The Red Lily Crown (42 page)

“Holy Saint Petroc,” Ruan murmured. He picked up the lantern and turned it so the light shone fully on the contents of the box.

An enormous double rose cut diamond set in gold. A chunk of hematite, set in iron and copper. Between them, the moonstone set in silver, so perfectly polished that it might have been worn and re-set and worn again since the creation of the world.

This is a moonstone from the kingdom of Ruhuna, on an island far to the east, beyond Persia, beyond the Silk Road. . . .

“The amulets,” Chiara said. “I wondered what had become of them.”

“There's more. More jewels—Chiara, this will keep us in comfort all our lives.”

Her hands throbbed. She said, “The formula. Is the formula there?”

He began to pull the jewels out of the box and pile them in the grass. There were a few odd instruments in the box as well, clearly with some scientific or alchemical function but not like anything Chiara had seen before. At the very bottom of the box there was another box made of polished cedar wood. It had been treated with some kind of wax to repel moisture. Ruan took it out and opened it.

Inside, packed in powdered gypsum to preserve it, was a single piece of parchment. Ruan took it out and brushed the chalky powder away, and Chiara recognized the writing from the great book that had been turned to ashes in the blast and the fire at the bookshop. Not Babbo's writing. The writing of the unknown original scribe, the even, heavy letters, faded by time. At the top of the page was written,
Venenum matri veterum effectus dulcedinem enim dico
sonnodolce
.
Some of the letters were smudged and hard to read. She puzzled it out.
The mother poison of the ancients, which I call
sonnodolce
for the sweetness of its effect
.

“That's it,” she said. “It's all in Latin.”

“More valuable than the jewels.”

“We need to take the jewels too. Give me the dagger—I'll cut off the bottom of the grand duke's cloak and make a bundle.”

“I'll do it. Have your hands stopped bleeding?”

“Mostly.”

“How do you feel?”

She grinned at him in the moonlight. “A lot better than Ferdinando de' Medici expected me to feel. What are we going to do with him?”

Ruan slashed a piece of fine red wool from the grand duke's cloak and began to put the treasure in the center of it. “He will be unconscious for another few hours,” he said. “I will bind his hands and feet with his shirt-lacings, and that will keep him immobilized until someone comes to find him. I have been part of enough death for one day,
awen lymm
, and he was right—he did set me free. But I will kill him if you wish him dead.”

Wish him dead?

Grand Duke Francesco on the floor, sprawled in a horrifying welter of blood and vomit and feces, his night-cap fallen off and his head bare.

Bianca Cappello's body slumped forward against the prie-dieu, lying limp in her silks and laces like a wilted flower.

“No,” she said. “I've had enough of death as well.”

He ran his hand over his face. The cut over his eye had stopped bleeding. As if it was the most important thing in the world, he said, “
My a'th kar
,
Chiara.”

“You said that before. What does it mean?”

“I love you.”

A final flicker of the
sonnodolce
made the words feel like an embrace. She said, “I love you too, Ruan.”

“We will leave him, then. Once we arrive in Cornwall we must both write down everything we know, and send him letters to the effect that if either of us comes to harm, the information will be made public in all the courts of Europe. Jago Warne can be trusted to hold the papers secretly.”

“And when he realizes we mean him no harm if he doesn't try to hurt us, he'll be clever enough—”

“And self-interested enough.”

“—to know he has been checkmated.” She smiled at him. “Will he be unconscious for a while? We have to go into the palace and find Vivi.”

He smiled in return. “Remember how long you were unconscious, that first night.”

“What about the guards at the gate?”

“I think a diamond or two apiece will persuade them to let us pass.”

He had bound the grand duke and they had started out of the center of the labyrinth when the throbbing in her hands stopped her. She said, “Ruan, let's take some of the thorns. I need the
sonnodolce
, and we won't have the time or equipment to make it.”

“Thank God one of us is practical.”

He stripped the grand duke's fine gloves from his hands and put them on, then carefully began to break thorns from the rose canes. “Twenty-six,” he said, “will give us half a year. Plenty of time to get to Cornwall and build a new laboratory.”

“I will start the
magnum opus
again,” she said. “I was so close, Ruan.”

“We will talk about it when we are safe,” he said. “Now let us go. We will leave the city by the Porta Romana—it is the closest. The grand duke will expect us to make for Livorno, so we will go farther south to Piombino instead.”

“And find a priest to marry us?”

