Painting Mona Lisa aka I, Mona Lisa

Aghast, I stared at him. He gave no sign of discomfort.

“I have watched you for some time. All those times you went to listen to Fra Girolamo. You are very beautiful, you know. Sometimes you would glance over your shoulder at the crowd, and I thought you might be looking in my direction, at me, because you knew I was there. Because you had noticed me.

“I know you are a woman capable of great passion, Madonna. I have your letters to your prospective husband. No one connected to the Signoria has any knowledge of them, yet. And I saw to it that the young lady who shared the cell with you will remain silent. No one need know that you had anything to do with the Medici. I can destroy the letters; I can protect you and your father from any reprisals.”

He paused, apparently waiting for a sign from me to continue, but I was struck dumb. He showed the first signs of genuine emotion then: His cheeks colored slightly as he stared down at his slippers. His feet moved nervously, scuffing softly against the stone.

Then he regained his absolute composure and looked levelly at me. “I want to marry you. I have feelings for you, and I had hoped-”

“I can’t,” I interrupted; surely he understood why.

His expression hardened. “It would be a terrible thing for your father to undergo any more suffering. A terrible thing, if he were to die.”

Had the bars not separated us, I would have leapt on him like a man, put my hands upon his throat. “I would do anything to save my father! But I cannot marry you. I am already married, to Giuliano de’ Medici.”

He gave a soft, indignant snort; his eyes were pitiless. “Giuliano de’ Medici,” he said, his tone absurdly flat, “is dead. Thrown off his horse while crossing the Ponte Santa Trinita, and drowned in the Arno.”

L

He must have been searching for me. He must have broken free of the hostile crowd in the Piazza della Signoria and made his way back to the Palazzo Medici. Perhaps Piero had already left, perhaps not-but Giuliano must have somehow gotten the notion that I had returned to my father’s house.

Ser Francesco said that a patrolling guard had fished his body from the river. It had been taken immediately to the Lord Priors, who identified it and buried it outside the city walls before anyone had a chance to desecrate the corpse. The grave’s location was secret. Even the Lord Priors did not discuss it among themselves, lest a search for the remains provoke fresh riots.

I cannot tell you what I did then. I cannot tell you because I cannot remember. They say that God, in His wisdom, causes mothers to forget the pain of childbirth so that they will not fear bearing more young. Perhaps that is what He did for me, so that I would not fear loving again.

The one thing I do remember of that night is greeting my father. It was dusk, and a haze of smoke further darkened the sky. The Piazza della Signoria was empty save for a solitary coach and soldiers hired by the Signoria, patrolling on foot and horseback.

Someone had splattered dark paint across the morbid portraits of the conspirators Francesco de’ Pazzi, Salviati, and Baroncelli. As their marred, life-sized images looked on, I clutched Ser Francesco’s forearm and staggered down the steps of the palazzo into a horrific new world.

At the end of those steps, the coach-ordered by Ser Francesco and occupied by my father-yawned open. As Ser Francesco steadied me on the step-his hand on my elbow, his gaze suddenly as timid as a youth’s at the outset of courtship-he said, “There is food and drink waiting for you. I have seen to it.”

I stared at him, still too numbed to react. I had not eaten in a day, but the notion of doing so now was offensive. I turned away and climbed into the coach.

My father sat, one shoulder pressed hard against the inner wall, his body slumped diagonally; he gingerly held one hand out to his side. The skin over his cheekbone was tight, violet, so puffed up that I could not see his eye. And his hand…

They had used the screws on him. His right thumb, protruding from the hand at a full right angle, had swelled to the size of a sausage; the nail was gone, and in its place was an open red-black sore. The same had been done to the forefinger, which was also grotesquely bloated and extended straight ahead, perpendicular to the thumb.

When I saw him, I began to cry.

“Daughter,” he whispered. “Thank God. My darling, my child.” I sat beside him and wrapped my arms about him, careful not to brush against the injured hand. “I am sorry.” His voice broke. “Forgive me. Oh, I am sorry…”

When he uttered those words, all of my resistance toward him, all of my anger, melted.

“I am sorry, I am sorry…”

I understood. He did not just regret our current situation or the promise I had been forced to make Ser Francesco in order to win his freedom. He was sorry for everything: for striking my mother, for taking her to San Lorenzo, sorry that Fra Domenico had murdered her, sorry that he had not taken up her cause. He was sorry for my sorrowful wedding day, and for the fear I had felt for him the previous night, and for the pity I was feeling for him now.

Most of all, he was sorry about Giuliano.

The next morning, when I woke safe in my own bed, I found Zalumma standing over me. She wore a look of such guardedness and complicity that I repressed the urge to speak, even before she lifted a finger to her lips.

The sunlight streamed through the windows behind her, causing a glare that made it difficult to see what she held in her hand.

I frowned and pushed myself up to a sitting position-grimacing at the soreness of my body. She thrust the folded papers at me. “I came upstairs,” she whispered, so softly I had to strain to hear her over the soft rustling as I unfolded my gifts. “As soon as the gonfaloniere came with his men, I rushed in here to try to hide your letters. But there wasn’t enough time. I only managed to save these.”

I smoothed them out-one a larger piece of paper, folded many times, the other small, creased in half. And I stared for a long time at my lap, at the image of myself, beautifully rendered in silverpoint, and of a brown ink drawing of Bernardo Baroncelli, swinging from his noose.

Order was restored fairly quickly throughout the city, though by then, every statue of Lorenzo de’ Medici had been toppled, every stone crest of the Medici palle adorning any building chiseled away. Four days after Piero’s flight, the Signoria overturned the law exiling the Pazzi, and encouraged all the offspring of Giuliano’s assassins to return. A bill was passed stating that Francesco and Iacopo de’ Pazzi had acted on behalf of “the people’s freedom.”

The day after the Medici left Florence, Savonarola met with King Charles to negotiate terms of his entry into Florence. A week after my wedding, King Charles marched triumphantly into the city, where he was welcomed as a hero. Ser Francesco wanted badly for me to go with him, for the Lord Priors ordered that all in Florence who were able to should attend, and wear their best finery.

I did not go. All my fine clothes had been burned the night of the riots, and my wedding dress was ruined. More important, I was needed at home. My father’s hand was red and putrid, and he shook from fevers. I sat at his bedside day and night, pressed damp cloths to his head, and applied poultices to the festering sores. Zalumma stayed to help me, but my father’s new chambermaid, Loretta, went to the spectacle on our behalf.

I liked Loretta. She had a keen eye and wit, and told the truth even when it was impolitic.

“Charles is an idiot,” she reported. “He does not have enough sense to keep his mouth closed. He stands with it gaping open, breathing in air through great crooked teeth. He is ugly-so ugly! A hooked nose so bumpy and large as to make Fra Girolamo shudder.”

Zalumma laughed softly; I hushed her. We stood in the doorway to my father’s bedchamber. Behind my back, my father slept quiet as the dead after a restless, pain-filled night; I had closed the shutters to keep out the glare of the morning sun.