The Red Lily Crown (10 page)

The Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

17 MAY 1574

B
abbo would've reveled in Cosimo de' Medici's funeral.

Chiara could hear her father's scornful voice.
Drape your coffin in as much black silk as you want, old man, and blazon your Medici balls for the world to see, you're still food for worms like all the rest of us
. Of course, she could also hear him shouting at her.
What are you doing in the Palazzo Vecchio, girl, rubbing shoulders with the likes of grand duchesses and duchesses and princesses? Get home with you, before I give you such a thrashing you won't sit down for a week
.

I'll show you, Babbo, she flung back at him. You won't shout at me anymore when I have the Philosopher's Stone in my hands.

She would've gone home if she'd been allowed to, but she was watched every second. She demanded to speak with the prince—the grand duke now, and never forget it—but he was suddenly so far above her he might as well have been in faraway Trebizond where they made athanors. She demanded to speak with Magister Ruanno. He'd helped her, after all. He'd treated her as if she was special, or at least useful. Donna Jimena told her a thousand—well, maybe ten—more stupid rules of court etiquette and gave her extra sewing to do. The only breath of a hint that she might someday actually act as the grand duke's
soror mystica
was the moonstone around her neck, and the lessons—hard ones, every day, reading and writing, most of it in Italian but some of it in Latin.

No lessons or sewing today, though. Today was the great funeral, a month after Cosimo de' Medici's death, the delay necessary so important people—princes and archdukes and ambassadors and papal envoys and the saints only knew who else—could make their way to Florence from all over Europe. The embalmers had been beside themselves, and rightly so. While carrying messages back and forth between Donna Isabella and Grand Duke Francesco's secretaries, Chiara had seen the black taffeta flyswatters especially made for the occasion being put to vigorous use.

However many important men there might be following the old grand duke's catafalque to the cathedral, there'd be no women. Women weren't allowed to take part in public funeral ceremonies; Chiara herself and Nonna and her sisters had stayed home from the guild's rites for Babbo. Rich and powerful as they were, the Medici women were bound by the same custom. They could do nothing more than watch the formation of the funeral procession from the second floor of the Palazzo Vecchio.

There were two windows set close together in the fine decorated chamber. At one of them Giovanna of Austria, now the grand duchess and first lady of the court, stood in solitary hauteur, with two of her small parti-colored hounds at her feet. They were the sire and dam to Donna Isabella's Rina, Chiara had learned, and had been sent to the grand duchess some years ago by her sister Barbara, the Duchess of Ferrara. The Duke of Ferrara had hated Duke Cosimo, everyone knew that, and had vied furiously with him for
precedenza
and the title of grand duke, but even so the Ferrarese ambassador would be following in the funeral train, weeping large crocodile tears.

The grand duchess's face was like stone. She was a small, thin woman with a crooked back she disguised with steel corsets and padded dresses; her features were plain but her eyes could be luminously kind if you looked past the piety, the homesickness and that bred-in-the-bone Austrian pride. At the other window, not six steps away but in what might have been a different world, Isabella de' Medici wept with stormy disregard for any such thing as decorum. Her sister-in-law and cousin Donna Dianora—
damned Medici
, Babbo grumbled in Chiara's head,
marrying their own cousins. No wonder they're all mad as foaming dogs
—embraced her and plied her with silk handkerchiefs. Behind them clustered half-a-dozen ladies of honor; Chiara had managed to work her way forward until she stood just behind Donna Isabella.

“What will I do?” Donna Isabella wept. “What will my poor children do? My brother hates me, he lies to me, he has thwarted me at every turn. I cannot bear the thought of living with my husband—this is my home, here, Florence, and I will never, never leave it for that terrible old pile of rock at Bracciano.”

Donna Isabella's husband, Chiara had learned, was Don Paolo Giordano Orsini, the Duke of Bracciano. A fine name and a fine title, but not so fine a man. He was hugely fat, too fat for any horse to carry him, and so he rode in litters like a woman. Somehow that didn't keep him from getting into fights over whores and spending Medici gold as if it were water. If I were married to him, Chiara thought, I wouldn't want to live with him either. Poor Donna Isabella.

