The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,198

friend I had left.

“I have been too long from the ones I love. If this last night has taught me anything, it is that it is time I saw my son.”

“Diego?”

He smiled. “You remembered.”

I turned back to the sea, beyond the wrecked fleet, off into the infinite, gray-blue yonder. “How will you live?”

“I think now Doge Battista may pay for my ship of fools, after the service I rendered the city, don’t you? And if he does not, no matter. I will petition the rulers of Spain.”

“Take this on Venice’s account.” I reached beneath my sodden robes and gave him the purse of fifty ducats I had stolen from my mother. His bulbous eyes popped further when he saw the gold flash, heard the chink of coins. “Don’t you need it?”

I shook my head. Money didn’t matter to me anymore. “Where will you go?”

“Portugal first, then the Azores, to my father and Filipa. And little Diego.”

I sighed like the wind, for all that he had and that I had not.

“I would not prevent you. Go and be with your wife and child. Love and family is all that matters.” I had forfeited both in one fateful night.

“I was about to say the same to you. Your mother awaits you at the doge’s palace.”

“My mother?” I had not given her a thought since Brother Guido had left my sight.

“Yes. She and your father and Ludovico il Moro were captured and brought to the city at dawn. They are my lord doge’s hostages until they sign a treaty of peace, which even now is being writ by his scribes.”

“What of Don Ferrente?”

“Turned for home as soon as the first ship burned.”

“And Niccolò della Torre?” I asked with a catch in my voice.

“Who?”

“The lord of Pisa?”

He shrugged. “I have no word of him. Why?”

“No matter.” I could not form the words, not explain the terrible irony that if I were to return to my life, I would be wed to the cousin of he who was lost to me, to be reminded every day that a better copy of this nobility once lived, once loved me. The cruelty struck me in the chest like a blow and I thought I would die too. Wished that I would.

“When you are ready, go back to your mother. You are the first soul she asked for, never thinking of her own safety. I think that she loves you. She is a lioness, granted; but you are the lion’s child.” I felt him kiss my forehead.

I could not look up. Could not lift my weary head.

“Godspeed,” he said.

“And you,” I whispered. But he had gone harborward and the wind snatched my words away from him.

I don’t know how long I sat there on the freezing shingle. Rafts of wood and bundles of canvas nudged and bumped at my feet as the tide inched in. At length the treacherous sun broke through the clouds and dried me, warmed the pebbles beneath my legs. It was going to be a beautiful day.

Soon I must choose to stay and drown or rise and live. I heaved myself up, and as I did so, I felt the scratch of a parchment in my bodice. The cartone of the Primavera, which had found me love and lost it again. I took the thing out and cast it into the sea, as far, far as I could, and turned back land-ward before I could know where it landed. I did not want the thing anymore. But the tide would not allow me even this gesture. The thing washed back to me, soaked and dun like a dead sole, and flopped over my sodden shoe. I looked at it draped there, and thought then that it was the last thing he and I had touched together—’twas something he and I had shared. Perhaps one day I would be able to look on it again. I rescued it from the surf before the ebb could take it again—squeezed the water from it like a washcloth and turned to wander back to the Palazzo Ducale, not knowing what else I could do.

My options were limited. I could stay and work the stews of Genoa, fucking sailors until I was too old for them to want me, or I could claim my birthright and get a feckless finocchio of a husband into the bargain, like a worm that comes with the apple. Or die by my own hand and meet Brother Guido in the afterlife. Only I