Quattrocento Read online

  The door creaked again, slowly, the high-pitched rasp drawn out, ending fitfully, and then starting again. Still no one appeared. Minutes passed, the breeze played in the trees, the sunlight danced and sparkled in the leaves, making waves across the grass, until even Anna’s presence began to seem as though it had been a dream. Tired of standing behind the tree, Matt began to feel impatient, and then ridiculous. Leandro couldn’t be inside. He wouldn’t be able to spend even five minutes in a deserted church. He would have left first, anyway. Matt let go of the tree and leaned against it, wondering what Anna had been doing if Leandro hadn’t been there after all. Leandro had missed the rendezvous. That was it—they would have no way of communicating, no way for him to let her know if something had come up to interfere with their regular meeting.

  Cautiously, Matt approached the church. He mounted the few steps and pushed open the door, already half ajar. The old latch, rusted almost through, hadn’t caught, and the door creaked. It had been the wind. He stepped across the threshold and paused, holding his breath as he waited in the hushed silence for his eyes to adjust to the shadows. The narrow windows, barely wider than slits, let in thin shafts of sunlight that banded the stone floor and solid columns lining the nave. The air, cool after the heat of the afternoon, was redolent of ancient brick and cedar laced with a faint trace of incense. There was no one there.

  It wasn’t much of a place for a lover’s tryst, Matt thought. The nave was empty but for one dusty old bench, angled near a pillar as though someone had started dragging it out and then thought better of it. The altar was bare, the rough granite stripped of any adornment. Behind the altar, around the curved back of the nave, Matt found a gap in the stonework, a low opening with narrow steps leading down into the blackness. The crypt, he thought, or the old original sacristy, but his curiosity ended there, outweighed by a childhood fear of dark, close spaces that had never gone away. And why should it? He was suspicious of adults who claimed to have vanquished all their early terrors.

  Where were the frescoes Rodrigo had told him about? They were nowhere in the nave. Matt leaned in a doorway, expecting it to lead to a chapel but finding that it was the short passage to a small cloister. The overgrown garden, choked with flowers and tall grasses, buzzed with cicadas and grasshoppers. Swallows had nested in the corbels of the graceful arches, supported by slender pillars of flaked and worn granite, and they flitted in and out, ignoring Matt as he wandered along the arcade. He turned the corner and came to a dead halt, astonished at the sight of a small room, separated from the arcade by a low wall and pillars and hidden from view by the overgrown garden. Two pillars in the center supported fan vaults, crisscrossed with narrow stone groins, and along the back wall a row of high windows, open to the sky, let in enough sunlight to give the space a bright warmth. Unlike the church, the chamber was fully furnished. So this is where she goes every day, Matt thought, still stunned at the sight of what lay before him. This was Anna’s secret, her hidden tryst, the place she vanished to when everyone else retired for the afternoon siesta, only her closest servant to keep her company.

  The furniture was plain, not at all as rich as Matt would have expected for a woman of Anna’s refinement and position. A stool, a long table under the windows, a broad shelf to the side over a row of drawers, and a chair. On the shelf there was a rainbow of colors in squat glass jars, next to tall decanters of oil, clear and dusky yellow, and small flasks. He took one holding a colorless liquid and pulled the cork, finding the sweet peppermint smell of oil of lavender. Under the shelf, leaning against the wall, were gleaming white panels of different sizes, blank, their surfaces as smooth and unblemished as the finest polished Carrara marble. Matt looked at the panel lying flat on the bench, blocked so that it was tilted slightly up in the back. Only a part was still bone-white, the rest filled with blue sky, and the darker whiteness of a cloud, and in the center, wings arched in midstroke, the slender form of a swallow.

  On the table sat a row of small bowls, each filled with the bright colors of tempera paint, and a handful of brushes, the hair still wet from use. Matt set down the panel and picked up the sketch that leaned against the wall. Silverpoint on heavy paper, a series of birds flew, the sheet crowded with quick studies and finished details. Anna was no amateur, dabbling in stilted renderings of pleasant bucolic scenes; this was the work of a serious artist. Matt remembered her insistence that he elaborate when the duke had asked about oil paint, her vivid memories as a very young child of a man painting a fresco at her parents’ house.

