Signora Da Vinci by Maxwell Robin

Author:Maxwell, Robin [Maxwell, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: NAL Trade
Published: 2008-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

“Cato,comequickly!”

It was nearly evening when a wild-eyed Benito bolted in through the front door of my shop, setting the bell to frantic ringing. I looked up from my grinding mortar.

“It’s Leonardo. He’s been arrested!” Benito’s expression became even more panicked. “He’s being held by the Office of Night.”

My arms fell to my sides. I tried to compose myself. This was an office of the church—the “Conservers of Morality.” Leonardo’s arrest by these people could mean only one thing.

Benito wished to accompany me but I begged him to stay behind, close up my shop and tell no one what he knew. It was a futile request, I realized. News of this kind traveled quickly through the city.

I made my way through the city with the greatest haste, hardly letting myself think, for the thoughts were too dark, too beastly to contemplate.

When I arrived at the building a crowd had already gathered outside. I pushed my way in and saw before an official desk manned by two robed friars—one severe and lugubrious, the other puff-cheeked and florid—four groups of men talking with terrible intensity within themselves. These must, I realized, be the families of the others arrested with Leonardo.

I was shocked when one of them looked up from his conversation and revealed himself to be Lorenzo. He came to me at once, his concern impossible to conceal. It was a struggle almost beyond measure to maintain my male demeanor. I was Leonardo’s mother. He was in desperate circumstances, and I had never, since coming to Florence as a man, felt my femininity so strongly as I did in this moment. Yet I steeled myself and spoke as Cato.

“Is it sodomy?”

“It is.”

“Why are you here?”

“My cousin Lindo Tornabuoni is one of the others charged. And another is my uncle Bernardo Rucellai’s illegitimate son.”

I knew the name Rucellai. Everyone did. Theirs was a very great family in Florence, rivaling though not equaling the wealth of the Medici.

All I could do was shake my head in confusion.

“Three others are involved as well—two goldsmith’s apprentices and a doublet maker. The youth they’re said to have abused is another goldsmith from a good family.”

“Those speaking for the accused step forward,” the lugubrious friar intoned.

Everyone crowded around the desk. Beads of perspiration trailed down the cheeks of the fat-faced priest as he read from a document in his hands.

“Bartolomo di Pasquino, Arturo Baccino, Lindo Tornabuoni, Tommaso di Masini, and Leonardo da Vinci are charged with the lewd and degenerate vice of practicing sodomy on one Jacopo Saltarelli, not yet seventeen. They have been denounced anonymously by a virtuous citizen. . . .”

“Anonymously?!” one of the relatives cried with great indignation. “Then how do you know he or she is virtuous?”

“Silence,” the fat priest ordered with icy disdain, then continued as if he had never been interrupted. “By means of a letter dropped in a tambura drum—‘the mouth of truth’ in the Via Motola.” The tamburas were drum-shaped boxes placed around the city into which citizens deposited written accusations of their neighbors of both municipal and religious infractions.

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