“I feel sorry for you, Mina. You should have had more faith in yourself, in me, and in those around you. Not everyone is like Father Cambio.”
True to his word, Cristofano testified that the priest’s death was a direct result of him having attacked me. I would not be punished, not officially, at least. I wrote a letter to Fabbiana, telling her what had happened, but it was returned to me, undelivered. She had succumbed to the consumption that had so long tormented her.
Plague swept through Florence, as it had done at least once a decade for the past hundred years. This time, I caught it. Friar Baldo, further proving his courage, prayed over me when I was sick, showing no concern for his own safety. During those days, when I slipped in and out of consciousness, Savonarola staged his largest bonfire—art, books, musical instruments, and more, piled fifteen feet high, all to be consigned to the flames. Rumor had it that Botticelli flung some of his paintings into it, but I will never believe those stories. I took much comfort in the knowledge that I had helped spare so many precious things from the flames. I’d made a mess of so much of my life, but at least in this, I had succeeded in doing some good.
I survived the plague, but just barely. My illness brought Bia back to me. During my long recovery, after it was clear I was out of danger, I told her my story, sparing no detail, and she better accepted my flaws after hearing it.
The next year, the city finally turned on Savonarola. Famine and plague had eroded his support. A Franciscan friar challenged him to a trial by ordeal, in which two men, one representing the Franciscans, the other the Dominicans, would walk through fire. Whoever survived—if either could—would be accepted as favored by God. Savonarola agreed, but on the day in question, spent so long arguing and negotiating that before the trial could start, the skies opened and doused the flames. At last, the citizens of Florence began to believe that God had abandoned Savonarola.
Soon thereafter, he was arrested, tried as a heretic, and executed, burned on the same spot in the Piazza della Signoria where he’d held his largest bonfire. Now it was his turn. I went to the piazza that day, not to see the spectacle but because I thought Salvi might be there. He was not. I never saw him again.
Not that I didn’t try. Six months later, I went to the Ospedale degli Innocenti and showed them my segni. He’d been apprenticed to a leather worker but left his position to follow Savonarola. After the friar’s demise, he’d fled, to where, no one could tell me. Abandoning him was a mistake I would never be able to correct. I mourned him and prayed that he would find happiness somewhere.
Eventually, the world righted itself. Art and culture flourished. The Medici returned to rule Florence. I became part of a small social circle, comprised mainly of obscure intellectuals and artists. Bia married one of them. Botticelli decorated her cassoni, just as he had mine. She gave her husband seven children.
I did not see Cristofano for a dozen or so years after Savonarola’s execution. He came to me on a sunny day a month after Maddalena died. I was sitting on the roof of my house, my damp hair pulled through a crownless hat. I started to speak, but he silenced me, pacing for nearly an hour. Finally, he fell to his knees, buried his head in my lap, and wept. And then, we were friends again. It was almost as if the intervening years had never happened. A week later, he told me he knew better than to propose to me a second time. We both laughed, but I realized that if he had, I would have accepted. Not that it mattered. What more could I want than his friendship, ever steady?
From that day, I kept no secrets from him. I told him what I’d done to help Friar Baldo. We decided to write the story of that tumultuous time in Florence and hide it somewhere safe, so that no matter what the centuries brought, it would be secure, waiting to be found. I copied it into the margins of my grandfather’s Lucretius. Cristofano hired a stone mason to alter three steps in the stairs that climbed to the top of Brunelleschi’s dome so that we could hide mementos of those days. In one, we placed the inventory of everything spared from the bonfires of the vanities. In another, Cristofano put two sketches, both given to him by Botticelli. The artist, as I’d suspected, had used the first when he was working on the fresco of Venus and the Three Graces on the wall of the villa where we’d first met. The second was the drawing he had made of me that night so long ago in the Palazzo Medici. Within the final altered step, we put Nonno’s copy of Lucretius.
My grandfather’s most precious book would be safe, but not lost. To ensure this, we left a code, embedded in quotes from De Rerum Natura written on the walls of my palazzo, placed carefully to mimic the locations of the houses of Florentines who had refused to stand by and let Savonarola destroy their cultural legacy. The houses are marked with a coat of arms bearing a bat, an arrow, and a caltrap, the design conceived by Friar Baldo. Cristofano and I adopted those same symbols to serve as signposts to our hidden treasure, carving them into those three altered steps in the Duomo, where they wait to be found by some future book hunter.
Florence,
190343
Colin’s statement to the police distressed me, but at least Signore Bastieri would know who had killed his daughter. He and Signore Tazzera arrived
