The Botticelli Secret - By Marina Fiorato Page 0,47

us—the family trencher for the head of the table.”

He nodded with comprehension. “Then we must thank the Lord that neither of us ate them—you because of your dislike and me because of the fast. The saint did save me.”

Perhaps. But I shivered to think how close he had been to eating the oysters I had saved for breakfast—only Tok’s interruption had saved him from his uncle’s fate. Ironic now that Tok had been sent to kill us by Niccolò who, had he been a dutiful son and attended the feast, would have eaten from the same platter and died too. Madonna, my head hurt with the mathematics of murder.

Brother Guido spoke again. “If it had not been that way, they would have got him somehow. And now we have been prevented from our audience with Lorenzo, the only man who could pardon us. I know not what to suggest. Nor where to take you. We are drifting, literally and metaphorically. We are a leaf in the current, and we must place ourselves in the hands of God.”

I had no intention of letting God run this. “We can’t give up!” I said. “There must be somewhere we can go!”

Brother Guido looked me in the face. His eyes held no fight, his gaze was dull and dead. “No,” he said. “It is ended, but for a miracle.”

I cast desperately about me for a solution but could see nothing but the strange landscape of dark houses lining the Arno on either side. Then, like the pinpoint of the polestar, a light appeared in one window. Then another. Then all the way up and down both riverbanks, each window, each door, each terrace and balcony, was filled with torches or candles. Every lamp was lit, every rush dip given fire, every tinderbox struck. Could this be to do with us? Could this be the hue and cry that Tok had started to find us? No, surely not, for the whole city was suddenly alight, one glorious constellation. Then, as we watched, the lights flooded the river like stars falling to float on the dark water, as the crowds that lined the riverbank set little paper boats onto the tide, each little vessel carrying a single candle. This fairy flotilla drifted along with Brother Guido and me downstream until we were surrounded by the little flames like fiery lily blossoms. I smiled with delight, despite our situation, and saw Brother Guido smile too. “Is this our miracle?” I asked him.

“Of a sort,” he said. “ ‘Tis the festival of lights, the Luminara, held each year on the eve of Saint Ranieri’s day. I should have remembered that . . .”

He stopped, as if choked, and I scrambled to his side, dropping my oar overboard in my anxiety, fearing he was suffering a seizure. Quitter he may be, but he was the only ally I had left in the world. In the golden glow from a million lights, there was enough illumination to see how pale he had suddenly become. “What is it?” When he did not reply I took his shoulders and shook him like a doll. “Brother Guido? What?”

“The light!” he said, turning eyes on me that were now brighter than any torch in Pisa that night. “Follow the light! My uncle is showing us the way—his last words to me was our escape route.”

My heart began to pound again. “But where are they going? Where does the light lead?”

He pointed downriver. “To the ocean,” he said simply, as we followed the numberless floating torches that were leading us to the sea.

Very soon, before the city’s bells had rung another quarter, we began to see that our destination was not the open water but a place somewhat closer. For a trick of the current made every torchboat gather in a wide tributary, a sort of millrace, that lay like a lake at the foot of a tall, castlelike building. A bend in the river at this very place meant that the torches stopped, the fiery lilies pooling in a lake of fire, which was a beauteous sight to behold.

I felt three things at this point.

Cosa Uno: wonder at the sight.

Cosa Due: relief that we were not to set out to sea in a tiny wooden bark that only had one oar and was already sploshing with bilgewater.

Cosa Tre: a growing fear that we would be set alight. But soon it became clear that the hundred thousand torches were being doused by someone, or something,