The Madonna of the Almonds (27 page)

Simonetta stood alone on the battlefield.

Veronica of Taormina, at Bernardino’s insistence, had brought Simonetta to Pavia in the carriage – one of the profits of a thriving business – for Simonetta could no longer ride. Veronica stayed behind at the nearby stream, with the carriage, gentling the horses and waiting patiently for her mistress. Veronica stroked the velvet noses and hummed her southern songs into the twitching ears to quiet them. The horses would not have crossed the brook onto the scarred plain even if she had bid them. They knew what had happened here. They could smell the dead, hear the ghostly battlecries, and shied and started at every breeze. Veronica narrowed her eyes against the whip of the wind and kept her far-seeing gaze on her mistress. Simonetta had walked a long way out.

Veronica of all people knew what her mistress had to do, for she had lost a husband too. Like Simonetta she had found a second, greater love, in Isaac; but knew that sometimes
memory prompted respects to be paid to that first attachment. Veronica knew, too, that such rites must be carried out alone. But her gaze never wavered as she watched Simonetta, even when her mistress walked further, to the very centre of the great expanse. She was an easy mark, for as well as the massive bear furs she wore, her body was full and abundant: she was with child, and very near her time.

Simonetta huddled into the bear pelt against the cruel wind that riffled the fur. The gust snatched at her hair and pulled the burnished tendrils from under the hood, the shifting sunlight turning the strands to a brief bright copper. The cloak smelled faintly of sweet sandalwood; the scent of Manodorata, its former owner. She was suddenly gutted with loss. As she blinked back tears she almost laughed at herself. She had come to mourn one man and wept for another. She had never mourned her own father when the plague had taken him, but now acknowledged that Manodorata had been as a father to her, one that she had never knew she wanted, never knew she missed. He had been her guide and her friend when she had needed him most, and she missed him every single day. She was glad that he lived on in Elijah and Jovaphet; his sons, her sons, and now Bernardino’s sons.

This was the first time she had left them alone, her three boys. Bernardino had encouraged her to go: happy beyond measure, he could deny her nothing, not even this. Since
the feast of Sant’Ambrogio, when she had sat with her family and been fêted by the crowds she had felt an increasing restlessness – she was not unhappy, never that, never again. Bernardino had teased her, saying she was a mother bird building her nest, and such feelings were common for a woman nearing her confinement. But she knew it was not so – something had changed in her that day; something had prodded her conscience, prompting her of a task unfinished, work undone. Gradually it had dawned in her consciousness what was missing, what was needful and she had come here with Bernardino’s blessing. His only concern had been the toll the length of the journey would take upon her and their babe, but he had been mollified by her agreement to take Veronica and ride in their fleece-lined carriage. She had left them in the great kitchens, which, despite the family’s new-found wealth, had remained the heart of the Villa Castello. Her own heart gladdened as she remembered the scene she had left – Bernardino had spread the great board with all his precious charcoals and pigments, and laid down vellum for the boys to decorate. ‘I shall teach them to paint,’ he declared with his customary confidence, ‘for that is what they shall do when they are grown.’

She smiled fondly. ‘
Both
of them are to be painters?’

He pointed to her stomach. ‘All three.’

She kissed them all, expecting tears from the little ones, but realizing with a gladdened jolt that they were happy with their new father. Elijah was already Bernardino’s slave
because of the episode with the dove, but even little Jovaphet settled happily down to the day’s activities. By the time she had gone the three were more decorated than the vellum, Bernardino more than the children. She had smiled, not censured. She cared not if she returned to find the villa frescoed like the church in Saronno. A process had begun, and it was pleasing to her.

She now felt many leagues away from that glowing happy place. Here it was cold not warm, she was utterly alone instead of in company, and she walked among the dead, not the gloriously alive. She took a breath of the chill air and turned around in a full circle. The plain was dappled in darkness and light as pregnant clouds scudded across the sky interrupting the sun. It lay flat, quiet and innocent, giving nothing away. To the north, the city of Pavia lay like a crouching scarlet dragon, the houses huddled like scales, the towers the spines of its back. For long moments she walked the battlefield. She would never find the right spot – she would never know where Lorenzo had fallen. She only knew that it was now four long years to the day since the field had accepted his body and the libations of his blood. Four years. And what lessons had been learned? Just a few short months ago Simonetta had heard tell in Saronno of how a French army at Landriano under Maréchal Saint-Pol had been decisively defeated by the Spanish forces of Antonio di Leyva, Governor of Milan. The cycle had begun again. And if that cycle, like the wheels of the great siege
engines that broke the body of Saint Catherine, turned inexorably to bring battle again to this land, the cycle of ignorance and the prayer-wheels of prejudice revolved too. For news had reached Saronno too of how thirty Jews had been burned alive in Bazin in Hungary, in this very year of 1529, for the ritual murder of a child who was later found alive. Simonetta shook her head. This was the very crime that she had first heard laid at the starred door of Manodorata.

