The Red Lily Crown (27 page)

“To what?” he said. He sounded amused and only mildly interested. He had turned back to his compound, bending forward to examine it carefully. His profile was sharp and clear against the laboratory cabinets full of exotic colors and shapes, the ancient books, the flasks of colored liquids, the crystals and the skulls. His thick dark hair was cut short enough to show the shape of his head and the fine musculature of his neck. The air itself seemed to shift and darken, as if she were in a
sonnodolce
dream even though she knew she wasn't.

She laid her hands on his arm and pulled him around to face her.

“It makes me want to kiss you,” she said.

He frowned a little, as if he didn't quite understand her.

She ran her hands up over his arms and shoulders and put her palms flat against his cheeks. His skin was cool, slightly rough where his beard would grow if he was not clean-shaven. His eyes had narrowed and his lips had parted a little. He didn't think she was going to do it. But she had already done it so many times in the
sonnodolce
dreams. She had imagined it during those summer afternoons, her first year at the Palazzo Medici, listening to Donna Isabella and Donna Dianora pleasuring each other. She had dreamed of men then and told herself they were faceless men, but in truth there was only one man and his face was Ruan Pencarrow's.

She stood on her tiptoes, closed her eyes and touched her lips very lightly to his.

One breath, hers and his together.

He pushed her away from him so hard that she stumbled, flailing with her arms for balance. One arm swept the hourglass from the table. It smashed on the floor, scattering glass and sand over the patterned black and white tiles of the maze.

She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to cry. She wanted to run away but her legs wouldn't move.

“Chiara,” he said at last. His voice sounded as if it hurt him to speak. “Chiara, if you do that I cannot promise you I will not—”

He stopped. They stared at each other. Neither of them breathed.

He said something in Cornish. Then he said, “I cannot promise you I will not compel you to break your vow.”

Chiara felt the blood flame up in her cheeks.

“I see you, Chiara,” he went on, in that same husky anguished voice. “In the
sonnodolce
visions. I see Cornwall, yes, and Milhyntall House and the moon over Wheal Loer, but I see you beside me as I walk along the cliffs. I feel you. I taste you and breathe your scent.”

She swallowed. She whispered, “I see you too. I count the days sometimes, until I can put the drop on my wrist and dream of you.”

He said nothing for a long time. At last he said, “Chiara, it changes things. If we are to love one another, everything will be changed.”

“I know.”

“I do not share the grand duke's belief that an alchemist's
soror mystica
must be a virgin. You know that. But as closely as we work together, the three of us—if you and I were to become lovers, he would know. He is not a fool, and the
sonnodolce
has made him—unpredictable. I would fear for you.”

“I understand.” She felt tears well up in her eyes and blinked fiercely. It didn't work. The tears slid down over her cheeks. “We can't— We can't. Not now. After, though? After we find the
Lapis Philosophorum
? After you—take your home back? After you take your revenge on the grand duke?”

“Many afters. Dangerous afters.”

“Even so.”

He reached out and ran his thumb lightly under her left eye, then through her hair where the scar was printed into her scalp. She felt him rub it gently, making little circles.

“After those things are done,” he said, “I will go back to Cornwall. Are you willing to leave Florence behind, leave your family behind, and come home with me?”

Leave Florence? Leave Nonna and her sisters? How could he ask her such a thing? She wanted to be with him, be his wife and his lover, work in a laboratory with him until the end of time. She wanted to see his Labyrinth House and his Moon Mine, yes. But she didn't want to go away forever. She wanted to come home in the end.

“Can we come back?” she whispered. “Have a home here, too?”

“No,” he said. His voice was stark. “Listen to what you yourself have said, Chiara. I am going to take my revenge on the grand duke. When I have done that, I cannot ever come back here.”

Chiara couldn't stop the stupid tears. She scrubbed them away and more kept welling up and spilling over. “What are we going to do, then?” she said. She knew it was stupid and childish but she couldn't help herself. “I know Cornwall is your home, but Florence is my home, just as much. How can we be together if you're there and I'm here?”

