SEPTEMBER 21ST, 1494
It is the day of St Matthew the Apostle, and Brother Girolamo is preaching in the cathedral on the subject of the Flood. He has made notes, he always does, but once in the pulpit he allows himself to speak as God directs. He has succeeded, this past May, in separating the Tuscan from the Lombard congregation of Dominicans and is subject now to no one but Cardinal Carafa, Pope Innocent, God, and his own conscience. The brothers in some of the other monasteries in Tuscany, in Santa Maria Novella and Fiesole in particular, chafe under his supervision. They do not like to see the rule of St Benedict and St Dominic enforced. The monks had put down rugs on the stone floors of their cells at Santa Maria Novella, and when he reproaches them they dare to object that the stone is cold in winter. Is it a sin to have warm feet? they ask him. It is a sin to put bodily comfort before love of God, he replies, and do they think the tile of San Marco is warmer? Offer your suffering to God. The Dominican nuns in their convents of Santa Lucia and the Annalena tend to become overenthusiastic in their asceticism, often claiming to see visions that may or may not be valid. They are very demanding of his time and attention. It is not easy being father of a wider family.
Now he is no longer under the supervision of Brother Vincenzo, he can preach as he chooses. The removal of restriction on prophecy in the pulpit is a great boon. He preaches today about Noah and the Ark, and hears himself saying Florence is an Ark and the water is rising, the flood tide poised to pour down. The Sword of the Lord is coming from the north, and soon. He calls for repentance, for them to make this city the City of God. The congregation listens, rapt, caught up in his words. Many of them are weeping. He sees the Count among them, transfixed. Afterwards, everyone wants to speak to him, touch him, tell him what a good sermon it was. He is a little bemused. It was a good sermon, yes, but he is surprised by how strong a reaction it has provoked. It seems people want to be purified, to be in the ark he is building.
When he makes his way through the throng, he sees that the Count is waiting for him, standing to the side of the main entrance, under the equestrian fresco of Acuto. He’s standing with Girolamo Benivieni, who never misses a sermon. Benivieni is a Florentine guildsman of moderate wealth, in his early forties, though the deeply graven lines between his nose and his chin make him look older. He writes poetry that displays his erudition, and always dresses in severe black, giving a simultaneous impression of austerity and ostentation. He and the Count are both wearing scholar’s caps; his is black and the Count’s is red. Girolamo sends his brothers on to San Marco and joins them under the fresco. “That was one of your best sermons yet,” the Count says. “It made my hair stand on end.”
“God spoke through me,” he says, as he always does. It is true.
“The French are poised to invade, are they your flood?” Benivieni asks. He has a slight cast in his left eye, which makes it hard to meet his gaze properly, or know exactly where he is looking.
“It will sweep down through Italy,” Girolamo says. Rumour says Charles VIII, the King of France, is in Lombardy already.
“You’re always wonderful, but today you were on fire,” Benivieni says. He keeps on, with fulsome compliments. “Can I walk somewhere with you?” he asks the Count after a while.
“Not today, I wanted a private word with Brother Girolamo, if you don’t mind,” the Count says. Benivieni excuses himself and hastens off.
“It’s strange, as he’s entirely sincere, but I wish I could like him as much as he seems to like me,” the Count says, as they watch him go.
Girolamo laughs. “I feel exactly the same about him! There’s something a little too much—”
The two of them walk back through the bustling streets in the direction of San Marco.
“Your sermon was so powerful it even distracted me from the reason I wanted to speak to you,” the Count says, looking as if he has just remembered something terrible. “Angelo’s sick, maybe dying. Can you take his confession, and give him the last rites?”
“Angelo? Dying? But I saw him two, three days ago!” My recording angel, Lorenzo had called him. He had written a wonderful poem after Lorenzo’s death, you still heard people singing it, Lightning has struck our laurel tree. He had become a regular at Brother Girolamo’s sermons, rarely missing one. “I need to get the host and the oil from San Marco,” he says.
“I’ll come with you, and then I can show you the way,” the Count says. They walk up the familiar street towards San Marco, through the thronging stalls of the leatherworkers.
