APRIL 23RD, 1492
He is sitting on the step in front of the Loggia, looking up at the Senatorial Palace as the light fades from the sky behind it. If he turns his head he can see the spire of the monastery of the Badia, and the tower that tops the People’s Palace. Here he can see the window of the little inn, high above, in the tower that seems so light and airy, lifting effortlessly and off centre above the battlements. He is counting on his fingers, wondering how many chances God will give him. He has had many lives, uncountable lives, where he did the same thing, unknowing. Then he had a life where he came to himself, where the truth about him was known by Lorenzo, Marsilio, Pico, and Angelo, where the stone was lost to Crookback. The life after that, he discovered none of them remembered, even with the aid of the stone, and he had to be exorcized by Brother Vincenzo to avoid an early death. Then there was the life where he became pope. The life after that, he took the stone into the fire, and died by the hand of Cesare Borgia on the steps of the cathedral. The next time, he went with Pico to Jerusalem, where they were both killed by the Saracens. The time after, he travelled alone to Hungary, where he had been able to learn nothing of where Mattias Corvinus might have come by the stone, and then throughout Europe, meeting Ficino’s humanist friends, reading, trying to pray, visiting pilgrim shrines, improving his soul as best he could. He was killed by bandits in Spain. This seventh time, in three weeks of knowing what he is, he has done nothing, told no one, not even Marsilio. Marsilio said seven might be a significant number, if three was not.
Is this torment? Or is this purgatorial, with even Hell being part of it? Can he get the stone into Hell and make a way out, a possible path towards universal salvation? He should tell Marsilio, and then he’d have someone to confide in. But starting the relationship again is difficult. He doesn’t want the Marsilio of today, the Marsilio to whom the whole idea is new. But the only way to have his old friend who has thought about it a great deal is to start again every time. Maybe he’ll tell Pico and Angelo this time too. He doesn’t know what he’ll do. He has come to the end of ideas. He feels directionless, rudderless, drifting. He prays for help, but God’s ear feels closed to him, as it always does.
The Senatorial Palace is unbearably beautiful. All of Florence is, this whole world God made for humanity. He can breathe and eat and look at beautiful things. He can almost pray, and he can listen to others pray. He does not know how to make his soul greater, or how to purge it. St Gregory of Nyssa writes about the pains of purgatory as being like a refiner’s fire driving the dross from the gold, or like cleaning mud off a rope. He remembers Heaven, remembers opposing God’s will. He knows he is unworthy of forgiveness. He fears he is no longer anything but mud, with no rope under there at all. He looks over at the spot where they build bonfires in this square, whether to burn vanities or to burn him. “Thy will be done,” he says, and tears spill over and he wipes them away. “Let me be seared.” A boy is staring at him. Dominican brothers should not sit weeping in public squares. The first star is just visible, glimmering above the crenellations.
He stands up and begins to cross the square. He sees Isabella coming from the direction of Santa Croce. She must be going home, but he wonders where she has been. She is carrying a basket. Her head is covered and she is wearing a plain blue dress, though a respectable woman would not be walking alone at this time of day. He smiles before he remembers that he does not know her yet. She slows her steps. “Brother Girolamo? Did you want me?”
“Isabella,” he says.
She starts with surprise. “How do you know my name?”
“I know many things,” he says. He wants to talk to her, he wants to tell her everything, confide in her. He wants her sympathetic intelligent friendship. He knows her well enough to trust her, and he has never told her before, so it will not be a repetition, the way it would be with the others.
She is still staring at him in consternation. “Did God tell you about me?”
“It’s very complicated,” he says. “I know you can see demons.”
Her eyes widen even more. “Not exactly see, more that I sort of know when they’re there,” she admits.
“We shouldn’t stand here, it’s getting dark,” he says. Some houses already have torches thrust into sconces outside, and the taverns have two, one on each side of the door. “Can I escort you home?”
She is flustered. “No, I’m perfectly all right alone. I’m used to it.”
“Pico shouldn’t leave you alone so much,” he says, without thinking.
“How do you know about that?” she asks, sharply. “Did Giovanni tell you about me? Did he point me out to you?”
“No, nothing like that. The way I know this is from God, or—at least not mortal. Let me walk with you.”
“Will you explain?”
“I’d like to. But it’s a long complicated story and I’m not sure you’d believe me. Let me walk with you in any case.”
