chapter 9

Matt, standing in the room, felt the warmth of the midday sun on the back of his neck. He held his hand up in the shaft of light, watching how it molded the veins and fingers into a desert landscape of stark shadows. He turned his hand over, cupping the weight of the sunlight in his palm.

The clip-clop of hooves on paving stones echoed up through the high window of the studiolo from the alley below, punctuated by the high whinny of a horse. “Ercole,” a voice called in the distance.

Matt felt the material of the doublet he was wearing. Linen. Soft. Under it a silk shirt, and on his legs, hose. Strange, he thought. This is very strange. Not the clothes, but how natural they felt. The colors were bright. That’s indigo, he thought, looking at the doublet, I wonder where it’s from. He fingered the silver pin that fastened the coat. I’m standing in a room, he thought, looking around. I was standing in a room, and I am still standing in a room. He looked down at his feet, standing on the same octagonal terrazzo tiles, but now in leather boots, with soft brown felt uppers that angled up in the back to his midcalf.

The studiolo was just as he had always known it. The same inlaid panels—the weapons, the instruments, the bench with the mazzocchio. And above it, the Garter. A shadow passed at the edge of his mind, an echo of darkness, like low thunder in the night, that grew as he looked at the empty black circle behind the Garter. A memory, something he had once known, but as he tried to bring it forward the feeling passed, and the circle became just a shadow of inlaid wood.

Matt looked farther up, above the Latin inscription that ran like a frieze around the room over the inlaid panels. The studiolo was unchanged, but different. A series of allegorical paintings hung on the high walls above the frieze, a complete cycle representing the liberal arts. Two of them, Music and Rhetoric, he had seen on his last trip to London. And there, over the door, was Astronomy—Ptolemy kneeling as he was handed an astrolabe—although Matt knew it only as a photograph, for the original, in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, had been destroyed in the war. The studiolo was furnished, too.

Next to Matt was a small table, standing by the side of a barrel chair of heavy carved wood, with arms that curved up in a semicircle from the crossed and intertwined legs. He ran his hand across the surface of the table, smooth and oiled, and then picked up the globe of brass loops in the corner behind a thick book with a tooled leather cover. An astrolabe, like the one in the painting, or in the inlaid scene on the wall just behind him, with the ambits of the sun and the moon marked off. Shining in the sunlight, the astrolabe cast turning circles of black shadow on the terrazzo floor as Matt looked at it. He set the astrolabe down and opened the cover of the book. A miniature of the sun, with beams like curved swords, puckered the thick parchment with its gilding. Geographia, the title proclaimed in elegant black lettering, inscribed by hand. Matt let the cover drop.

He looked at the closed door again. He could stay here. He could sit down; he didn’t have to go anywhere. Tired, he found the idea appealing, but the door pulled at him. What lay beyond? He found it odd that he felt no urgency, or even sense of danger, but instead only an expectant curiosity, almost as though he already knew what he would find. He walked over to the door, under the lowered ceiling of the entryway, inlaid with the Duke of Urbino’s coat of arms, and, pushing it open, stepped through.

The long room of the ducal library stretched in front of him, reaching the entire breadth of the palazzo. Furnished, it looked even larger than when Matt had seen it, stripped bare, on his trip to Gubbio years before. Shelves of books, broken by tapestries and pictures, lined the tall room from floor to ceiling. Two massive tables, laden with thick tomes and bronze sculptures of heroic mythical struggles, sat in the center. Matt walked over to the nearest painting, a forest scene of a woman bathing, while beyond her a man changing into a stag was being attacked by dogs.

Matt, entranced by the painting, became aware that he was not alone. Someone was standing in the entryway to the library. He looked over to find a man dressed in the long red robes of a scholar but with the broad shoulders and short, stocky legs of a wrestler. He had a face to match, with wideset eyes framing a nose that had long before been flattened and left that way, like a rock wall tumbled by a frost heave and never repaired.

“Actaeon and Diana,” Matt said, as the man walked up to him. “Van Eyck. I saw it in Brussels.”

“The duke just got it. I’m Rodrigo de Aranjuez, the duke’s librarian. And you are?”

“Matt. Matt O’Brien.”

“Might I ask where you are from? I can’t place your accent. Ireland?” he asked, looking at the ring on Matt’s finger. A gift from his parents, passed down from generation to generation, it was a ruby set in a golden coil.

“No,” Matt said. “An island west of there.”

“Interesting,” Rodrigo said. “I didn’t know there were any.”

