IV

“Quickly, quickly, quickly,” the handmaiden said as she bustled Lorenzo down the tower and out onto the street. She had him don an apron and carry a slops bucket in each hand so nobody would question him. The door to the building was guarded to stop people going in, but nobody was stopping people from going out. Though that might happen sooner or later.

“What is it?” Lucia had asked, over and over, “What has happened? Why are all the bells tolling?”

“It is trouble,” was all the handmaiden said, over and over in reply. “Such trouble. The household is all astir. The whole city is astir. And this! This!” She pointed at Lorenzo, trying to refasten his clothes with his back turned to her. “O Dio mio! Your father will kill him as surely as night kills day and send you to a nunnery with your head shaven!”

“You must help us,” Lucia implored of the handmaiden, grasping her shoulders. “I love him and you must help us.” The handmaiden looked as if she were going to collapse under the sudden burden of this, but then she said, “Hurry!” She reached out and took Lorenzo by the hand. Lucia took his other hand, as if to hold him there a moment longer, but the handmaiden tugged mightily and dragged him to the door. “When will I see you again?” Lucia called.

“He will come back when he is a rich lord,” the handmaiden said, “Though heaven help him if he has any connection with the Medicis.” She slammed the door behind her and dragged Lorenzo down the corridor. “And heaven help you if you’re found in the household today,” she said. And so he was bustled down the stairs, carrying two slops buckets of turds, and pushed roughly out onto the streets.

“Thank you,” Lorenzo wanted to call back to her, but she had already turned her back on him and gone back inside the household. He stood there for some moments, feeling that he had left a part of himself behind, but having no further desire to attract the attention of the guards, he made his way quickly up the paved street. There were people hurrying along the walkways all around him, muttering or crying as the bells continued to toll. It was the signal that the city was under attack, but how could that be? Who could attack them? An army of plague victims? Or had they assembled around the city in such numbers that they were battering down the gates to get in?

He tried to stop people on the streets and ask them what was happening, but each had a different story. “The ceiling of the cathedral has collapsed.” / “Cosimo Medici has been slain.” / “Hundreds are dead.” / “An invading army is inside the city.” He must see Galileo, he thought. If anyone knows what is happening, it will be him.

The old man would ask him where he had been, but he doubted he could ever tell him. He had broken the old man’s trust and would be ashamed to tell him what he had done. But who else could explain to him what he had experienced? Galileo had taken him on as his apprentice when he was very young. An orphaned boy who had become a ward in the Medici household, in a manner nobody seemed to rightly remember. One more of many wards. But one whom the old man, Galileo, declared was possessed of a useful brain. That had led him to a different life than any of the other young boys of the household. No duties in the stables or kitchen or yards. No need to rise before daybreak in winter and cart water. No need to muck out horse dung from the stables. Instead he had grown up under Galileo’s kind but firm hand. He had taught him to read. To write and do mathematics. And to think for himself.

Which he had found had become a two-edged sword. For as he grew he came to the belief that the old man was not letting him fully experience the wonders of their work. He was diligent and was industrious and loyal, but the old man forbade him from undertaking any science experiments of his own. It was not fair, he thought. He was the apprentice. He should be the one to trial the chronometer and magnifier, not those old sea captains. Had witnessed him perfecting other instruments. He had helped build them. He knew each device’s workings and perils. He had even designed many science objects himself. Galileo had told him they were promising. But still Galileo forbade him to use any of the devices they built. He had told him it was dangerous in the hands of a young person. Told him that there were consequences for its use that Lorenzo should be spared from.

Galileo had been kind to him, but to deny him this was not right. He had a burning need to improve his position within the household. He was not one of the boys who lived on the lower floors of the palace, and was excluded from their games and comradeship. And he was not welcome on the upper floors. He was a boy in-between, with nobody to call a friend.

But he had Lucia, who he would glimpse once a week at church, or at a city festival. His special friendship with her had sustained him through his adolescent years. Allowed him to play out in his head the long conversations they would have about life and how the world worked, and everything he had learned. But he would need to have a higher station for that to ever happen. He would need to be more than just an in-between-floors apprentice.

