I would never grow up to rule; I would never grow up at all. I backed away from the window.
“Where is she?” I whispered to the girl.
“Madonna Clarice? At the front door, talking to two men. They told me to fetch you.
“She is so angry with them,” the girl continued. “She did not want them to wake you. She is swearing at them so, she will surely provoke them-” She pressed her hand to her mouth as if she was going to be sick, then forced herself to calm. “Last night, she summoned me and said that, if anything happened to her, I was to see you safely to her mother’s people.” She glanced nervously at the door. “They will come looking for you, if we don’t appear soon. But…”
I lifted my brows questioningly.
“But we could leave by the servants’ stairs,” she continued. “They wouldn’t see us. There are places to hide here. I think Madonna Clarice would want that.”
I expected Clarice
Aunt Clarice, lifting me up to touch Lorenzo’s childish face. Clarice, lifting me out of the rebels’ reach, even as they tried to tear her apart. Clarice, who could well have departed with her husband and children, leaving us heirs in rebel hands. But like her grandfather, she did not abandon those of her blood, no matter how fatally afflicted.
I placed the worthless gem upon the pillow, then pulled off the silver talisman, on its leather cord, and coiled it beside the stone. Then I looked up at the servant.
“Get my gown, please,” I said. “I will be going down to meet them.”
PART III
Six
Images from that day are etched clearly in my memory: the long walk down the stairs, the sight of Clarice in the vestibule, a shawl tossed over her shoulders to hide the fact that a swath had been torn from the back of her gold gown. Her wrist-resting now in a sling-had left her pale with agony. Although the man she spoke to was more than a head taller and flanked by two aides of similar height, she seemed larger than them all. Gesturing sharply with her free hand, she railed as fearlessly at him as she had at Passerini the morning he came to tell her Pope Clement had been routed.
As I moved down the stairs, the man listening to her glanced up. He was intense and very quiet, and made me remember something Piero had once said, that a dog who did not bark was far more likely to bite. His hair and beard and eyes matched his new brown cloak. He was Bernardo Rinuccini, head of the rebel militia.
I remember how his eyes grew rounded at the sight of me, how Aunt Clarice’s mouth fell open as she glanced over her shoulder, stricken and profoundly speechless.
“Promise me you won’t hurt her,” I told the general, “and I will go with you.”
Rinuccini stared down at me. “I have no reason to hurt her.”
“Promise me,” I repeated, gazing steadily at him.
“I promise,” he said.
I walked past Clarice to Rinuccini’s side; there was horror in her eyes as she watched me slip irrevocably from her care. But the greater horror was mine, to glimpse the proud spirit behind those eyes and to mark the instant it broke.
They led me away. When I appeared in the doorway, the troops waiting on the lawn cheered. I moved quickly so that they had no cause to touch me, not until I was lifted up onto a horse and into the lap of a well-born soldier. He wore not a sword but a weapon I had never seen before: an arquebus, a contraption of wood and metal designed to blast balls of lead into distant victims, like a miniature cannon one might hold in one’s hand. He regarded me with victory and loathing; never was a trophy more scorned or prized.
The ascending sun coaxed the previous night’s rain from the earth; the horses moved through low swirls of mist as we rode across the quiet countryside. Numbed by the enormity of my decision, I rode in mindless dread, my back pressed to my guardian’s chest.
By midmorning we had returned to the city. We headed not south to the great Piazza della Signoria and the gallows but north. As the streets were busy, we attracted much attention, but most failed to notice a little girl huddled against one of the soldiers; by the time a few had, we had already passed, and their faint curses, like stones hurled from too great a distance, did not frighten me.
Our procession turned onto an unfamiliar street lined with stone walls. They were thick and high, unbroken save for three narrow doors at long intervals.
We stopped at one of the doors. Set into it were two iron grates, one at eye level, behind which a black cloth had been hung, and an uncovered one at foot level.
An aide dismounted and called at the covered grate, while another soldier swung me down from the horse. The door opened inward, an aide pushed me inside, and someone quickly shut the door behind me.
I stumbled forward onto a stone patio that lay in the shadow of a large building and glanced up at the woman who faced me. She was worn and colorless and dressed in black but for the white wimple beneath her long veil. She put her finger to her lips for silence, so emphatically that I followed her without a word into the building, which was as plain and aged and soundless as she. She led me up two flights of narrow stairs, then past a long row of cells, before depositing me in a tiny room, with a bed pushed against the wall opposite the window and two chairs.
The latter were occupied by two young women clad in shabby brown dresses. They dropped their mending after making the same gesture, finger to lips, before they hurried to me.
Clumsily, they began to remove my gown. I doubt they had ever seen anything as fine, for they didn’t understand how to unlace the sleeves, but at last my gown slipped free and I stepped out of it into an uncertain future.
Seven
On one of Florence’s most oppressively narrow streets lies the Dominican convent known as Santa-Caterina da Siena. The convent’s denizens fiercely opposed the Medici and supported the rebels, no doubt because it catered to the poor. Its six boarders-girls of marriageable age or younger, from families who had discovered that it was cheaper to keep them at the convent-were born of the lowest class of workers: the dyers, weavers, and carders of wool and silk, men whose occupations stained their hands, twisted their bodies, scarred their lungs. These were men who fell sick and died young, leaving behind daughters who could not be fed. These were men who had torn down our Medici banners and ignited them out of hatred for the rich and well-fed.
