just a bit, to think that Camilla had already chosen to live in a home she would never have to leave.

“Then I was previously a wealthy man,” Niccolò said, “with few lords to serve, and those few were uniformly wise and courageous.” His slight smile was as sharp as his eyes were opaque.

“Niccolò, what if with your next step you could walk from here, this very moment, into a new life, just like Ginevra degli Amieri? Would you?”

He closed his eyes as if miming the dead Ginevra. I feared he regarded this question as another temptation put before him by a woman who had yet to restore her reason.

But on this occasion, when Niccolò looked at me again, I saw an entirely different answer.