The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,143

forcing myself to recall his sweet face, his sweet voice, his long hands writing down the names of the flowers. I looked hard at each bloom. There seemed to be ten in all, although I could see at once that a number of them were duplicates; there was more than one of each type of flower. I counted four different types in all, and after a great deal of thought I believed that I had identified them. The two flowers almost lodged between Chloris’s teeth were occhiocento, or “hundred eyes,” a common flower of the hedgerow. Then I knew the little white flower with the yellow center to be the anemone, by recalling the herbalist’s teachings. Next fell two coral roses, of exactly the type I had held in my skirts, the roses which we had been at such pains to number in vain, for we had never reached any useful conclusions about the number thirty-two. Finally, a twin-headed corn-flower, blue as the twilight lagoon. A fiordaliso. Ten flower heads and four types of flower. Occhiocento, anemone, rose, and fiordaliso. I could not divine further for try as I might I could not recall the Latin for any flower but the rose, even if I ever knew it. So all I had to work with was the number four, the number ten, or the letters R, F, O, and A.

I sighed. I sensed it would be useless to try to construct a word from this quartet—for one thing, the flower names I knew were in Tuscan not Latin, and for another, I could barely read at this point, and barely set down letters in the right order, let alone construct a word from a jumble of letters. Still, there were only four, and I resolved to try. I knew what I was about—I was taking refuge in the puzzle. If my brain were busy doing this, that poor member could not dwell on the real horrors of the day, nor the imagined horrors that could befall another man, in another jail, in another city-state. Well, then.

R for rose

A for anemone

F for fiordaliso

O for occhiocento

The exercise was short. Eventually, painstakingly, I came up with:

RAFO

ROFA

OFAR

ORAF

FARO

FORA

AFRO

ARFO

None of these seemed to me to make a word, at least, not one that I knew. I wished heartily for another flower with another convenient letter. If only I had an L, for instance, I could make FLORA, which would seem suggestive (of what I did not know). But my desires could not add what was not there—I must stick with what I had. Perhaps if I added one letter for each bloom—two F’s as two fiordalisi were shown? And so on. But this didn’t work either—I was left with a crazy collection of letters, none of them useful to me.

Presently I turned from letters to numbers. Perhaps the number four, the number of flower types, or the number ten, the number of blooms, was suggestive—but here I was graveled even sooner. There were four seasons and four winds and four apostles, but I could not think of any tens save commandments and only because I had broken most of those.

I gave up and stared from the window, seeing nothing. From habit I rolled the cartone and placed it in my bodice. It was no good. Like a moth frighted from the candle when he scorches his wing, like a wasp frighted from a ripe peach by the angry diner’s hand, I returned again and again to the place that spelled my doom. I could not help but think of him that I had lost. I recalled another evening in another place, where I had stared once before over another sea. That evening it was the Bay of Naples the day I had come upon Brother Guido lying in his bed, back scourged till it ran with blood for the sin of kissing me. Now, hundreds of leagues into the north, my heart bled out too, and I grew colder and stiller. Perhaps it were best that we should part, that he should die, for I could never have been with him again and not touched him, not kissed him. Better that he should die, and me too.

I stayed in my room all day, refusing all food and drink and company. The sun drowned in the lagoon and the gondoliers and whores competed for evening trade. Exhausted, defeated by the sleeplessness of the night before and the day’s exertions, I fell fully clothed onto my bed, asleep