The Red Lily Crown (39 page)

R
uan expected to find Bianca Cappello reduced to a welter of tears and hysteria. To his surprise she was kneeling at an old prie-dieu, her eyes red and swollen but her expression composed. People forgot, he thought, that she was a Venetian noblewoman by birth. They remembered only her sins and excesses.

“He is dead?” she said. Like her eyes, her voice bore signs of tears within its calm. She had taken off all her jewels but for a single pin that held a white veil over her hair. There were diamonds decorating its head, and the arms of Tuscany impaled with the arms of the house of Cappello.

“Come with me,” Ruan said. He gave her no name or title.

“If I am to die too, I would die as the Grand Duchess of Tuscany.”

“That is for the cardinal to say. Come with me.”

She crossed herself and rose. “I did not push her,” she said. “I have confessed all my sins, and done what penance I could do, shut up as I have been. All I have left to say is this one thing. I did not push her.”

Was she play-acting, as she had done throughout her life with the grand duke? There was only one other person alive who knew the truth—Chiara, who had been there. He took Bianca Cappello's arm as if she were a prisoner, and walked with her back to the grand duke's bedchamber.

“Here is your Bia,” the cardinal said, when they stepped into the room. “She is alive and well, as you can see—you will excuse my small jest regarding her death. Now keep your promise, and tell us where to find your secrets.”

The grand duke got to his feet. He could not stand straight without the special shoe that he wore on his twisted right foot, but he held his head with dignity. For the space of several breaths he just looked at Bianca Cappello. She looked at him steadily in return. What were they thinking? Had it been worth it, their long obsessive love for each other and all the death and destruction and misery it had caused?

“The hiding-place is at the center of the labyrinth,” he said.

“The labyrinth?” The cardinal frowned. “Where? Which labyrinth?”

“Chiara Nerini will know.”

Images flashed through Ruan's mind—Chiara naked with her hair loose, down to her hips, little more than a child on the night she had passed through her initiation. Chiara older, a woman, in her pale habit with the moonstone on her breast, gravely pacing through the labyrinth set into the floor at the Casino di San Marco. Chiara telling him how Bianca Cappello had hired an assassin to leave her in the center of the poisoned labyrinth in the Boboli Gardens—
she never guessed I'd be immune to the poisoned thorns
.

There were so many labyrinths, all associated in one way or another with Chiara. Which one?

The cardinal looked from his brother's face to Ruan's, and back again. Then he gestured.
Allow him to embrace her
.

Ruan released Bianca's arm so she could walk across the room to her lover. With the white veil pinned over her hair, she looked like a nun. The grand duke embraced her, and she bowed her head against his shoulder. He ran one hand gently over her veiled head.

“Have courage, my Bia,” he said. “I will not die tonight.”

The cardinal picked up the vial of luminous greenish-blue liquid. For a moment it seemed to absorb all the light in the room.

“But you will,” he said. “I give you the opportunity, brother, to choose your death—which is more than you gave Isabella, or Dianora, or the women you abducted to provide yourself with an heir, or the men who dared to whisper conspiracies against you. Which is more than your Venetian whore gave to the Grand Duchess Giovanna.”

Bianca Cappello cried out wordlessly. The grand duke stroked her head again. “Be calm, my Bia,” he said. “And what choices do you offer me, brother?”

The cardinal held out the vial. “Poison,” he said. “A dignified death, as Socrates died. Or Magister Ruanno's blade.”

Ruan said nothing. He thought of all the times he had sworn he would kill the grand duke with his own hands. Now he was not sure he would have the physical strength to do it.

The grand duke smiled. “It amuses you to jest with life and death, brother,” he said. “Well, then, I propose a wager to amuse us all. If I drink your potion and do not die, you will take Magister Ruanno's blade for yourself, and die on it as Roman generals died. Swear it.”

So he has been taking the
sonnodolce
, Ruan thought. He is immune to poisons. Even arsenic, which whatever the cardinal says is hardly a dignified death, will not touch him.

“Eminenza,” he said. “I must warn you—”

“I swear it,” the cardinal said. “Magister Ruanno, your blade, if you please.”

Too late, then, for objections. Ruan drew his dagger and offered it to the cardinal, hilt first. It was a workmanlike piece, with a blade of tempered steel, a pommel and guard of bronze, and a carved black horn handle. The cardinal took it in his right hand. With his left, he removed the stopper from the vial and handed it to his brother.

The grand duke did not bother to sniff it or taste it, but drank it down quickly, as if it was a fine ice-chilled wine on a hot summer day. He put the empty vial on the table.