Yet here at Pavia the scarred soil had long since healed, and hardy grasses pushed through the guilty ground; even flowers now dotted the sward. If the world lived in circles, nature circled too and pushed forth shoots of hope and health, however tainted the soil. At one such spot, where the wildflowers grew and the grass was bright with a patch of sunlight, Simonetta knelt at last and placed her hand flat on the ground. She knew now why she had come. It was not the irrational whim of a pregnant woman. She had needed to close the door. She had come to say goodbye.

All those years ago, when the news was fresh and the grief was new, the
Comune
of Pavia had forbidden ‘searchers’ from coming to seek their dead, through risk of pestilence and the utter confusion of thousands of maimed bodies. Simonetta had never been able to bring Lorenzo home, to see him closed in a casket, to sing masses for his soul. No grave was there that she could visit yearly, mitigating her grief as the seasons wheeled around. Now such things would be put right.

Simonetta beckoned across the great space to Veronica, who tethered the horses and came to her, bearing the twin burdens that were too heavy now for her mistress. She carried a shovel slung over her back, and in her arms she carried two long parcels, wrapped in the silver and blue di Saronno banners, swaddled like babes against the four winds. Veronica set down her load and dug a shallow pit in the hard ground while her mistress rested. Simonetta could read in her maid’s solemn face the recollection of her own husband’s burial, and regretted any pain the girl might feel – hoped that she might too benefit from this day. For what had seemed the end for Veronica then had been a beginning too, as Isaac had come to her.

At last, Simonetta laid the two long bundles in the soil. She could barely distinguish between them through the swaddle – both long, cold, steel but it did not matter. Both were culpable, both were bringers of death.

The sword and the gun.

Veronica scattered the soil over the weapons till they were gone from sight.

Simonetta’s mind was as blank as the black soil; she could think of no last words, no prayers or songs of leavetaking, just an overwhelming sense of rightness. She did not want to keep Lorenzo’s ancestral sword for maudlin recollections on winter evenings, nor hand it on to a son who was not his own.

It ended here.

The di Saronno name would now be one of trade, not warfare, and she would be as proud of it today as her ancestors had been in the past. The world turned, and the battles continued, but she would have no part in them. She was in the business of
creating
life. Bernardino, too, did not kill nor maim; he used his gift to make the earth more beautiful, and he would leave the world a better place than the one he entered.

His passion for his work had returned with their marriage and he had begun one last painting of her as the Virgin, fascinated by the changes that her pregnancy had brought to her body and face; another manifestation of his mortal Madonna. This panel painting, half complete and leaning by the fireplace as its glaze dried, showed her rounded and serene, every part of her plumper and glowing save her pale hands. She was cradling Elijah, with Sister Bianca looking on benevolently. ‘I shall call it
The Virgin
and Child with Nun in Adoration
,’ announced Bernardino, in a tribute to his friend who had returned to her ministry in San Maurizio. Simonetta had finished her sittings and noted the lack of any background or context to the painting. She and Elijah and Bianca seemed to float in space, with nothing beyond them save the flat sheen of the glaze. Elijah had teased his new father: ‘Perhaps we are spirits, mother; bogles and goblins that float over the plains of Lombardy.’ And he had run round the house shrieking ‘whooooooooo’, making ghostly faces to fright his little brother. Bernardino had
smiled but kept his peace. When Simonetta questioned her husband, Bernardino refused to let her see what else he had planned for the painting’s background. ‘’Tis a surprise,’ he said. ‘You shall see it on your name day, in one short month, when you are twenty-one.’

She had asked no more, happy in her pregnancy and content in their two children. It gladdened her that their sons would be raised to live by the brush not the sword. She smiled a little at the saccharine motto that had come to her; a fitting blazon for the Luini arms. She suddenly had a longing to be back home, but her business was not yet done. She dismissed Veronica again: ‘I’ll not be long.’

She laid her hand down once more, on the soil that Veronica had levelled, where the sword and the arquebus and Lorenzo’s blood lay beneath. ‘You were the love of my youth,’ she said, ‘but now I am grown. The world changed and took you away from me, and I changed too.’ Then, from beneath the lacings of her bodice she took out a milk white almond, warm from her bosom, and pushed it into the cold ground. Just like the one he had given her on their wedding day. She covered the nut completely, gave it back to the earth like the offerings the Romans made to the ground, to nourish their crops and appease the gods. Her own God sat in his Heaven again, the years of doubt behind her. She was happy. It was time to take her leave of Lorenzo. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

Simonetta rose with difficulty, her hands under her belly,
round as a gourd. The child kicked inside her with a strength and urgency she had not known before. She gasped with pain and pleasure, unable to move for a moment. She saw Veronica start towards her with concern on her face, but she shook her head at her maid and smiled. The movement subsided and all was well. All was more than well. The clouds split suddenly and the sun burned down as she walked to the carriage without looking back. She resolved to remember Lorenzo with gladness, and every year on this day have a requiem mass sung in Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno for his soul. The rites that she had been too numb with grief to afford him would be his at last.