He laughed. She had never heard him laugh with so much pure happiness. “A priest,” he said. “And then a ship as fast as the wind.”

At the iron gate, the grand duke's guardsmen were happy to take a fortune in jewels and disappear.

The kennel master at the Palazzo Pitti welcomed them with relief. “That poor little hound,” he said. “She's been a-pining. Won't eat, won't play. I don't mind telling you, I don't have much use for that Grand Duchess Bianca.”

The kennel boy Rudi brought Vivi in. She flung herself into Chiara's arms with a high cry, like a baby's. Torn hands and all, Chiara hugged her desperately.

Ruan said, “You will no longer have to deal with Donna Bianca.”

The kennel master frowned for a moment. “That cardinal?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Don't want to know more,” he said. “But I'll be keeping an eye out for little Princess Maria. The last of Donna Giovanna's girls. The boy's not bad, either, the one they call Prince Antonio. No get of the grand duke's, but that's not his fault.”

“He won't be a prince any longer. Can you do something for Signorina Chiara's hands? Clean them and bandage them, and give her a pair of gloves?”

“That I can, that I can. Always treating the dogs' cuts and scrapes.
Mutter Jesu
,
fräulein
, what did you do to yourself?”

With the same gruff tenderness he would've used on a wounded spaniel, he sponged Chiara's torn palms with soap and water and strong liniment, then wrapped them in clean bandages and gave her some soft leather gloves.

“There you go,” he said. “Change those bandages every two or three days. Take good care of your little hound, now. She has a faithful heart.”

After that they made their way to the stables, where two star sapphires bought them two riding horses and a packhorse with double panniers. Ruan packed the red wool bundle into one pannier, and in the other made a warm nest with blankets. Chiara lifted Vivi inside, petting her and whispering to her.

“We have a long journey ahead,” she said. “It's all right now. No one will ever hurt you or take you away from me again.”

Vivi looked up and perked her ears forward.
You took long enough
, her expression said.
But I knew you would never leave me forever
. Her eyes were bright as ever, dark-rimmed, even though her face was white. She sighed contentedly and tucked her nose down between her paws.

Ruan checked the girths. “Up you go,” he said to Chiara, helping her to mount her horse. He swung up on his own horse and pulled its head around.

The sky was just beginning to lighten when they reached the Porta Romana. The main barred gate in the center was closed, but there were four small portals, two on each side. Ruan guided his horse to the one farthest to the left. A man appeared from the shadows. Ruan put something into his hand, and after a moment he opened the portal.

“Come through,” Ruan said.

They rode through.

“Wait,” Chiara said. “I have to get down.”

“Chiara, we have no time.”

She was already scrambling down from her horse. The Via Romana was paved with stones of every shape and size, sunk in packed soil and worn by hundreds of years of horses and oxen, wagons and plain walking feet. She sank to her knees and awkwardly, with her gloved hands, dug one of the small stones free. It looked like a piece of Nonna's
schiacciata
, dimpled on its upper surface, light brown flecked with darker brown and white.

Oh, yes. Almond milk and schiacciata. We've come up in the world,
mia nipotina
, since you've become a plaything of the Medici
.

“Chiara, what are you doing?”

“Good-bye, Nonna,” she whispered. “I'll take this with me and I'll always have a little piece of home.”

Travel safely
, nipotina
. Don't forget me. Don't forget you have a sister. Don't forget your Babbo, who loved you once, before his mind was twisted.

“I won't forget,” Chiara said. “I'll forgive him some day, if I can.”

He never meant it.
Nonna's voice again.
He was mad with his grief. Let your new life be free from this poison,
nipotina
. Forgive him now, and go across the sea to the west with a light heart
.

Chiara pressed the piece of stone to her heart for a moment, then got to her feet, put the stone in her saddlebag and swung back into the saddle. She looked around at Ruan.

“You knew about the necromancy, didn't you? About Babbo meaning to sacrifice me to bring Gian back.”

“I did not know. I guessed.”

“I wanted to show him I was worthy to live. I wanted to be greater than Perenelle Flamel, all to show him.”

He reached out his hand and touched her cheek. “You are worthy to live because you are you,” he said. “Not Perenelle Flamel. You. Chiara Nerini.”

She put her hand over his. Even through the glove and the bandages, she could feel his warmth.

“I love you, Ruan,” she said. “I forgive him. And I will never look back.”