“He’s not at the Medici Palace?” Girolamo asks.
“He’s at my apartment on the Via Porta Rossa. That is, Isabella’s apartment. He wasn’t well enough to go out to his own house at Careggi, or mine at Fiesole. But all the servants except my man Cristoforo ran away, thinking it was the plague because we were both sick.”
“But it’s not the plague?” The summer had seen the usual outbreak of plague. Mortality is highest among the young. Brother Girolamo has grown only too familiar with the signs.
The Count shrugs unhappily, frowning and looking down. “It’s definitely not plague. No black spots, no swellings. I’m not sure what it is. I think—we both had dinner with Piero, three days ago. He hadn’t invited either of us for a long time. Did you know he’s instituted hierarchy of seating? At Lorenzo’s table anyone sat anywhere, and you could find yourself between a sculptor’s apprentice and the Ambassador of Venice, and we’d have the most fascinating conversations. But he’s done away with all that. Usually when we eat there now, he puts me beside him, because of my rank, and makes Angelo sit down at the end with the servants. But this time he put Angelo on his other side. I thought it was a sign of reconciliation, or being kind so we could eat together, but now I don’t know.” He sighs. “Maybe he wanted to make sure we both finished our meals. I only went because I wanted to ask Piero a favour—Elia Pardo, one of my old Hebrew tutors, is being thrown out of Bologna with his family. I wanted Piero to invite him to Florence, maybe get him to give a few Hebrew classes at the University, the way del Medigo did. He agreed to invite him. He seemed affable. He was paying attention to Angelo, even seemed to be listening to his advice for once. Angelo was so pleased. He tries to hide it but he’s hurt by the way Piero has been pushing him away. But almost right after, we both fell sick. I got better, though I’m still not quite right. Angelo just got worse and worse. The doctors bled him, but he’s getting weaker. He’s been so cold we put the bed curtains up already.”
“You think you were poisoned?”
The Count pulls a face. “I can’t accuse Piero. But—”
“Why not? If anyone can, you can. You’re the Count of Concordia, he has no formal status.”
“I’m his guest, in his house.” He looks sideways at Girolamo. “You remember when we talked about Lorenzo and you said he had us all jessed like hawks? Piero thinks he owns us all, and his hand isn’t gentle on the traces. He doesn’t like opposition, or advice. Lorenzo would always listen, and make new plans if necessary.”
“But to try to kill you! Why?”
The Count shakes his head. “I didn’t imagine he would do that. And it might just have been bad octopus.”
“I hope it was,” Girolamo says, though octopus in mild autumn weather is usually safe. “Did it taste bad?”
“No, not at all. Tasty, done Genoese style. But—well, it could be simply a fever. But Angelo is very bad. And of course I’m twice his size, so if we both had the same dose of poison, that makes sense. But you said I wouldn’t see the war,” the Count says, lowering his voice and stopping on the corner.
“It has been two years, and you still haven’t settled your affairs.”
“I’m close. Now I am no longer excommunicate, which was the most difficult thing. But it’s so complicated! I’ve given away all my money, but sorting out the Mirandolan inheritance is taking forever. One of my brothers is in Rome and never replies to letters, and the other argues with everything. His son Gianfrancesco is a good boy, with a philosophical bent to him, but he’s spending all his time riding between here and Mirandola carrying messages.” The Count raised his hands and eyes to heaven dramatically. “Soon. Any day now, I expect Gianfrancesco to come back with the news that I am free to join you. Though Camilla Rucellai prophecied that I’d become a Dominican in the time of the lilies, so I expect it will take until Spring.” He sighs.
Camilla Bartolini Rucellai is a married woman whose prophecies do not seem hysterical, but genuine. Deborah, in the Bible, had been a prophetess, so it is possible for them to exist. He has tried to restrain Mistress Rucellai from spreading her prophecies, even where they overlap with his own. This is because she has seen so many visions of Girolamo guiding the commonwealth. She shouted out her prophecy about the Count and the lilies in the church of Santa Maria Novella, disrupting a service, and it is now widely known in the city.
