The King's Agent (49 page)

“Tell me all you know,” Battista implored. “Was it the emperor?”

“Yes and no,” Michelangelo began. “It was his forces, that much is certain. But word is they acted alone, those under the command of Bourbon.”

“François’s betrayer,” Battista hissed.

“Indeed,” Michelangelo agreed. “But it was not done at the duke’s command, but over him. It seems the men lost faith in their commanders. No food or pay made them angry, and angry men do barbarous things. For his own good, Bourbon took part in the invasion. Ironically, he became one of the first to fall.”

“Dead?”

“Very. And any military constraint remaining evaporated with his last breath. Those few who made it out of the city say the pillaging and destruction continues. Hundreds, mayhap thousands are dead. No one knows for sure. No one can get into the city. They’ve closed the gates and guard them well.” The artist hung his head, heels of his hands pushing at his wrinkled forehead. “I fear greatly for my work ... my pietà ... the chapel.”

Aurelia reached out and pulled his hands away. “You must have faith.”

Battista cocked an eye at her, something in her words disturbed him, but he could not name it, too eager to learn more of Rome.

“And the pope? What has become of Clement?”

Michelangelo’s golden eyes rolled heavenward. “Held captive, in the Castel Sant’Angelo. Almost all the guards, nearly two hundred, died seeing him safely there. There remain not enough alive to get him out.”

Battista jumped to his feet, chair scraping against the floor with a screech of protest. He paced about, a crazed animal locked in a cage, his heart torn as assuredly as the city. He had no care for the Medici pope, but he bristled with consuming anger against foreign soldiers plundering Rome.

His hands gripped the back of his chair, his knuckles white and hard as sun-bleached stones.

“What from Ippolito and the cardinal?” Battista asked of Florence’s rulers. “What is the word on the street?”

“No one knows. The speculations swing, as does the pendulum. Half fear the marauders will make for Florence next. The other half believe the time has come to take back the Republic, in the wake of the Medici fall.” The sorrowful man hung his head. “But how many more must die?”

The question hung in the still air like a noxious odor.

Michelangelo looked up at his friend looming above him, great swollen tears in his eyes.

Aurelia squeezed the older man’s hand in hers. “You must not—”

“You knew!” Battista raged, turning on her, all his anger, fear, and revulsion divested upon her head as the revelation came to him. “You knew, and you could have stopped it.”

The accusation was harsh and loathsome. Aurelia did nothing to deny it.

Releasing her hold upon Michelangelo’s hand, she reached for Battista’s. With a glimmer of repulsion, he pulled away.

But she followed, jumping up, barreling toward him, meeting his gaze without shame or weakness.

“I did not stop it, for it was not meant to be stopped.”

Thirty-four

There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery

—Inferno

S
he closed her eyes, arms held away from her body, palms forward, posed in a posture of acceptance and abandon. Few medicinals had healed her as well as this place; in its embrace her wounds mended, her strength returned, and her body once more boasted the curves of a vigorous woman. Her paradox branded her healing as the illness that would take her away.

Aurelia surrendered to the warmth of the sun as it crested the horizon, born of another day; she capitulated her being to the chirping birds, the gurgle of the small fountain, the air replete with all that was earthy and blooming, fresh and redolent. Droning insects buzzed near and past her, caressing wind flowed over her, and she became of her surroundings, no longer merely in them.

“Why do you cry, Aurelia?”

Battista’s soft hush pulled her back to the physical world.

Aurelia blinked, returning to the earth, standing in the center of the small courtyard of Battista’s home.

She raised a hand to her cheek, slim brows rising upon her freckled forehead as it came away moist.

“I did not know I did,” she replied.

He stepped closer and she drank of his face: the small but full curled mouth, the narrow but angled soft eyes, the sharp planes of a face both hard and tender. Would she see it again, after today? She loathed not having the answer.

Battista stepped one foot on each side of hers, lowered his long body, and slithered it against her as he wrapped his arms across the small of her back, the graceful move of a sensual lover. Her body weakened against the force of it and she dropped her forehead onto his chest, the linen soft and the flesh firm.

