The Red Lily Crown (17 page)

“Your marten skins”—he gestured with the point of the knife to the mantle on the cold ground—“have not brought you a child, have they, despite the fact that you have been my mistress for what? Nine years? My wife may produce only daughters, but she at least is fertile. She has borne me six children, and three of them live. The youngest is thriving. I still have hopes of a half-Imperial son. Do not dare bring my wife's name into this.”

“I am sorry,” she whispered. Even under the cold-mottled color of her face he could see the flush of shame. It was her great failure, that she could not bear him a son.

“Only this month, the emperor recognized me at last as the Grand Duke of Tuscany—my wife's brother, my own brother-in-law. Do you think I would throw away his favor?”

“No, Franco.”

“Very well. You understand what you are to do, then? You will discover evidence of dishonor against both Donna Dianora and Donna Isabella, and you will give that evidence to no one but me.”

“Yes, Franco.”

He said nothing for a moment. Her teeth chattering with cold, she said, “Franco? You said it was one reason. Why Donna Bianca was the queen of the Carnival. What is the other?”

“I still have hopes of a half-Imperial son,” he repeated thoughtfully. “But a son—any son—would once and for all silence the whispers that I am less than a man.”

She said nothing. He could read her expression—she feared he meant to take another mistress. She knew about his whores and did not care—they were only whores. But if another noble mistress bore him a son, even Bia would not be enough to hold him.

“Once Lent is over,” he said, “during the Easter celebrations, you will begin to show symptoms of being with child. You will make a point of this—hiding the evidence of your courses, producing sickness in yourself in the mornings, feigning a growing belly. You may take that old woman of yours into your confidence, the one you brought from Venice with you.”

“Caterina Donati.”

“Whatever her name is. She will do anything for you, will she not?”

“Y-yes.”

“In fact, she was willing to help you practice this very deception on me—a pretended pregnancy and a changeling child.”

Bianca turned white. The violet mottling of cold looked like a lace veil over her skin. “No. No, I never intended to do that. I never told Caterina that.”

“Do you think I am a fool? I know everything you do. I know everything you think and hope for. I would have killed you, my Bia, if you had tried to deceive me like that.”

“But now—now—now you yourself want me to do it?”

“I do. I will manage the details, and far better than you could ever have done. I will have a son, legitimate or not. If my wife bears nothing but daughters, I will legitimate him and make him my heir.”

“And I will be his mother?” Bianca flushed suddenly, her skin turning rosy despite the cold. “The mother of your heir?”

“The mother of my son, at least. Assuming that you have the courage and tenacity to carry it through.”

“I will. Oh, Francesco, I will.”

He gestured to her. “Cover yourself. We will return to the palazzo. The costume you have planned for the entertainment tonight—you will have to wear a scarf, I think, to cover those unfortunate cuts. How clumsy you were, to stumble into the thorns while we walked.”

“I was clumsy,” she whispered. Her voice was soft and acquiescent but there was a dark glitter deep in her eyes, joyful and secret. He had commanded her, and she would obey him. And the whispers about his manhood would be silenced forever.

She gathered up her bodice and sleeves. The grand duke picked up the marten-fur mantle and wrapped it around her. She grasped the rich fur and pulled it close.

“Let us go in, Madonna,” he said. “It is growing colder. Even so, do you not agree? It has been a fine evening for a walk in the garden.”

“A fine evening,” she repeated. “And this fur is wonderfully warm. Even after nine years, my lord, there is always the chance of a miracle.”

R
uan left his apartment in the Casino di San Marco in the black of night, on foot and alone.

As he made his way through the silent streets—
and you, Magister Ruanno, will have time to meet secretly with your messengers, who run back and forth to London at your direction
—he thought of the arrests, the executions, the disappearances. Whispers of treason had been everywhere in the months since Orazio Pucci had lost his handsome head in the dark cellars of the Bargello. What had he confessed? Who was next?

The faintest and most dangerous whispers of all concerned Isabella and her reckless young sister-in-law Donna Dianora. They were sick. They were not sick. They were being poisoned. They were poisoning each other. He did not particularly care about Dianora's fate, although she was a beautiful creature and it would be a sin against God's creation to destroy her. But he cared about Isabella, very much.

Over the past months he had argued with her. Tried to convince her to leave Florence, travel to Rome where her brother the cardinal lived in state and comfort. To do something, anything. She had laughed at him. She was the grand duke's sister. The same Medici blood ran in both their veins, and to the Medici, blood was everything. How could her own brother harm her?

Sometimes in the nights he had thought of abducting her, taking her away by force. He had loved her once and that had marked her for him, marked his own heart. She was in danger and he would protect her, as he had not been able to protect—

Stop it, he admonished himself. You were six years old.

He needed a spy. A watcher, in the heart of the Medici women's secrets, to warn him if the situation became truly dangerous. He could not stand directly between Isabella and her brother's menace, but he could watch, and collect information, and eventually compel her to believe in her own danger.

