obedient member of the Seven and follow in Lord Silvio’s footsteps to bring Pisa to the alliance. They took my uncle’s ring.” He held out his left thumb, bare except for a white band where the skin had escaped the sun’s stain. “I imagine Niccolò now wears it obediently upon his hand.”
I considered. I thought that Brother Guido had neared the truth, but I knew there to be another twist in the tale. Lord Niccolò had had to be coerced into accepting me back as his betrothed—after all, an ex-harlot who had been racketing around the peninsula with his cousin was no great wifely prospect, be she never so fair. But as the dogaressa’s daughter I was a vital link in the Seven’s chain of power. And while I was being feted around Venice and taught how to be a proper wife, Brother Guido was living on fetid water and darkness.
“Were you alone? In the prison, I mean?”
“Not at first. I was in the general cell with all manner of unsavory characters—the Bargello’s finest. Oh, it was not so bad, not unlike the monastery, for the church, too, is full of thieves and pederasts and criminals, so I was right at home. The only difference is that these varlets were honest men, honest in their criminality; they do not deal in dissemblance and hypocrisy. They do not pretend to be devout while they break every commandment in the calendar.”
I realized that prison had not robbed Brother Guido of his words, for the length of his sentences seemed to match the length of his sentence. Nor had it, seemingly, given him back his God. I had thought that in a time of such trial he would once again turn to the Lord, but he seemed to hold the church in as much contempt as ever. “How can you condemn your foundation? For there is one there who has been a friend to you, and to me too, for he wrote to tell me of your fate.”
“Aye. Brother Nicodemus. Yes, yes, I must absolve the good herbalist. He has been a better friend to me than you know. And a worse one. For he gave me my freedom and made me a murderer.” He fixed me with tortured eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“When you were choosing your gown at Santa Croce, in the herbarium . . .” I remembered, but it seemed years ago.
“Brother Nicodemus took an herb from his bunches and folded it in my hand. It was belladonna. In case something should go awry.”
I knew the plant. Everyone did. A deadly poison indeed. I shivered. “You never told me!”
“Of course not. I placed it in my shoe, and the guards never looked there.” He rubbed the back of his neck in his accustomed gesture. “Every day I took it out and looked at it. Every day I said, if I can but live through this day, I will take it tomorrow. And then the next day I said the same. I deferred my suicide for near on six months.”
My flesh chilled. I had thought many times that he might die, but never by his own hand. I realized with a shock how far he had strayed from his God. “How did you live?” I whispered.
“I thought about the Primavera. I remembered every detail that I could. I could see it in my mind’s eye. Every day I escaped my surroundings into that grove, walked around the figures, conversed with them about Dante or Boccaccio. I could remember every detail that we had discussed, interrogate every leaf and flower, every stroke of the brush. But some of the figures were mere shadows, the ones we had not yet examined, and some details were blurred or misty, insubstantial, flitting from my eye like fishes, the net of my memory not swift enough to claim them. But others”—he paused—“such as yourself were clear as day.”
My heart flamed; I knew not what to say. “And they tried you, in the end?”
“No.” He seemed relieved by the change of subject. “I was told by a guard I had befriended that something had changed, that Lorenzo had to move fast and needed me dead. I was to be executed the next day without trial. Summary justice,” he said, his lips curving with irony.
I remembered my mother using the same words in Venice, and I knew her handprint was upon this. Niccolò della Torre had no doubt signed the marriage contracts, for I remembered he had visited my