She nods, reluctantly. She has been to his sermons, and they are in public streets. Other people pass them, men going home from work, groups of young men going to taverns and brothels, a few little clusters of women hurrying home. They walk in silence for a few paces, as he considers where to start. “I remember other lives,” he begins, as they walk towards the guild church of Orsanmichele. “But they’re not different lives as Plato writes, they’re all this life.”
She thinks about that for a few minutes. They pass Verrocchio’s statue of Doubting Thomas and turn down a side street. He knows the way as well as she does, of course. “So you knew me in other versions of your life?” she asks.
“Yes. In some, I helped you become a Dominican nun.”
Isabella gasps. “Not at the Convertite, the convent for reformed prostitutes and fallen women?”
“You said you’d done nothing Pico hadn’t done, and I’d heard his confession and accepted him at San Marco,” he says.
She laughs, a comfortable sound. They are by the old market, where the last of the stalls are shutting down now. “He always says he wants to take orders one day. It’s why he hasn’t got married. But—it’s uncanny, what you know.”
“It’s uncomfortable,” he says.
“Come up and tell me,” she says. “It’s only just down here.”
He knows, but he doesn’t say he does. He follows her across the market and in through the familiar door. Inside the apartment, she doesn’t take him to the little study this time, but into a room on the other side, where the walls are painted in red and green lozenges, with motifs of fanciful parrots. The wall hangings too feature parrots. It’s a big room, but sparsely furnished. It had belonged to the Pardos when he lived here. He wonders what they thought of the birds. “Did you know Cardinal Sforza has a parrot that can recite the creed?” he asks.
“Really?” Isabella shakes her head, smiling. “Does it understand what it professes?” She lights the lamp and sets it on the table. He sees a sewing basket and two chairs of his design.
“No,” he says. “It just squawks it out, without any comprehension.”
“Wine?” she asks. He shakes his head. “Oh, of course, it’s Lent.” She gestures him to a chair. He sits. The room smells of lavender and oranges. There is a bowl of oranges and lemons on the table. She takes up her mending and bends her head over it as they talk.
It’s difficult to know where to begin, but once he begins to tell her it all pours out, and it’s difficult to stop. She asks intelligent sympathetic questions that keep him talking. “So there are two kinds of demons, are there?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“The kind I can almost see, the insubstantial kind that can’t talk and can be banished with holy water, and the kind like you, the embodied kind. Is that right?”
“We’re all the same in Hell,” he says, sadly.
“Maybe. But on Earth, there are two kinds?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the difference? I mean you know how you get out, to repeat your life. How do they get out in that form? Is there already a gate? It can’t be the one Jesus opened, because the world was full of demons when he was alive, swarming with them, two thousand in one poor man, the ones that went into the Gadarene swine.”
“I have no idea how they get out in their insubstantial form. I’ve never done that when I’m in Hell,” he says, intrigued. He has never thought about it before.
“Have you seen the same demons here and there?” she asks.
“There’s Crookback,” he says. “I’ve seen him here embodied as a man, and here as a demon, and also there as a demon. He— I need to talk to him, but I can’t see how. We can’t talk in Hell, and the times I saw him here as a demon of course we couldn’t talk.”
“Can you talk to him when he’s embodied?”
“I don’t even know whether he’s an Italian mercenary or the King of England this time. And the one time we tried with him and the stone it was a disaster,” he says, and tells her about it, which leads to telling her more about his other lives and failed attempts to get the stone into Hell.
“But in all those lives you’ve never earned your living,” she says at last.
It hadn’t even occurred to him that he hasn’t. “No. I never have.”
“But you could,” she says, assessingly. “You could work as a copyist, or a secretary, or a translator.”
“I suppose I could. If I leave San Marco.”
“I think you should. You don’t think it’s right to stay a priest, knowing you’re a demon. And since you’ve come to me for advice, I think you should try to lead a normal life. An ordinary life, I mean, one where you’re not a prophet or a pope or anything. That might be good for your soul. It seems to me you’ve read every book that might help, in all those lives.”
“Either that or Pico or one of the others read it for me,” he agrees. “But what about Florence? What about the world?”
“Leave it to look after itself. When you were pope you saved a lot more people, but you don’t think you should be doing that every time,” Isabella says.
“No, but my life in San Marco is the one that feels right, that I repeated every time I didn’t know what I was.”
“And if you’re not here, Florence won’t be spared by the Sword of the Lord?”
“If I’m not here and I don’t explain to someone else how to do it,” he says.
“But maybe that’s what God wants, for Florence to be sacked then. Maybe it would avert something worse later,” she says. “Or maybe Giovanni will think of it for himself, or think of something even better for Florence, if you don’t interfere.”
