APRIL–MAY 1498
“No,” Piero says. “Absolutely not. Florence is not going to war with its own mercenary captain.”
The fire upstairs in Marsilio’s room, started by the falling lamp, has been extinguished. Marsilio, looking tiny in death, has been carried to the nearby church of San Lorenzo, where the monks are praying over his body. Girolamo can’t believe he’s dead, even though he saw him fall. He died glowing and is assuredly with God, they do have that comfort.
Angelo has a cut on his forehead, and he says it hurts to breathe. Girolamo thinks he may have broken some ribs. He also keeps coughing, from breathing the smoke. The three of them are standing in front of Piero’s desk in his little studio. No one else is present. He has not asked them to sit. Piero’s desk is piled with precious objects from his travels, reliquaries, books, a crystal bowl of gems, his white fur cloak, a little statue of a naked goddess. It reminds Girolamo of the Bonfire of Vanities.
“He killed Marsilio,” Pico repeats.
“I don’t care,” Piero says. “I mean, I care, we can’t have Crookback behaving that way, killing my father’s men and setting fire to the palace. But I’ll reprimand Crookback and he’ll apologize and that’s the end of it. We need the White Boars if we’re going to conquer Siena.”
It is the first Girolamo has heard of a war with Siena. He looks at Pico, who looks dishevelled, his habit torn and dirty, his hair rumpled and with a huge sooty mark on his cheek.
“Hire another company of mercenaries, get rid of Crookback and then use them for Siena,” Angelo says.
Piero shakes his head. “Are you a child? Imagine I offered a great deal of money to Cesare Borgia, or Francesco Gonzaga. They’d come here with their armies, yes, and fight the White Boars. At the end of that, what happens? Does whichever leader is left standing bow to me and take his troops off to fight in Siena? You’re not that naïve. He’d be here, and Florence would be in his power. We could trust my wife’s Orsini kindred, but they’re in exile right now, fleeing from Borgia.”
“All right,” Pico says, speaking quietly and very precisely. He leans forward and plants both palms on the desk. “It’s not all right, and you know it, but all right. Do it that way. Keep him. Forgive him for killing Marsilio. But he has stolen something from us, and we need to have it back. It’s a little jade plate, quite valuable, that belongs to Girolamo. You have to make getting it back part of his apology.”
Piero looks at Girolamo for the first time. Girolamo fights off the urge to smooth down his clothes. “You had a valuable jade plate?” he asks, in a disbelieving tone.
Girolamo pulls out the pouch where he carried the stone, which feels very empty without it. “I did.”
“And this was doubtless part of some mystical nonsense?”
Pico and Girolamo both start to speak at once, and stop. “Crookback may be able to do inestimable damage with it,” Girolamo says.
“Magical damage?” Piero asks.
Girolamo nods, though magical damage doesn’t seem a strong enough term for renewing the war in heaven.
“You have to get it back, Piero,” Angelo says.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Piero says. “Enough of you. I won’t take your orders. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. You are also my father’s men, not mine.”
“That’s true, but we will be your men and serve you as we did Lorenzo,” Angelo says.
Piero shakes his head. “I know the three of you persuaded him to send me away. I’ve had long enough to think about it. At first he convinced me it was for my own good and Florence’s, but after a while I could see who benefitted, you three, and Capponi, and my cousin Gianni. I was young, he said. Well, I’m older. I was inexperienced. Well, I’ve spent time with Maximilian, time with Ferdinand, watching and learning how they rule. I’m not putting up with interference from you. You’ve had it your own way for five years, but you’re not in charge now.”
Angelo winces. “I know that, and I’m very glad you’re ready to be master of the shop now—”
“Master of the shop,” Piero says, dismissively. “My father used to say he was that, I know. But Maximilian offered to make me Duke of Florence. Or I can wait, and have the title when Leo is pope.”
“Well, good,” Angelo says. “I know you’re in charge. But—”
“Or Pope Alexander might give it to me now, if I give him something in return,” Piero goes on, ignoring him. “After all, how many times are we Medici supposed to save you from your heresy, Pico? I was afraid you were too popular and there would be a riot if we tried to arrest you, but this Crookback affair gives us a perfect excuse. Not very saintly, is it, fighting with a mercenary captain over a magic stone? And it will make Brother Mariano and the Franciscans pleased with me too if I get rid of you.”
“You can arrest me, you can send me to the Pope, you can do whatever you want and I’ll raise no trouble as long as you get the stone back from Crookback and give it to Girolamo,” Pico says, passionately.
There is a silence. Piero looks at Pico’s hands splayed out on his desk, and then up at Pico’s face. He looks back at his hands. Pico picks them up, one at a time, and folds them. They have left sooty marks. “I can arrest Girolamo too,” Piero says.
“Fine,” Pico says, not even glancing at him. “Arrest all three of us, execute us, that’s all very well as long as Girolamo has the stone. It’s more important than any wordly considerations, more important than life or death.”