“How about Isabella?” he asks.
“I’ve arranged for her to go to Genoa and start a business.”
At San Marco, the Count waits in the courtyard while Girolamo runs into the Pilgrim Hall for a bag with the oil and the host. The brothers at San Marco are among the few who will visit those dying of plague, and calls have been so frequent all summer that they keep everything ready. In some towns the Franciscans would take care of visiting the dying, but here most of that work falls on San Marco. First Brother Antoninus began it when the monastery was built a generation ago, and now it is expected. He takes up the bag and turns to go.
Domenico comes up to him, bursting with the thousand things he needs to ask about, but Girolamo raises a hand. “A dying man needs me. Nothing can be more urgent. I will be back for Ninth Hour prayers.”
It is like, and unlike, the time the Count took him to Lorenzo. He follows him through the narrow twisting streets. A cold wind is blowing and it is spitting rain. They pass a tripe-seller’s stall, the smell savoury and heavy with onions. “Why would Piero want to kill you?” he asks.
“Pique?” the Count suggests. “Or…” He hesitates, looking at Girolamo. “He asked me at dinner if I really meant to take vows, if I wasn’t afraid it gave you too much power, for someone of my status to join San Marco.”
“That’s not why I want you,” Girolamo says, horrified.
“I know. Of course. But if Piero thinks that—”
“If he thinks that and he poisoned you, it’s an attack on me as well as you. It’s an attack on the Dominicans. On the Church.” They come out into the open space by the Baptistery, with the huge dome of the cathedral looming up above them.
“Lots of people come to your sermons and listen to what you say. After this afternoon, even more people will come. You’re becoming very influential. Camilla Rucellai tells people God tells her you’ll guide the commonwealth, and she’s not the only one to think so. Piero could well be afraid of your influence. You can’t make Florence pure, the ark, and leave him secure in his position. He’s not Lorenzo.”
Girolamo shakes his head, wondering again how Lorenzo had attained God’s grace, despite wealth and power. He touches the green stone in his pocket. “I haven’t attacked Piero. Never.”
“No, but you talk about how people ought to live. And if he’s afraid of that, and if he’s afraid my joining you might give you more standing with the community, then maybe that’s why.” The Count touches his elbow and they turn into another narrow street.
“Then why did he poison Angelo?” It’s amazing to Girolamo that anyone would want to hurt Angelo, who is enthusiastic and friendly, and besides, a poet famous all over Italy.
The Count shakes his head. “He used to be Piero’s tutor. Piero hates him because he’ll never be grown up in Angelo’s eyes. You saw a little bit of that when Lorenzo was dying. Piero’s been cold to him. Lucrezia and I have been trying to get Angelo to go to Ferrara or Mantua for this last year. The D’Estes would be only too glad to support a poet of his quality.”
“Yes, because it would give them status,” Girolamo says. “And Piero thinks you and Angelo are giving me status, and that is taking it away from him.”
“Status. Influence. Authority. It’s all tangled up together and has nothing to do with God and what’s truly important.” The Count sighs. “I never thought Piero would stoop to poison. It’s such a contemptible ignoble thing to do. If Angelo dies the world will have lost a man worth far more, by any real measure, than Piero. And I will have lost a true friend.”
“Don’t eat with Piero again,” Girolamo says.
“I won’t,” the Count replies, fervently, as they turn alongside the church of Orsanmichele onto the Via Porta Rossa. “And I hope that soon I can enter San Marco and leave such worldly things behind.”
“There is too much of the world in the cloister,” Girolamo warns.
“Here we are. Come in.”
It is the first time Girolamo has visited the house where the Count lives in sin. The door is grand enough, but it stands between a woodworker’s and a silk merchant. Once in the courtyard inside, it’s clear from the faded frescoes and pieces of junk lying about that the family who own this palace have fallen on hard times, and the building has been divided. There are stairs leading up around the courtyard, which makes a light well in the middle of the building, up to the fourth floor. “The ground floor is all shops. The family keep the nobile floor, at the top of the first flight of stairs. Our apartments are on the second floor,” the Count says, leading the way. “I don’t know how many people live up on the third floor.”