And though Galileo might not appreciate that he used independent thinking to come to the decision, he had decided to steal the metal gloves and try them out. Use them to rise above his station. Use them to rise above the very city and climb Lucia’s tower. Science would help him understand what it was that drew him to Lucia so. It was something he needed to understand, though even after having been with her now, he could never hope to explain it to another. Even Galileo. Now they had met. They had talked. They had touched. Something wonderful had happened between them. It was so powerful that he felt that he had emerged into a changed version of his city. As he felt changed himself. He could still feel where Lucia’s skin had touched his. Could still feel the fluttering inside his chest where something had transformed. He was both frightened and awed by it. And an invasion of the city, or a battle, seemed minor by comparison. He placed one finger to his chest, where he had felt the flesh open. It was more amazing than watching the metal gloves and all their cogs and wires melding with his hands and feet when he put them on.

He suddenly stopped walking. The gloves! He had left them in Lucia’s tower. He felt a sudden sense of dread. Heard the bells tolling disaster loudly. His feet felt very heavy as he made his way quickly back to Palazzo di Medici, walking past the streets where statues of the ancients stood on pillars, looking down sternly. It was as if they knew that he had been arrogant and stupid. He had betrayed all his years of teaching. There was a story he recalled about one of the ancients who stole fire from the gods to give to mankind so that they could develop civilisation and industry, and he was punished by being chained to a rock where a large eagle would come and feast on his liver, only to have it grow back each day for the eagle to rip open his flesh and eat again.

He knew it was really a metaphor, but it suddenly seemed to be no more unreal that having one’s hands turn to metal claws. When he finally reached the Medici palace he found it ringed by soldiers. It took him some time to find one who recognised him and let him through. Inside the building there were more soldiers everywhere, arming themselves and searching through rooms as if looking for hidden enemies.

He found Galileo in his chambers, calmly making sketches of some new invention. He appeared a little older to Lorenzo’s eyes than he had the day before. He was dressed in black, with a white collar, as usual, his aged figure sitting squatly on his wooden chair. His skin seemed a little greyer. His fingers and limbs moved a little slower. Even his nose seemed a little more swollen, to Lorenzo, and his beard a little greyer, also, and his hair had surely receded a little more. Or was it just that he had been up all night once again, working on some fabulous device? All around him were cogs and wheels and lenses that he could assemble the most amazing things out of, and then disassemble again so that no one else could ever copy them. Only Cosimo the Great himself had copies of the final machines, and he guarded them closely.

Galileo’s latest interest was in reflecting light and images. He was convinced he could capture images in some way. Freeze time into a single moment. It was incredible, but so many of his ideas were incredible. As his apprentice, Lorenzo had learned more than he could ever have learned in fifty years at school. And the master used his young and steady hands, and good eyes, to manufacture and assemble many of his experiments. The old man’s eyes were failing, as was his steady grip, which was as closely a guarded secret as his inventions themselves.

“Ah, there you are,” the old man said, glancing up at Lorenzo, which was his usual greeting to the boy.

Lorenzo could not say anything for some time and waited for the old man to ask about the missing metal gloves. But he did not. And he did not ask him where he had been. He was glad for being saved the need to lie. “What is happening?” Lorenzo asked Galileo. “The city is in an uproar! Have we been invaded?”

“Only by hysteria,” the old man said. “Which will prove a much harder foe to fight than any army.”

“Why?” Lorenzo asked. “What has happened?”

The old man put down his quill pen and looked at the young man. “There was an assassination attempt made upon Cosimo Medici in the cathedral this morning. His brother Giuliano is slain. Cosimo has been wounded, but not severely.”

Lorenzo’s face showed his shock. Galileo watched his apprentice and then said, “So, what can we assume from this using logic?” Lorenzo stammered for a moment. “Well there will be vengeance on the assailants.”

“Of course,” said Galileo.

“And who is responsible?” asked Lorenzo.

“The Lorraines are being accused of the attacks,” said Galileo.

Again the shock showed on Lorenzo’s face. “But… but… that means…”

“It means civil war. It means an end to the peace accords within the city walls.” Lorenzo nodded his head, but he was thinking of Lucia. He was feeling a hole slowly growing in his heart where the butterfly had been. She would now be separated by rows of armed soldiers that would proclaim him a mortal enemy. He could not expect to see her at service again and could not expect to be able to climb up her tower wall unseen again. He felt sick in his stomach. Perhaps she would be taken to a nunnery where he would never see her again.

“And where was the attack?” Galileo asked him.

“You said in the Grand Cathedral,” he replied.

“Which means?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“Inside the sanctity of the Grand Cathedral,” Galileo said.

Lorenzo nodded his head, as if he knew what that meant, but Galileo could see that he didn’t. “And that means the rules of order have been broken,” he told him. “Daemonicus ex machine. We are entering a time when we will be ruled by demons.”