It was the best way, the only way, to protect her.

He needed someone—

The softest scuff of a footstep behind him in the dark.

He stepped to one side just in time. The upward thrust of the stiletto, aimed for the small of his back, sliced through his doublet and stung the skin over his ribs on his left side. He turned, pulling his own knife out of his right boot in the same movement. The assassin, carried forward by the momentum of his failed thrust, stumbled slightly. Ruan brought his own knife down into the man's back, just below his shoulder blade, and pulled hard to the side, following the space between the man's ribs. The man collapsed with a grunt of shock and agony.

Kawgh an managh.

Ruan cleaned his blade on the man's short black cloak and turned him over. He was masked. He pulled the mask away and swore again. The man's skin was fair and high-colored, his hair was reddish-blond—he knew him. He had seen him before, in the employ of the English ambassador. And the ambassador was expecting him. In his pouch he had another hundred gold scudi
for the English ambassador to send on to London, after taking his own share as a commission.

Had the ambassador sent this fellow, with an eye to keeping all the gold for himself instead of just a percentage of it? Or had the dead Englishman learned of the meeting and decided on his own to make his fortune?

Ruan put his knife back in his boot and walked on. He felt no particular remorse over killing the man—it was not, after all, the first time he had killed a man with a knife. If he had been half a breath slower, it would be his body lying dead in the street. The quickened heartbeat and quivering muscles of after-fear, yes. Repugnance, yes. Anger, yes. But not remorse. The watch would find the body and shrug their shoulders that an unwary foreigner had been stupid enough to walk the streets at night, and that would be the end of it.

It was a dangerous business, bribing men at the English court. Necessary, yes, and he would keep doing it. But dangerous.

Almost as dangerous as living with the grand duke's instability and mad suspicions in Florence.

He needed someone who could tell him the secrets of Isabella's household, so he could protect her from her brother.

•   •   •

After that Ruan kept to the laboratory, working on a new process for extracting silver from the ore of the Bottino mine. Most people believed alchemists could make gold and silver in their laboratories; metallurgists knew better. But there were ways to make a given amount of ore produce more metal than it had produced before. Science, not magic—although sometimes the line between the two was not easy to discern.

For practical purposes, though, increasing the mine's yield meant he could demand increased commissions from the grand duke, and he needed gold; buying influence at Queen Elizabeth's court in London was like feeding gold into an endless furnace. Damn the grand duke, anyway, for being caught up in his own plots and counterplots and not making a fresh start on the
magnum opus
. The
Lapis Philosophorum
would solve everything, not because it would magically turn base metal into gold, but because the grand duke would fling wide the doors of his treasury if he believed he had achieved it.

Whatever it cost, one day he, Ruan Pencarrow of Milhyntall, would kill Andrew Lovell and ruin his family. Only when they were poor and ragged and homeless, as he and his mother had been, would his revenge be truly achieved.

“Magister Ruanno?”

He looked up.

It was Chiara Nerini.

“Soror Chiara.” He carefully set his reagents aside, the copper of Calais, sulphur and lead, orpiment and oil of Spanish radish.

She stepped farther into the laboratory. She was not wearing her
soror
's habit, only an ordinary gown and a dark mantle, but he could see the glint of the silver chain around her neck, just inside her collar; she was wearing the moonstone. Her hair was neatly braided and coiled, with the silver strands over her left ear mostly hidden. She looked thinner. There was a hollowness around her changeable eyes and under her cheekbones that had not been there since the days when she had first joined the court.

She had reasons to be thinner—she was in Isabella's household, after all, and that was a dangerous place. It made her look more adult—more desirable, if he were to be strictly honest with himself, and at the same time more fragile. He did not want to hurt her or distress her.

“Your man brought your message,” she said. “What do you want, Magister Ruanno? Can I help you with your experiments?”

“No.” He poured clean water over his hands and dried them on a towel, taking his time about it. “You are intimate with Donna Isabella and Donna Dianora, are you not? You serve them, share their secrets?”

She folded her lips in and frowned. “I won't spy on them for you, if that's what you want.”

He smiled. She was direct. He was not used to that; the intermediaries, informers and conspirators he was accustomed to dealing with never said what they thought in two words if they could dance around it in ten.

“I mean them no harm,” he said.

“Perhaps not. Even so, I will not betray them.”

So. He had hoped it would not be necessary to compel her.

“The times are unsettled.” He stepped out from behind his worktable. She took a step backward. “Most of those connected with the Pucci conspiracy have been arrested, but not all. Pierino Ridolfi, for example. He is in Germany, they say, although the grand duke's agents continue to pursue him.”

The girl said nothing. Her eyes had widened when he said Ridolfi's name.

“The grand duke knows that Donna Isabella helped Ridolfi escape Florence. He knows she provided him with Donna Dianora's necklace to pay for his flight, and a fine horse. What he does not know, not yet, is the means by which she passed these things into his hands.”

“No one knows that.”

