Chapter 10

Alas, Poor Piero

It was raining outside. Warm rain with a heavy scent of damp earth and moist young plants. Not heavy rain, more in the nature of heavy mist, but nevertheless wet enough to be a distraction and an irritant.

She had wanted to return to the poolside but he had pleaded embarrassment. ‘I recognize that this rain makes no difference to you. Your clothing is intended to become wet. But I have only one habit. What do I wear for our conversations if that becomes soaking wet?’

Finally she had given in to him. She was, she recognized, being selfish, using her position of ownership to make everyone pander to her will. It was a habit she had learned during her childhood in the Palazzo Medici, but as she got older, one she was beginning to regret. The young monk was right. It wasn’t necessary. They had a comfortable dry room at their disposal, one with a large open window from which, if she wished, she could still look out and enjoy the freshness that the rain had brought that morning.

The wide eaves of the tiled roof above her head gave complete protection from the rain and now she sat, propped on the edge of the windowsill, while he, returning to their original routine, sat in the corner of the room, facing out toward her.

‘Did your husband take long to die?’

For an instant his question struck her as crass, insensitive, even coarse. But then she remembered that he was, after all, only picking up a remark of her own, made late in the previous day.

‘Was that such an awful thing for me to say yesterday? That in my mind, my husband was already dead? It wasn’t just my mind it was in. The vultures were already lined up along the Via Largo, waiting. And to the south I could imagine even more of them, across the Ponte Vecchio, prowling the corridors and grounds of the Palazzo Pitti, plotting, rehearsing, waiting, each of them desperate for news.

‘True to form, he kept us all waiting. He hung on painfully and ineffectively for months. By now he couldn’t leave the house, hardly left his bed in fact. Just lay there, in pain, confused at what he had done to deserve such an ending and trying desperately in his mind to find some purpose, some justification for his life by which he might be remembered. But the truth was he was a lost cause and he knew it. The servants drooped around, shoulders bowed, pulling what they thought were the appropriate faces, but in truth bored rigid.

‘Lorenzo escaped. He announced that the family needed to make a show of courage and confidence for the popolani and he took to the streets, to be seen. Not walking but on his charger, the big white one he called Fortuna.

‘And while he faced the world, I sat and faced my dying husband. I had, finally, grown sorry for him. No man should be asked to accept that combination of hopelessness, pain and indignity. I learned, watching him in those final days, the importance of dignity to the dying. Self-esteem is, I think, the last door to close before we give up. Once that is gone, there’s nothing else to cling on for except, in the very strong, sheer bloody-mindedness.

‘So I stayed with him. He had never been consciously unkind to me. He had no more wanted to marry me than I had wanted to marry him, but somehow between us we had made the most of a bad situation. We had always maintained civility towards each other. In fact, to the outside world, we probably looked like a loving couple.

‘The really sad thing is that, even as I watched Piero die, I was grieving for his brother, Giovanni. Somehow, in maintaining family decorum, I had never had a chance to grieve for Giovanni at the time when he had died, but now it all spilled out. The respect, the humour, the sheer physical love of life that he brought to every occasion.’

‘You loved him, didn’t you? Giovanni?’

He did not look at her as he asked the question, perhaps not wanting to appear intrusive. She watched him, knowing he did not need to lift his head, knowing that today her voice would tell him everything he needed to know, with uncomfortable precision.

Finally, she let it come. It had to some time. ‘He was the love of my life.’

She leaned back out of the window and breathed deeply, sucking in the fresh, damp air and remembering Giovanni in the garden of the Palazzo Medici, his arm round her shoulder, reciting poetry to her and acting the fool.

‘How did you cope?’

She turned, looking out at the gardens below, picking her words carefully. ‘It wasn’t always easy. As I told you yesterday, I threw all my energies into Lorenzo. For years I had known he was the future …’ She paused, still looking out of the window, trying to decide whether or not to go down the path that had just opened up in her mind. And finally made a decision. ‘As had Cosimo.’

She looked across the room at Savonarola and wondered whether he remembered. His expression answered her question immediately.

‘He made … provision for his grandson, you told me. On his deathbed?’

She saw him look up, sharply, and she nodded. ‘Yes. His investment in the future, he called it. Lorenzo’s Gold.’

Again she looked out of the window, thinking, deciding, filtering. She was about to open a door, a door to a world of secrets, but how wide she should open it she was still undecided. For the benefit of her soul she knew she must tell the truth. She was, after all, in confessional now. But all of it? The risks were high. If this man broke the secrecy of the confessional, Lorenzo would never forgive me.

‘I knew Cosimo had made provision, but I did not know how much or in what manner. That secret, as he himself had told me, had been taken by Donatello and given to Maddalena at the Convento di Santo Damiano. Now both were dead and the trail had grown cold. There was only one other person who might be able to point me in the right direction.

‘The abbess?’

She found herself smiling. ‘You have been listening.’ She saw him grin in return, with what looked like a mixture of pride and apology.

‘The abbess, yes. I wrote to her. She replied quickly, sounding relieved, as if she had been finding the responsibility of her secret a heavy burden. She confirmed that everything was there, the first instalment, as she called it, and, amongst Maddalena’s few possessions, her journal and her collection of letters from Cosimo. Amongst those, she told me, was his final letter, the one Donatello had brought with him and explained, the one that contained the poem.’

