The Red Lily Crown (33 page)

She looked away from him, as if she was hiding something. It wasn't entirely play-acting. “No particular person,” she said.

He chuckled. “Particularly not Magister Ruanno dell' Inghilterra?”

She said nothing.

“I will keep your secret, I promise you. But you must keep your promises to me as well.”

“Thank you, my lord. I'll keep my promises and send you news of Bianca Cappello's household when there is any news to be had. For the grand duchess's sake, and little Prince Filippo's.”

He stood up and gestured for her to go out of the
loggiato
. “Let us go back to the gardens, where my man is holding your dogs,” he said. “It's very kind of your grandmother to keep Giovanna's old dogs. I shall have to send her a gift, to show my appreciation.”

In other words, Chiara thought as she passed through the Vasari Corridor, high over the streets and houses where the ordinary people lived, I am to remember that you know my Nonna's name and where she lives, and that supporting the old republic is treason under the Medici.

The Villa di Pratolino

5 AUGUST 1578

T
he grand duke had made elaborate arrangements to receive his English alchemist into his presence again. Waiting-gentlemen surrounded him on the dais. Bianca Cappello sat at his side, richly dressed in rose-colored silk, attended by graceful ladies. Chiara stood a little distance away from the dais with her hands folded and her eyes cast down, plainly dressed, the moonstone hidden under her camicia.

The entire tableau vivant had been designed to show the grand duke's aloof indifference to alchemy, to his
soror mystica
, and in particular to Ruanno dell' Inghilterra and whether he came back to Florence or not. Everyone's face was expressionless. No one moved. Then Ruan stepped through the doorway, and Chiara felt as if a great burst of flame had sucked all the air out of the chamber.

His eyes met hers. There was one spark of joy and desire, so quickly damped that it might not have happened at all. He didn't smile, but he didn't have to. She managed to draw in a breath and looked away.

“So, Magister Ruanno.” The grand duke sat back with insultingly informal ease in his fine carved chair. “You have decided to grace our city with your presence again.”

“I can only beg you to have mercy upon me, Serenissimo,” Ruan said. Chiara looked up again, unable to resist. He sounded different. He looked different. How? It wasn't his clothes. They were plain and dark, as they had always been. The heavy workman's muscles in his shoulders were the same. The difference was something in his face. Before, for all the endless sadness of his dark eyes, there had been certainty—certainty that what he wanted would ultimately be his. Now the certainty was gone.

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

What had happened to him in Cornwall? Chiara pressed her hands together hard, to keep from reaching out to him.

“Mercy, Magister Ruanno?” the grand duke said. “I am not in the habit of rendering mercy to those who leave my household and my city without my permission.”

Ruan didn't move. “My affairs in England were disordered,” he said. “You, Serenissimo, were much occupied with the birth of your son and the heavy responsibilities of your position. I had no opportunity to apply for permission in the ordinary way.”

“And the fact that you have returned—does that mean your English affairs are in order now, and you are prepared to remain in Florence until the
magnum opus
is completed and the
Lapis Philosophorum
is in my hands?”

“My English affairs are settled for the time being,” Ruan said. His expression was unreadable. “I have come back to Florence indeed, Serenissimo, to help you create the
Lapis Philosophorum
, once and for all.”

Since he doesn't even believe there is such a thing as the
Lapis Philosophorum
, Chiara thought, that couldn't be the real reason he has come back. Has he come back for vengeance? For gold? Is he running away from something?

We are bound to each other, and in the end we will find a way.

Has he come back for me?

“Very well, then,” the grand duke said. He seemed to be staring at Ruan as intently as she was, but his eyes were oddly out of focus, as if he could not see clearly beyond the dais upon which he and Bianca Cappello sat. He often looked like that now, absorbed in himself and his mistress-wife and nothing else. However little he may have cared for the grand duchess, she had connected him to the outside world of emperors and kings. With her death that thread had been cut.

Would Ruan understand that?

“I will show you the mercy you ask,” the grand duke was saying, “and reinstate you in your position as alchemist and metallurgist in my personal household. Apply to my secretaries for your wages and for the keys to the laboratories.”

