The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,106

said; then we’d have his gratitude, and his protection, and you’d save your skin.”

“I don’t care about my skin.”

“My skin then.”

He was silent, but not from torment this time; he was thinking. He looked at me as if for the first time, and I knew then that he cared about me enough to try to save me. It was a warm night but I suddenly felt hot, as if the sun had waked. And there was something else in his eyes too; he didn’t want to quit and I think I knew why. His brain. The fire of his faith may have died but the flame of his intellect could never be extinguished. I hit him with my best shot.

“Besides, can you really walk away not knowing what it all means? Can you really sleep at night not knowing what secret lies in the flowers? What calamities will come with the spring? Why there are seven conspirators, not eight, as there are in the picture? That you couldn’t work it out, that you let the riddle beat you?”

I had him then, but I couldn’t resist one more, completely practical point. We didn’t actually have a palace to house us, nor a retinue to tend to our needs. I couldn’t go back to my little cot by the Arno, flooded with Enna’s blood. He couldn’t go back to Pisa and his murderous cousin. “After all,” I finished, “where else can we go?”

He knew I was right. He had no choice but to return to the monastery he had once called home. I glanced at the sky—night was falling, the Florentine day was beginning. We moved to the gate and I woke Brother Malachi, as I had done more than a month ago, by shoving my tits in his face.

27

Nicodemus of Padua was silent.

He had heard the entire incredible tale and now sat, stroking the white stubble at his chin and occasionally grunting faintly, as if he were digesting a meal. He was digesting our story.

I had begun by looking around me, when we had entered the herbarium at Brother Malachi’s direction. It was an intriguing place—a candlelit room with a colonnade of pillars and cross-rib vaults holding up the low roof. My eyes followed the pillars upward.

Madonna.

Two thirds of the way to the ceiling the ribs disappeared into an inverted meadow. Hanging from the ceiling were flowers and herbs and bulbs of every sort, drying in the firelight, turning gently on their twines as our breath or the door draft stirred them. The scent of the flowers and herbs, all jumbled together and releasing their heady fumes as the fire warmed them, was almost overpowering in its cloying, choking sweetness. We sat at a trestle bench for our conference, the fire burning merrily at the hearth at our side. Every other niche of the place was crammed with fat-bellied pots, corked bottles, or clay crucibles, labeled in Latin and stacked to the ceiling. A long scrubbed table ran along one wall, crowded with flints and burners, copper pipes and alembics, all crazily connected with tubes of pigs’ gut. Most bizarre of all was the herbalist himself, smaller than any living man I had seen yet with the wisest eyes. His age was numberless; he could have been on this earth since the Crusades, as his ancient cheeks carried more lines than a Saracen’s map. His hairs were as scarce as his wrinkles were plentiful, for they sprouted in white whiskers just above his ears and round his head in a snowy frill.

I let Brother Guido tell the story, without interruption, for I realized early on that the old monk had a difficulty—he had, as all the brothers had, seen me at the postern in the old days and knew that I brought corruption within his walls. He did not meet my eye once, but I took no offense—I had had plenty of insults in my life and I could well stand a monk’s disapproval, if only he would help us.

When he spoke at last, his voice was unexpectedly deep, and with a strong Paduan accent. If he felt surprise at seeing a Franciscan novice who had disappeared more than a month ago reappear dressed as a prince, with a well-known tart on his arm and with an incredible story to tell, he did not show it. And of all the things he may have said, he struck right at the heart of Brother Guido’s anguish. “And you are certain, my brother,