hear?”
“Yes, Dogaressa.”
I feigned sleep through this but was also listening carefully, as you may imagine. Once again I got the puzzling sense that my mother really did love me, and that she was in equal parts concerned that I had spied upon her and worried for my safety if I had left this room. She was an odd mixture indeed—but what I most feared now was that she would come over to me and sit beside my “sleeping” form as she had done once before. If she should smooth my hair, or even kiss my heated cheek as she had done in Venice, I was done for. But I thought I knew my mother well enough to know that she would not show the weakness of affection in front of a servant, and I was right. She withdrew, and my maid sat at the hard bench at the window groaning and wakeful, to watch me as the night paled to dawn. As my heart slowed and I drifted to sleep at last, I almost felt sorry for her. Almost.
In the rosy morning we left the city. As our carriages wound away from the gates, I noted that the archduke had not risen to bid us good-bye and I didn’t blame him—for I had only had a couple of hours’ sleep myself. The strange Venetians were no longer with us. I knew now they would stay and train Sigismund’s miners and moneyers. My mother, it seemed, felt comfortable that their business had been successfully concluded, for even she felt able to lower her guard long enough to sleep. It was a sight I had never seen before, and it was an arresting one—she slept quietly and tidily across from me. Not for her the grunting snores or drool that assailed me from Marta at my left shoulder. In rest, my mother’s face relaxed from its haughty expression and she looked younger than ever. Her long lashes lay on her cheeks, the dawn sun gilded the tiny hairs on her skin like the warm fuzz of an apricot. Her lips slightly parted, full and pink, her pearl teeth peeping from within, and her yards of precious hair loose on her shoulders like a new bride, gold in the sun like the first barley harvest. I had to admit, the bitch was beautiful.
I shifted in my seat, ready to sleep myself, and the silver coin in my sleeve cut into my side. I pulled it out to take a look, safe in the sleeping company. On one side, a man’s head stamped with a profile I knew well, for I had seen and admired it in his family church of San Lorenzo in Florence, watching his cousin wed.
It was the noble Medici profile of Lorenzo il Magnifico.
Lorenzo was the “he” that the archduke and my mother constantly mentioned but never named.
Something strange, though—he was wearing his own laurel leaves in the sunray arrangement of the garland of Sol Invictus I had seen in Rome. And on the other side stamped into the silver was a single word—whose letters I spelled out laboriously:
I-T-A-L-I-A.
Italia. I turned the coin over and over again in my hand, the morning sun glinting on the newly marked silver, the flashes crossing the face of my sleeping mother. What was she up to, she and Lorenzo and the others? Italia. The word meant nothing to me but was not wholly unfamiliar, and I knew I’d heard it before. I was too tired to rack my poor brain. It would come to me. Italia. Italia. The word became one with the rumble and rhythm of the carriage wheels. I-tal-ia, I-tal-ia, I-tal-ia.
I slept.
8
Milan
Milan, March 1483
38
My mother watched me lazily as we traveled, through eyes that were mere glittering crescents.
I felt the cartone in my bodice, the wooden roll in one sleeve, and the silver coin in the other every time I shifted position, and felt as if her gaze saw through my clothing. I determined not to sleep at all on the journey, fought hard to keep awake after the night I’d had, for I trusted my mother no more than she trusted me. I knew she suspected me, knew she thought there had been foul play in Bolzano—that I’d given Marta the slip. I knew she searched my chamber routinely, wondered that she hadn’t yet searched my person. I even had the bitch’s mask in the hood of my cloak. I met her eyes and dropped mine, wary lest she guess