“Not particularly pleasant,” he said. “A rather sour, metallic taste. From the color, I would guess it is a compound of arsenic and copper.”

“Franco,” Bianca Cappello said. “For the love of God, I beg you—cast it up. No one can drink such a large dose of arsenic and survive.”

“Be calm, my Bia,” the grand duke said. “You must prepare yourself to witness my brother's death, which will be unpleasant for you. For me, however, it will be—”

Suddenly he doubled over, choking. Saliva ran from his mouth, and a ghastly scent of rotten garlic filled the room.

“Hold the woman, Magister Ruanno,” the cardinal said. “I want her to watch. So, brother, you thought you had become a god, and were not subject to the natural laws of poisons?”

Ruan stepped forward and grasped Bianca Cappello by the arms. She was white and shaking with horror. For a moment she struggled weakly, then subsided.

“I will—not die,” the grand duke gasped out. “I am immune—for years I took—the
sonnodolce
—a mithridate. I have seen proof that it is—efficacious—”

He fell to his knees, retching violently. Sweat stood out on his forehead like drops of oil of vitriol.

“A mithridate?” The cardinal grasped his brother's hair and pulled his head up. “A universal antidote? God's blood, is that true?”

“A drop—every seven days—no poison will ever—” He began to vomit. The cardinal jumped back, disgusted.

“But you have not taken it for almost two years,” Bianca Cappello cried. “Ever since your last stroke of apoplexy—the physicians—Francesco, you have not taken it.”

“It does not—matter—the effect lasts—”

He began to convulse. He lost control of every function of his body. As much as Ruan hated Bianca Cappello, and despite the cardinal's order, he turned her away from the grand duke's suffering and forced her head down against his chest.

After about a quarter of an hour, the cardinal said, “It is over. He has died of his own hubris, and fortunately, Magister Ruanno, I can return your blade to you unbloodied.”

“Fortunately, Eminenza,” Ruan said. He took the dagger.

Ferdinando de' Medici smiled. “Address me as Serenissimo,” he said. “I am the grand duke now. As for Donna Bianca—”

The doors to the chamber burst open. They both turned their heads.

In the doorway, flanked by four guardsmen in Medici colors, stood Chiara Nerini.

C
hiara thought: how many things can a person see all at once?

Ruan. Alive. White as a specter, his bones showing through his skin, his eyes suddenly aflame.

Bianca Cappello in his arms. A white veil. Swooning? Dead? Oh, please God, not dead, not yet.

The cardinal, smiling. His merry eyes turning toward her. A red night-gown, embroidered with gold. Keys and a seal on a table beside him.

On the floor, sprawled in a horrifying welter of blood and vomit and feces, the grand duke. His night-cap had fallen off to reveal that he had lost most of his hair.

How many disconnected details, frozen between one moment and the next? How many things that were not what she expected?

“Ruan,” she managed to say.

Time jolted forward again. The cardinal spread out his arms and said with authority, “This room is to be sealed. You, guard, find a priest. You, find servants to wash the grand duke's body and lay it out properly and clean the room. You, take Donna Bianca to her own chamber and lock her in. Magister Ruanno, take Signorina Chiara to the library where you can speak with her privately. I will see you in the grand salon in an hour.”

The guards scattered to their assignments. Ruan stepped forward and held out his hands.

“Chiara,” he said.
Keer-ah
, as he had always said it, not
kee-ah-rah
. “
Awen lymm
, my inspiration, my dearest heart.”

His voice was the same, low and precise, the voice of a man who spoke many languages and sometimes had to think before choosing a word. There were new lines at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were still hollow and dark and bleak with endless sadness.

She tried to say his name again, but she couldn't.

“Come with me,” he said.

She didn't take hold of his hands. She was still shaking with shock and confusion. The guardsmen in their Medici colors—she had believed them to be from the grand duchess. She had expected to be taken to a laboratory, cool and quiet, filled with athanors and alembics, elements neatly labeled, books set out for her to study.

Instead—death. Horror. Nothing as it should be. And Ruan. Ruan—

He walked beside her to a room furnished as a library, with polished tables and cushioned chairs and magnificent books laid out on reading stands. A harpsichord stood in one corner, its lid propped open, the inner surface gilded and painted with red lilies and milk-white swans.

Gently he said, “Will you sit down?”

She sat down in one of the chairs. She clasped her hands in her lap so he couldn't see them or try to take hold of them.

He seated himself in another chair, on the other side of the table. She heard him let his breath out, as if it had taken the last of his strength to walk so far.