“I don’t know. It’s so hard to know what God wants!”
“Yes, isn’t it?” she agrees. “But you’re not God, and you don’t know what God wants. You say you’re trying to make your soul better. Leaving the world to get on with it without your demonic prophecies and living an ordinary life like ordinary people is something you haven’t ever tried.”
“Yes, maybe I should try that. But I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“You’d want to be somewhere they don’t know you, and out of the way of all the armies, and somewhere big enough they want books copied,” she says. “If I were you, I’d try Venice. You’ve never been there, have you?”
“I’ve passed through it, but never stopped for long,” he says. He feels a little of the same exhilaration he felt telling Pico he’d go to Jerusalem. He thinks of the canals, and the tall palaces with their air of looking East to Greece and the Ottomans, not West to Europe.
She bites off a thread. “You’d be as helpless as a baby,” she says. “It seems to me I’d better come with you.”
“You! But—” He remembers the sensual beauty of her loose hair, on the road to Genoa, and the time he had burst into the bedroom.
“I know how to do all the practical things you don’t, how to find somewhere to live and make sure there’s food on the table. And I could pray for you, offer up your prayers the way you said I thought of before, and that Marsilio Ficino did for you. From what you’re saying, it seems I have another two years of Giovanni before either Piero kills him or he takes vows. It’s hard to give that up, but—it’s only this time, isn’t it? I know that now. And if he takes vows, then at least he’ll be alive, even if I never see him. I love him, but I’m lucky to have had as much of him as I have, a man like him, and a girl like me. I could barely read when we met. I’m a bean seller’s daughter.”
“I will have to get released from my vows, the solemn release, so that I can marry,” Girolamo says.
“Marry!”
Girolamo blushes; he feels his cheeks burning hot. “I’m sorry. Were you thinking to come as my housekeeper?”
“I’m soiled goods,” she says.
He shrugs, still blushing fiercely. “That doesn’t matter. I’ve virginity enough for both of us.”
Isabella laughs, and puts her hand over her mouth to stifle it.
“And I’m not even human,” he goes on. “You’d be honouring me. But you said a normal life, an ordinary life, so I thought you meant—”
“I don’t know what I meant,” she says, looking down.
“You love Pico.”
“I do,” she says. “And he’s fond of me too. But I can’t stand in his way of going to God.”
“I wouldn’t want to stand in yours,” Girolamo says.
“Christian marriage serves God too,” she says, though she is still not looking at him. “And I really could help you, and if it did help with the big thing, with the stone, with apocatastasis.”
He is surprised she remembers the word, and then not surprised. Pico had been made to recant on that point by the Inquisition, though it wasn’t truly heretical. He had probably talked to her about it. Or she might have read about it on her own. He has a lot to learn about her. He consistently underestimates her. “Yes. You can help with my soul.”
“And it won’t do any harm to my own,” she says, with a little smile.
“And maybe we could have a dog,” he says.
She laughs. He likes her laugh. “A dog?”
“Angelo had a little brown-and-white dog with a feathery tail when we lived in Rome. He was called Achates. I’ve never had a dog. It seems the kind of thing ordinary people have.”
“Then we’ll have a dog, and a cat, and maybe later a baby,” Isabella says.
“I must inquire about giving up my vows. It’ll take months, and it’ll take months at least for Pico to be ready to go into San Marco. And I should tell Marsilio.”
“I don’t know. He’d want to try things, wouldn’t he, Platonic things, things that would get in the way of you leading an ordinary life. Having a friend like that who knew would make it too special.”
“But—he said he always wants to know, to know for sure the things he only guesses,” he explains.
“Then tell him, but tell him you’re going to try an ordinary life without any meddling,” she says, licking the thread to rethread her needle. “And when we go to Venice, we needn’t give him our address.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Girolamo says, and as he says it the door bursts open, and there is Pico.
“Did you—” he begins, and stops. “Girolamo! What are you doing here?”
“Girolamo tells me you’re going to become a Dominican,” Isabella says, setting her needle carefully into the hood she is mending.
“I was intending to tell you,” he says. He comes into the room properly and closes the door.
“That’s all right. Because just as you’re taking your vows, which you need to do quickly to avoid the death Girolamo saw for you, Girolamo’s going to be getting a dispensation to lay his down, and we’re going to get married.”
Pico’s face goes through a number of expressions very rapidly, passing through surprise, chagrin, and anger, before settling on delight. “I don’t quite understand, but I’m very happy for both of you,” he says. “I hope you’ll allow me to dower you properly, Isabella.”