“You need not leave Florence,” Donna Dianora said. “You have the Palazzo Medici, and the villa at Baroncelli. Your father has left you an income of your own, and also provided a rich dowry for your daughter—he promised it, you know that.”

“Promised it!” Isabella burst out with fresh tears. “Promised, yes, but did he write it down? Did he put his will into the hands of his notaries and his men of law? No! Nothing is written, so it is all up to Francesco now—will he do as our father wished, or not?”

“Surely he will.”

“If he does not give everything to his Venetian mistress. He has already given her our mother's jewels, the ones he took from Signora Cammilla before he locked her up at Le Murate.”

“But Donna Bianca is your friend, is she not? After all, you arranged the death of her husband, and sheltered—”

“Shhh.” Donna Isabella looked around uneasily. Chiara looked up at the paintings on the ceiling—a beautiful woman kneeling at the feet of a fellow who looked like a king—and pretended she had not been listening. Donna Isabella, with her angel's face—she had arranged a murder?

“Of course I arranged it,” Isabella was whispering. “And I have her letters, proving she was part of the plan. She will be my friend in this business of my father's will, or I will make them public.”

“It would serve her right if you did. Orazio says—”

“Orazio, Orazio. I am tired of hearing about Orazio. You and your lovers are dabbling in treason, Dianorina, and everyone knows it.”

One of the ladies of honor passed cups of wine and a tray of sweet cakes from the sideboard. Chiara wanted a taste of the wine and one of the little cakes, made with fine white flour and spices, baked golden and glittering with grated crystals of sugar. She wanted to see what was happening in the courtyard. If I was free, she thought, I could go to the Piazza della Signoria whenever I wanted to, and see the procession, and maybe even steal a cake from the baker's stall. If I was free—

She edged closer. There was a tiny space at the edge of Donna Isabella's window, and slim as she was, she might fit into it.

If you were free
, whispered the demons inside her head,
you'd be dirty and hungry and dressed in your old camicia and gown. How quickly you've forgotten what life was like before you went out in the rain to sell the silver funnel to the prince
.

For once the demons were right. If she was free, she wouldn't have washed herself this morning in warm water scented with lavender oil, or combed her hair with an ivory comb and braided it with black velvet ribbons in the old grand duke's honor. She wouldn't be wearing a new black overgown with crystals sewn on the matching sleeves, and wouldn't have heard Mass in Donna Isabella's private chapel, with a jeweled chalice and paintings of the three Magi on the wall. So no, she didn't really want to be
free
free. She just wanted to see what all the fine ladies were seeing, and pretend to herself she was one of them. Even if they did have awful husbands.

Donna Isabella cried out with fresh anguish; everyone in the room jumped. The lady with the cakes dropped the plate, or had it knocked out of her hands. The other ladies all cried out and clustered around, picking up cakes and trying to soothe their mistress, and Chiara took advantage of the confusion to slip into the space at the side of the window.

In the courtyard below, on the black-draped catafalque, lay the old grand duke's body—but of course it couldn't be his body, not really, not after a month—the grand duke's effigy, then, its face and hands sculpted of wax colored and painted so it was startlingly lifelike. No wonder Donna Isabella had screamed. The grand ducal crown with its jeweled red lily was on his head. Grooms in the Medici colors held the reins of six enormous horses, all caparisoned and plumed in black velvet—yes, Isabella had talked about that as she talked about everything, resenting the expense, the grand duke's six favorite mounts trapped with funereal garb richer than what she herself had received. They would be led, riderless, in the procession. Chiara wondered what would happen to them afterward.

She felt a tug at her skirt, and looked down. One of the grand duchess's little hounds had found a lost cake on the floor, and was about to swallow it. Without thinking Chiara bent down and retrieved the cake—the sugar and the spices might make the dog sick. He looked up at her with woeful dark eyes.

“Rostig.”

The dog turned its head, and with a longing look at the half-crumbled cake, reluctantly returned to its mistress.

“I thank you, signorina,” the grand duchess said, her Italian serviceable but heavily accented. “Too much
zucker
, sugar, it is not good for them.”

Chiara gathered up her skirts and bent her knees in the best curtsy she could manage. Donna Jimena had despaired of her ever learning it properly. Babbo would call it truckling and groveling. “I'm honored to serve you, Serenissima,” she said. “I often look after Donna Isabella's little Rina.”