“The colors are so fresh and clear,” Matt said, looking at the painting again. Even restored, it had not had anything approaching the richness and transparency of what he saw now.

“The secret of Van Eyck, or so they say.”

“No. That’s what everyone used to think, but it was a myth. It was technique. The oil, and the way he built the glazes.”

The man glanced at the painting, and then back at Matt. “You know about oils?”

“Of course. Everyone does.”

“Not exactly,” Rodrigo said. He thought for a moment. “I’m leaving today to join the duke. I think you should come along. Would you like to meet him?”

“Federico?”

“That’s the only Duke of Urbino I know of. Are you all right?”

Matt, caught by Rodrigo, regained his balance. The clothes, the paintings, speaking Italian—he had studied the period so well and spent enough time in the country that they were like second nature to him. But to meet Federico, the great duke. How or why it had happened, he had no idea; but it undeniably had, and what was strangest of all, he realized, was that it wasn’t until Rodrigo had mentioned the duke that it had really hit home where he was. It was as though he had woken from a dream to find himself not at home but in a place he knew just as well.

It had taken four days to get to the villa. Matt could see it long before he could see the way up to it, high on the opposite ridge, across the narrow river and beyond the carefully cultivated fields. The hillside folded in on itself, making it much longer to get to the top than he thought it would at first. The fields gave way to olive groves that rose in gnarled profusion to rank upon rank of grapevines, already sagging under their ripening harvest, the wine-dark sea cresting at the very top against a sun-baked brick wall that hid a garden from their sight. All that could be seen of it, as they mounted the rutted track that ran alongside, were the upper branches of fruit trees and the darting songbirds that ignored their passing.

They had arrived late in the afternoon, after the hawking party and the hunters had returned and the horses were being brushed down and led, hooves clattering loudly on the cobbles, to the stable. The simple neoclassical façade that had led them up the hillside had masked the true size of the house. The dirt lane led them around to the side, sweeping up in a final curve lined with poplars to the forecourt that was hidden behind. The stately row of trees was punctuated the last hundred yards by massive marble urns chipped and green with moss, vines tangled around the bases. The hillside leveled, as though taking a breath before its final steep lunge to the summit, leaving the house on a gentle rise. Three tall stories of stucco fronted by a terrace, the villa was flanked behind by a myriad of smaller buildings, stables and storerooms. They had passed the duke’s troop, camped in the valley below, but his honor guard was here, their tall pikes stacked against the stable wall, the pennants hanging limp in the still air.

The distant chant of evening services rose and fell from somewhere inside the villa as they stretched and turned, limbering muscles stiff from a full day of riding. The shadows slanted across the forecourt, offering some welcome shade.

“Let’s see who’s here,” Rodrigo said after they had dismounted. He set off for the kitchen, on the right side of the massive villa.

The room was surprisingly large, Matt discovered, as he followed Rodrigo through the open doorway. An open hearth, large enough to stand in and flanked by two earthen ovens, took up the greater part of one wall. The light from the windows opposite was balanced by the glow from a fire that roared high despite the heat. Suspended by hooks, several large brass pots shone like Christmas tree ornaments, while behind them, its skin a dark red, a pig roasted on a spit, the fat hissing as it dripped on the coals. Like a world turned upside-down, a meadow of dried herbs hung from the beams overhead: bunches of rosemary and thyme, braids of garlic, garlands of crimson peppers shining with a latent heat like sleeping scorpions. A heavy table took up a good part of the center of the room, the little of the top that could be seen scored and dark from untold years of use. A huge wheel of pecorino, partly excavated like a mountainside in Carrara, towered next to a jumbled stack of bread loaves, like logs that had rolled off the mountain, cut and ready for use. Beside them were bowls of grapes and olives, and brightly colored majolica jars with the name of their contents boldly inscribed, and, in front, a row of birds plucked and trussed. Too small to be chickens, larger than quail, Matt wondered what they might be.

“Antonio, if you let that fire go out I will make you think it is in your hose,” a sturdily built woman called out, her attention focused on the wooden paddle she was shifting in one of the ovens. Like a risotto that hasn’t been properly stirred, her melodious Italian had a hard crust of Germanic inflection.

Antonio, an overgrown child whose open mouth and vacant expression showed him to be as dull as the bucket of charcoal in his hands, just stared at the librarian. Rodrigo, finger to his lips, took the scuttle and stood just behind the woman.