“I love you,” he said, without preamble.

—I love you—

It made her feel sick. Anger, fear, joy? She wasn't sure. She didn't know if she believed him or not. If it was true, why had he left her at Le Murate for so long? Why hadn't he found a way to escape from the grand duke and come for her?

“I knew you were alive,” she said at last. “I tricked the grand duchess into telling me. Where have you been?”

“I was arrested three days after I took you to Le Murate. I have been walled into an underground cell at Bottino, from that day until seven days ago.”

So that was why he was so white. Why he looked insubstantial. One cell, underground, all this time? At Le Murate she'd had the laundry to do, at least, and then the copying. She'd had the cloister to walk in, with Donna Jimena. She'd had Vivi.

How had he kept from going mad?

How could she be angry with him?

“One day,” he said, “when we have more time, I will tell you about it. The only thing that matters now is that every day I was there, I thought of you. I thought of what we said to each other, that afternoon in the cellar, and how we were at odds—I would have changed it, if I could.”

Her heart contracted. “How did you get out?”

“The cardinal came for me. The grand duke was sick with one of his tertian fevers, and in his ravings he revealed—” He stopped. After a moment he said, “Revealed many things.”

“When the guardsmen came for me,” Chiara said, “I thought they were from Bianca Cappello. She visited me at Le Murate.” Her voice began to shake, out of her control. “Ruan, Donna Jimena is dead and Bianca Cappello took Vivi. She took her and she
hit
her and I want to kill her but not until I have Vivi back.”

He frowned. “Gently,” he said. “We will find your Vivi and make sure she is safe. Start from the beginning.”

He laid his hands on the table, palms up. When she saw the familiar white scars she felt a quaver of response, as if he had touched her.

“Will you put your hands in mine?” he said.

She unfolded her hands, finger by finger. Each small movement seemed to matter so much. She lifted them and lay them flat on the table in front of her. The crooked fingers, the ink stains and calluses from holding a pen day in and day out. She had become so used to her hands she hardly saw them anymore, and seeing them now shocked her, as if they weren't her own hands at all. Ruan didn't move or say anything. After a while she felt strong enough. She lifted her hands again, and put them into his.

Warmth and strength flowed from his skin to hers, as if between them they were somehow performing the first step of a distillation, the application of heat to extract vapor.

A distillation. The laboratories, in the Casino di San Marco, the lemon-house at the Villa di Pratolino, the bookshop, in the cellar, her own laboratory where—

“I saw it, Ruan,” she said. “The
Lapis Philosophorum
. It was finished, or so close as made no difference. Cinto took it out of the athanor, and it was—like looking at—like looking at—”

She couldn't think of anything it was like. She could remember the moment but there were no human words to describe it.

“It lasted for only half a breath,” she said. “And then it was gone.”

He closed his hands gently over hers.

“It was not your fault, Chiara.”

“He broke Nonna's wrist, taking the key to the cellar away from her. She was crying.”

“They didn't know. Any of them. It was a blast like no one had ever seen before, over in an instant. You must have been on the stairs, with the wall to protect you.”

The wall—

“You took me to Le Murate,” she burst out suddenly. She didn't mean for it to sound like an accusation, but it came out that way.
You took me to a place where they walled me up for years and years
—

She pulled her hands free. She remembered how red and raw they'd been when she worked in the laundry, how swollen her knuckles had been with damp and cold. How it had taken a year of goose grease and warm wrappings to make her fingers flexible again, and then how she'd developed new cramps and calluses from copying psalms, day after day after day.

“We could not wake you,” he said. His eyes didn't waver from hers. “I did not know if anyone would ever wake you. I knew Donna Jimena had been your friend, and I knew the Benedictines had famous infirmarians. I never thought I would be arrested—I would not have taken you there, Chiara, if I had known.”

How many things would they both have done differently, if they had known? His hands were changed, too. She remembered them as sun-browned and strong. Five years in an underground cell had made them pale and thin, the joints prominent. She unclasped her hands and laid her palms against his again.

In a gentler voice she asked, “Why did he arrest you?”

“You know how mistrustful and suspicious he had become. The blast was an unnatural thing, it was at your family's bookshop, and I went a little mad, I think, with my fear for you. I was not careful to hide what I said and felt. He put those things together and he deduced—”

“That we had broken my vow.”

“Yes. And more than that, that we were performing secret alchemy, a
magnum opus
he did not know about.”

“Bianca Cappello thought I was doing it alone.”

