The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,127

Pazzi, the head of that unfortunate family. After he betrayed il Magnifico he fled the city, but was soon found and dragged back by Lorenzo’s men, thrown in the Bargello jail and tortured. Only then, when he could take no more and still live, was he brought to the Palazzo della Signoria, and stripped and bundled out of the window to hang, writhing with his fellow conspirators . . .”

The archbishop, as Brother Guido had said.

“His remains were cut down to be buried in the Pazzi Chapel in Santa Croce . . .”

The very place Brother Guido and I had hidden the night I first asked for his help. Why did every sentence recall him to mind!

“But angry crowds broke open his tomb and the good friars exhumed his body and buried it near the gallows, in unconsecrated ground, to appease the people. But even there Signor Jacopo was not allowed to rest—he was dug up and a great throng of boys dragged the naked cadaver around the city, by the noose by which he was hanged. At the Palazzo Pazzi, the mob bashed the cadaver’s head against his own doors, shouting, ‘Open up! The Great Knight is here!’ “ She was enjoying herself—her voice was thickened with bloodlust. I could see her searching for my reaction, so I gave her none, but in reality I could have shit my stockings. What kind of man had I angered? The people loved him and hated those who crossed him.

Madonna.

Evidently Vero Madre had finished her grisly tale. I reflected that not once had she told me a fairy tale, as she dandled me on her lap at bedtime. But this monstrous story of blood and torture she was happy to recount. I shivered, not for the dull day and the cool breeze, and not for fear of my own skin, though I would not be returning to Florence anytime soon. I shivered instead for my one true friend, who was a prisoner still in that viper’s nest, perhaps even now in the notorious Bargello, where the unfortunate Jacopo had lain.

“Do you see, now, the power and influence of the man your friend has insulted? For Lorenzo is light and dark, he is a great friend but a powerful enemy. He himself wrote a couplet to describe his dual character. ‘Orange blossom seen at dawn is bright, / Yet seen at dusk it holds the first of night.’ Our best hope for your future, and all of ours,” she went on, “is to remove you from that sin, from the offense committed—the disrespect to him and his family by the disruption of the wedding. To re-create you as a noblewoman, heir to the Serenissima and the bride of Pisa. Then we may once more join the greater plan, count ourselves in that number at the command of il Magnifico. Luciana.”

The word sounded strange from her lips, from the lips of the woman who had given me that name. “This is your home now, until you marry. But it may not be so bad. There is much I can teach you.”

“So my name is Luciana then.” I ignored the rest.

“It is. But your family name is not Vetra—you were given that alias by virtue of your . . . mode of travel to Florence.”

The light in the glass. Some of the first words he had ever said to me.

“Your family name is Mocenigo, that of your lord and father.”

Mocenigo. It would take some getting used to. “And are there any more in this happy family? Any doting brothers or sisters I don’t know about?”

There was a tiny pause, perhaps half a heartbeat. “No. You are our only heir. You had a younger brother, Francesco, but he . . . died.” She did not invite sympathy.

There was a sunburst of comprehension in my brain, as if that hapless orb had broken through the gray lid of the sky. I narrowed my eyes against the truth, as if against the light. “When?”

My mother was silent.

“When did he die?” Louder now.

“When you were twelve.”

I met her guilty eyes, hating her. I understood it all now. My loving mother had shipped me off to Florence, then clambered back into my father’s bed before my cot was cold and got herself another brat on his ducal bones—my brother. Rejoicing in their new male heir, my doting parents had forgotten me. A Florentine convent was quite good enough for me, a girl child, no more use than a marriage prize,