  Searching the room, Matt discovered a stack of finished panels leaning between the drawers and the wall. He went through them quickly, a glance at each one—angels, allegories, forest scenes, a portrait left unfinished—before he found the two he was looking for. He pulled them out and stood them side by side against the wall on the shelf. Yes. He took the panel from the bench and set it to the right of the others. There, he thought, looking at the three pictures with satisfaction. From left to right, panel to panel, just as it had in his office at the museum, a swallow rose into a clear blue sky.

  chapter 15

  I have come at last to the short day, Matt thought as he walked along the path, his shoes crunching on the gravel. And the long shadow when the hills turn white and the grass fades. Still longing—what? He vainly searched his memory. Casts its spell—no. Still longing—it was no use, empty. Frustrated, he stopped and opened the slim volume in his hand. Still longing stays green. Of course. Long shadow, white hills, fading grass, still longing—stays green. Easy enough to remember. He tried again, reciting it under his breath as he resumed walking, only to halt again as he turned the corner of the topiary hedge, trimmed to represent the animals leaving the ark, two by two. There she was.

  Anna was herself reading, sitting on a stone bench in the shade of the tall poplars that lined the walk. Botticelli might have painted her, dressed in white in the morning light, still golden with the early sun. The soft air was tempered with the rich scent of rosemary and lavender, of peach and lemon from the espaliered trees on the tall brick wall that bordered the garden to the north. Her silk dress, edged at the scalloped neck by a thin gold braid threaded with black and silver, had wide sleeves that were slashed and tied to show the white chemise underneath.

  Matt began walking again, pretending to be engrossed in the book.

  “What are you reading?” Anna asked as he approached. Francesca, sitting on a nearby bench, her needle winking in the sun as she embroidered a square of satin, glanced up.

  “Contessa,” Matt said with a deep bow. “Dante,” he replied, “the great canzoni.” He began reading aloud. “ ‘I have come at last to the short day and the shadows when the hills turn white and the grass fades—’ ”

  “Sad thoughts for a fine summer day,” Anna protested.

  “But such a wonderful poem,” he countered. “ ‘Still longing stays green,’ ” he went on, “ ‘stuck in this hard stone that speaks and hears as if it was a woman.…’ ” His voice trailed off. It had seemed like such a good idea; it was the way things were done. Into the fertile soil of a fine summer morning, watered by the mist of the fountain, accompanied by its sweet music, nourished by the warm rays of a benevolent sun, the seed of poetry should take root and germinate, yielding the tender, vulnerable shoots of a nascent love. And what could be better than the canzoni? The complexity, that was the problem. It definitely sent a mixed message, which was fine for a poem but merely clouded the issue at hand. I should have chosen “Miracolo d’Amore,” he thought, even if I can’t sing. There, at least, the message was clear.

  “You are right, it is a superb work,” Anna agreed. “So much better than that inane song about the miracle of love we’ve been subjected to lately. But being a woman, I always found that line you just read a bit strange,” she added. “Hard stone. Who wants to be compared to hard stone?”

  “A good point,” Matt said. “But I don’t know that he really means a woman. I think he’s talking about winter.�
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  “That’s a northern perspective. Does everything make you think of ice and snow? Does my dress remind you of a snowstorm?”

  Matt was tempted to tell her that now that she mentioned it, her thigh, outlined by the sheer silk, did call to mind a gentle slope under fresh snow. “It makes me think of Fra Angelico,” he said instead.

  “I remind you of a monk?”

  “A painting of his,” he said, realizing as he did that that might make matters worse. But Anna did not seem to take the comment amiss.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “The angel, in one of the cells at San Marco.”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “Why don’t you ask Lorenzo? He should be able to get you in. He has a cell there of his own.”

