“SIMONETTA!” I CRIED. “HOW GOOD IT IS TO SEE YOU.”
I was sitting for Verrocchio as he began real work on my sculpture portrait. He had already hammered away angular corners of the slab, and now a smooth forehead peeped up over the top of white stone, rounded elbows protruded from the chipped and chisel-scratched sides. As he explained what he would carve away next, Simonetta came in on the arm of Giuliano, there to see the progress on Leonardo’s Madonna of the Carnation.
Oh, what a terrible difference there was in her from the last time she and I had really talked at length, at the Feast of St. John’s palio, many months earlier. Then she had been so full of vivacious, playful humor. Now La Bella was still, but pale, her exquisite face grown thin, her enormous amber eyes entrenched in dark circles. She smiled when she saw me, but that was quickly followed by a shaking cough.
Shielding her mouth with a handkerchief, she reached out her other hand. “Dearest Ginevra, come sit with me a moment, while Giuliano speaks with the maestro.”
Leonardo was nowhere to be found, so Giuliano went to inspect the painting with Verrocchio. Simonetta and I retreated to a quiet corner in that busy studio and settled down in a thick waterfall of dark- and light-blue skirts. I noticed one of the apprentices stop dead to look at the pretty picture our dresses, and certainly Simonetta, made.
“How are you?” I asked. Simonetta had been ill enough that she had rarely left her home, so I had heard only worried rumors about her. “Your cough?”
“I fear it is phthisis.”
“Consumption? Oh no! What can be done?”
Her smile was wan. “They have bled me several times to rebalance my humors. And Giuliano has doctors scouring manuscripts from Hippocrates and Pliny to find some ancient antidote. But”—she shrugged—“my life is in God’s hands. I have faith in his mercy and judgment, whether to keep me here or take me to him.” She took my hand in her feverish one. “I would rather talk of you. I tire of discussing my illness.” She leaned toward me and whispered, “Now tell me all.” Her eyes still danced merrily despite the dark shadows under them.
“About?” For her amusement, I smiled mischievously and arched my eyebrow.
“Aha! Then it is true! You blush with love, my dear, and are even more beautiful for it since last we met. How is it with the ambassador? All of Florence is talking about his adoration of you.”
“There is talk?”
“Of course! You two are the subject of many dinner conversations at the Medici palazzo, great philosophizing, sighs and dialogue about the power of pure, chaste love, and how beauty and a godly soul can inspire others to find the divine.” She leaned closer and whispered in my ear, “And speculation, of course. Particularly among some of the ladies, who would give anything to be so lauded. They are jealous.”
“Speculation?” I asked, taken aback. I don’t know why the news surprised me, but it did.
“Yes, my dear. What did you expect?” Simonetta patted my hand. “But do not let it bother you. The things people have said about me and Giuliano . . . well . . .” She laughed. “Legend brings good and bad reports, truth and lies. You must learn not to worry over it, now that you are thus elevated.”
“I am hardly elevated.”
“Oh my, that modesty of yours is so endearing, Ginevra. Not elevated? You have had a painting, a statue, and many poems commissioned about you from some of Florence’s most gifted minds and hands. Lorenzo the Magnificent spends hours conversing with your ambassador about Plato’s dialogues and Petrarch’s sonnets and how they apply to you and Lucrezia Donati. It is quite the bond between them now. So much so that my dear Giuliano grows envious and feels displaced in his brother’s affections.”
She continued, lowering her voice. “Especially since Lorenzo has made large unsecured loans to your Bernardo Bembo, in part to pay for all the art and poems he is commissioning to celebrate you. Lorenzo listens less and less to Giuliano on matters of business. So yes”—she gave a gentle laugh and then a tiny cough—“you have been much elevated.”
Bernardo’s propensity for extravagance and now taking on further debt—because of me—was alarming. I started to ask Simonetta what she knew of the loans. I also longed to tell her about my last encounter with Bernardo. It had been so . . . well . . . there was nothing courtly or tender about that kiss in front of Leonardo. It had frightened me. But Simonetta interrupted me by putting her arm through mine and laying her head on my shoulder. “I am so weary,” she said. “May I rest here a moment on your soft shoulder?”
Closing her eyes, she shuddered with a suppressed cough. “Tell me of your artist, Ginevra. I only sat for Leonardo da Vinci a few times, but I found him so intriguing. Full of ideas.”
I felt a sharp stab of jealousy as I wondered if Leonardo had shared his inner thoughts and dreams with her as freely and eloquently as he had with me. If he had stared at her face and the coloring of her cheek, hung on her stories. Simonetta was far superior in her beauty, her feminine decorum, and her gentleness. He might decide I was a lesser subject. “Did . . . did he talk a great deal?” I asked.
“Oh, no, my dear, hardly at all.”
I sighed with relief, even as I felt an idiot for doing so.
“But when he did open his mouth to speak,” Simonetta continued, “I found myself questioning all sorts of things.”
At that I laughed. “Indeed, I have had the same experience.” I paused. “He has opened my eyes to so many things. Wondrous things. You know, he has such insight into women and our possibilities. It has been quite . . . liberating.”
Simonetta tilted her head back a bit to gaze up at me. “Oh my, Ginevra. You must hide that.”
“What?”
“That affection.”
“But you say it is the talk of the city already.”
“Not for the ambassador. I am not talking of that.” Simonetta sat up and took my face in her two fragile hands. “For your painter.”
I pulled back and frowned. “I have no affection for . . .” But at that moment I realized—with some dismay—that Simonetta might be right.
She nodded sympathetically. “I understand.” She nestled back against me. “Despite my love for Giuliano, I have similar feelings for Sandro Botticelli. It is the deepest of romance to have someone study you so closely for hours to find what is noblest in you and then capture it in paint. There is nothing else like it. And yet, my dear, there is nothing to be done beyond that.” She sighed. “But that is enough. Enough to cradle to your heart for life.”
I was reeling with conflicting thoughts and the recognition of a dangerous, muddying undercurrent in my emotions when one of Verrocchio’s apprentices ran into the studio, shouting for him. “Maestro!” The boy turned round in confusion, trying to locate his master. “Maestro, where are you?”
Simonetta sat up, and she and I both pointed within. The agitated apprentice darted inside. “Maestro! Maestro! The tamburi!”
I gasped, remembering Leonardo’s anger at a man who’d dropped a letter into the box for denunciations, the box known as “the mouth of truth.” His fury back then hinted that Leonardo was somehow familiar with the letter’s accusations—or perhaps feared it was about him. A letter in that box was usually cause enough to haul a person in front of the dreaded Ufficiali di Notte—the tribunal in charge of purging Florence of what it claimed to be vice and sin.
There was a torrent of worried explanation of something that Simonetta and I could not make out. But then there was a large crashing within as someone threw and then kicked several objects. “God’s blood!” Verrocchio shouted. “I warned him to be more careful. The fool!”
Verrocchio appeared looking red-faced and furious, and charged out of the studio without even glancing our way. His anxious apprentice dashed behind to keep pace. Then Giuliano appeared, worry marring his usual jovial handsomeness. “Come, my dear.” He gently helped Simonetta to her feet. “I must take you home. And then tend to this trouble.”
“What has happened?” she asked.
“It seems my cousin, Leonardo Tornabuoni, has been arrested on charges of sodomy along with three other men—all accused of being Florenzers and corrupting a young goldsmith apprentice. One of those denounced is Leonardo da Vinci.”