on the flags. My mother flipped him a ducat, payment for removing the dogaressina’s vomit. And I stumbled back up the stairs, back along the passages, back to my room.
34
Bonaccorso Nivola, Bonaccorso Nivola.
I had heard the fear in his voice. I remembered he had said, “Does her mum know?” Not her dad. I remembered how he had paled when he thought the dogaressa stood before him. I realized he knew what I had divined when I first came here—the She-lion was beautiful but deadly. I ached for his family—suffered agonies of guilt about the unknown, unseen Lisabetta. If she had loved her man as I loved mine, what agonies must rack her now? Her man lay in jail as did mine; we shared a fate but hers was a hundred times more dire—she was a widow in truth, with fatherless babes and no money, an empty bed and an empty cupboard and an empty heart and no wealth to ease her days. Dead reckoning—Signor Cristoforo’s phrase came back to me, and suddenly seemed to have enormous significance to the fate of the poor sailor who had agreed to navigate me out of here. I vowed one day to send succor to Bonaccorso’s wife and children, for God only knew if he would ever quit the pozzi. At least Signor Cristoforo had, if my mother spoke truth, been merely banished—allowed to return to his brother and his beloved map shop by the sea, and thence to his wife and the son he had never seen but could bring tears to his eyes at a word. For that I was glad.
But my own cause was hopeless. I knew that I would now not be able to escape; that I would languish here until, by a cruel twist of fortune, I would be taken over the mountains to Pisa where I would be wed to the cousin of the man I loved. To be reminded every day by the similarities of blood that I had bought a counterfeit, a poor copy of the man I wanted. Worse still, Brother Guido was still in the Bargello, a jail at least as bad as the one I had just fled.
In despair I went to the inlaid chest at my window—had she searched my room? No, the gold I had stolen from her room the night before was all there. I took it out and tied it in the kerchief I had meant to give to Bonaccorso Nivola for my passage. I strapped the packet of coins tightly to my upper thigh. If it could not buy me freedom, I could at least send it to his family as I had pledged. There was something else in the bottom of the chest lying forgotten and crumpled. I drew it out. The cartone.
I opened the casement to cast the thing out into the lagoon, for it had destroyed Enna, Bembo, Brother Remigio, Bonnacorso, Brother Guido. And me. But it was the one thing that still connected me to Brother Guido. The one thing left to me that we had both touched. My fingers would not give the parchment up, however hard the west wind snatched at it. In the howl and moan of the warm current, Signor Cristoforo’s words ebbed back to me, as if the spring tide carried them.
The west wind. The west wind heralds the spring. Zephyrus.
I closed the window abruptly. Lit a candle. I unrolled the painting carefully, tenderly, weighted the corners as we always used to do. Looked once more on the picture that my lost love and I had gazed on so oft together. My eyes were drawn to the figure of Chloris—my mother, who had tasted a man’s blood today—looking innocent, frightened, running from the blue-winged wraith at her right shoulder.
Zephyrus.
Her hands reached toward the figure of Flora—toward me—for help. I noted the shift Chloris wore was so close to that which my mother wore today. Then I noted again the flowers that issued from her mouth. And the herbalist’s words came to me once again.
Flowers drop like truths from her mouth.
Suddenly I knew that they must mean something and I set my jaw. Very well. If I could not escape, I could at least foil whatever deadly plan my mother was cooking up with Lorenzo de’ Medici. I concentrated hard—checking the flowers that fell from her mouth against the ones that we had identified on Flora’s garb, racking my pained memory to recall all that was said in the herbarium,