“I see,” Piero says. “What on earth is it?”
They do look at each other now. Angelo’s face is grim and grey with pain. The others seem to want him to explain. “It’s the Holy Grail,” Girolamo says.
Piero laughs. “The Holy Grail! You are all quite mad. I’ll do my best to get this thing from Crookback, but if he thinks it’s the Holy Grail too, then he might not want to give it up. Meanwhile, I’m arresting you. Guard!”
Two of the Medici guards come in. “Take these men—no. Take him and him,” he points at Angelo and Girolamo, “To the People’s Palace, and you’d better take Brother Giovanni to the cell my great-grandfather was imprisoned in at the top of the Senatorial Palace, the little inn.”
Pico starts to laugh. “Well, Fortune is a woman all right,” he says.
Girolamo has never spent any time in the People’s Palace before. In other times, they brought him here regularly to torture him, as they do Pico now, but then took him back up the many stairs in the Senatorial Palace to the little inn and his solitude. There is no solitude here. All the prisoners share one large room, partially below ground level, so they are surrounded by thieves, sodomites, blackmailers, and drunks. Everyone’s friends and enemies call to them through the bars. He has more enemies than he could have imagined, largely because Piero has taken up Crookback’s accusation and had him accused of killing Marsilio. Everyone loved Marsilio, and so everyone who believes he did it hates him. Angelo is accused of meddling in politics, which he can’t really deny. Girolamo denies murdering Marsilio until they torture him, when he admits it and then denies it again as soon as they stop. Pico, on the other hand, admits nothing, no matter how many times they dislodge his arms from his shoulders and reinsert them. He steadfastly insists he was doing God’s work. Girolamo would admit even that he is a demon, if it would get them to stop torturing him, but they don’t ask, and so he is able to keep it to himself.
“May twenty-third,” Angelo whispers to him late one night, when everyone else is asleep. The two of them are in a back corner, in complete darkness.
“That’s right.”
“You think it will be the same?”
“I don’t see any reason why not.”
“I don’t see any reason why it is the same, when so many things are so different,” Angelo says, emphatically.
“God must want it.”
“Must want you to die then. I have lived longer than I normally do. Is there something different about the date of your death and mine?”
“Not that I know about.”
There is a silence, and then he feels Angelo’s arm around his shoulders. The two men have touched so much in the last few weeks in the cell, huddled together, hugged, trying to offer what comfort they can, that he thinks nothing of it.
“Next time, I’m going to abolish torture very early,” he says quietly, as his shoulders send a twinge of agony through him. “If there is a next time. If Crookback doesn’t use the stone to storm Heaven.”
“If the four of us, with half a dozen other trusted friends of Marsilio’s, the best minds in Europe, couldn’t work out how to use it, how is he going to?”
“He might remember. He remembered the War in Heaven.”
“He did. He called you brother.”
“All angels are brothers,” Girolamo says, in the darkness.
“But not demons?”
“I suppose so.”
“It suggests that he isn’t all evil.”
“I’d rather cling to the thought that he won’t know how to use it,” Girolamo says.
“And we will have a lot more time to work on the problem,” Angelo says. “Another whole iteration.” He slides his arm lower, away from Girolamo’s hurt shoulders and around his waist. “Have you ever copulated, Girolamo?”
Girolamo freezes, and knows Angelo can feel that.
“I’m—you know what I am!” he says.
“I know. I just thought—”
“You can’t die with that on your conscience!”
“It’s all right if you don’t want to,” Angelo says, and loosens his arm.
“It’s not a case of whether I want to, it’s a case of what’s right.” He isn’t sure whether or not he wants to. He knows what men do together, he has to know to be able to understand confessions and set penances. It has always been women who have inspired his lust. But no one has ever invited him before, except the solicitations of prostitutes of both sexes, who have only ever inspired him with disgust and pity.
“We’re already in prison and they’re going to execute us whatever we do. And we don’t have the stone, and you’re already damned and you know it, and they let Silvestro and Domenico confess to you, so they’ll let us confess to Pico, and I can confess fully.”
“You won’t be truly contrite if you’re already planning to confess!” Girolamo says.
“Yes I will. I’m always contrite afterwards.”
“It doesn’t work that way! Go and find one of the sodomites, there are enough of them in this cell. I’m sure they won’t mind being woken up.”
But Angelo doesn’t go, and he doesn’t push him away, but they don’t move any closer either, they just sit there, leaning on each other in the darkness until eventually the grey dawn lightens the window and day comes. Jailers bring hard bread, and later take them up to be tortured.
And on the last day the comforters come and take them to the Senatorial Palace, and it is all the same as his death in every iteration, except that Pico and Angelo hang beside him instead of Silvestro and Domenico. They are hung over the fire, and he falls, not forward on his face like good people, but on his back, like the damned.