“I know. It was you.”

She turned so white he was afraid she might have one of her falling-spells. “Stop. Please. Do not say any more. What do you want? I will do anything you ask, if you will do something for me in return.”

It had been little more than a guess, that Isabella had used this girl as a go-between. Who else who served her had no other ties or loyalties? Who else was young and foolish enough to do such a dangerous thing? His guess had apparently been spectacularly correct.

He said, “You are hardly in any position to bargain.”

“Even so. Please.”

What was it about her that touched him? He had not thought there were any soft places left in his heart, and yet here he was, struck to the quick by the thought that she would never trust him again. Angry at himself, he said, “If you swoon away, I swear I will leave you here on the floor and go straight to the grand duke with what I know. Very well. You will serve as my eyes and ears in Donna Isabella's household. Tell me what you wish me to do in return.”

She steadied herself with one hand against a heavy cabinet filled with books. “Nonna,” she said, as if that explained everything. Actually, it did.
The Nerini are supporters of the old republic
, she had told him the day they went to the booksellers' quarter to retrieve her father's equipment,
as well as being respectable
. That wild-eyed grandmother of hers had carried her support for the old republic far beyond respectability, and was probably up to her neck in Pucci's treasons. She might even have helped Ridolfi escape.

“Help me get them out of Florence for a little while,” Chiara Nerini said. Her eyes were dark with fear and anguish. “Nonna and my two little sisters. If you'll do that, I'll tell you everything I see and hear in Donna Isabella's inner chambers.”

“She helped Ridolfi escape.”

She resisted for a moment longer, then nodded. One small terrified nod.

“Does anyone else know?”

She whispered, “No. I don't think so.”

He looked at her for a moment. I should not agree to this, he thought. It is too dangerous. And yet even as the warning formed itself in his mind, he heard himself saying, “Very well, I will manage your fool of a grandmother's escape. Do you not think to ask that I keep silence about your own involvement?”

“You can't denounce me and at the same time use me as a spy.”

Neatly reasoned. And true. He smiled at her, a baring of his teeth, nothing more.

“Say I get them out. Where will they go?”

“Nonna has a sister in Pistoia. It's to the west, not very far.”

“I know where it is. Will this sister take your Nonna in? Hide her, if necessary?”

“I think so. I hope so. I only met her once. They aren't booksellers—Prozia Innocenza's husband is a locksmith and toolmaker.”

“The better to lock your Nonna up if she dabbles in any more treason. What about the shop?”

“I'll speak to the master of the Arte and arrange for a caretaker. Nonna will never stay in Pistoia for long—she is Florentine down to her bones, and will come back as soon as it is safe.”

“Perhaps it will never be safe.”

“This is home,” she said simply. “She will come back. I would come back, if it were me.”

This is home.

He thought of Milhyntall House looking out over Mount's Bay, and he understood her.

“Very well,” he said. “It is in the grand duke's interest that the shop remain as it is—there may be more small pieces of your father's equipment. More books, hidden. Who knows what may be there?”

That made her eyes flicker away for a moment. There was something hidden in the shop, something she had not told him about. He had suspected as much the first time they had gone there. Well, there would be time to deal with that later.

He said, “Tell your Nonna of the danger, and persuade her to go to Pistoia for a little while. I will arrange for suitable papers.”

“You can do that?”

“I can. You go back to the Palazzo Medici and keep your promise. I want to know if there is any hint that Donna Isabella is in danger. Get word to me particularly if either the grand duke or the Duke of Bracciano require her to leave the city for some isolated place.”

“I'll help you with Nonna's escape. I'll—”

“You will do as you are told. I want no suspicion attached to you.”

“Will you let me know when they are safely away? Please?”

“I will let you know.” She looked so desperate that he took pity on her. Again. A bad habit to get into. “It is not a dangerous thing, Soror Chiara, if properly managed. The less you know about it, the better.”

“How soon will they be able to come home?”

“It will depend on whether or not Ridolfi is captured, and if he is, what he confesses.”

“Donna Dianora's sick more often than she should be,” she said abruptly, as if she felt she owed him some immediate payment. “One moment she thinks she is being poisoned, and the next moment she shrugs it off and drinks wine straight from the kitchens.”

“Isabella?” he said.

“I'm not sure. She's sad, because Don Troilo Orsini has fled. But I don't think she's being poisoned. She's more careful.”

“Good. That is the sort of thing I want to know. Now off you go. Tomorrow I will provide you with a cipher and a supply of invisible ink—your messages to me, and mine to you, must remain a secret.”

She looked at him. Her eyes had lightened to a deep greenish-gold color, with brown in a distinct ring around the iris. They had the clarity that signified a water sign. He wondered if she knew what her birth date was, and what her sign would be if he cast her horoscope.

“Thank you,” she said. “You could have forced me to help you, without helping me.”

“I know.” I am a fool, he thought. How did she become another woman with her mark upon my heart? “Do not forget your promise.”

“I won't forget.”