The Red Lily Crown (34 page)

“Yes—it was the twelfth day of November, in the year 1558. I found it in Babbo's book.”

“Babbo's book?”

“I have a book I kept back, when I showed you the other books.”

“I knew it,” he said. “Will you show me?”

“Tomorrow. Or the day after. I want you to tell me everything,” Chiara said. “I'll tell you everything too.”

He helped her dress again, and braided up her hair as deftly as any maidservant. They stood on either side of the great table—I need to be apart from him now, Chiara thought, for a little while at least, so I can be my own separate self again. Even so, the connection between them was like the strange force she had observed between a lodestone and an iron nail, intrinsic and inescapable.

“Do you think the grand duke will guess?” she said.

“No. You may not see it—but you have seen him every day, or close to every day, for the past eight and a half months, have you not? When I saw him this morning, after being away for that long a time, I was struck by the change in him. He is so lost in his own pleasures now that other pleasures, other people, no longer exist for him.”

“Then we are safe?”

“I would not go so far as that. He is still dangerous, and we will have to be careful. I will find a place for us, a secret place, where we can be together.”

She nodded. “But for tonight we are safe here.”

“We are safe.”

“We can talk for a while, then,” she said. “Begin at the beginning.”

“T
here was a rebellion in Cornwall in 1549,” he said. His voice sounded like Nonna's when she told one of her old fairy tales. “The year before I was born. It was over religion and the prayer book—the young English king of the time was a Protestant and wanted everyone to pray in English. The Cornish wanted their Catholic prayers in Latin, as they'd prayed them for a millennium.”

“And they had a war over that?”

He smiled ruefully. “Many wars are fought for religion. The new prayer book started it, but it grew and grew and suddenly the rebels wanted to kill all the gentlemen as well. My father and mother—”

He stopped. The dark depths of sorrow and remembered cruelty welled up in his eyes, and he stepped back, as if he did not want the story to touch her. The increase of distance between them hurt, as if he were pulling her heart out of her breast.

“My father and mother were loyalists,” he went on, “imprisoned by the rebels in terrible conditions. The English used mercenaries to put down the rebellion, and when it was over, they did not take time to sort out who had been loyal and who had not. Estates and land were given away wholesale to Englishmen, as rewards. One of them was given the gift of my father's estate—Milhyntall House and the mine, Wheal Loer.”

Chiara wanted to put her arms around him and hold him forever, but she knew she dared not touch him now if she wanted to hear the rest of the story.

“His name was Andrew Lovell. He paid to have my father killed in cold blood. He hunted my poor mother like an animal, for all that she was heavy with child. With me. Andrew Lovell wanted no true heirs to Milhyntall born, to contest his ownership. If a miner's family had not taken her in and hidden her name and rank and concealed me as one of a dozen hungry and dirty miners' children, I would not stand here this moment.”

“Oh, Ruan.”

He made a gesture, short and hard.
Do not say you are sorry. I could not bear it
. After a moment he went on.

“I was six when she died. I was put to work in the mines with the other children. I would still be there if—”

He stopped.

“If what, Ruan?”

He picked up a glass retort and looked at it. His hand was shaking. Chiara huddled inside herself and waited for him to throw it.

He put it back on the table, very gently. “I have been using the grand duke's gold,” he said, “and my own reputation, such as it may be, to convince the English crown to give Milhyntall back to me. The queen's advisor John Dee has spoken to her on my behalf.”

Chiara wondered if he would ever tell her what had happened to get him out of the mines. She wondered if she wanted to know. She said, “Is John Dee an alchemist too?”

“Among other things. He is the one who sent me word here in Florence—I thought the matter had been arranged, but Queen Elizabeth's fancy turned to another petitioner. She is a great one to reward her favorite gentlemen with gifts, is Elizabeth Tudor.”

“Apparently you arrived in time to change her mind.”

“Only just.”

“So you took it back from the Englishman? Your home?”

He walked across the room to the other window. Dusk's fading light made him nothing more than an outline, all darkness with none of the detail that made him Ruan. He said, “I rode up to Milhyntall House between its rows of lime trees, breathing their scent, thinking of how my father and his father and his grandfather before him must have played along the lane. It felt as if—as if it had been bred into my bones, to love those trees. To love the house. It is nothing special, just an old cobbled-together house built through the centuries in different styles, weathered by the sun and rain and sea winds.”

