The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,16

pamphlet that I left in place of the painting when I stole it. They are coming to look for you. Your brother, here”—I looked at the headless corpse looming above us—“God rest him, was taken for you. He sat with you in the church, his cell is next to yours. He keeps these pamphlets in his room. He is tall like you, slim like you. He has . . . had . . . dark curly hair. The only thing they missed is that as the senior librarian, he is tonsured and you are not. But he was cowled, as were you all when you left the church, and if I had not taken you aside, they would have found the right man.” I caught my breath and I let the facts sink in, and his face, already blanched, now took on the sickly hues of terror. “Aye, you know I am right,” I went on. “They made a mistake, as they did before tonight when they killed my friend in place of me. But they do not care who they kill, be they ever so lofty”—my voice cracked as I thought of Bembo—“and will not stop till they get what they want. They think you are helping me, and now, believe me, you damn well will. Now gather your wits and get us out of here.”

This last seemed to focus his mind. When he spoke, it was brief and to the point. “The herbarium,” he said, and we set off at a run, before I could tell him I had heard footsteps in the arches as we talked.

Brother Guido led me to a low door in the wall and we were through into a fragrant garden, planted in a maze of box hedges. Without stopping for conference we climbed as one over the peach trees that espaliered the retaining wall, and we were down into a slop of drainwater, which soaked our feet as we ran back into the piazza of Santa Croce. At once we darted down a side alley and ran till we reached a quiet square where we could rest and see the approach of four narrow alleys. We sat at a little water fountain, drank to cool our burning lungs and rest our bursting hearts. The sky was lightening, and we would soon be discovered.

“We must away.” Brother Guido echoed my thoughts.

“Where?” It was all I could do to gasp out the syllable.

“I know a place which will welcome us. It is not far, but a hard climb.”

My heart sank, but terror rose and gave me the strength I needed.

“Take me there,” I said.

7

Leaving Florence in search of sanctuary was perhaps the hardest part of the whole night. Under a gray smear of a sky, we made our way through the slums of Ognissanti and began to climb the hill to Fiesole. Ognissanti, as I already told you, is a shithole. And the former home of Signor Botticelli. A fitting home for the bastard, if you ask me. Shanties and shacks cramp together, grays and browns, assorted in size and shape like a grin of bad teeth. And the residents! More than once the sight of a monk and a girl together elicited a leer or a gesture from one of the hideous citizens, who seemed to have been belched up from Signor Dante’s hell. The whole place stank, too, of the numerous tanneries and their attendant sludge. Everywhere eviscerated animals were stretched out in unlikely starshapes like guilty souls on the rack. I lost my shoe in a suck of mud where the Arno had burst its banks in spring, but was too tired and terror shredded to care. My fine shoes with the golden points had already had to contend with piss and blood tonight; meet it was that the mud should take one. I threw its fellow after it and saw the monk eyeing me.

“What?”

He shook his head. “That may not have been wise, signorina. The way is long and hard.”

I narrowed my eyes. “How long?”

“Above five miles. And upward.” He made a weak gesture up the hill, to where an indistinct skyline was a silver thread emerging from the dark. I shrugged, with a bravado I did not feel, and trudged after him barefoot. My feet stung on the path, proving the brother’s point—but I had already lost one shoe before I flung the other; what was I to do, walk the hill with one foot shod and the other bare?