“Why do you cry?” he asked again.

Aurelia shook her head against him but could not speak; to say the words would make them real.

Battista heaved a sigh; his chest rose beneath her, the air, so harshly exhaled, fluttered against her head.

“The time has come for you to leave.”

Half a question, half a denouncement; she denied neither.

“Yes.” She lifted her gaze to his face. “In a few hours, perhaps less.”

Battista frowned, puzzled, but shook it away. “You could stay here, Aurelia.”

“Battista, do no—”

“You could stay here and still serve your duty.” He rushed out his plea, allowing no argument, pulling her closer, crushing the air from her lungs with insistence. “You could stay, here with me. I know we may never marry. I know we could not bear children. But I would gladly sacrifice all to keep you with me.”

He leaned down, tipping his head to the right, right beside hers. Another piece of Aurelia’s heart cracked at the look upon features grown so dear, where despair and hope mingled tenderly. Aurelia reached out to stroke his tawny skin; she meant to placate and he continued to refute it.

“I could protect you. I could ensure your safety and help you, as surely as the Mantuan does.”

There it was, the name rose up from out of the ground, a thick vine to separate them.

Aurelia closed her eyes, tenebrous brown with sadness. “The guardians must live a sequestered life. If any learned who they were, who they loved, it would be used against—”

“I would not tell a soul.” Battista flapped his hand at the opened door at his back and the men who had gathered in his home, drawn there once more, as their days and their lives returned to something resembling normalcy.

The men had offered little in the way of recriminations, though she and Battista had fully expected it, fully anticipated them to grouse and question the losses, not only of any hope of finding the relic, but all three pieces of the triptych as well. Battista had blamed destruction by fire, a truth maligned by his failure to include their part in it. Only the loss of Ercole tainted the mission as a true forfeit, his life taken for the sake of an unsuccessful quest. But loss was inevitable, no matter the course of life, as the passing of Lucagnolo’s wife showed them. These men had learned much through these hard days.

Aurelia smiled as the sounds of their antics flowed out into the courtyard—the shuffle of cards, the affectionate chiding between men who cared for one another.

And yet she could not accept Battista’s offer. “I believe you, Battista. And I believe
in
you. But we can never know who may come into our lives. We could never know how to trust those who learn of my truth.” She splayed her hands upon his chest with a slow to-and-fro of her head, heavy with the profundity of her existence. “The kind of power I guard is poisonous. It creates monsters out of the most commendable of souls. It is a virulent disease. Even your men could be weak to it.”

Battista pushed her away, face cross and shadowed, as he stepped back toward the house. “No, you know not of what you speak. These men are pure of spirit. I know it. I know it as surely as I know how desperately I love you.”

He turned back, his own fruitless argument slumping his shoulders, dropping his chin upon his chest.

Aurelia rushed to his side, taking his hands and holding them against her chest. She longed to fly away if she could, end this parting and spare him the pain of it. “They are all good men, Battista, I do know. As good and true as you.”

As if the men heard her commendation, a great ruckus arose, voices lifted in what seemed tomfoolery, but the tattered croak of fear and alarm named its truth.

Battista’s eyes narrowed, his head perking at the sound. Aurelia heard it for the warning it was.

“Battista! Make haste!” more than one man cried out.

Battista and Aurelia turned together, rushing forward and into the house.

The front door and windows stood open, shutters thrown wide. Men jostled one another to glimpse whatever took place beyond.

Frado scurried away from the door, rushing across the room at them, round cheeks splotched red, bald pate gleaming with a sheen of sweat.

“Florence is under siege!” he cried.

“No!” Ascanio and Lucagnolo refuted together.

As Ascanio stepped from the door, the parade of the armed rushed by. But not a soldier marched among them. Instead, the streets overflowed with their neighbors, Mario of the haberdashery, Lucrezia from the flower shop, and more, hundreds of them.

Like a rushing river tumultuous with fish, the crowd swept past them, anger and determination upon their brows, chants of revolt upon their tongues.