“Home.”

“Yes. Home. You have lived in your own home all your life. My home—my home was never mine, not until that day.”

“What happened?”

“Andrew Lovell was waiting for me at the end of the lane with ten mounted men. I had the queen's commission and two dozen German mercenaries riding with me. It was hardly a fight—Lovell's men surrendered immediately, rather than give up their lives.”

“But Andrew Lovell didn't?”

“No. He swore that Milhyntall was his, no matter what the queen said, and that he would die before he gave it up. The men on both sides stood back and left the fight to the two of us, sword to sword.”

Chiara said nothing. She wondered about Andrew Lovell, about his family. He had lived at Milhyntall for what, twenty years? He would have thought it was his, and his son's after him.

“It was not a fair fight,” Ruan said. His voice was hard. “I was twenty-five years younger, a handspan taller. But it was not a fair fight in the days after the rebellion, when my father faced three of Lovell's mercenary roughnecks and held them off just long enough for my mother to escape, before they killed him.”

“You killed Andrew Lovell.”

“I killed him. Milhyntall House and Wheal Loer are rightfully mine again, as they should have been from the moment of my father's death.”

“I'm surprised you came back to Florence at all.”

He turned at last and faced her.

“The grand duke owes me a death,” he said. “And I would have come back for you, in any case. But as I wrote to you—I have achieved what I desired, and at the same time I have lost everything.”

“What does that mean?” She held out her hands to him again. Did it frighten her, disgust her, that he had killed Andrew Lovell? That he had planned it, risked his own life for it, and ended it deliberately with a sword thrust through his enemy's heart?

No. It didn't. It was vengeance, quick and clean. She understood vengeance.

“It means that Andrew Lovell took everything valuable out of Milhyntall House,” he said, “right down to the furniture and the paintings and the very tiles on the floors. He drove the miners to overwork the mine, without opening new shafts or adits—it is stripped down to the bare rock, and even the machinery has been sold. The miners are starving, the very families who protected my mother and me, and now they look to me to bring back their livelihood.”

“But you—”

“I beggared myself to buy the English queen's influence. I need gold again, a great deal of it. However much I hate him, I need Francesco de' Medici and his obsession with the
Lapis Philosophorum
.”

He leaned toward her and put his hands in hers. The sensation was as if the piece of iron had attached itself to the lodestone at last, with an almost audible sound like the click of a lock.

“Help me,” he said. “The grand duke will pay anything if he thinks we can create the
Lapis Philosophorum
for him. It will be part of our revenge—to lead him to think he will have what he wants, and to deny it to him in the end.”

“I've thought the same thing,” she said.

“You have?”

“I've been making changes to certain substances in his laboratory, so his search would never, ever succeed.”

That surprised him. “Ingenious,” he said. “Dangerous, as ingenious things often are.”

“There's a place where everything is pure. A secret laboratory. I know you don't believe the
Lapis Philosophorum
exists, Ruan, but I do, and I will find it—I will be an alchemist in my own right, greater than Perenelle Flamel. I will show Babbo he was wrong 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 couldn't say it. Ruan couldn't say what had happened to take him out of the mines. Would they be able to tell each other all their secrets one day? Or not?

“You amaze me,
awen lymm
,” he said. “You have faced so much and changed so much, in the time I have been away.”

“The grand duchess's death changed everything.”

He leaned over and kissed her mouth, a gentle kiss, comforting. “I am sorry,” he said. “I know you loved her.”

“I don't know what I felt. I admired her. She didn't deserve to die as she did, and Bianca Cappello doesn't deserve to be in her place.”

“How did you end up in her household, of all places?”

“She tried to kill me.”

“She
what
?”

She kissed him again. “It doesn't matter. I'll tell you later. Ruan, what will we do in the end? After you have the gold you need, and after we make them pay for what they have done? What will we do?”

“We will go home to Cornwall. We will be safe there.”

Her heart seemed to shrink and grow cold within her breast. She said, “Your home, Ruan. Not mine.”

He looked down at their hands, clasped together. After a long pause he said, “Can you make it your home, for my sake?”

“I don't know. I'm not a lady and I don't have a fine house or a mine or property. But this is where I was born, and my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before me, all back through I don't know how many grandmothers. I'm a guildswoman of Florence, in my blood and bones, and I can't even think of what it would be like, a life somewhere else. It would be like going to live—in Trebizond, or at the bottom of the sea.”