Ruan's expression betrayed a flicker of surprise. He thought the grand duke had given in too easily. The truth, of course, was that nothing the grand duke had done in his new laboratory had been successful. He believed it was because their triad, sun and earth and moon, had been disrupted by Ruan's absence. Let him believe it. Chiara wondered what Ruan would say when he learned that virtually every element in the laboratory at Pratolino had been cautiously and delicately adulterated.

“Laboratories, Serenissimo?” Ruan asked.

“Yes. The Casino di San Marco, of course. You will resume your residence in the apartments there. But I have installed a new laboratory here at the Villa di Pratolino as well. One of my guardsmen will take you there. Later today, perhaps, Soror Chiara and I will join you.”

No, not
Soror Chiara and I
, Chiara thought with an intensity that frightened her a little. Just Soror Chiara. I will find a way to change your mind for you, Serenissimo, so I will be the only one to join Ruan, in the silent shadows of the lemon-house, with the scents of the fruits and the leaves all around us.

The grand duke rose and offered his hand to Bianca Cappello. She rose as well. They seemed to see no one but each other. The gentlemen and the ladies followed them as they went out of the room. Chiara walked last of all. She wanted to look back—oh, she wanted to look back so badly.

But she didn't.

•   •   •

It took nothing more than a whispered lie to Bianca Cappello that the grand duke had looked with favor on one of the other ladies that morning. The Venetian stormed off to the grand duke's private apartments, and Chiara was sure as she could be that no one would see either one of them again until morning. No one else would go to the lemon-house. The servants were afraid of the blasts and strange smells—brimstone, they whispered, from the depths of hell—that the grand duke's experiments produced.

She stepped into the laboratory and closed the door behind her. There was one lantern burning over the great table. Reddish light from the setting sun slanted up through the high windows. The lemon and orange trees in their tubs had been pushed into the corners, but their pungent scent still drifted in the air, mingled with the smells of saltpeter and sulphur. Babbo's athanor from Trebizond was on the table, with alembics and pelican flasks lined up beside it. In the cabinets the ranks of glass jars were filled with liquids and powders and crystals of every imaginable color.

“Chiara.”

Ruan stepped out of the shadows. He had taken off his jacket and his white laced shirt shimmered in the half-light. The skin at his throat was darkly tanned against the white, but of course he had been outdoors on his Cornish estates, on ships and horseback as he traveled. “The grand duke?” he asked.

“Safely occupied. No one else will come.”

For a moment they looked at each other. Then he held out his arms, a gesture half-questioning, half-demanding. She went straight to him as if she had been doing it all her life.

“Awen lymm.”
He bent over her, embracing her as if he would set her apart from the rest of the world forever. She could feel the words in the outflow of his breath.

“Tell me what it means,” she said. “Please?”

“I am afraid you will not like it.”

“I don't care. Tell me.”

“It means sharp jaw.”

She had to laugh, pressed against him. She wasn't sure what she'd been expecting but that wasn't it.
Does the grand duke not like his bedmates with their ribs sticking out and their chins as sharp as a kitchen-knife?
Nonna's voice, the day Ruan had taken her back to the bookshop for the first time. Did he never forget anything?

“But in Cornish the word
awen
means also inspiration. So you may have a sharp jaw, but you are also my keenest inspiration.” He curved one hand over her head, gently, so gently, stroking her hair. “Did you get my letter?”

“Yes. Nonna gave it to me.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her gently away from him. She made a wordless sound of resistance but he compelled her to step back. “We must take care, Chiara.”

“But Ruan—Ruan, please don't push me away. No one will come.”

“You cannot be sure of that. Not here, in a villa belonging to the grand duke himself.”

They stared at each other.

“I feel as if you've never been gone,” Chiara whispered. “The
sonnodolce
. The dreams. Oh, Ruan, you said we would be together, and I've been waiting and waiting and
waiting
—”

He caught her up in his arms again with a harsh sound, half-groan, half-curse. “Do you think I have not waited?” he said. “I have waited, and taken such care—
re Dhyw am ros
, I am tired of being careful.”

He pressed his open mouth to her eyebrow, and then her temple. Every muscle in his body was trembling. She felt him pull one of the silver pins out of her hair. The delicate scrape of the pin's point against the scar over her left ear made her shiver with a desperation she'd never felt before.

