The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,14

my home.” I decided the time had come for threats. “If you cannot help me, perhaps one of the other brothers . . .” I took a step to the door.

He held out a hand to stop me. “Wait.” I could almost hear him thinking. My words had been suggestive: the idea of appealing to another—his next notion was to find himself a chaperone.

“Signorina. I think I must lay this before Brother Remigio, my superior and librarian, and one of the initiators of this charitable enterprise. As a man of learning and letters, he designed the pamphlet that I showed you today.” Even the dark chapel could not hide the blush that showed me he recalled what I had done with the first copy. (I thought it not the moment to tell him where I had left the second.)

I understood him. He wished to be rid of me, to wash his hands like Pilate and hand me over to his superiors. I was happy; the higher up I went, the more protection I would have. I could pine over the beauteous monk at a more convenient season. The fellow went to the doorway and looked left and right into the cloister. The footsteps of the faithful brothers receded, and there was a muted opening and shutting of doors as they returned to their cells—doubtless for a few hours’ rest before their next devotions. Once silence reigned, the monk motioned me to put up my own hood, and, doing likewise, he beckoned me into the cloister. The well-tended rectangle of grass glowed dark green, and the sky above was velvet blue. Ringed by colonnades of perfect arches, the place gave me a sense of peace once more. I felt Brother Guido’s hand under my elbow and it was good to be no longer alone.

We tiptoed on silent feet through a pair of great doors to the left of the Pazzi Chapel, to a larger cloister, square this time, with doors leading to each dorter. A stone well marked the center of the quad with a bowed tree leaning over to peer into the depths. The tall monk drew me into a doorway and shielded my body from sight as he whispered instructions. “Signorina, you must stay here,” he hissed. “This is the door to my cell, but I cannot take you within, for it would not look . . . well. Nor can I leave you in the open. Stand back into this shadow while I wake my neighbor—the librarian, Brother Remigio, that I told you of.”

I knew this was no time for idle chat so I held my tongue and shrank back obediently against the oaken door, fitting my slim frame into the jamb. To be sure, certain parts of me protruded a little, but in all I was pretty well hidden unless someone would come in or out, and as the brother had already indicated, this was his door, so I was safe for the while. I waited.

And waited.

The hard wood bit into my back and I began to wriggle. I counted my heartbeats, then all my teeth with my tongue. I sang all the bawdy songs I know inside my head till I ran out. Then I said all the prayers I know, which took much less time. My limbs froze, and at length, when still he did not come, I was forced to move away from the door, shaking my limbs and waggling my head like one with the palsy. The blood flowed back into my stiff muscles with an exquisitely painful impression of a thousand pinpricks. Still he came not and I stretched my neck, catching sight as I did so of a stone roundel, which sat above the door in carved relief.

It featured a great tower, of arches and columns piled on top of each other, leaning crazily to the right. I knew it, of course, for the great campanile tower at Pisa, which, although only lately finished, was reputed to list heavily to one side, as if fit to fall. Florentines were divided as to the veracity of this tale. Some, like myself, did not believe the story and thought it a feeble lie on the part of the Pisans, in an attempt to aggrandize their inferior city and pull it from the shadow of its great neighbor Florence. Some, who claimed to have seen the thing, merely shrugged and said it was typical of the Pisans, who could not build a pile of