“Antonio,” she called again sharply. “Damn that boy,” she muttered, and yanked the paddle out of the oven. Holding it like a mace, she turned to look for the hapless youth, only to find Rodrigo grinning at her elbow. “Ach!” she cried. “Did you remember my cloves?” she demanded, recovering immediately.

Rodrigo laughed and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Lisl, mein Kätzchen, please. Why do you think I came all this way?” he asked, and held up a linen bag secured with a double loop of ribbon.

“I know what you came for. A good meal,” the cook replied, slapping his hand off her waist. She brushed the thick apron that covered her simple blue dress.

“Ah, Lisl.” Rodrigo sighed. “The unrequited passion is a pleasure unto itself. What sets it apart from all other stirrings of the soul is that it is the only one that will ever last. When desire is the fuel, the fire will never burn out. This is Matteo,” he added, seeing her sharp glance taking him in. “He has come from the farthest reaches of the globe on a noble quest. Diogenes searched high and low for that rara avis, an honest man. My good friend Matteo has an even higher goal in mind, for he searches not for himself but to satisfy the longings of his people. In the cold and dismal winters of his desolate homeland, lashed by the angry western seas, they huddle in caves of peat around smoking, wind-driven fires—”

“You are Irish?” Lisl asked.

“In spirit,” Matt replied.

“—even great Helios,” Rodrigo continued, “in his golden chariot of fire forsakes these hardy souls for warmer climes, barely visible on the horizon as he flashes by, dawn coupled with dusk like the frantic mating of dragonflies. The sweet bosom of Mother Earth that nurtures us with her bounty is there a withered teat. They subsist on dried fish and raw eggs, stolen out from under sleeping birds in the dark of night.”

“Hah,” Lisl exclaimed. “Scottish.”

“A little of both,” Matt admitted.

“And still they have faith,” Rodrigo went on. “They dream. And they whisper in awe of a legend handed down for untold generations from the shrouded mists of bygone times, ever since the returning Crusaders brought word of it to the far shores of this mortal domain. They say it has magical powers to restore youth and vitality, to make the blind see and the dumb sing. Shipwreck, kidnapping, piracy—he has survived them all in his unflagging search.”

Antonio, his eyes as big as the wheel of pecorino, looked at Matt with a mixture of fear and respect.

“He will not rest until he finds it,” Rodrigo continued. “And what is the object of this glorious quest?” He paused. “Porcini mushrooms. When I found him, he was headed for Siena.”

“Oh, please!” Lisl, kneading dough, slammed it hard on the marble slab.

“Exactly!” Rodrigo exclaimed. “In the last siege the Florentines catapulted the putrefying remains of dead mules into Siena to spread pestilence and disease,” he explained to Matt. “A common tactic. But the Sienese? What did they do? They ate them! Even today the most highly regarded dish in that town is rat. Stewed with peas and onions,” he added as an aside. “Mules and rodents, but not a single decent porcini in the entire place. I told Matteo that true north was the only direction on the porcini compass, and thus rescued our itinerant pilgrim from the terrible fate of a most certain culinary crucifixion.”

Antonio, shuddering, crossed himself.

“So many words,” Lisl said, her powerful forearms flexing as she kneaded the dough. She stopped just long enough to tuck back an errant lock of hair. “They are like flour for you,” she continued, as she lifted the lump of dough and dusted the surface of the table. “But when I am done I have a loaf of bread. What do you have? Cake.”

Antonio nodded eagerly, a big smile on his face.

“Porcini would be nice,” Matt said. “But what I would give my soul for right now is a strudel.”

“Ach, a strudel,” Lisl said, pushing the lump of dough with the heel of her hand. “Apples. Mein Gott. Here they have no decent apples.”

“We have the best apples in the world,” a boy said from the door behind Matt, correcting her with complete self-assurance, as though Lisl had asserted that the earth circled the sun. There was something familiar about him, Matt thought, as the boy came to the table and reached for a wedge of cheese. What could it be? Not his face, although there was in the line of his jaw and his sea green eyes an echo of someone he had once known. He was around ten, Matt guessed, but he had the confident manner of someone who is more often deferred to than deferring.

“Not now, Orlando, you will ruin your appetite,” Lisl admonished him.

“But that’s exactly what I want to do,” Orlando replied. “I’m hungry now. What’s the point in waiting? Why is it that eating at certain times that bear no relation to anything as far as I can tell is satisfying your appetite but any other time is ruining it? The cheese is the same, I’m the same, the only difference is where the sun is in the sky, and I don’t think the sun cares.” He glanced down at the smaller boy who stood in his shadow, who nodded vigorously in agreement. “Cosimo, may I offer you some cheese?” Orlando asked.

