The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,38
and coal-black pasta made with the ink of a squid. Then there was a positive menagerie of stuffed meats on the groaning board; little deers and immense boars, roasted and sewn back into their skins, eyes staring glassily at those that had come to devour them. There was even a peacock, cooked and mounted with his glorious green-blue tail replaced to fan out as a centerpiece. I ate until my dress bit at the seams, and drank heartily, and laughed with Lord Silvio, and had a thoroughly good evening.
Brother Guido, I noted, ate nothing and drank only water, for he intended to fast. A platter of oysters, which he had told me upon the road were his favorite food, was placed before me, for the three of us to share. Now I never eat oysters, don’t ask me why—I think it’s partly to do with the fact that they make the pearls, like the one in my navel, and partly because they remind me of swallowing a man’s seed, which I have to do enough in my line of work without doing it in my leisure time too. I pushed the gold platter toward Brother Guido. “Go on,” I tempted him. “Your favorite.”
He looked at me as if I were the Devil in the wilderness, pressed his full lips together into a line, and shook his dark curls. “I must not,” he said. “I am fasting in honor of Saint Ranieri who did inspire me to my calling.”
“Surely oysters don’t count! They are Lenten fare, peasant food!”
He shook his head again. “From daybreak tomorrow I may eat again, but not before the saint’s day dawns.”
I shrugged, and moved the platter toward his uncle, for I would not have the righteous monk suffer the pains of denial needlessly, whatever you may think of me. But as I moved the plate I swept some of the nobbly shells into my lap, there to conceal them in my apronlike overskirt. He could not eat till morning? Well, then I would save half a dozen for his breakfast. His uncle, meantime, ate heartily of the rest of the plate; clearly the love of these ugly shellfish ran in the family.
After the oysters came the sweetmeats, and I stuffed myself once again with meringues, marchpane, and little pastries from the Orient. And then came the climax of the feast; two servants carried in a most wonderful pudding made exactly in the likeness of the leaning tower, the white sugar artfully describing the layered arcades and colonnades, even the bell tower on top. The thing was placed on the table, where it leaned authentically, amid a burst of applause from the guests. Brother Guido and I exchanged a look. Seeing the tower again, remembering the very shape that the Botticelli’s Graces described with their hands, reminded us that the hour had come when we must share what we knew. Even the steady presence of Tok at the lord’s shoulder did not prevent a sudden shiver. The sugar tower was soon demolished and the platters carried around. I saw, as had happened all evening, that the empty place by the empty chair was served with a platter as if an invisible guest sat there, and the plates and delicacies were beginning to mount up like a scullery sink. On the other side of me, Brother Guido refused his plate, and I admired his abstinence in the face of such delights, as much as I admired the beauty in his stoic face. The pudding was delicious, but as I enjoyed the burst of sweetness I became aware at the same time of a sour little pain just below my heart at the thought that, in under a year, Guido della Torre would take full vows and be lost to me forever.
At length, the final guest had gone, and the two della Torres and I were closeted together in the library tower of the palazzo, a fine room with four glazed windows looking to the four points of the compass, and the rest of the walls lined with books. Lord Silvio was clearly as fond of reading as his nephew. I had never seen so many books in one place before. The three of us hunched around the well-lit reading table in the center of the room, like a trio of generals perusing a war time map. Lord Silvio looked at the painting for long moments before speaking. His face inscrutable, he tapped his left thumb on the table