Primavera was spinning in the sun, and squinting, for her eyes were no longer strong. The gooseboy was slack-jawed—as usual, no surprise. Fra Ludovico had fallen to his knees as if beholding an apparition. He needed Latin for the moment: “Ecce homo.” But it wasn’t Cristo Himself stopping for lunch at Montefiore, but Vicente de Nevada, trudging up the sloping road, accompanied by something that looked from this distance like a dog without a head.
I admit that my days had not been filled with surprise of late, and what is life without surprise? I had never expected to see Don Vicente again. I had not expected that someone would need to tell him that, despite his sacrifices, his daughter was dead.
I stepped to the mirror and passed a hand over my hair, and then tore from my scalp a circlet of pearls, to appear more common. I bound my stomacher with quick hard pulls of the cords.
I hurried down the flight of steps from the door of the salone to the terrace below the loggia. I stood with my hands on both my cheeks, to appear as I truly felt: terrified and overjoyed.
Vicente
HE SAW Donna Lucrezia appear, in a black cloud of silks paneled with gold brocade, like a thunderstorm slotted with stripes of lightning. He had to catch his breath, for the years in a dank dungeon had done their mischief in his lungs, and there were certain exercises he’d never undertake again. The last few miles, the soft approach up and down the succession of hills, slowly rising toward Montefiore’s red roofs, had seemed to take longer than the weeks and weeks between Ouranopolis and Venice. But there was the famous Borgia, more beautiful than ever. More beautiful than any fishwife of the Adriatic or courtesan of the Doge. More beautiful than anyone but his Bianca.
The stone beast hung back, skulking in his shadow. On the shores of Agion Oros, once the sun had opened its Cyclops eye again, the beast had seemed less marmoreal. Its limbs took on the snapping energy of a puppy’s, and its aspect was marginally more animal. So Vicente began to think of the creature as an improperly made dog, one with a faceless knob that passed for a head. The companion had certainly helped him obtain passage in every instance, as no one wanted to be bitten by a stone dog that had no mouth.
Lucrezia Borgia met him at the bottom step. She held her hands out at last. Her fingers touching his were like lilies set against burned twigs.
“Welcome to Montefiore,” she said. Not Welcome home, he noticed, but here were Fra Ludovico and Primavera to do that.
He didn’t turn to them yet. He could hardly get his breath. He hoped before he would need to ask, a shutter would fly open, a voice would ring out. Her hands would lift in the air in the gesture of surrender to the impossibility he knew he was manifesting: that, after all this time, he had come back.
But the day kept its secrets. The house teased him. His retainers and his unexpected houseguest waited for him to speak. With difficulty he discharged a clutch of phlegm and found his words. “Donna Lucrezia. My house is yours.” He couldn’t continue with the formal language, though. He couldn’t afford to spend his breath in pleasantries. “My daughter. Where is my daughter?”
“Oh, there’s much to tell you,” she answered, “but we won’t speak out here. You need to change those hideous rags. Come in, my friend. I’ll decant some—”
“Primavera?” he said. “What is the state of affairs here?”
Primavera kept silent. He pressed her to explain, but she spilled tears down the netted wrinkles of her cheeks, and shook her head.
“Primavera,” he demanded. His voice was a croak, a whisper.
Fra Ludovico said, “She can’t answer your questions, Don Vicente. She doesn’t have the faculties.”
“Has she lost her mind?”
“She has lost her tongue, in some accident or feat of vengeance. It was ripped from her mouth. She could never write, as you might remember, so there’s no way to learn what happened to her.”
With some surprise, Lucrezia said to the priest, “You’ve become coherent with the return of your employer. I haven’t heard you make so much sense in years. Your tongue will have to come out next.”
“I have no idea if what I say is true, of course,” continued Fra Ludovico hastily. “For all I know, Primavera slept with the famous squid again and in a dangerous moment of passion swallowed her own tongue.”
“What nonsense is going on here? Where is Bianca?”