The boy paled, caught between the Scylla of loyalty to his friend and the terrifying Charybdis of Lisl. He looked from one to the other, unable to speak.

“Allow me,” Orlando said with exaggerated grace, like a host refilling a wineglass, and handed Cosimo a piece of cheese that he cut off with a quick stroke of the knife before the boy could find his voice. Cosimo took it with a wary half-glance in Lisl’s direction. Matt saw Rodrigo struggling to keep a straight face. “The guest in my house is hungry,” Orlando announced to Lisl. “It is my duty as a host to see to his needs and wants. Father Bonifacio told me this just yesterday when we read Lucullus. ‘It is of primary importance for the proper host to attend to the needs and wants of his guest before all other obligations, for the way we treat those who depend on our beneficence is the truest reflection of our humanity,’ ” he intoned, mimicking his tutor. He took a piece for himself. “And so it would be equally rude for me not to join him. He is a guest, after all, not some mendicant pilgrim. Let’s go,” he said to Cosimo, hearing the laughter of a party approaching from outside.

“… depends on what time everyone gets up,” a young woman said, walking into the kitchen, to the man following her. Young and vivacious, with fawn-colored hair pulled back and braided in a French knot, she wore a pale red dress over a white chemise with a scalloped neckline. Embroidered on the shoulder of her blue cape was a golden star with curved tongues of fire. Her only jewelry, aside from the thin gold band encircling her forehead, was a pin on the bosom of her dress, three irises with emerald and azurite blossoms set in gold with silver stems.

A villa, Matt thought. That’s what Rodrigo had said. We’ll meet the duke on his way to Mantua. But he hadn’t said which villa, or who the owner might be. Matt should have known when he saw Orlando, for now the resemblance was unmistakable. It was Anna, but not as he had imagined her at all. Younger, she had an animation and quickness that was both entrancing and unsettling, too, since it was so different from the pensive quiet he had assumed, from the painting, was her nature. While he had no doubt that was a part of her, he could tell already it was not her usual disposition.

“Orlando!” she said, as the boys wormed their way by the two women who had also come in. “Father Bonifacio is looking for you.…” But they were already gone. “That boy!” she said, and turned to one of the women. Older than Anna by a few years, and with a quietly observant air, she was wearing a dress of dark blue, unadorned but for a simple gold braid piping around the square bodice and at the hem. She was the only one of the group, Matt had noticed, to have taken in him and Rodrigo.

“Francesca,” Anna said. “I want Father Bonifacio to see me immediately after dinner. Lisl,” she continued, turning to the cook, “we are going to Virgil’s cave Friday. There will be twenty of us. The duke is quite fond of your trout, is there any chance we might have some? We’ll be leaving midmorning. Very good,” she added, tasting the sauce in one of the pots hanging to the side of the fire. “It needs more honey, don’t you think?”

Her voice, too, was not as Matt had imagined—vibrant and laced with humor, but with an underlying foundation of authority.

“At the end,” Lisl replied, chopping the dough into half with a huge knife held in both hands, and then into quarters, and then again. “If I put it in now, it makes it mush. I put it at the end and it makes the best flavor but not mush. If you want I add it now.”

“Not at all, you know best. Cinnamon, too. I would add more cinnamon. You did well with just one kid,” she said, putting down the spoon.

“Three, madam.”

“Three?”

“Yes. But there are pies with what was left,” she added, pointing with her chin to the row resting on the shelf by the window.

“Well, there are twenty of us,” Anna said. “It’s like feeding an army.”

A laugh rumbled from the man who had accompanied her into the kitchen. “It is an army,” he said, his voice like a shovel biting into gravel. He leaned against the table, arms crossed, with the latent power of a strung bow. Powerfully built, and with features as strong as forged metal, he was clothed in black from his short jacket, crossed with belts and a broad dagger hanging at his side, to his tall leather boots. “We’re going hunting tomorrow,” he said to Lisl. “Would you like boar, or stag?”

The cook shrugged, not looking up from the dough as she shaped it into round loaves. “Either one,” she answered. “See where the arrows land. You dress it, I cook it. But save the organs,” she ordered, sliding one of the loaves onto the wooden paddle. “This time, please do not give them to the dogs.”

“They expect them.”

“I expect them.”

“Then you shall have them,” the man responded with a bow. “We’ll be leaving at the crack of dawn,” he added.

