The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,128

a tool of alliance. They left me to rot till their beloved boy died and they suddenly needed an heir again.

My mother’s agate gaze bored into mine, defiant, but our journey was ending and the subject changed with the landscape, to her visible relief. The canal had spilled into an open sea and a great domed church marked the end of the channel. Now we bobbed on the open tide, skirting the shore till our boat drew alongside a great square with pigeons and colon-nades and twin pillars reaching high into the mist. A great campanile, coral tipped, reached out of the lake like a sword, the blade red with gore. As a backdrop to the glory, a range of far-off mountains draped behind the city like a silver shawl.

“And here”—a sweep of the green and gold sleeve—“is your new home.”

I looked on the enormous white palace, huge and yet delicate, its snowy walls and slim pillars iced with pearly pinnacles and filigree traceries. The façade changed with the water like a very opal. How arrogant, thought I, how confident to build a palace of lace with your duke within, right on the lip of the sea. This was no castle or citadel; the doge’s power was such that he had no need to hide behind curtain walls and arrow slits.

Crouching next to this snowy palazzo was an Eastern ba-silica like a guardian dragon of the Orient, hunched in golden domes and with a hide of jeweled frescoes, with golden spires reaching to the sky like Turkish pikes. I might as well have been in Constantinople.

Home, my arse.

The dogaressa’s servant moored the boat and handed her ashore, and my mother herself turned to do the same for me. For one mad moment I thought to sever the golden rope that held us with the neckrim knife of my green bottle, the piece of glass the sisters had saved for me, and take the boat wherever I could, to escape this watery prison. But I knew I could not get far, and I suspected that to pole and steer such a vessel was harder than it looked. Reluctantly I took my mother’s hand and stepped ashore, looking her full in her masked face as I did so, matching her defiance. Behind my mother the white frontage of the palace was a blank face and staring eyes, just like her.

“Do you always wear that thing?” I asked, as we moved forward to the palace doors. “That lion mask?”

“Outdoors, yes. The lion is the symbol of our great city, and the she-lion the head of her family.”

I did not expect such honesty from her, such openness about how she stood with my father, an admission that she was the ruler of all. “You can hear her balls clang together like a ring o’ bells,” Don Ferrente had said.

As if she had given too much away, she hurriedly continued. “It is expected. As my people see me, so they esteem me.”

And I knew her then for what she was, a cold beautiful surface, deadly beneath, like this city that was once my home and was now again.

30

In the next few months I grew a mask too—I was given the veneer of nobility but my insides were frozen with misery; I had everything and I had nothing. I was pampered and preened and gentrified, yet I was unhappier than I had ever been.

I spent my mornings a caged bird—in the beautiful apartments of the doge inside the white snow palace of the Palazzo Ducale. I never forgot that I was a prisoner—for I was soon assigned a guard. A plain woman named Marta was sent to attend me. She was a sullen creature with a small hairy wart riding her lip and eyes that looked in different directions but nevertheless both seemed to be watching me. The wench was introduced to me as my lady’s maid and certainly she did as I bid her, albeit with a grudging, sulky air that made me itch to slap her. I would have been within my rights to beat my servant, but I dared not, for lady’s maid she may have been though in truth she was my jailer and we both knew it. I had no doubt that every detail of my behavior reached the open ears of my mother.

My days proceeded, each one, thus in a regimen of sameness: in the mid-morning I was bathed and combed and scrubbed daily by a gaggle of attendants. I