The grand duchess lifted her hand and gestured:
Come closer
. No one else was paying any attention—the serving women were fetching more cakes and wine, Donna Isabella was still crying and Donna Dianora was still handing her handkerchiefs. Chiara stepped from the one window to the other.

“This is Rostig,” the grand duchess said. Her affection for the little dogs made her plain face more attractive. “Rust-red, in your language, for the color of his head and ears. His mate is Seiden, silky one.”

Chiara made a small mock-curtsy to the dogs. “They are very handsome, Serenissima.”

“You are the alchemist's daughter, are you not?” the grand duchess said. “The vowed virgin who is to assist my husband in his alchemical experiments?”

Chiara was surprised. “Yes, Serenissima.”

“You wonder how I know? The priest at the Cathedral of San Stefano in Prato told me he allowed my husband to have the Sacra Cintola for a night. What better relic upon which to swear a vow of virginity?”

Chiara didn't know what to say, so she said nothing.

“Will you keep it? Your vow?”

“Yes, Serenissima. For as long as I am in the grand duke's service.”

The grand duchess did not actually smile, but her eyes crinkled with a trace of humor. She had the protruding Habsburg chin and jaw and she would never be called pretty, but when her eyes warmed like that she looked—pleasant, at least, in a melancholy way. “So you think of running away.”

“No, Serenissima,” Chiara said. “Of course not.”

“If the grand duke wishes to have you in his service, he will not give the opportunity. You are watched?”

“Yes, Serenissima.”

“Have you performed any alchemy yet?”

Chiara shifted uneasily. Why was the grand duchess questioning her, showing interest in her?
The prince wishes you to be vowed as a virgin, with all the rituals of magic he loves so dearly, to satisfy his wife and his mistress
, Magister Ruanno had said. Was the grand duchess jealous? How could that possibly be?

“No, Serenissima. So far all I have done is read and study.”

“Take care for your immortal soul,” the grand duchess said. “There is magic connected with alchemy, evil magic.”

“Yes, Serenissima.”

The grand duchess gazed out the window again. Chiara looked, too, pleased to have a space where she could see everything. The grand duke had come out into the courtyard, wearing a black robe with a pointed hood. A mourning robe, certainly, or at least that was what people would think—but Chiara recognized it. It was his alchemical cassock. His brother Don Pietro and his brother-in-law, Donna Isabella's husband Don Paolo Giordano Orsini, stepped to his side, wearing similar black habits. Don Paolo's might have made a shop awning all by itself, with plenty left over for kitchen curtains and a few dishrags. The grand duke's second brother, Cardinal Ferdinando, wore his formal scarlet vestments, as did the papal nuncio. The catafalque was lifted, the trumpets sounded and the procession began.

“He was a sinful man,” the grand duchess said. “A slave to the flesh, as are all the Medici. But he was kind to me at first. See the frescos in the courtyard, behind the columns? They are scenes from the places where I grew up, in Austria. He had them painted especially for me, when I first came to Florence—he knew how homesick I was.”

So, Chiara thought, he did one good thing. One less day in Purgatory.

“Later, though—later he was no longer kind. He allowed—that woman, the Venetian—to flaunt herself at court, pretending that she was not—my husband's mistress. I withdrew, because I could not possibly meet her. People said I was haughty and cold because I was Austrian, but it was just—I could not possibly come face-to-face with her, speak to her.”

She sounded deathly sad. And yet she was quiet and self-contained. At the other window, Isabella flung herself against the panes of glass, sobbing wildly with no thought of her place or position. Donna Dianora also pressed close to the window, although she was not crying.

As the procession passed out of the courtyard, through the
cancello
, Grand Duke Francesco did not look up. Don Pietro and Don Paolo did not look up. Cardinal Ferdinando, however, lifted his head and looked at the windows. At them all? No, just at one of them—the grand duchess. He raised his hand and traced a small cross in the air, a blessing. The grand duchess made the sign of the cross over her own breast in return. Chiara felt the connection between them, a connection not of the flesh but of the soul. If Cardinal Ferdinando was truly a devout man, it was not surprising that he admired his sister-in-law.