He ran his scarred palm over her forehead, brushing back a few loose strands of her hair. His touch was so gentle and so full of care that it broke her heart.

“We will be together,” he said. “For now, we must wait.”

She put out her chin at him. She felt it quavering. “Wait for what?”

“I do not know,
awen lymm
.” He smiled at her, just a little. “But we are bound to each other, and in the end we will find a way, or I will die in the trying.”

Carlo Nerini's bookshop

16 SEPTEMBER 1577

“N
onna!”

Chiara slid down from the horse and ran into her grandmother's arms. Vivi danced beside her, barking with delight at all the excitement.

“Look at you,” Nonna said. She squinted her eyes as if it was hard for her to see clearly. “Riding a horse like you were born to it. I remember the days when you were so scared of horses you'd puke at the sight of one. Let me look at you,
nipotina
.”

She took hold of Chiara's wrists and spread them wide, then let go of one and twirled her around with the other. Vivi jumped up and went round in circles as well.

“You look thin. You look older. Not so fresh and pretty, for all your fine clothes and pearls in your hair. How old are you now, anyway?”

Leave it to Nonna to say the things no one else ever said. “I'm eighteen—I'll be nineteen in a couple of months. As you know perfectly well. Living at the Medici court is enough to squeeze the freshness and prettiness out of anyone.”

“Still keeping that crazy vow of yours? It's past time you were married—a good husband would perk you up a bit. Why are you riding about with only a guardsman in Medici colors? Where's your fine chaperone?”

“Donna Jimena? She entered the convent at Le Murate. It broke her heart, I think, the—” She was going to say
murder
but stopped herself at the last moment. “The death of Donna Isabella.”

“Le Murate, eh? She can tell her beads with old Duke Cosimo's so-called widow, then. No one ever gets out of that place. Come inside,
nipotina
, and see your little sisters.”

The bookshop gleamed with cleanliness. The caretaker had managed it well enough, but no one could clean like Nonna. Lucia and Mattea stood next to each other, scrubbed spotless and neatly dressed. In the year-and-a-bit they'd been in Pistoia, Lucia had changed from a gangly girl to a young woman. How old was she? In her head Chiara counted. Fifteen. The same age she, Chiara, had been when she'd gone out in the rain with an ancient silver funnel in her pouch.

Three and a half years ago. It seemed like a lifetime.

“Hello, Lucia,” she said. “Hello, Mattea.”

Mattea—if Lucia was fifteen Mattea had to be twelve, and she didn't seem to have changed at all—squealed and flung herself across the room for a hug. Chiara caught her up and swung her around, then kissed her on both cheeks.

“This is Vivi,” she said. Vivi looked up at the sound of her name, her brown eyes bright with merriment, her long ears floating out on either side of her head like an angel's wings. “Grand Duchess Giovanna gave her to me when she was just a puppy, and she's a year old now, a little more. A grown-up dog, just as you two are grown-up girls.”

Mattea instantly went down on her knees and began to stroke Vivi's ears, murmuring with pleasure. Lucia didn't move. She looked straight at Chiara with stormy eyes.

“How kind you are, Donna Chiara,” she said, “to allow us to come back to our home.”

Nonna cuffed her ear, not really hard enough to hurt. “It wasn't Chiara's fault that we had to go to Pistoia,” she said. “It was mine, and you know it. If your sister's friend Magister Ruanno hadn't arranged for us to get out of the city I could've been arrested and tortured and hanged in the Piazza della Signoria, and where would you have been then? Orphans begging on the streets, that's where.”

“It must be nice to have such friends at the court,” Lucia said. The cuff hadn't sweetened her temper. “And to wear beautiful dresses, and have a dog that's a gift from the grand duchess herself.”

“A sweet doggie,” Mattea crooned.