“Vicente.” Lucrezia laid her hand on his sleeve. “I’ll tell you what I know, but not here, not in front of them. You don’t understand about Fra Ludovico. In your absence he’s gone mad and he gabbles like a lunatic.”
“Where is she?” Vicente turned around and around, and the stone dog followed him in stone circles.
“Here’s gabbing like a lunatic for you, my lady,” said the priest. “No one keeps news of a child from her parent. Don Vicente, listen: by force of will or by the will of force, Bianca made her escape from this prison. We don’t know where she is or what has become of her. I pray for her departed soul daily.” He made to comfort Vicente, but the weakened man twisted and sat down on the ground, his legs giving up.
“You’ve been a comfort, clearly,” said Lucrezia icily. “Escort him to the piano nobile, you two. I’ll prepare a restorative for him.”
When he had come to his senses some, he dried his face and looked about. The stone dog was sitting on its hind limbs alertly. Lucrezia reigned from behind a table of inlaid marble. Three candles, nearly invisible in the strong daylight, shifted their slender flames.
“I’d hoped to tell you news you could rejoice in,” she began.
He didn’t speak. But he turned and looked at Lucrezia. Though his lungs were enfeebled after his years in prison, his eyes seemed fine. He had learned that he hadn’t tired of looking at things. Even now his eyes were greedy. The beautiful Borgia woman lifted her slender neck to be looked at. Her chin had the tight articulation of a well-made lady’s silk slipper. He could imagine burying his damp eyes into that proffered hollow. But his years of celibacy stayed his mind from considering any pleasure more fervent than consolation.
His visions of Bianca—memories of her in this room—were of a child who didn’t yet come up to his lowest rib. If he had seen his girl as a young woman on the road five miles out, he passed her without knowing. Would he know her again if he found her?
He said at last, “Let’s finish the business first. I’ve brought Cesare the token he hired me to find.”
She rolled her eyes. “Cesare isn’t in a position to care, so you can save your breath. I’m not the desperate man grasping at straws that he was. I have no interest in sham and trickery.”
“You supported him in his command of me to this task, Donna Lucrezia.”
“It was his strategy to follow every hope, however fantastic or mundane. It gave him peace. And what calmed him calmed us all. As you remember. But whatever deceit you’ve concocted to abuse us with, it isn’t worth my time nor your breath, which I see must be husbanded.”
“Nonetheless. I’ve accomplished the task with which I was charged.”
“Then you’ve done my family a great service. Thank you.”
“In exchange for my undertaking Cesare’s assignment, he was to keep my home and my family safe. He’s broken his agreement. I’ll have my words with him, and see how he can help to find my daughter.”
“You’ll have to find him first. In the afterlife.”
He gaped. “Murder?”
“Of course. That’s the only way Borgias agree to die.”
He lowered his eyes to the stone dog. “I’ve been away so long,” he muttered, “too long, for sure. I don’t even know what year it is, nor who rules the states of Italy.”
Mincingly she said, “There is a della Rovere in the Vatican. As Julius II. He pretends to do good. He is of no interest to the Borgia enterprises. Florence has its Gonfalonier for life, and the Doge of Venice is a certain Leonardo Loredan.”
“That much I know,” said Vicente. He paused to cough. “I’ve had an audience.”
She raised a plucked eyebrow.
“I stopped to beg access to the Doge’s treasury—for permission to lodge safely there the artifact I stole,” he said.
“Please, Don Vicente. You’re not well. You don’t need to spend your breath on such lies. For one thing, a gentleman farmer wouldn’t dare to approach the Doge of Venice.”
“I dared approach you, once upon a time.”
“For another, it’s a crude ploy to pretend you found something Prince Dschem doubtlessly invented in a desperate moment.”
“I did indeed. I found the branch of the Tree of Knowledge, and with such a credential I bartered for an audience with the Doge. Duchessa, I had had many years to think about the negotiations between your family and mine. I found that I didn’t trust your brother to take possession of the entire artifact. I needed something to bargain with in the event he threatened me or my family. And wasn’t I wise? He who took a good deal of my life from me, and in the interim lost track of my daughter’s whereabouts—what right had he to this thing of unequaled magnificence?”