He smiled, just a little. It changed his face. “You were,” he said. “The grand duke did not believe a woman could be an alchemist in her own right. I suppose it is a good thing he thought I had been directing you, because that is why he kept me alive.”

They sat quietly together for a little while. Suddenly she remembered once thinking that she and Ruan were like a lodestone and iron—when had that been? Whenever it was, it was still true. Her fingers interlaced themselves with his, and for a moment she could not quite tell where her flesh ended and his began.

Then slowly, so slowly, he stroked the inner surface of her right wrist with his thumb. Her wrist, where the
sonnodolce
liquid dropped. He said, “Do you remember taking the
sonnodolce
?”

“I am still taking it.”

She could feel his surprise—his thumb stopped for a moment. He said, “How did you obtain it in Le Murate?”

“A physician brought it four times a year. It was one way the grand duke made sure I would not try to escape. He knew and I knew I would go mad without it, and only he could give it to me. I don't know what I'm going to do, now that he's dead—he kept the formula a secret.”

Ruan put his head down for a moment, his forehead against the backs of her hands. She lifted one hand and ran it lightly over his hair. That, at least, felt the same as it had felt before—thick and crisp. Ruan had never used scented pomades on his hair, as most of the men at the court did. She wondered if his mouth would feel the same against hers. If his hands would feel the same when they weren't holding hers, but sliding sweetly over her naked skin.

After a moment he lifted his head. “You will not die or go mad without it,” he said. “He gave me none after he imprisoned me, and although it was bad for a while, I survived. It will probably be easier if we can give you smaller and smaller doses, instead of stopping it suddenly, between one week and the next.”

“But you didn't have—” She pulled one hand free and pressed her fingers to the scar over her left ear.

“I know. If you need the
sonnodolce
because of that, we will find it. The grand duke told us, before he died, that he had a secret hiding place at the heart of the labyrinth—”

“Which labyrinth?”

“He said you would know.”

She closed her eyes. Labyrinths. Think of the labyrinths.

The large and beautiful design traced out in black and white chips of stone on the floor of the laboratory at the Casino di San Marco. The smaller, cruder one set in terra-cotta tiles in the lemon-house at the Villa di Pratolino. Were there others? She had never been in the grand duke's private apartments in any of his palaces. He could have had dozens of them.

And then there was the poison labyrinth in the Boboli Gardens, behind its locked iron gate. An exact match to the black and white labyrinth but a dozen times its size, created with hornbeam and yew, rose canes and bittersweet and masses of red lilies. She had been in the center of it only once, in night's blackness and moonlight, and the last thing she'd been looking for was a secret hiding-place. Even so—what better place? And the center had been marked with a strange pitted stone, covered with what might have been carvings—

She opened her eyes. “The poison labyrinth in the Boboli Gardens,” she said.

He pressed his lips to her fingers again. “I think you are right,” he said. “Chiara, I do not trust the cardinal, but if we can reach this hiding-place first, it will give us a chance to bargain with him.”

She thought about that. Once, when she had been a different person, she had struck such bargains, for life and death. Now the very thought made her sick and shaky. She said, “Ruan?”

“What?”

“Will things ever be the same again?”

Will we ever be strong again? Trust each other again? Will we ever love each other the way we used to? Will we even be alive, tomorrow and the next day?

“Not the same,” he said. He stood up and walked around the table. She shrank back in her chair but he grasped her wrists firmly and gently and pulled her to her feet. They looked at each other. He put his arms around her. She pressed her hands against his chest and tried to push him away at first, then all at once with a wordless cry she threw her own arms around his neck and clung to him as if she was falling and falling and he was the only thing in the world she had to hold on to.

“Not the same,” he said again. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. “But we are meant to be together,
awen lymm
, and we will find our way back. Will you come home to Cornwall with me now?”

“Yes.”

“We will have to be married before we leave Italy. There are no Catholic priests left in England, or at least none who dare practice their faith openly.”

“But the banns—”

“A few gold scudi will take care of the banns. Now quickly, before the cardinal sends for us again—what happened with your Vivi?”

“The grand duchess took her. She wanted me to make another
Lapis Philosophorum
to heal the grand duke, and she thought she could use Vivi to force me. We have to make her tell, Ruan.”

“We will.”

“Is the cardinal going to kill her? Bianca Cappello, I mean?”

“Yes. But he is not the cardinal anymore.” He kissed her cheek, and then the corner of her mouth. His lips did feel the same. Her whole body shuddered with its need for him.

“He is going to take the crown for himself?”

“Yes. And we must fight, my dearest heart, so he does not kill us too.”