“How long have you lived here?” It seems a strange place for a man of his status to live.
“Isabella has lived here since I came to Florence. I pay the rent. I don’t live here, I live out at Fiesole or at my rooms in the Medici Palace. I came here on and off, you know, to visit her.”
When Girolamo first sees her, Isabella is carrying a bucket of strong-smelling vomit down the stairs. He assumes she is one of the people who live on the third floor, until the Count introduces her. She surprises him with her wholesomeness. She doesn’t look like a courtesan but like a strong-armed country girl. He recognises her immediately, he has often seen her at his women’s sermons, listening intently with her head to one side. She is modestly dressed in brown and white, like the respectable wife of a small guildsman, with no ostentation and her dark hair modestly covered.
“The servants have left, and Cristoforo refuses to carry this,” she says, apologetically. She is holding the handle in both hands.
The Count takes the bucket from her. “I’ll take this to the cess, and you take Brother Girolamo up to Angelo,” he says. Girolamo thinks it is good to see him doing such a thing, but he is also shocked to see how naturally he does it. He’s a count, after all! No matter how much he tells himself such things are vanity he can’t quite erase his instinctual flinch. Isabella leads the way on up to the narrow gallery with a waist-high wall that runs around the second floor, and then around the corner.
“Angelo wants to make his confession,” Isabella says quietly as she opens the door. “I’ll leave you alone with him.”
Girolamo hardly hears her. The room is dark, all the shutters but one are closed. There is a single immense demon looming over Angelo’s huddled figure on the bed, filling the whole space visible between the yellow-and-red curtains. It is a skeleton with a great gravid swollen belly, like a pregnant woman, with long flowing golden hair sprouting from its skull. It holds a scythe and is crouched over the dying man as if sharing his breath. Girolamo doesn’t hesitate or wait for Isabella to leave. He forms his fingers into a circle and strides forward. “I banish you in the name of Christ Jesus!” he shouts. The great demon, like all the other demons Girolamo has banished, shrieks, shrinks, and passes through his fingers and back into Hell.
Angelo is looking at him with wide eyes, and behind him the woman Isabella gasps. “What was that?” she asks.
“It was death,” Angelo says. “The friar has banished death.”
“It was not death, it was only a demon, come to terrify you and, if it could, to draw you with it to Hell in fear and despair,” he says confidently. “Death bears no such fearsome shape, but is the gateway to eternal life in the love of God.”
Angelo begins to weep. Girolamo turns to Isabella. “Did you see it?”
“I saw a great shadow with a scythe,” she says. “Only now, when you were here. Before I felt the pressure of its presence. I too thought it was death in the room with us.”
“It only became visible after you left, here under the curtains with me,” Angelo says. “I thought—”
“I am here,” Girolamo says, drawing back the bed curtains. Even if Angelo is cold, it is surely better for him to be able to breathe. He is not surprised the dying man saw the demon, but he would not have expected the woman to be able to. So few people are aware of the presence of evil. He looks at her. “Go to the Count, while I hear Angelo’s confession. I will call you in a little while.” Her eyes go to the stinking buckets beside the bed, one of which is half-full, then to the dying man, then back to Girolamo. She nods, picks up the half-full bucket, and goes out without speaking.
Brother Girolamo goes to the window and opens the other shutter, letting in more light. Then he opens the window to the fresh breeze, which cuts through the fetid smell in the room. As he turns, he notices that the room is frescoed with birds and shields in red and blue, not hung with tapestries as the best rooms would be. The bed curtains and covers are rich and heavy brocades in yellow and red, and the bed itself sturdy carved walnut. Angelo Poliziano, never a big man, looks little more than a shrimp huddling under the covers.
On the wall opposite the window are shutters pulled over a painting. He opens them tentatively and sees, to his relief, a sweet-faced Madonna, the Christ child on her lap and young John the Baptist at her knee. He leaves the doors open.