“So the Doge has the supposed relic of Eden.”
He said, “I left one Apple from the branch. I retained two of them for bargaining with.”
“Is that so? Let me see it.”
“I’ll remind you, respectfully, that I went on Cesare’s bidding.”
“I am his sister and his widow and his heir. Let me see it.”
“You don’t even believe it exists.”
“Convert me.”
From his traveling sack he withdrew the few items of clothes he had acquired on his return journey. Within them, settled as lightly and safely as a walnut meat in a shell, reposed the sacred bough. He took it and lifted it with both hands. The stem shone as brightly silver as if a servant had only just finished buffing it, and the silver leaves shimmered delicately in an invisible wind from another climate. The two Apples remaining smelled of rosy sweetness, though from where the third had been plucked, a blemish of black tarnish knobbed.
Lucrezia Borgia lowered herself to her knees and made the Sign of the Cross. “Upon the wood of this same tree was our Lord crucified,” she said.
“The tree is silver,” said Vicente.
“That is its aspect to our sight. It’s not silver, though; how could a silver tree support Apples in an eternal state of perfect ripeness? This is no artifact, but proof adequate for the revival of a failing faith.”
“One has to have faith first in order for it to be revived,” he said. “I am through with this thing, whatever it is. I want no more to do with it. How did Cesare die?”
“I wish his body were here,” she said. “He is buried in Navarre, they tell me. He was looking for the de Nevada family to raise up an army on his behalf.”
“There is no de Nevada family in Navarre, or none that would recognize this wandering cousin,” said Vicente coldly.
“You wrote to Fra Ludovico—?”
“I wrote lies for the purpose of protecting my daughter. Apparently it wasn’t enough. Now you must tell me, Donna Borgia. I don’t have any interest in sacred matters. I want to know how my daughter died.”
“She went off into the woods on her own and she never returned,” said Lucrezia. “Primavera’s grandson found her body at the foot of a cliff. He buried her in an unmarked grave in the forest.”
“I will see him now. Ranuccio, is that it? Do I remember? Ranuccio. Where is he?”
“You may not see him,” said Lucrezia. “He disappeared from the region shortly thereafter. I believe he was caught poaching a pig from the barns of Don Mercutio down the valley, and rumor has it he was done in as a pig might be done in.” After a pause. “I mean, on a spit.”
Vicente said, “Why was my daughter wandering alone in the woods? She was a timid sort.”
“She changed,” said Lucrezia. “She became brazen and feckless. I couldn’t stop her, though I did my best. I hope you appreciate my efforts. Primavera was no use at all, you know, and Fra Ludovico has become a simpleton. His spiritual warnings made no difference. As best I could, with the obligations of my marriage and my life at the court of Ferrara, I have stood in your stead as a parent, Vicente.” She raised herself to her feet and held the bough in her arm as if cradling an infant. “I’ve done what you asked of me, what you begged of me. But I couldn’t wander into her soul and make her love me or respect me. In the end she was a willful child, like most. Her ending was likely inevitable.”
Vicente de Nevada stood too. He had to crush an inclination to beg pardon and leave the room, as the room was his, the house was his, even the sad history of what had happened to his daughter, whatever it was, belonged to him, not to Lucrezia Borgia. But unless she walked out of the room first, he would be ceding to her the right to the house, and this he was unwilling to do.
“Tell me about your dog,” she said, smiling at him. She put down the sacred bough and picked up a small pearl-handled knife.
“The dog doesn’t figure in this story of grief. It has no name,” he said.
“It?” she said. “Not he or she? Poor thing. Come here, poor deformed thing.”
The creature came forward warily.
