The Red Lily Crown (31 page)

C
hiara burst through the front of the bookshop and ran into the kitchen behind it. “Nonna,” she said. She doubled over, trying to catch her breath. Vivi danced around her, claws clicking on the scrubbed wood floor. “Nonna, he's married her.”

Nonna looked up from the soup she was stirring. The cloudiness of her eyes was becoming more visible every day. The kitchen smelled of roasted chicken and fennel and garlic.

“Who's married who?” Nonna said.

“The grand duke. He's married Bianca Cappello.”

Nonna tasted her soup and added more salt. “Can't be more than gossip. Even Francesco de' Medici wouldn't be stupid enough to marry his Venetian whore with the emperor's sister hardly cold in her tomb.”

“It's not gossip.” Chiara slung her leather bag on the table and began to take out bottles of white and red crystalline powders. “I've been to the Villa di Pratolino, taking equipment and supplies for the grand duke's new laboratory there. I saw Bianca Cappello.”

“She lives there.” Nonna dipped a piece of bread in the soup and held it out to Vivi. The little hound sat up on her haunches with her white front paws tucked neatly against her chest, and when Nonna threw the morsel of bread she jumped up and snapped it out of the air.

“I spoke to her.” Chiara began to arrange the bottles in groups, by color. “May she be damned to hell for all eternity. It's supposed to be secret, of course. In public he's still pretending to be a grieving widower.”

“All the better for you the Medici devil's occupied, coming and going with his powders and potions like you do and taking whatever you please. What's all that?”

“The red crystals are cinnabar—it's a sulphide of mercury, although you'd never know there's a silver metal inside it, by looking at it. The white powder is called philosopher's wool—it's zinc ores that have been burned in air.”

Nonna made the sign of the cross, then the
corna
, the two down-pointing fingers like horns that warded off the evil eye.

“It's not black magic, Nonna.”

“Best to be safe, either way.”

“I wish it was magic, and that I knew how to use it. Bianca Cappello threatened me—she boasted to me that she was married to the grand duke, and afterward she regretted it. She told me she could have me silenced forever.”

“Keep out of the affairs of the Medici,
nipotina
. I worry that you spend so much time alone with the grand duke, without your Magister Ruanno.”

“The grand duke says he's coming back to Florence. We're going to start the
magnum opus
again at the summer solstice, and if we succeed . . . I don't know, I think Magister Ruanno may find an assassin's dagger between his shoulder blades.”

Nonna looked at her thoughtfully. She seemed to be weighing whether or not to do something. After a moment she said, “Just so there are no daggers in your own back from that bitch of a Venetian. Have you been to see the kennel master today?”

Nonna held up another tidbit of bread and made a circling motion with it. Vivi went round and round in circles, then again caught the bread when Nonna tossed it. Nonna did love dogs and had clearly spent hours teaching Vivi her tricks.

“Yes, I saw him. Rostig and Seiden are grieving for the grand duchess, refusing to eat, lying by the door all day, watching and hoping. The kennel master's wife takes care of them, and Rina and Leia too, but they're lonely—there's no one left to love them.”

“What about the children? I'd think they'd want their mother's pets.”

“I don't know if anyone's asked them. They're at the Palazzo Pitti, and the grand duke has put them in the charge of Bianca Cappello. I'm going to ask him to put me in the children's household too—someone has to keep an eye on the grand duchess's children, because the Venetian will poison them all to make her changeling boy the only heir.”

Nonna sniffed. She could express more scorn in one sniff than Chiara herself could do in a week's worth of words. “I can't help you with the children,
nipotina
, but bring the old dogs here. I'll make sure they have good dinners and folded blankets in the warm sunshine, for your grand duchess's sake. She was good to you, for all she was married to a Medici.”

“And I could take Rina and Leia to the Pitti—the grand duchess's daughters could take them out into the gardens for their exercise. I promised her, Nonna, that I would watch over them all.”

After she was dead, perhaps, but still. A promise was a promise.

Nonna reached down and ran her hand over Vivi's head. “Just be careful,” she said. “I don't like all this talk about assassins, and the grand duke's Venetian whore threatening you. We've had enough trouble with the Medici, and we don't need any more.”

Chiara dipped a piece of bread into the soup and ate it herself. “I want to keep my place,” she said. “I can become a
magistra
, Nonna, an alchemist in my own right. I can show Babbo that I'm worthy.”

“Your father's dead and gone. You can't show him anything.”

“He meant to—”

I will cut her throat, and her virgin's life-blood will bring him back. She should have died instead of Gian, and it is only right she be the one to bring him back
.