Milhyntall House, Mount's Bay, Cornwall

17 APRIL 1589

C
hiara kept the ingredients for the
sonnodolce
in a special locked cabinet—black, white, yellow, red. She knew exactly what they were, and exactly how to combine them—purified powdered charcoal made from oleander wood, crystallized sap from the root of the water hemlock, the crushed and sun-dried golden stamens of the nightshade flower, and the distilled and re-distilled essence of red lily petals. The page of parchment with the formula she kept rolled up in its cedarwood box, in the same cabinet. She had been giving herself less and less, from week to week. But this morning—this morning she was putting it all away. Closing and locking the cabinet for good.

The laboratory at Milhyntall House wasn't hidden away in a cellar. It was on the upper floor on the west side of the house, with windows facing west and south over the bay. Through the south window she could see the island of Saint Michael's Mount, with its ancient monastery. Ruan wouldn't go to the island—he said he could still feel the misery and terror of his father and mother and the other people who had taken refuge there during the rebellion, only to be driven out and imprisoned by the English. To her the island looked peaceful and remote. She could imagine the monks that would have lived there in past centuries.

“A rider has come from London.”

She looked up. It was Ruan.

“Has he brought letters?” Ruan's riders from London always brought letters. He corresponded with the most astonishing people, from the English queen's occultist and advisor Dr. John Dee to a highly placed secretary in the emperor's household in Vienna, from a great doctor of canon law at the University in Ferrara to the French king himself, Henri III. All of them seemed to want Ruan to go and live in their cities and devote himself to their desires alone. No one would believe that Magister Roannes Pencarianus, the mysterious alchemist who was still whispered about in Vienna and Florence and up and down the length of Italy, would truly want to live on a windswept estate in Cornwall and do nothing but manage the workings of his own mine.

“A good-sized packet.” Ruan shrugged the coiled whip from his shoulder, then bent his head and kissed the corner of her mouth. “What are you doing,
magistra
?”

“Putting the
sonnodolce
away.”

“You do not have the components in suitable proportions. You require more of the red-lily distillate.”

She looked at the glass jars. He was right. It didn't matter, but—well, maybe it was better to be safe. What if the voices came back after the baby was born? It would be the dead of winter, and there would be no lilies in the garden.

Ruan didn't know yet, about the baby.

“You're right,” she said. “I'll collect some of the lilies today. I'm not going to take any more of it, though, Ruan. I've been taking less and less, half a drop now, every twenty-one days. I feel well—strong. I want to be free of it.”

He put his arms around her. He was different. He'd always been a strange, uneasy combination of the workman and the gentleman, and you'd think that now, when he was lord of his own estate at Milhyntall at last, he'd have settled down and become a gentleman through and through. Just the opposite had happened. He was tanned by the sun and the sea wind from being outdoors at Wheal Loer. His hands had fresh calluses over the scars. There were threads of silver interwoven with the glints of copper in his dark hair, but when he smiled—oh, when he smiled, it was real, the good smile, not only his mouth but his eyes as well.

“Just so you have what you need to make more, if you need it,” he said.

She put the cabinet aside. “I'll go down to the garden now,” she said. “Come with me, and tell me about your letters.”

They walked down the stairs. Vivi lay in the square patch of sunshine at the kitchen door. She did love the sunshine on her poor stiff joints. When she heard their steps she lifted her head.

“We're going out into the garden, Vivi,” Chiara said. “Do you want to come?”

Vivi put her head down again and sighed with deep contentment.
No, thank you
, the sigh said, plain as plain.
I'll just stay here and bask in the nice warm sun
.

The puppies trotted in at the sound of her voice. They loved the garden.

“Come on, then, Rudhloes. Owrlin.”

It was the doctor of science in Ferrara who had arranged the matter of the puppies, whose names meant “Russet” and “Silk” in Cornish. The duke's hound master, it seemed, had continued to breed the little parti-colored hounds from the original pair that had been sent to Duchess Barbara of Austria as a wedding gift by the queen of England. With Duchess Barbara being Grand Duchess Giovanna's sister, and the two new puppies being—well, who knew exactly, but in some long and complicated way related by blood to Vivi—it made them special. Not that they needed anything but their own melting dark eyes and merry little white-flagged tails to be special.

Chiara picked up a basket and a small knife, and they went out into the garden, which was protected by the bulk of the house itself from the salt winds off the sea.