Lucrezia turned and neatly sliced from one of the Apples a clean wedge. The juice beaded up on the knife. The moon-white flesh was flushed with pink and pale green and yellow. She held the knife down with the Apple slice on it, and for this supreme honor the beast found reason and means to develop a mouth. A hole in its top opened, more or less mouthlike, and a helpful tongue leaped out and gathered the Apple.
“I adore feeding the hungry, just as the Scriptures tell us.” Her words were tender but their delivery flat: she displayed an alchemist’s skeptical curiosity over a trial of elements.
The creature sat back and looked up at Lucrezia. It occurred to Vicente that it now had eyes, and lids that could blink. It blinked its stony lids. One dry tear broke from each duct and rolled to the terrazzo floor, there to shatter into a clot of dust and gravel. An improbable smell of rue.
“It would seem you are telling the truth,” she said. “This really is the Apple of knowledge. It will give tongue even to the rock.”
The beast turned to Vicente and put its head between Vicente’s knees. With its new tongue it licked Vicente’s hands.
Then the thing straightened up, like a little monkey, its forelimbs pivoting outward. On its hind legs it took a step or two. Lucrezia said, “Honor to God, the thing is walking.” She backed up a step, and picked up the knife again. “Vicente.”
The beast paid her no attention. With one of its forelimbs it reached forward and the stubby hoof was cloven in three. It helped itself to the rest of the Apple that Lucrezia Borgia had offered it. “Vicente,” she said, “what license.”
Vicente made no move. Confident as a three-year-old and about as tall, the stone beast walked on its hind legs, up to the hearth. Today’s fire was laid but unlit. The beast knocked the brush aside and shuffled through yesterday’s ashes to the back wall of the fireplace. It leaned its head and its shoulders—there was no denying they were now shoulders—into the wall. It disappeared into the stone as neatly as a corpse is swallowed by a flooded quarry.
Vicente was stirred by the audacity of the stone dog. Its disappearance after all these weeks was a bracing shock. Whatever had rescued him from the dungeon in Agion Oros had exacted its price and gone away. Had it been traveling beside him, invisible, incognito, in the Greek fishing vessel? Its stone weight interfering with the boat’s maneuverability? No proof of that. Who knows how long the stone had been with him, and in how many guises. Now it was gone.
He was bereaved further, this time for a stone.
The world seemed a punishing sleeve of bright changing lights and dark moods. Flawed and regrettable, the presence of it nonetheless clawed at one, claiming one’s attention. “Get out,” he said to the Duchessa de Ferrara, hardly believing his temerity. “Get out of my house at once.”
If Lucrezia Borgia was shaken, she didn?
??t show it. She put her white knuckles against the desktop and leaned across to him. “In my own time and in my own way, and not before. I owe you nothing.”
“You owe me my daughter’s life,” he said. “Will you pay me with your own?” He pushed the table with his hip, ineffectually; his hands strangled air.
She was frightened, though, and fell back. The bough with one remaining Apple slipped from her grasp and rolled along the hem of her garment. “If you kill me you’ll never even learn where your daughter’s body is buried. You won’t know where to have Fra Ludovico sing her the last rites, which I could tell you even now.”
“No one will sing you last rites. No one in Italy will weep when you die, and the name Lucrezia will fall out of a fashion for a thousand years.” But her parry had worked. His hands, hungry for resis-tance to overcome, paused.
“You are a father without a child,” she said. “I am a child without a father. Surely we can understand each other’s grief? In days to come it will not seem so hard.”
He looked at her as if the concept of days to come was impossible to decipher. Then his hands opened, palms outward. “There is no way to live without her,” he said.
“You must make your confession to Fra Ludovico,” she replied. “Custom says God can speak even through the flute of a madman when forgiveness is required. Don’t presume to know what your life may become now until you have yourself absolved of your sins.”
He spat at her display of piety. She made a wincing smile and said, “I am as practiced at accepting absolution as I am at sinning with ever greater relish the next time. If you’re going to murder me, Don Vicente de Nevada, do it in a state of grace, anyway, for a more illustrious contrast of effects. Cesare always mentioned the satisfaction of it.”