“That is, if the crack of dawn is loud enough to wake the dead,” Anna said. “The sleep of the just is nothing compared to that of the just in bed, and your party has a habit of keeping the stars company.”

“We’ll be away at daybreak,” the man repeated to Lisl.

“Yes, Your Excellence,” the cook replied, her precise Germanic inflection masking the tartness of her words.

“Master Rodrigo,” Anna said. Matt tensed as she turned in his direction, but her eyes stopped just short of him, coming to rest on his escort. “You don’t have much to say. That’s not like you.”

“Contessa,” he replied, with a deep bow. “The mere thought of daybreak has rendered me speechless.”

“So you will not be joining the hunt?”

“It would not be a good idea,” he replied. “Keeping in mind Saint Augustine’s dictum that we are what we eat, I must admit that I am as much quarry as hunter.”

Anna shifted her gaze to Matt. This, he thought, was exactly as he imagined, but even more so; eyes of deep green like sunlight filtering through the stillness of a forest. I am a mountain lion, and I beg for mercy—Ginevra de’ Benci would know her, he realized; they weren’t that far from Florence. They might be friends.

“Madama la Contessa Amoretti de Cavalcaselle,” Rodrigo announced. “Matteo O’Brien,” he added, hand on Matt’s shoulder. “He made the journey with me from Gubbio.”

Returning Anna’s steady gaze, Matt felt Rodrigo’s hand, still on his shoulder, push him. Remembering himself, he bowed, sweeping his hand before him just as Rodrigo had shown him.

“Leandro Castellano da Montefeltro,” Rodrigo said.

The man, still leaning against the table, bowed slightly in response to Matt. “From Ireland?” he asked.

“No,” Matt replied. And who are you? he wondered. Da Montefeltro; that meant he was a member of the duke’s immediate family. The duke had two sons who had survived to manhood, Matt knew—one legitimate, named Guidobaldo, who would succeed his father as duke but would never achieve the same success as a condottiere. The older son, Antonio, a bastard, died fighting in the service of a neighboring state. But Leandro? The name was new to him.

“We must go,” Anna said to Leandro. “If the count’s meal is ready, we shall take it with us,” she said to Lisl, who deftly ladled soup into a tureen, which she then covered and put on a tray with some bread.

“Antonio,” she called out, starting the boy like an ungainly rabbit from the shadows where he had retreated when Anna and her party had come in. He took the tray and followed them out the door.

“Lisl, we must leave you, too,” Rodrigo said.

“I am heartbroken.”

“Take solace, then, Liebchen—it’s only temporary. We’re here until the duke moves on, like the invisible finger writing on the wall: ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.’ ”

“A movable feast,” Lisl said.

“Feast or famine, such is the way of the world; and all is famine, my dear, when compared to this oasis of plentitude and succor. Let’s go find our room and get settled,” he said to Matt. “Dinner is soon enough.”

“So that’s Anna,” Matt said, almost to himself, as they left the kitchen.

“The contessa?” Rodrigo asked. “How did you know her name?”

“You must have told me,” Matt replied, flustered to discover that Anna was her real name.

“Did I?” Rodrigo asked. “I don’t remember— Not that one!” he yelled to the servants who were starting to unload the last of the horses they had brought with them from Gubbio, a massive gray dray horse with a single large oaken box on his back.

“Give me a hand with this,” he said to Matt, as he went to the horse.

“Did Saint Augustine really say that?” Matt asked. “You are what you eat?”

“He most certainly did,” Rodrigo replied, working free the tongue of one of the heavy straps securing the box.

“Unfortunately it was lost, or perhaps just never written down. It’s a shame, really. So little of what is said survives in recorded history. Even by someone as monumentally important as Saint Augustine.”

“Then how do you know he actually said it?”

“It’s right there, in everything else he said. Ready?” he asked, and then together they lifted the box free and set it on the cobblestones next to the wall. “There,” Rodrigo said with relief. Matt wondered again what could be inside the box to warrant such care. Rodrigo, who had encouraged his questions about everything under the sun, and had kept up a steady commentary about the things Matt hadn’t thought to ask about, had cut him off abruptly when he had shown curiosity in the stoutly built box, crossed with leather straps and brass studs. The box might have contained gold for all the care that had been taken with it on the trip. Rodrigo, allowing no one to handle the box without his supervision, had set an armed guard to watch over it every moment they weren’t on the road. It couldn’t be bullion, though, Matt thought; a box that large filled with gold would have been too heavy to move. He picked up his bag and walked with Rodrigo into the interior courtyard of the villa.