He withdrew his hands from hers. “What do we do, then?”

She swallowed. I won't cry, she thought, I won't cry, I won't cry. “I don't know.”

A long time passed—she could have said the
Pater
and the
Credo
and half a dozen
Aves
. “We do not have to decide now,” he said at last.

“No,” Chiara said. “We don't.”

He smiled at her. Her heart came to life again with a painful jerk. “Decision or no decision, I love you, Chiara. It is too dangerous for us to marry, because I do not trust any priest to hold his tongue. But I will vow myself to you, if you will vow yourself to me.”

“I vow myself,” she said. “Now and always.”

She stood up and put her arms around him again. As she leaned against him she could feel the hardness of his flesh against her own softness. After a few moments she said, “Ruan, maybe we really will find the
Lapis Philosophorum
. Maybe it will—I don't know, give us a way to be in Florence and in Cornwall, at the same time.”

He smiled. “I think not,” he said. “There is no such thing, my dearest love. In the end, you will have to choose.”

She leaned back and put one palm on his chest, over his heart. “One of us will have to choose,” she said.

An apartment of two rooms on the Via di Mezzo

15 AUGUST 1578

C
hiara opened her eyes. Bells were ringing. She counted them. Nine—midafternoon, then. At first she didn't know where she was. Then Ruan shifted beside her and put his arm around her, and she remembered.

“In these rooms,” Ruan had said, as he unlocked the door, “I am a petty nobleman from Siena, and you are the unhappy young wife of a very rich banker here in Florence. We are carrying on a clandestine affair, and find opportunities to meet when we can. The dyer's widow who rents out the rooms is transported by the romance of it all, and of course by the gold I have paid her. She swears she will keep our secret.”

And then they had come into the bedroom, and—

“I fell asleep,” Chiara said. She stretched out her arms and legs. “I don't know if I ever want to get up again.”

Ruan smiled. “We have a little time still,” he said. He lay one hand over her belly, caressing the smooth taut skin. “The more we meet here, the more careful we must be that you do not conceive.”

“Nonna always says there are ways, but only wicked women use them.”

He laughed. “Wicked women,” he said. “And intelligent ones as well. There are secret formulas in the ancient books, which are probably safer than your Nonna's old wives' remedies.”

“Give me the formulas, then. I will make them myself—they're for women to use, so they'll be more effective if they're created by a woman's hand.”

She knew he didn't believe in such correspondences, and said it only to tease him. That was the most amazing thing of all. When they were in these rooms, they laughed. They teased each other. They acted as if they were ordinary people.

It was heaven.

He grinned, rolled out of the bed and pulled on his shirt.

“I am hungry,” he said. “And the apricots will be juicier if peeled by a man's hand.”

Chiara scrambled out of the bed as well and slipped her arms into her camicia. “You'll have to tie my laces when I put on my bodice and sleeves and skirt,” she said. “But that can wait.”

The other room was simply furnished with a chest and two chairs. The walls were whitewashed. On a table under the window rested a jug of wine, a fresh loaf of bread in a napkin, and a basket of apricots. The fruits were a rich golden color blushed with red, their velvety skin stretched to bursting with ripeness. Their scent filled the air, sweet with an elusive edge of bitterness.

He picked up one of the fruits, took out his dagger, and began to pare it. The velvety skin fell in spirals on the scrubbed wood of the table. Juice dripped in the slanting sunlight, gleaming and sweet.

“Tell me,” he said, “about Donna Bianca trying to kill you.”

The change from teasing to seriousness was so unexpected Chiara didn't know what to say at first. Then slowly, haltingly, she told him all of it—how Donna Bianca had been in the Palazzo Vecchio, how she had struck the grand duchess and meaning it or not sent her to her death. Later, how Donna Bianca had gloated about the secret marriage and threatened to silence her, Chiara, forever. And then how she had awakened in the heart of the labyrinth under the moon, with the
sonnodolce
-poisoned thorns glinting all around her. There was no reason to whisper with just the two of them in the room eating apricots, but saying the words aloud, all of them, for the first time—it frightened her. At the same time it was an agonizing relief, as if she had put one of Nonna's hot poultices on a deep, deep wound and drawn out all the poison.

When she was finished, Ruan said something in Cornish. It sounded ugly. Then, more gently, he said, “So the grand duke also knows you have been taking the
sonnodolce
.”