Saronno
. Her heart was thirled with joy as she knew she would be back with her family in a few short hours. Simonetta lifted her hand to her face to smooth her wayward curls and the ring on her knuckle caught the sun with a glitter. She splayed her strange, pale fingers at arms length to admire the design, proud as any new-wed girl of her betrothal ring.

Bernardino had had it made for her; he had taken the commission all the way to Florence, returning at last to the city of his youth. There along Ponte Vecchio where the finest goldsmiths in the world wrought their alchemy, the greatest craftsmen among the best – the first among equals worked in a humble shop with a six-pointed star over the door. Simonetta had sent Bernardino there – she knew that the Hebrew artisans within were those who had made the
golden hand of her dearest, lost friend. Bernardino had only to cross the threshold and utter the dead man’s name, to be given the very best of attention. It was just as well. For the design of Simonetta’s ring, conceived and sketched by her betrothed, was a difficult one – not to be entrusted to the amateur. It was a delicate wreathed heart wrought in curlicues of gold. Inside the heart fanned a fleur-de-lys of three gilded almond leaves. But sitting atop the leaves were three oval almonds of the di Saronno arms, represented by a glowing trinity of freshwater pearls. Fortune’s wheel had turned too; full circle, and the tree had borne fruit.

Veronica approached and took the outstretched hand with one of her rare smiles. As she helped her mistress into the carriage it began to snow; small, delicate blossoms that would not threaten their way.

Without knowing why, Simonetta di Saronno tipped back her head, and opened her mouth to let the flakes in.

Lorenzo Giovanni Battista Castello di Saronno died in Pavia on the twenty-fourth day of February in the year of Our Lord 1525. But Selvaggio Sant’Ambrogio lives. I know because I am he. I am settled happily in Naples; I thought my secret safer if my family and I removed from Lombardy. Family? Yes, let me tell you of the people that are dearer to me than any I have ever known.

Nonna still lives – she lived again the day that she opened her eyes and beheld me stooping over her sickbed, the day that I found Amaria again at the
pozzo dei mariti
, the day I came back from Saronno. The sickness she had was in her heart, and the only physick she needed was my return. I am humbled, and do not deserve such a grandmother, such a friend. The warm winds of the south agree with her heartily, and now I do not think she will ever leave us.

My son was born in the summer and we named him
Gregorio, the name of a distant memory, of one that deserves the honour. He is the delight of my eyes, and as he grows he plays on the floor of his father’s workshop, with the wood shavings. For I must tell you that now I am quite a prosperous man, and a well-respected citizen of Naples. The furniture that I make sells very well, and I was able to buy a large Neapolitan house. How strange it is that I, the last of the noble line of di Saronno, have become a carpenter and a tradesman! Yet I enjoy the work, and love the wood; it has meaning, a reality and immediacy a world away from the veneer of courtly pursuits. One keepsake alone came with us from Pavia, and it is something that I made and am proud of; the dovecot stands in the centre of our fine new courtyard, and our dove has new friends to delight her, something which in turn delights my wife.

Ah, my wife. Her heart is full of happiness and prosperity suits her well, yet for all her fine silks she still has the kindest heart of any creature that lives. Now she will tend our own children, as she once tended her husband; and as she will one day care for our children’s children too.

Sometimes I hear news from Saronno. I heard it said that Simonetta and Bernardino also had a son, whom they named Aurelio. I set to work and carved an entire Noah’s Ark of tiny pairs of animals, each no bigger than a thumbnail, complete with a wooden boat to keep them in. I sent a runner all the way to the Villa Castello, with the gift wrapped in a red silk parcel, and strict instructions not to
name me as benefactor. I hope that he had joy in it. (I did not know just how much at this time – for many years later Aurelio Luini followed his father’s footsteps to the monastery of San Maurizio in Milan and painted a miraculous fresco of Noah’s Ark, a worthy inheritor of his father’s talent. You may still see it there today.) I know that Evangelista learned to call father the man that had once painted a dove in the palm of his hand, and that little Giovan Pietro followed his brother’s example.

And Simonetta? I know she found true happiness as Luini’s wife, and the mother of his sons. I never saw her again – but I saw her likeness. Bernardino once said that Lombardy is covered in blood and paint; the blood drains away, but the paint stays for ever. You may see Simonetta yourself if you go, as Amaria and I did, to the Museo Civico Gaetano Filangieri, in Naples. Look for a painting called The Virgin and Child with Nun in Adoration by Bernardino Luini. There you will see a Madonna and Child sitting in an almond grove while a nun with a kind face reads to them from the scriptures. In the background, among the trees, walks a man. A man that displays only one hand of flesh, for the other golden hand is hidden in his cloak. A man that was killed by the Madonna’s arrow in that very place, in the name of friendship. The child in her arms is his eldest son, an orphan of the war between one God and another. The Virgin has white hands, and the third and fourth fingers are all the same length. They are the hands
of the artist’s wife and the mother of his children.

They are the hands of Simonetta di Saronno… the Madonna of the Almonds.