“The grand duchess gave Vivi to me,” Chiara said, “because I was sick and she was afraid I would die. See these?” She stretched out her left hand, displaying the ugly crookedness of the second and third fingers that she usually went to such pains to conceal. “They were broken by—by a duke. He crushed my hand in a door and didn't even care. There was no one to treat the wounds for days and they got infected and I'm lucky I didn't lose my arm. That's how
nice
it is to have friends at court.”

“Shush,
nipotina
.” Nonna was there, tucking the poor fingers into a safe curled fist and holding them warm against her heart. “I'm sorry you were left alone to suffer such things. Lucia doesn't understand—she only sees the pretty things you have, and that she had to leave her home and all her friends without even saying good-bye.”

Lucia's face crumpled up with a combination of shame and dismay and anger and longing. Broken fingers or no, it was easy to see she envied the dresses and the names of the highborn. “Sorry,” she said. It didn't sound as if she meant it. “I'm betrothed now, did you know that? Cinto's a bookseller's son from Pistoia, and when we're married he'll be made a member of the Arte here. The shop will be his. His and mine. I'll have a husband, which is more than you can say, for all your dukes and duchesses.”

“It's true,” Nonna said. She patted Chiara's hand.
Let her have her moment
, the pats said.
We need a man and a guild member to run the shop again. She is growing up and all this has been hard for her
. “His full name is Giacinto Garzi, and he's the second son of a good family, so this is an excellent arrangement for everyone. He's a fine boy.”

“I'm happy for you, Lucia,” Chiara said. She meant it, too. “I truly am.”

“There, now, we are all a family again.” Nonna started through the doorway to the kitchen behind the shop. “Lucia, go and see your friends, and if you have a word to spare from stories of your
promesso
, remember to tell them we went to Pistoia to take care of your Prozia Innocenza in her terrible sickness. Mattea, play with Vivi, and take care she doesn't run off. Chiara, come into the kitchen with me, and help me cook our dinner.”

What she meant was,
Chiara, come into the kitchen with me so you can tell me all the things you don't want your sisters to hear.

A fat chicken was simmering on the stove, its rich scent punctuated with garlic, onions and sweet peppers. The cupboards were packed full of food, vegetables and fruit, oil and olives, long strings of noodles looped and knotted, dried peas and lentils in baskets and bags and jars. Two new loaves of bread awaited cutting, and a bottle of strong red wine had been uncorked to breathe.

“Now,” Nonna said. “Tell me about your Magister Ruanno, and why he suddenly arranged for us to come home, and settled your Babbo's debts to the Arte once and for all, and filled the kitchen with so many good things.”

“He's not my Magister Ruanno,” Chiara said.

“I know when you're lying,
nipotina
. Go slice the bread with that fine new knife, if you please—my sight's not what it used to be and I'm not used to such sharp knives. While you're slicing, tell me what it is you're not telling me.”

“It's true he's not my Magister Ruanno.” Chiara picked up the knife and sliced the end off the loaf. The knife was so sharp it was like slicing butter. “I'm keeping my vow, Nonna, until I hold the
Lapis Philosophorum
in my hands. Until I can be healed, and—well, and some other things.”

“What other things?”

She sliced off another piece of bread. The sweet yeasty scent made her mouth water. “Magister Ruanno is from a place called Cornwall, in England. His home is there, his father's estate and a mine, and they were stolen from him somehow. He won't tell me exactly how, but he wants to get them back.”

“There's talk about him. He disappeared, people say, after Donna Isabella's”—she paused, just like Chiara herself had paused—“death. Then he appeared again, thick as two thieves with the grand duke. Some people say he killed them himself, the grand duke's sister and sister-in-law, on the grand duke's orders.”

“That's a lie.” Chiara put down the knife. If her hands were going to shake like this, she'd cut herself. “That's a terrible lie. I was there, Nonna, and I saw—well, I heard—Donna Isabella's husband beat her and strangle her. Magister Ruanno loved Donna Isabella, and his obedience to the grand duke is only a pretense so he can—”

She stopped.

