The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,177

again with her next gambit.

“Your hair is a disaster,” she said. “Chiara. Bring the comb and the oil. And, let me see. Yes, the moonstones, I think, will meet the case.”

Her elderly lady’s maid, whom I’d recognized from Venice, brought the needful things from my mother’s traveling cabinets. My mother placed me before the mirror and dressed my hair herself, her touch surprisingly soft and skillful. She combed my knotted locks into smooth skeins and twisted little ripples of curls to be pinned up with the moonstones, leaving half of the mass to fall down my back. When she had done, she clasped my shoulders and looked into the mirror beside me. We met each other’s eyes somewhere behind the glass. Two blond green-eyed women, dressed in flame silk, our blood relationship writ all over our faces, in the wideness of the eye, the dark wing of the brow, the small upturned nose, and the full rose lips. She did not say anything as she pressed her cheek to mine, but I got the point.

We were family.

Cloaked, booted, and masked (“for you will be among soldiers, dear”), my mother sent for the sergeant at arms again, and we were led from the residence down a flight of stone steps and past an ornamental lake stuffed with carp. The fish flicked their golden bellies to the sun as they turned in the water. I could have flipped one out, crunched his head, and eaten him whole, for I was still starving.

Into this picturesque court came the duke and his retinue, at a swift pace—I noticed il Moro always seemed to march. Not walk. His mien was military, his business war—everything about him martial. In the morning light I noted the duke’s dusky skin and olive-black eyes and hair, and understood, for the first time, why I heard him everywhere dubbed il Moro—the Moor.

Again he greeted us in his soldierly way and was as bluff and friendly to me as yestereve, as if I had not spent the night in one of his cells.

“Come,” he said. “I will show you great wonders, madam and miss, that we talked of at dinner.”

With that, he led us down a little loggia, arched black and white in strong sun, and unlocked a low door with the hand that wore the Medici ring. He turned to his guards. “Six stay, six go,” he ordered. “No Romans.”

The sergeant at arms counted out the men. “You, two Milanese. You, from Maremma. You from Siena. You from Modena, and, Pisan, you.” I looked up at the word, and saw that Brother Guido was the Pisan picked to guard us.

We entered the dark door and spiraled down on a left-turning stair, the soldier’s sandals clattering behind. Down, down, down to a vast chamber flooded with light from arched window shafts that reached through twelve feet of solid rock to the upper courts of the castle. I was reminded again of the covered causeway where I had run till and from last night. But if the causeway had been inhabited by such creatures as I saw here, I would never have left the castle.

Madonna.

They were great beasts of wood and iron, towers of siege standing high like giants, war machines with teeth like dragons. Constructed on a grand scale with wheels and pulleys and ropes, and joists and cannon, and bristling with blades.

We moved as one down the huge hall, cavernous as a cathedral, but a place to worship war, not God. And as if intoning the Scripture, Ludovico Sforza began to speak in a tongue that I recognized as Latin. Was that why the duke had specified no Romans? Would people from Rome be more likely to know the language of the church? I, of course, understood but one word in a hundred. My mother, nodding at the duke’s instruction, understood all. But I knew, with a fierce pride in my chest, that there was another here that would understand every word of il Moro’s commentary and would be able to relate it to me in time.

Each creature had its attendants, its keeper; engineers, tinkering, adjusting, experimenting, running trials, adding a bolt here or a nail there, planing wood or shaving metal. And at the hub of it all, a small ugly man, his features obscured by beard and moustaches. Who bowed low to the duke and then proceeded to gabble to him, in Latin faster and more fluid than his master; a firecracker of a man, fairly bursting with