“Now that the atmosphere is more wholesome, let’s see,” Girolamo says, going to the bed and kneeling beside it. “You may be near death, Angelo, but you are not yet dead.” His medical training taught him to observe some signs, but his work with the poor has taught him more. He would judge that Angelo has a day or two more of pain and suffering before God finally takes him. “Certainly you have time to confess your sins and be absolved.”
Angelo tries to smile. “I may not have time for all my sins.”
Girolamo does not respond but looks at him evenly. It is no time for levity.
“Bless me, Father. I have loved the pagan poets more than the Scriptures,” Angelo says, chastened and sincere. His breath has a heavy scent of garlic. “I have used the names of pagan gods in prayer.”
“To worship idols, or using them poetically as other names for God?” Girolamo asks, calmly. It is important to make the distinction, but even more important to have the dying man confess his real sins, so he can be truly contrite and have true absolution.
“The latter,” Angelo says. “Always the latter.”
Girolamo nods, relieved. “That is not a sin.” It’s not even uncommon, in Florence. There are even men here who do the former. He suspects Marsilio Ficino of being one of them. Since Lorenzo’s death, Ficino has avoided him as much as he can, and he suspects that may be why.
Angelo goes on. “Pride. I thought I could revive the ancient world, that everyone who learned Greek could be a friend, that I could reach them all and be the centre of the rebirth of antiquity. I thought my talent for poetry made me important. I thought I could be the new Petrarch, even the new Virgil.” His face looks grey on the pillows, and his heavy hair is soaked with sweat.
“And do you repent this pride?”
“I do.” He breathes heavily, then resumes. “Worse. When I was tutor to the Medici boys, I fought with their mother over teaching them Ovid when she wanted them to read psalms.”
“Ovid wrote better Latin,” Girolamo admits. “But you know you were wrong.”
“I cannot repent of loving Homer and Cicero,” Angelo says.
“Loving them is not a sin. But they have no power to save you.”
“You do.” He is looking at Girolamo with desperation.
“God does, and I am his instrument,” Girolamo says. He is used to being people’s last hope. “What else?”
“Sins of the flesh,” Angelo says, looking away, then catching sight of the Madonna over Girolamo’s shoulder and looking away from her too. He stares down at his own thin hands on the embroidered bedcover.
“You have sinned with women?” Girolamo asks, gently.
“No, with men,” he says.
“With boys?” Girolamo asks, disgusted, but trying not to show it. He hates to see the young boys from poor families sell their bodies down under the Old Bridge. The sodomites seduce them into unchastity, turning their heads with flattery and paying them a little for their favours. If they get caught, it is the boys who suffer, who cannot afford to pay fines. There are young boys there every day. Girolamo wishes he could rescue them, but what could he do with them? There are so many of them, and they are hungry.
“Men. Never boys, not since I was a boy myself.” He sees that Angelo is ashamed of this, as if he believes it would be a lesser sin to fornicate with boys than with grown men. “Always men. Friends. Humanists. Plato—”
“Plato wrote against sins of the flesh,” Girolamo says, firmly, sure of his ground. He won’t allow Angelo to use Plato as justification for this.
“Plato says it is second best,” Angelo says. “I believe he’s right. But second best is still—I have sinned in this way over and over again. I’ve repented and confessed and done penance, and then sinned again.” Yet he saw Lorenzo glowing blue with God’s grace, Girolamo thinks. But who knows where he was in his cycle of repentance at the time Lorenzo died?
“Do you truly repent now of these sins?”
“I do.” Girolamo hopes he sees truth in Angelo’s red-rimmed eyes.
“And if you live, you will strive your hardest to resist such things?”
“If I live, I will come to you at San Marco and take vows like Pico,” Angelo says, which he has never said before. “But I will not live, will I?”
“There are miracles,” Girolamo says. “Do not doubt God.”
“I do not. He sent his Son. He sent Lorenzo. He sent you.”
Girolamo bows his head and prays to Saint Jerome for humility. He sees that Angelo is shivering.
“Should I shut the window?”
“Thank you,” Angelo says.
Girolamo walks over to the window and closes it, leaving the shutters open for the light. There is a chest under the window with women’s clothing spilling out of it. This room, with the beautiful picture of the Madonna, must be where Isabella usually sleeps. She is entirely unlike what he had pictured.