“To arms! To arms!” they cried, fisted hands pumping the air above their heads.

Men and women of all ages brandished weapons: swords, daggers, and bows, even a few of the costly
archibugi,
the deadly muzzles stabbing the sky.

“Guns! Guns to the people!” Voices rose up in adjuration. “Florence belongs to the people!”

“They’re headed for the Palazzo Vecchio!” Barnabeo cried, so fierce in the throes of revolt his squeaking voice became shrill. “Get to your weapons!” He pulled his own sword, forever by his side, from its scabbard and entered the fray.

“Wait for us!” Lucagnolo cried as he and Frado flew up the stairs, returning in seconds, Frado with a crossbow, Lucagnolo with a sword.

“We will go first to your home,” Lucagnolo proclaimed to Ascanio with incitement, then pointed to Pompeo. “And then to yours.”

The four men rushed to the door. Last in line, foot upon the threshold, Ascanio came up short and quick, head spinning round. Handsome face aflame, his eyes jumped from Battista to Aurelia, no words upon his tongue, naught more than a fearful expression upon his noble features.

“Go along, Ascanio,” Aurelia urged him on, holding on tightly to composure in the face of this moment as best she could. “Battista will find you in time.”

“What?” Ascanio asked with an awkward tilt of his head, a puckered, perplexed brow.

Her self-possession broke and she rushed across the room, throwing her arms around the man’s neck as he looked over her head at Battista in confusion.

“Tell the others to be safe. Tell them ... tell them I will never forget them, not a one.”

“Come on, Ascanio!”

The cry reached them from the street, and Ascanio’s arms answered her embrace. She pushed him away and out the door, slamming it closed behind him.

“I need only a moment, Battista.” Aurelia rushed past him and up the stairs.

In Battista’s room—for she had made it her own since their return—she stood in the center, pulled in all directions. There were so many memories, so many things that held them; she knew not what to take and what to leave.

In the end, she grabbed only one gown, the same she had worn the first night they had made love, in the small room over Michelangelo’s study. Rolling it into a ball, she pushed it into her small rucksack and, with it, a golden stone she had picked up in the caves, a seagull feather from the shore, and the small dagger, the one Battista had insisted she keep. They were naught but silliness, but they were her most cherished possessions.

Flinging the bag over her shoulder, she ran down the stairs, back into the room where Battista awaited.

He had armed himself in her absence; a long, fine sword now hung by his side.

“I am ready, Battista.” She took his hand, rising on toes to sweep his cheek with a quick kiss, and pulled him toward the door.

But he would not be pulled; he jerked her back with his immobility alone.

“You must tell me all you know.” It was a demand, and one he had every right to, but she could not appease him.

Aurelia turned, cleansing her face of all emotion, for it was no longer a time when their cares, wants, and desires had any precedence.

“You must get me back to Mantua.” An emotionless, strident declaration. “Get me back to Mantua, then return here to your duties. It is time.”

Battista winced, eyes rolling, hands fisting, shoulders creeping up. She pushed his patience with her baffling nature, perhaps one too many times. But it could not be otherwise.

“We must go, Battista!” she demanded of him harshly, though the taste of it was putrid upon her tongue.

He gave way then, looking none too pleased, and followed her out into the streets. The wide avenue continued to boil with those who would take it back from the Medici. It took many minutes to calm her and Battista’s skittish horses, to pacify them enough to mount. Battista pulled on his reins, pointed his mount to the north.

“To Michelangelo’s first,” Aurelia said, heading in the opposite direction. “We must warn him.”

With a hard click of his tongue and a squeeze of his heels, Battista followed.

“You must tell me, Aurelia,” he called out as he pulled alongside, staring at her with feverish eyes, leaning out of his saddle toward her. “You must tell me what I am to do.”

She heard his doubt then. He would answer the call to duty, as he always had, but for once fearful that he would not do the right thing.

Aurelia smiled at him, the best she could muster on the eve of their parting. “You will do what you are meant to do. Have no fear,
amore mio
.”