The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,26

those fingers.” I rubbed my eyes.

“Perhaps they are spelling something?” Brother Guido mused, too tired to notice my feeble jest. “Do their hands make a letter? If not in the Arabic, then the Cyrillic script, since classical figures are thematic here?”

I had no thoughts on letters, Arabic or otherwise, for I cannot write. I left him to that particular line of inquiry. My tired mind wandered, to be brought back by a swift question.

“You said you knew three things about dancing. What was the third?”

Madonna, he was quick. “Qualcosa Tre: your gaze should be lowered modestly to the ground. You should never look directly at a gentleman, even if he is your partner in the measure. You should never meet his eyes, no matter what pleasures you intend to exchange later. Yet the middle maiden”—I pointed—“while her sisters gaze at the hands, is looking directly at him.” I traced my finger left to the face of Mercury, as played by Signor Botticelli.

“You’re right!” exclaimed Brother Guido. “She is gazing at him intently, as if she would say something.”

“Or as if she wants him in her bed.”

The brother blushed. “I think she is the key,” he said. “It’s her. She alone of the three is connected by her glance to Botticelli. Let us turn our eyes upon this central Grace, and only she. She conceals the identity of the first city. Pisa, Naples, or Genoa. We must search for any letter, or mayhap coat of arms, concealed about her person.”

Once again, I was stranded on the sandbanks of my ignorance. I knew naught of any of the three, save that they all went to sea and were packed full of merchants and sailors that sometimes washed up in Florence to unload their wares between my legs. But, to show willing, I looked again at the flame-haired maid, seeing in her glance at the handsome Mercury something of my own desires. My tired eyes traveled from her red head to the white hands clasped above.

And then, I saw it. A shape swam into my tired view.

‘Twas not what was there, but what was not. The space in between the hands, the strange, swanlike clasp of the dancers, described exactly a shape I had seen only yestereve. A strange trick of my spent brain took me back to the doorway of Brother Guido’s cell in Santa Croce, where I had shrunk into the shadows of a silent cloister, the darkness shielding me from mortal danger. And there, above the doorway that held me, in a stone roundel was carved a tower. A tower that leaned.

“She’s Pisa,” I said. The strain of the night brought a gurgle of laughter from deep within, rising, unstoppable, from my throat. “She’s wearing the tower on her head.”

Brother Guido bent over my pointing finger. He, too, began to laugh, a deep, musical sound, strange in its unfamiliarity.

“So she is.” Then, softer, “So she is.” He shook his head. “That I, who call Pisa my home, did not see this, when I have grown under the shadow of that very tower. The shape, the incline, all is exactly right. Even the bell tower at the very top is described precisely by the negative space between the Grace’s fingers. What an ass am I, a blind, foolish ass! And as for you”—he turned with a smile that warmed me from head to toe—“there are many things to be learned besides what we may find in a book.”

I returned the smile, feeling almost bashful, which is not like me at all. “And now?” I asked, already dreading what he would say.

“Pisa. We’re going to Pisa.”

“We’re going there?”

“Yes. For two reasons. One, my uncle is a great man in the city and may help us. Two, we are endangering my Lord Abbot for every hour we stay here. For if the assassins trace us to this place, they may believe we have shared our knowledge and decide to murder him too.”

“Is the same not so of your uncle?”

“No, for he is a man of great power and consequence.”

I snorted unattractively. “So was Bembo.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, if our timing is right, we may be able to meet him without revealing ourselves.”

“What can you mean?”

“You’ll see,” he replied enigmatically, and then lifted his head as if he smelled music. “D’you hear? The bells are ringing for Matins.”

“Stay a moment.” I pulled his sleeve. “We have identified Pisa as the central Grace. But what is to say that she is the beginning of the