“Do more great sins trouble your soul?” he asks Angelo, as he settles back down beside the bed.
“It’s hard to forgive Piero for poisoning me,” Angelo says. “I was his tutor. I felt as close to him as if we were family. And I’m only forty, and I had so much left to do. He could have exiled me if he wanted to be rid of me. I’d have missed Florence, but it is loyalty to the Medici that has kept me here. There are lots of places I could have gone. And if he’s killed Pico too I don’t know that I can possibly forgive that.”
Girolamo must speak as a confessor, and cannot say what he thinks of Piero. “Forgiving enemies and turning the other cheek is one of the hardest things our Saviour asks of us. Are you trying to forgive him?”
“Yes,” Angelo says, after a pause. “But…”
“Consider how much sin you are asking God to forgive you, and try to forgive those who have sinned against you. It’s not the same as condoning what they have done.”
“I think I can forgive him for killing me, though it’s very hard, but not if he has killed Pico,” Angelo says.
Girolamo nods. “The Count says he has recovered from his illness.”
“I am trying,” Angelo says again.
“Christ forgave his torturers. Do you think Piero knew what he was doing, any more than they did?”
“If he didn’t then that’s my fault. I was his tutor. I should have taught him right from wrong, or at the very least smart from stupid.” Angelo screws up his face and looks as if he might weep again.
“Are you confessing to being a bad tutor to Piero de’ Medici?” Girolamo asks, smiling to lighten the mood. “Because that’s not a sin.”
Angelo smiles back, briefly, then his face falls again into grief. “Ficino made Lorenzo into what he was. He and Lorenzo believed I could do the same for his sons.”
“Sometimes God doesn’t give us the right material,” he says. He has found this often with his monks. “Did you do your best?”
Angelo nods, then the motion clearly makes him queasy, and he lurches for the bucket. Girolamo holds it closer to him as he retches agonizingly over it. The vomit stinks so badly that it makes Girolamo a little queasy to be close enough to hold the bucket. He sets it down when Angelo has finished, and takes up a rag to wipe Angelo’s face as gently as he can. Afterwards, he offers him water. A brown glazed jug and cup are set on a stool near the bed.
“I think it was the Pazzi Conspiracy,” Angelo says, after drinking. “Piero was six. Lucrezia was eight. The others were too young to notice, but it was very hard for those two. They were very close, but always fighting, even before that. But then all of a sudden one day their uncle Giuliano was murdered, Lorenzo was wounded, all of us were constantly moving from villa to villa, in a terrible atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. Their mother was pregnant and uncomfortable. By the time Lorenzo went to Naples, Piero was eight, and for those two years he’d hardly had a day to be a child, to feel safe. He couldn’t play outside in the streets, he couldn’t make friends with other children, he had to be afraid all the time. It’s not surprising he doesn’t know how to deal with people, to trust them. That’s when he went wrong.”
Girolamo isn’t at all sure this excuses Piero de’ Medici in any way, as it was fifteen years ago, and he’s had plenty of time to grow up since. But if it helps Angelo to forgive him now, he is glad. He offers him water again. Forgiving enemies is always difficult.
“Any more great sins on your conscience?” he asks.
Angelo starts to shake his head, then stops, shivering, and huddles down under the covers. “No,” he says, taking the water and drinking. “Will there be poetry in Heaven?” he asks, like a child, as he hands back the cup.
“I think there will be something better,” Girolamo confides. “Something that poetry reminds us of, and that is why we are drawn to love it. I think loving all earthly beauty is a way to lead us to love Heavenly beauty. So there will not be sunsets or poetry, but there will be something like them but even better.”
“I wish I might have time to make that thought into a poem,” Angelo says.
“I absolve you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. You will need to atone in Purgatory, but the door is open, and at last you will see God and know the truth and beauty behind the joys of this world.”
Girolamo takes the host and the oil and begins the ceremony of last rites, forgiving each body part for the sins it has committed. Angelo weeps throughout, but that is not at all unusual. The gospels say that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we must become like little children.