“You have to be more careful,
nipotina
, in what you let people goad you into saying.” Nonna spooned up the chicken's juices and basted its golden skin complacently. “I think your Magister Ruanno is a dangerous fellow to know, and it's just as well you're keeping your vow right and tight. Are you close to finding your Philosopher's Stone?”

Chiara picked up the end piece of the bread and nibbled on the crust. After a moment she said, “We're getting closer each time, but the process the grand duke has chosen, with fourteen stages—there are just too many things that can go wrong.”

“So there are different ways to do it? Like different recipes for
ribollita
?”

“Yes.” Chiara had to smile at that. “And Babbo had a book with a different—well—recipe.”

Nonna frowned. “He had a lot of books. Your Magister Ruanno took them all away.”

“Not all of them. Nonna, listen. I've learned a lot, working with the grand duke and Magister Ruanno. I think I can create the
Lapis Philosophorum
myself, if I follow the process in Babbo's book. But I need you to help me.”

“Ah, now we get to what you're really hiding. Tell me,
nipotina
, if you do this thing, will it mean that the devil-damned Medici won't succeed in getting the Philosopher's Stone for himself?”

Chiara ate some more of the bread. She hadn't really thought of it that way, but suddenly the whole plan revealed itself in her head, perfect in every detail. Of course. The ultimate revenge. Make little mistakes, so tiny as to be unnoticeable, while helping the grand duke. Deny him the
Lapis Philosophorum
he lusted for. And at the same time, work as a single alchemist, not a
soror mystica
but an alchemist in her own right, in her own secret laboratory in the bookshop's cellar.

“Yes,” she said. “That's just what it means. I can make sure the grand duke's process fails, and at the same time, if I can set up a laboratory in the cellar here, I can follow the stages in Babbo's book and achieve the
Lapis Philosophorum
for myself.”

“You know what happened when your Babbo made the cellar into a laboratory.”

“I know. I'll be careful. He was doing something bad, something against nature.”

Her head throbbed. Babbo's voice whispered,
I will cut her throat, and her virgin's life-blood will bring him back. . . .

But the sensation in her head wasn't as painful as it once had been, and the voice seemed to be coming from far away. Maybe it was part of being older, and not so fresh and pretty, that the headaches and voices weren't torturing her like they'd done before. She hadn't had a falling-spell for—well, she couldn't remember. Half a year? A year?

“I will practice only alchemy itself,” she said, as if with the purity of her art she could keep every danger away. “Science, and not necromancy.”

Nonna nodded slowly. “You scare me sometimes, girl. You know I don't believe the Philosopher's Stone really exists.”

“It exists. I'll prove it to you.”

“If it strikes a blow against the Medici, I'll help you. What do you want me to do?”

“Just keep the cellar locked. Make sure the girls don't go down there. Help me carry things down—I'll bring equipment from the grand duke's laboratory, and the materials I need. He has so much, he'll never miss it.”

And I'll block the secret passage with stones, she thought, and lock the hatchway with double locks. I won't need it anymore, now that Nonna is in charge of the shop again.

“And your friend Magister Ruanno,” Nonna said. “Are you going to tell him about your secret laboratory?”

After we find the
Lapis Philosophorum
? After you take your home back? After you take your revenge on the grand duke?

What was one more lie after all the others?

“I won't tell him now, because he'll try to stop me,” she said. “He'll be afraid for me.”

“Sensible man.”

“I'm not afraid, Nonna. Magister Ruanno has secrets of his own and I don't want to break his back with another. I'll tell him after I've succeeded, because after—”

She didn't say what was going to come after. She couldn't put it into words, even inside her head, because the choice was too terrible. Ruan? Or home? How could she live the rest of her life without one or the other?

“After,” Nonna said, “you're going to have to run far and fast, because the grand duke will want what you've made. He'll kill you for it, if he can catch you.”

“He won't catch me,” Chiara said. She wasn't sure if she believed it but she said it anyway. “And even if I have to run away for a little while, I'm a Florentine down to my bones just like you are, and I'll always come home in the end.”