She stopped herself just in time. It would break Nonna's heart anew to know what a deadly sin her son had planned.

“He meant to do a lot of things,” Nonna said. The wrinkles in her cheeks seemed to deepen with sadness. “I wasn't sure if I should give you this,
nipotina
, but if you're bound to stay at court with the devil and his whore, you need all the friends you can get. Your Magister Ruanno, he's different.”

She went to the box where she kept fresh bread, opened it, and took out a packet of paper, folded together and covered with wax seals. The seals had been broken. Chiara took it and saw that it was addressed to the bookshop of Carlo Nerini in Florence, nothing more. The handwriting struck her to the heart, with its tall, narrow letters and sharp, straight, angular lines. She had seen it before in one short note, written in invisible ink and tied to Vivi's collar with silken threads.

“This is from Magister Ruanno,” she said. “You opened it?”

“It was addressed to the shop, wasn't it? I'm not so blind that I can't read an order if I look close enough, and that's what I thought it was.”

Chiara unfolded the paper. It was exactly as Nonna described it—an innocuous request for a book of Dante. The writing filled only half the space. The other half was blank.

Although of course it wouldn't be blank if it was held over a flame.

“I'm going to take this down to the cellar with me,” she said. “I need to put these things away.”

“Be careful with it,
nipotina
. Burn it when you're finished.”

Nonna, who had survived how many anti-Medici plots and revolutions, who had been born during the first republic, who had been an ardent supporter of the second republic? Yes, she would know about such things as invisible ink.

“I'll be careful,” Chiara said.

In the cellar she lit the lanterns and put the bottles of cinnabar crystals and philosopher's wool on the shelves in their proper places. Then she lit the brazier, unfolded the piece of paper, and held it over the fire.

I am taking ship in the morning. I have sent the grand duke a letter, but I know him well enough to expect an embrace in public and an assassin's dagger in secret, and will take care accordingly. The news of the grand duchess's death has reached me. May she rest in peace.

I have achieved what I desired, and at the same time I have lost everything. I have missed you,
awen lymm
. I will tell you more when I see you.

It wasn't signed, but then none of his messages had ever been signed.

I have missed you
.

She tore the paper into shreds and fed the pieces into the brazier, one at a time. The fire burned up hotter, and the heat seemed to find its way into her flesh and her veins and her heart. She needed the
sonnodolce
—it had been only six days instead of the seven that were supposed to pass between doses, but she craved it and the dreams it would bring, the relief.

I have achieved what I desired, and at the same time I have lost everything.

What did that mean?

And what about what she herself desired? What about the
Lapis Philosophorum
, which would heal her, quiet her demons, make her whole? What about her ambition to learn, to experiment, to be a
magistra
more famous than Perenelle Flamel? What about proving to Babbo, once and for all and forever, that she was worthy to be alive? Was she to leave Florence, give up everything she had struggled and suffered to achieve, for Ruan Pencarrow and his labyrinth house and his moon mine halfway to the end of the world? I love you, Ruan, she thought—yes, there, I said it, inside my head at least—but I'm not ready to go. Not yet.

She took the tiny bottle of
sonnodolce
from its hiding place—hidden even from Nonna—and looked at it for a long time. It was half empty. I have to be careful, she thought. I don't know when the grand duke will make more. I know something about the components but he's the only one who knows the exact ingredients and the proportions of the formula. So that's another thing I need to find for myself. I wonder if Ruan's been continuing to use it, or if being back in his Cornwall, his home, has been satisfaction enough. I hope he hasn't stopped. He needs protection from poisons if he is coming back to Florence.

She removed the stopper from the bottle and let one drop fall on her wrist—left wrist this time. The liquid remained in one cohesive drop for a minute or two, then seemed to sink into her skin. Like the water in the silver sieve, she thought. A thousand years ago.

Carefully she sealed the bottle again and put it away. Then she went to the narrow pallet she'd set up in the darkest corner of the cellar and stretched out on the straw mattress. She closed her eyes.

When Ruan comes back . . .

She was in the great salon of the Palazzo Vecchio, standing to one side, half in the shadows. The grand duke was seated on an elaborate throne, decorated with gold and studded with jewels. He was dressed in gold and silver, and wore the crown of Tuscany with its central red fleur-de-lis. In his right hand he carried the scepter, a gilded rod topped with a globe of the world. Light seemed to shine from all the magnificence he wore, and it intensified the black shadow behind him.

Slowly, slowly, Chiara turned her head.

At the other end of the salon, Ruan Pencarrow stood in an arched doorway. He was dressed in plain dark cloth and leather, his head bare, his whip coiled over his shoulder. On his left wrist perched a glossy black bird, like a crow but not a crow, its beak bright red, long and curved. Behind him there was a storm of light, bright as the sun.