“I have a pallet,” she said. It was hard to breathe and hard to talk. “Over there. For the nights when I have to watch over something in one of the athanors. I swear to you, no one will come.”

“I do not care if anyone comes.” He pulled out another hairpin, and she felt the heavy braid of her hair uncoil. She put her head down against his chest, breathing his scent, feeling the pulse of his heart. It felt strange to have her hair loose. It was like that first day, in the rain, in the Piazza della Signoria. She wanted him, but she was—what? Afraid? Not really afraid, not of the act of them coming together. Afraid of what it meant. How it would change everything.

He stroked her head again, then took hold of her braid and tugged her head back so he could look into her eyes. It hurt a little, and at the same time it overwhelmed her with desire more intense than any of the dreams had ever been.

“
My a'th kar
,”
he said. “My love, my love.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist and held on to him tightly. Did he really taste of lemons, or was it just the scent of the lemon trees? Slow, so slow—she heard herself groaning very softly with the pleasure of kissing him, tasting him, breathing his breath. After a little while he lifted her, cradled her against his chest, and carried her to the shadowy corner where her pallet was, behind the trees in their tubs, where she couldn't see the cabinets or the alchemical paraphernalia. There he put her on her feet for a moment while he spread his cloak over the straw. His own fine dark blue cloak that smelled of his skin and his hair and the sea.

Ruan
 . . .

Without taking his mouth away from hers, he unlaced her bodice, untied her skirt and overskirt, stripped it all away, the fabric and stiffened stays and the embroidered lace. He left only the great moonstone on its silver chain. It seemed to tremble as her heart pounded, but of course that couldn't be true.

“Even if someone looks into the lemon-house, they will not see us here,” he said. “Lie back.”

She let herself fall back, drowning in her own senses—the way his scarred hands felt against her naked flesh, flesh no man had ever touched, flesh so responsive it frightened her a little. She could hear herself keening with helpless delight, hear his breathing, uneven with the effort of holding himself back. His skin tasted like salt and copper.

“We are breaking your vow,” he said softly.

“No. I have been absolved.”

He drew back. In the lemon-scented dimness she could just see the glint of surprise in his eyes. “When? How? Does the grand duke know?”

“No. Don't talk, Ruan. Please don't talk.”

He said nothing more. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to him. He didn't rush her or press her. One touch at a time, one intimacy at a time, he learned her secrets and revealed his own to her. It was like the
sonnodolce
dreams and at the same time utterly unlike them, because real flesh had real heat and tastes and scents, more head-swimming than anything any drug could ever give. It had real shape and size and weight, real sweet silkiness, real ferocity, real overpowering completion.

It didn't hurt, not really, not the way the young women at the court were always whispering it did. It was strange, but it wasn't terrible at all. I've done this before, she thought—I've put two elements together, male and female, dark and bright, earth and moon, let them mingle and burn until the whole room blazed with heat.

After a little while he turned her face back to his and touched his lips gently to the spot just between her eyebrows. “The headaches? The voices? Do you still have them?”

“Not so much. Not at all, really, not anymore.”

He kissed her eyelids, first one, then the other. “Mystery after mystery. I cannot tell you how much I have thought about you.”

“
Sonnodolce
dreams?”

“Sometimes.” He kissed the thin fine skin under her eyes, then the place where her scar was, under her hair above her left ear. “Sometimes just my own thoughts—memories—your hair, loose down your back as it was for your initiation. The way you looked at me, when you ground the
caput mortuum
, wearing the silk mask—you knew, without being told, how dangerous it was. In the grand duchess's little store-closet, in the dark. I wanted you so in that moment I was almost afraid to ask you to strike the light.”

“Oh, Ruan. I've missed you so much. I knew—I knew when you came back—I knew.”

“So did I.” He ran his hands through the masses of her hair, twisting strands of it around his wrists. “You have such beautiful hair. There are copper ores deep in Wheal Loer that are just this color—brown, but so dark as to be almost black, with glints of blue and violet.”

“It's just hair.”

He laughed softly. “It is your hair, and that is what makes it unique. Like your eyes, which change from one moment to the next. One day I will cast your horoscope—do you know what your birth date is?”