“One letter,” Ruan said, “was from Dr. Dee himself. He is pressing me urgently to go to London—the queen has just sent her Counter-Armada to Spain, and imagines great victories on the sea. Dr. Dee is not so certain, and before she launches any further attacks he wants her ships better-supplied and better-armed. To that end, he has convinced her that I can make Greek Fire of particular purity.”

“Can you?”

He laughed. “No,” he said. “The formula for Greek Fire has been lost for centuries. Best that it stay lost, I think. Such weapons are often misused.”

“Are you going to go to London?”

“Perhaps, in a month or two—Jago Warne can manage things here. Would you like to go? You have never been to London.”

“No,” she said. She knew she was dangerously old for a first childbirth—thirty years old by the time the babe was to be born, thirty, how could that be?—and wanted to stay home and be safe with the baby curled under her heart. “Not this time. Were there other letters?”

“One from the Ferrarese ambassador in Florence.”

She walked on, to the bed of lilies. They were glorious in the April sunshine, masses of them, some white, some pink, some red as blood. The sweet pollen-y lily scent drifted in the sea air. In the center of the lily bed lay the piece of stone from the Via Romana. Already it had settled into the rich earth of Cornwall, and looked as if it belonged there.

She knelt down and began to cut the brightest and most perfect of the red lilies.

“I'm not sure I want to know the news from Florence,” she said.

“Your sister Mattea has returned. She has a husband now, and a baby, and is living not far from the rooms we had on the Via di Mezzo.”

“I can't imagine the Ferrarese ambassador being interested in my sister.”

Ruan laughed. The puppies liked the sound and romped around his feet. “He is not. I particularly asked him to make inquiries. You know the Duke of Ferrara hates the Medici, and so he has directed his ambassadors to make every effort to entice me to Ferrara and the university there.”

“Everyone wants you.”

“And I want only you.” He watched her cutting the lilies for a moment, and then he said, “Grand Duke Ferdinando has chosen a wife. Her name is Christine of Lorraine—she is a niece of the French king, so clearly the grand duke is aligning himself with France rather than Spain. They are to be married next month, with great celebrations.”

She thought of her own hurried marriage ceremony in the shabby little church in Piombino. She had never even known the name of the church or its patron saint, and even so she wouldn't trade it, not for all the great celebrations in the world. She said, “I don't envy her.”

“The ambassadors says Ferdinando is a good ruler. Better than his brother.”

“It was always his nature to be a prince,” Chiara said. She cut another lily.

“His nature, and Isabella's. They were the most like old Duke Cosimo. Francesco—well, he wanted other things.”

“Yes,” Chiara said. “Other things. I wonder how Ferdinando escaped from the labyrinth. I wonder what he said to people, to explain it.”

“I am sure he created a fine tale—he is intelligent enough. And no one can dispute that he is a true Medici, as they would have done with little Don Antonio.”

“If only Prince Filippo had lived. That would have been the best.”

She continued to cut the lilies. Her basket was almost full. Some day—some day perhaps she would go back in secret, see the Duomo against the sky, and breathe the air of Florence again.

“Why have you chosen this moment to stop taking the
sonnodolce
,
awen lymm
?”

She tried out different words in her head but none of them sounded right. Finally she said the simplest thing.

“I'm with child. I'm afraid the
sonnodolce
might mark it.”

Ruan crouched down beside her. “Chiara. My dearest love. Put down that basket and that knife, if you please, so I can embrace you properly.”

For a long time they knelt there, their arms around one another. The puppies followed scents in the grass, twisting and curling like the paths of an invisible labyrinth. The presence of the red lilies was overpowering for a moment—the scent of so many memories. Would the grand duke place the red lily crown on this Christine of Lorraine's head? When he did it, would he remember Giovanna of Austria, how he had loved her once, how proudly she had borne the weight of the crown until the day she died?

It didn't matter. Not anymore. None of it mattered. Well, maybe only one thing mattered.

“Are you ever sorry?” she said at last. “That we never created the true
Lapis Philosophorum
?”

“No. It does not exist.”

“It does exist. And you wouldn't be you, Roannes Pencarianus, if you didn't want to be remembered as a man who achieved alchemy's greatest glory.”

He chuckled. “Perhaps one day we will try again, then. Just you and me—like Perenelle Flamel and her Nicolas.”

“They found the secret of eternal life. They will live forever.”

“So the story goes.”

“Maybe we will be like them,” Chiara said. She picked up the most beautiful of the red lilies, broke off the flower, and tucked it into her hair where the silver streak grew over her left ear. “Maybe we will live forever, too.”