He is the opposite of the grand duke in every way, Chiara thought, dream-slowed. Dark simplicity outlined with light.

“Welcome back to Florence, Magister Ruanno,” the grand duke said. “You have come to kill me, I think, in revenge for my sister Isabella's death.”

Chiara tried to scream. She couldn't.

“I have come to kill you,” Ruan agreed. He took a step forward. “And to take our
soror mystica
away with me.”

“You will never have her. She cannot live without the
sonnodolce
, and only I know the secret of its formula.”

Two men with silver daggers stepped into the room from a side door. They went to Ruan. He did not move. The black bird screamed, and launched itself into the air. It flew up and up and up, and Chiara realized that in her dream the great salon was open to the sky.

“I will have her,” Ruan said.

“You will not.” A different voice, a woman's voice with a Venetian accent. Bianca Cappello floated down into the room wearing a white silk dress and a blood-red jacket. She had a rose in her hand, its stem thickly starred with thorns.

“I will stop her breath,” Bianca Cappello said.

The grand duke gestured with his scepter.

The two men struck Ruan with their silver daggers. He fell. They continued to stab him, over and over, as he lay on the floor at the grand duke's feet. His blood spread over the polished marble. It was not ordinary red blood, but molten metal, copper and iron, metals from the heart of the earth.

“Ruan!” Chiara screamed. She tried to run to him but every move was unnaturally, terrifyingly slow, as if she were caught in a thick sticky web. “Ruan, Ruan . . .”

She opened her eyes. She was whispering, “Ruan, Ruan.”

She was in the cellar, on her pallet. The brazier had gone out, and the lanterns were flickering. None of it had happened. It was only the
sonnodolce
.

“Ruan,” she said aloud. “He means to kill you. Hear me, wherever you are.”

The cellar was silent. She was alone. And Ruan Pencarrow, wherever he was, couldn't hear her warnings.

The Poisoned Maze in the Boboli Gardens

17 JULY 1578

C
hiara floated up out of blackness with the taste of blood in her mouth and the scent of earth in her face. She was wet and shivering, although it wasn't cold. It was dark, so dark. At first she thought she'd been buried alive, but then she realized there were sounds around her, chirrings, rustlings, insects and leaves. There was air. There was the unmistakable scent of the Arno. She was lying face down on soft thick grass, mown as short and fine as velvet.

But where?

She turned over. The sky was black and clear, glittering with stars, the Via Lattea arching through the vault of the heavens like silver smoke. The moon was almost full, bright enough to cast shadows. She was in a circular clearing, surrounded by a wall of leaves, with some kind of stone in the center. But no. It wasn't quite circular. It was lobed, like a rosette with one, two, three—six petals. A rosette with six petals—the center of a labyrinth. A labyrinth made of small trees, clipped and manicured, with bittersweet and rose canes twining among their branches. Flower beds around them. It was too dark to see what kind of flowers were planted there.

She sat up. She was wearing ordinary clothes, her blue linen bodice and skirt over her white camicia, striped stockings and blue leather slippers, her hair braided and pinned up with plain tortoise-shell pins. Her head hurt—not a headache, and not a demon's voice to be heard, thank the saints—just a hot painful spot at the back of her neck. She lifted her hand—a lump, swollen and throbbing. Had someone struck her? When? Why?

I was at the Casino di San Marco, she thought. Rufino was there—but wait, no, he wasn't. I came out into the street and he wasn't there with the horses and I looked for him—

And that's all I remember.

She gazed up at the stars. There, that was the North Star, just as Ruan had taught her. Her own stars, the curling tail and spread claws of the Scorpion, were on the opposite horizon, so that was south. Was the labyrinth itself aligned with the cardinal directions? If it was, the pattern of the arcs and double folds might be the same as the pattern of the labyrinth set into the floor of the laboratory at the Casino di San Marco.

She focused on the Scorpion and slowly moved her gaze straight down. And there was the darker shadow among the shadows, the break straight south between two petals of the rosette. The way out.

She pushed herself to her feet, using the central stone for support. It felt rough, pitted with sharp-edged indentations. Was it natural, or had it been carved?

There was only one person in Florence who had gardens vast enough to create a labyrinth so large out of trees and vines. And with the scent of the Arno in the air—she had to be in the Boboli Gardens, behind the Palazzo Pitti. Had the grand duke arranged for her to be abducted and abandoned here? Was it another one of his mad tests? It could hardly be an attempt to murder her—surely he'd realize that she'd come back to consciousness and eventually find her way out. A labyrinth, after all, was a single path, for all its doublings and foldings.

