The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,125
use my connections to mitigate his fate. My considerable influence could certainly ease his path to the gallows, at the very least.” I began to protest, but she held up her hand. “If you disobey me, I will do nothing; so choose.”
I shut my trap and we both sat down again as one—I had no choice and she knew it. I had handed her the shackles with which she could bind me to her and keep me here.
“There can be no question of you returning to Florence just now,” she continued, more calmly. “You, also, have angered il Magnifico.”
Il Magnifico. I remembered, sharply, the ring I’d seen on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s thumb at his ward’s wedding, and with it, the realization that this great man, with the aid of his leprous henchman, was cooking something up with the rest of the Seven. I could not resist the chance to have the riddle solved once and for all, if only my mother would give up the answer.
“Signora?” I began meekly.
“You can call me ‘Dogaressa.’ ”
I thought she would have said “mother,” but clearly we were not at such a pass just yet. “The Primavera—the painting—do you know what it means? The purpose of it all, the riddle it contains? Do you know what il Magnifico intends? The war that he hopes to wage?”
The eyes were now hard as chips of jade, but a merry laugh trilled from behind the mask. It was a musical, charming sound, like a carillon of golden bells. It was also entirely false.
“What can you mean? What riddle? What war? The Prima-vera is naught but a fine gift that the groom made to his lady, by his favorite artist. It serves no purpose beyond a celebration of the greatest beauties that our land has borne, with the bride the queen of them all. You should count yourself lucky to be among them, as do I.”
“You, Dogaressa?”
The noble head inclined again. “I am depicted as the nymph Chloris.”
Of course. I thought back to the night in Santa Croce’s her-barium, which now seemed worlds away, when we had concluded that Flora and Chloris were cities close to each other. Flora and Chloris were connected, not by distance but blood. They shared the same features and the same lineage. And I did “hold the secret” after all. We had been right, too, when we thought that the secret was to do with the bearing of a babe or a child; now I knew I was that child. My forearms were clothed in fish scales to connect me to the sea; I was a child of the sea, the greatest sea republic ever—Venice.
But as to the rest—the cities, the Seven, the alliance—could my friend and I have been wrong all along? Was there no more to the painting than a celebration of beauty—myself, my mother, Fiammetta, Simonetta, Semiramide—and Botticelli’s presence as Mercury as an artist’s joke? I looked at my mother’s hands. She wore a huge beryl ring carved with arms, presumably of the Mocenigo family, but there was no golden ring bearing the golden balls of the Medici palle—or otherwise—on her thumb. Doubt doused my flesh like the salt spray. “But . . .” I began, and was frozen by a stare as green as a frozen sea.
“Ask no more of that, it is a request, a warning, and my command as your mother.”
And my doubts vanished—there was something hidden here, else she would not threaten me so. The dogaressa leaned forward in a sudden fluid motion which upset the boat not at all, as if she were at one with the craft and the sea itself. “Let me be rightly understood. Your father and I will require your complete cooperation if we are to help you in the matter of your . . . unfortunate friend. Your actions have already embarrassed our family in the eyes of the Florentine court, perhaps worse. And that is why we thought it expedient to leave before the celebrations at Castello—my Lord Doge, of course, stayed for the feast to appease our exalted friend and smooth the diplomatic waves, and will return soon.”
My heart plummeted in my throat at the notion of meeting my father—that dour, colorless man I had seen in his bizarre ceremonial weeds. Odd that during all these years of missing my mother, I had never contemplated the identity of my father. My impression of Venetians was formed from the ones I had screwed, so naturally I had assumed I