‘There was a poem?’ The surprise on his face made him sit up sharply.

Lucrezia stood up from her windowsill and walked to the centre of the room. She composed herself, remembering. She must get it right or the whole effect would be ruined. Carefully, from memory, she recited it:

Beneath the goldsmith’s secret

Possession, lover, son

There lies the stone of destiny

Whose answer is but one

Ten quarrels equidistant

From where that once we lay

My final diminution

Holds Lorenzo’s destiny

She reached the end without hesitation and to her satisfaction he responded. ‘Oh well done! You remembered it.’

She returned to her windowsill. ‘I am a poet. I do not forget poetry. Not even simple rhymes.

‘With Piero on his deathbed it no longer seemed disloyal to visit the abbess. Lorenzo and I made the journey a couple of weeks later. We were supposed to be disguised, but I am sure a number of people recognized us. Everyone knew what Lorenzo looked like, and in any event, he made no secret of his identity once we were amongst the nuns. We took presents, as was customary, mainly food, wine and oil – two cartloads – but also a few books for the library that Cosimo had originally founded.

‘Madonna Arcangelica could not have been more welcoming. She insisted on giving us a tour of her convent. It is a fine place and in reasonably good repair, apart from the roof of the main chapel, which had sustained damage during the earthquake.

‘She seemed keen to tell her story, especially when she realized that Lorenzo was the very person the whole scheme had been established for. We stood in the chapel, directly beneath the gaping hole where the beams had collapsed, and she pointed to the place where Maddalena had died. They had tidied up and were at that time still using one of the side chapels for their services. They had hung great canvas sheets and some old tapestries to protect it from the worst of the weather. But at the place where Maddalena had been crushed they had left the broken-backed pew as a sort of shrine. It was autumn when we visited and they had a pot of water with branches from the hedgerows covered in wild berries. A simple tribute but one, I thought, fitting.

‘She took us to the library and the vault and with due ceremony she gave Lorenzo the keys to the two great chests that were in there. He unlocked them and, to our amazement and satisfaction, we found gold, a great deal of gold, all in brand new florins from Cosimo’s time. We had them loaded into our carts and as we were doing so, I lifted my eyes to the damaged roof and signalled to Lorenzo.

‘He is such a good boy. He realized instantly what I meant and insisted that two of the great bags – two thousand florins, be given to the abbess to see to the necessary repairs. Afterward, as we were returning home by way of Fiesole, I asked him why he had been so generous. The repairs to the roof could, I knew well, have been done for a quarter of the money – perhaps less. He smiled and said, “She knew that money was there and she knew that nobody else had any idea how much of it there was. But still, even with that hole in the roof a daily reminder, and providing the most perfect of moral excuses, she did not help herself to it. That is why I rewarded her handsomely.” And of course, he was right.

‘Afterward we ate together with the nuns, and Lorenzo made a speech. It was a good one, for a change, without any of the lewd jokes he often liked to slide in, and the nuns seemed delighted. Then the abbess presented us with Maddalena’s casket, containing her breviary, her bible, her journal and the letters she had received from Cosimo over the years, and we left.

‘Lorenzo allowed me to take the casket. “You and Maddalena were always friends,” he said. “Besides, you are a better poet than I am. I will leave it to you to decipher my grandfather’s message.” It was typical of Lorenzo to delegate the onerous tasks, but it was also a kindness, as it gave me something to do while I wiled away the hours as Piero lay dying.

‘My husband finally died late on the evening of the first of December. By the time the doctors had pronounced him dead it was past sunset. I’m sure it was a relief for him, as it was for all of us. Nobody grieved. Those who needed to had long done their grieving. We were just content that it was all over and we could stop holding our breath.

‘Of course, as you have learned to expect,’ she flicked her eyes across the room and saw Savonarola nod, ‘protocol took over. For his own good reasons Lorenzo wanted to make his father’s death more of a political event than it really was. “My father is dead, grieve with me” had a better ring to it than, “take notice, I am in charge now”. So the funeral was made a men-only affair and, as such, political rather than personal, public rather than family.’

‘The reverse of Cosimo’s funeral, then?’

Savonarola had found a way of sitting with his elbows on the arms of the chair, his hands clasped together, and his chin rested on his thumbs. Although relaxed, he looked very attentive.

She left the window and began walking slowly around the room. ‘Exactly. With Cosimo’s death we had wanted to play down the vacuum we knew was left behind. But now the story was reversed. This time we wanted everyone to feel safe in the knowledge that Piero could do no more harm and that Lorenzo the Magnificent was …’

‘In charge?’

She stopped walking and shook her head. ‘In a republic, we could not presume that. No, we simply made it clear that he was now the head of the family, and left it to others to respond.’

She reached the back of her chair and stood with her hands resting on it, facing him. There was a finality to her stance as she remained unspeaking.

Sensing that the conversation was over, he lifted his head from his hands and made to rise from his chair. ‘Judge us by what we do?’

She grinned. ‘Yes. But as you do so, always ask yourself why we do it.’

Savonarola nodded to himself and she could read his expression. Oh but I always do. Every day , it said. She smiled to herself as she watched him leave.

He’s a bright one, this, and learning fast. From now on I shall have to be extra careful how much I say to him.