“Straight south,” she said aloud. “Then east, and double back west at the first fold.”

Some small animal rustled away at the sound of her voice. She stepped through the opening and between the walls of leaves, black-and-silver in the moonlight. The trees were hornbeam and yew, taller than the top of her head. Bittersweet vines, bramble bushes and rose canes grew thickly among the trees. At the first turning a thorn caught her sleeve and she heard stitches tear.

“
Che palle
,”
she said, under her breath. Now that she was out of the open rosette in the center of the maze, the pathway was narrow and the moonlight slanted across the tops of the leaf-walls. Between the walls it was hard to see. She held out her hands, and only just in time, because her palms found thorns, long and sharp. She gasped and jerked her hands back.

Carefully she felt her way around the loop of the double fold and started back to the west. She rubbed her palms against her skirt—the prick-wounds were superficial but they stung. Was the path getting narrower? Another thorn caught her skirt, and when she turned south again she felt a branch of bramble-thorns gouge into her upper arm, tearing the fabric of her sleeve. She walked straight. If the labyrinth was built according to the same pattern as the one in the laboratory, here, at the end of the path, she was at the outer edge. But the shrubs and trees and bushes were entangled and impenetrable, and there was nothing to do but continue to follow the path.

She walked east and north, around the first arc. Something—something was making her dizzy. It was almost as if she had put a drop of
sonnodolce
on her skin. The thorns seemed to writhe and reach out to catch the fabric of her clothing. She pushed them aside and kept walking. A fold of the path, double back, keep walking. Keep walking.

Keep walking. I am here with you, and I will help you walk to the end.

She wasn't surprised to hear Ruan's voice. She wasn't surprised to feel his presence, see him even, if she glanced quickly out of the corners of her eyes.

“What's happening to me?” she asked. She kept walking. Double back again. A short arc, this time.

What do you think the grand duke wanted with one hundred small vials of the
sonnodolce
, each vial to be compounded with fresh rainwater, in a proportion of one part to one hundred parts?

Was it Ruan's voice, or her own thoughts?

She could feel the scratches of the thorns and brambles, throbbing with the beats of her heart. They were on her hands, her arms. A branch scratched her face, and pulled at her hair.

Keep walking. Around, double back, around again.

Compounded with fresh rainwater, such as might be used to water plants. He has been using it here—every thorn that pricks you puts
sonnodolce
into your blood. If you had not been taking your small doses, if you were not immune—you would be dead, long before you reached the end of the maze.

So it was an attempt to murder her.

And perhaps I will find a way to make certain your breath speaks no one's name, ever again.

Not Ruan's voice. Bianca Cappello's. The grand duke's mistress must have known the maze was poisoned, and she had arranged it all. Who would ever think to blame her, when it was discovered that the grand duke's
soror mystica
had wandered into a maze in the Boboli Gardens and fallen dead in one of the paths?

Each arc was getting shorter—she was closer to the center of the labyrinth again. Even though the poison wouldn't kill her, somehow she had to stay on her feet—the familiar dream state with its visions made her want to lie down, curl up, and dream forever.

You must walk the labyrinth,
awen lymm
, all the way to the end.

It was strange, that she could hear Ruan's voice as if he were standing beside her, when she hadn't heard Babbo's voice or the demons' voices for so long.

In fact, barely once or twice since you began taking the
sonnodolce.

Had Ruan said that, or had she thought it for herself?

Was it true? She tried to remember. When had she last heard the voices?

Time twisted and folded back upon itself just as the path did. She was standing in the Piazza della Signoria in the rain. She was carrying a silver sieve, full of water. She was outside a door, her fingers in the crack between the door and the wall, trying hopelessly to pull the crack wider as Donna Isabella screamed. She was standing at the top of a marble stairway with Grand Duchess Giovanna. She was facing Bianca Cappello, who had red lilies in her hair.

She walked and walked. The moonlight glanced off the leaves and the thorns, the roses that looked black and white, the bittersweet and bramble berries like drops of blood. The flowers under the espaliered trees were lilies, touched with scarlet where the moonlight struck them. Were her feet even touching the ground? She wasn't sure. She was sure that Ruan was walking with her, although of course he wasn't really there. He was on a ship somewhere, coming to Florence, where the grand duke intended to use his knowledge and then kill him—

Suddenly she realized she had come out of the labyrinth. Before her there was a locked iron gate. She was tired, so tired, but at the same time she felt as if she'd been sleeping and had dreamed it all. Only the scratches on her hands and arms and face proved it had been real.