“Yes. And there's something else—he told me you can't just stop taking it, once you've started. I've craved it, but I thought— I thought it was only—”

“Only what?”

“Well, only that it made me dream of you. And that it—I don't know, somehow it's made me better, stopped the headaches and falling-spells and demons' voices. It's good as well as bad. The grand duke promised I could have as much as I needed—”

She stopped.

Ruan laughed softly. “He would. Because as long as he is the only person with the formula, it binds you to him.”

“I may be bound by the
sonnodolce
, but I'm not his creature.”

Ruan leaned over the table and kissed her mouth, a long and lingering kiss that shivered through her nerves like a silver thread and tugged itself into an intricate knot in her belly. He tasted of apricots. “No,” he said. “You are no one's creature, not even mine. You have learned a good deal of court politics, for the daughter and granddaughter of republicans.”

“I haven't had much choice.” She kissed him again, feeling the thread of sensation quiver. Then she leaned back. She had talked enough about herself. What Babbo had written in his book about the sacrifice? Her secret ambition to become an alchemist in her own right, like Perenelle Flamel? Those things could wait for another day. “Ruan, how did you end up in Austria? I want you to tell me.”

He didn't move for a moment. Then he stood up and ran one hand over his left arm, just below the shoulder. There was a scar there, she knew—she had seen it. She had seen every inch of skin on his body, every mark and scar, and she wanted to know everything about them all.

“When I was only a boy, I worked in the mine. The Warnes hid me that way, among all their own children. They were the family who gave my mother and me shelter after my father was killed.”

Chiara nodded.

“Andrew Lovell wanted Wheal Loer to produce more. He hired an Austrian metallurgist, a man named Konrad Pawer, to inspect the mine for new lodes.”

“Konrad Pawer,” she said. The name meant nothing to her.

“You have read Agricola's book,
De Re Metallica
.”

“Some of it.”

“Agricola is a Latinization of Pawer.”

“Like you sometimes sign yourself Roannes Pencarianus.”

He smiled. “Yes. Konrad Pawer was Agricola's nephew. He was a charlatan, but he traded on his uncle's famous name.”

“How did he end up taking you to Austria?”

He rubbed the place on his arm again. “I wanted to learn,” he said. “I was too young to realize he knew nothing.”

“And then—”

“He took me to Austria with him,” he said. “I was fourteen years old. Angry and terrified and wild with the wildness of a boy who is not quite a man. You have seen the scar on my arm—it is where Konrad Pawer's knife went through and pinned me to a table.”

Chiara said nothing. The sweet juice of the apricot had turned bitter on her tongue.

“He shouted at me—swore he would not stand by while I surpassed him in the emperor's estimation. Swore he would kill me first. To him I would never be anything but a pretty Cornish mine-boy.”

“So you were defending yourself.”

“Even so, I killed him.”

“And then—?”

“I made sure his body would never be found. I told the emperor he had gone off on a journey to the east, along the Silk Road to Cathay, in search of rare substances. A year later I was sent here, to Florence with the Archduchess Johanna's household.”

Without a word she held out her own hands. After a moment he put his hands in hers. They were warm and perfectly clean, with the exception of some stickiness from the apricot juice.

“We've eaten all the apricots,” she said.

He looked at her. After a moment he nodded. This was what it was, then, to love someone? This acceptance, whole and complete?

“And it is time to go back to the Palazzo Pitti,” he said. “The children will be looking for you.”

She stood up and went back into the bedroom for the rest of her clothing. He helped her put her bodice on, and laced it up, and tied her sleeves. She said, “Ruan?”

“Hmmm?”

“Your formulas? They won't keep me from conceiving, ever in my life, will they?”

“No,
awen lymm
.”

“I'd like to have children of our own. I love taking care of the princesses and poor little Prince Filippo.”

“We will have our own children one day, when we can marry and it is safe.”

“As long as the grand duke is alive, it will never be safe.”

He had re-braided her hair and was pinning it up again. She could feel the silver hairpins against her scalp, and she knew what he was thinking.
It will never be safe in Florence while the grand duke is alive, but far away in Cornwall, after he is dead—

Don't say it, Ruan, she begged him silently. Please don't say it. Not now.

He didn't. He pressed his lips to the side of her throat, just under her ear, and said quietly, “The grand duke will not live forever.”