She could see a golden line above the buildings of the city in the east, across the Arno, where the sun would rise. Surely a gardener would come soon, and open the gate. In the meantime she would sit, holding tight to the ironwork, and close her eyes for just a moment.

•   •   •

“Soror Chiara,” the grand duke said. He looked—what, angry? Partly, and partly surprised, and partly curious, and in a frightening way, satisfied as well. “So it is you.”

“Yes, Serenissimo.”

“And you were inside the locked gate. Inside the labyrinth. Is that correct?”

She'd been asleep when the gardener found her. He'd run off to find the key to the gate and had come back with an ironmonger—apparently the key was mysteriously missing. By the time the lock was broken and she was freed, the sun was high overhead and bells were ringing for Sext. She was taken inside the palace, given a cup of watered wine and a chance to withdraw for a few minutes to relieve herself, thank the saints. But the scratches on her face and hands had grown hot and swollen, and her clothes were dirty and torn, and there wasn't much she could do about that when she was taken straight to the grand duke without being allowed to wash her face or change her clothing.

“Yes, Serenissimo,” she said. “Inside the labyrinth.”

“And you are well? I see you have scratches, and I will direct my physician to attend to them shortly, but other than that—you are in normal health?”

So it was true. The plants in the labyrinth had been watered with
sonnodolce
and the grand duke couldn't believe she'd been scratched so badly and was still alive. Once he got over his amazement, he'd start wonder- ing why.

“I'm well enough, Serenissimo.”

“How did you get into the labyrinth in the first place? The lock is on the outside of the gate, and the key was missing.”

“I don't know, Serenissimo. I was—”

Just then Bianca Cappello ran into the room, satin skirts rustling and jewels glittering. When she saw Chiara, she turned so white that Chiara expected her to faint. She clutched at her skirts—no, she was trying to conceal part of the finely worked gold filigree tassel of chains attached to her belt with an enameled medallion.

“Madonna,” the grand duke said. He didn't speak to her as if she was his wife, but of course they were still playing their game of make-believe mourning. “What do you do here? I have not requested your presence.”

“Serenissimo.” She made a hasty curtsy. “I—I heard that—that a woman had been found in the maze, and—”

So she'd known the labyrinth was poisoned. She'd had to see with her own eyes when someone had told her the grand duke's
soror mystica
had been rescued alive. Because she had arranged it, the abduction, the labyrinth, all of it.

I will find a way to make certain your breath speaks no one's name, ever again
.

She flushed bright red. “Nothing, my lord.”

He let her stand there for a few seconds, then gestured wordlessly to the chair beside his own. She seated herself, clearly regretting she'd run into the salon and wishing she could run back out again. Chiara looked at her steadily, without any curtsy or acknowledgment. If the grand duke noticed the omission—and surely he did—he said nothing.

“Now, Soror Chiara,” he said instead. “Continue.”

“I was at the Casino di San Marco, Serenissimo, and had gone out to look for Rufino and the horses. That is the last I remember before waking up in the center of the labyrinth. I believe Rufino was either tricked or complicit or assassinated. I believe I was struck down from behind and abducted.”

“And do you have any idea who might have done such a thing?”

Tell the truth? Lie? Or be silent?

It was too soon. As much as she hated Bianca Cappello, she didn't have the power to confront her openly. Wait, she thought. Wait. Don't attack until you're certain you can win.

Without expression she said, “No, Serenissimo.”

“Indeed.” The grand duke looked from her to Bianca. He was no fool, and Bianca had given herself away, rushing to find out how her victim could possibly have escaped from the poisoned maze, so obviously attempting to hide whatever it was she had attached to her belt.

“Tell me, Madonna,” the grand duke said to his wife-who-no-one-knew-was-his-wife, “what have you there?”

“Nothing, my lord. My needle case, my scissors, a reliquary.”

“Show me.”

She didn't give him the medallion at once. The grand duke looked at her, intent and narrow-eyed. Then something strange happened. Her whole appearance changed—she lowered her eyes and hunched her shoulders slightly, as if she had changed from a proud Venetian noblewoman to a frightened kitchen maid. Her hands shook as she unfastened the medallion with its decorative chains and all the golden and jeweled objects attached to it. Without a word she handed it to the grand duke.

“That is better, my Bia,” he said. “Now, let us see what we have here.”

Bia?

A pet name, presumably, between two lovers.

“A needle case and scissors, yes. A thimble. A gold toothpick with pearls, a reliquary, a few keys. And what is this?”

He held up one of the keys. It was not gold, not ornamental. It was plain worked iron.

Bianca Cappello sat frozen. She might have been changed into a wax effigy of herself.