  “I did ask him. But they’re Dominicans. They mean it when they say no women are allowed.”

  “So if it isn’t winter, then how do you understand Dante’s meaning?”

  “I think he’s describing the human heart.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Matt said.

  “You’re not made of hard stone.”

  “You know, I like that. It makes sense,” Matt said, perusing the poem. “This part here—‘Now when the shadow of the hills is blackest, under beautiful green, this young woman makes it vanish away at last, as if she hid a stone in the grass.’ ”

  “Would you like to sit?” Anna asked.

  “Thank you,” Matt replied, and took a seat on the bench next to her. The scent she was wearing, familiar and not overly sweet, like wild roses or honeysuckle at the edge of a stream, blended with the flowers and the musty scent of the box hedge. He could see the fineness of her hair, could feel how close her leg was to his, could not avoid her eye but was afraid to meet it.

  “What are you reading?” he asked, looking at the thin volume in her hand, bound in marbleized calfskin. “Something more seasonable?”

  Anna opened the book. “ ‘I am a young maiden, and I willingly rejoice and sing in the new season,’ ” she recited.

  “ ‘Thanks to love and my sweet thoughts,’ ” Matt finished the line. “Is that how it goes?”

  “Yes. You know it,” she said.

  “ ‘The Ninth Day,’ ” he replied. “It’s one of my favorite parts. The Decameron was how I learned Tuscan. I just reread it myself. But now I’ve forgotten how the rest of it goes.”

  “ ‘I wander through green meadows gazing at the white and yellow and vermilion flowers, at the roses above their thorns and the white lilies—’ ”

  “What about blue?” he interrupted.

  “Too sad.”

  “Look at them,” Matt said, pointing to the bed of irises across from them. “They’re blue. Do they look sad? They seem pretty happy to me.”

  “That’s the yellow in them.”

  “I yield to a greater authority,” Matt said. “You know irises better than I.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Your compresa.” Matt nodded to the pin that she, like many young men and women, wore on the bosom of her dress as a personal symbol. Anna’s, which he had noticed on the first day he had seen her, was three irises, emerald and azurite blossoms set in gold with silver stems.

  “Three blossoms, each with three petals,” Matt said. “Symbolizing the Holy Trinity. But also the three meanings of the iris: valor, wisdom, and faith.”

  “You know much about it. Are you a gardener?”

  “No. I have neither the time nor the patience. A well-made garden is a work of art.” Matt winced inwardly; had he really said that? It was why he never talked about art with anyone. His ideas, which seemed so natural to him—more a way of seeing things than ideas—inevitably sounded banal and pretentious when given a voice. Anna, who hadn’t replied, evidently thought so, too. He tried to think of something to say to temper the remark.

  “You’re right,” Anna said before he could speak again. “One of the highest forms of art, you might even say, because it combines elements of all the rest.”

  “That’s true,” Matt replied, with a quick glance at her face. Was she teasing him, or did she really mean it? “Like painting, it draws on color and composition.”

  “And like sculpture, volume and space.”

  “And music.”

  “Music?” Anna laughed. “Well, then, why not dance, too? Or poetry? There is sound, I’ll grant you that. The fountain. And the birds, and the breeze. I suppose you could call them musical.”

  “No, I mean it quite literally. Musical ideas, expressed visually. Theme and harmony.”

  “Harmony?”

  Matt thought quickly. Had harmony not been invented yet? He tried to remember, but musical history was one area where his knowledge was hazy at best. Polyphony. Pergolesi. He knew how it happened, sort of, but not when. “Several voices working independently but together at the same time. Most of all, though, what I’m thinking of is the added element of time. Painting is two-dimensional, sculpture, three, and music, four. But in a garden the time unfolds so slowly that you can’t see it as it happens. Only the cumulative effects, afterward.”

  “But painting and sculpture have that element of time in them, too. The ones that work, at any rate. It’s the sense of a before and after, of a moment seized out of time. Of time suspended. It’s so elusive, the hardest thing to capture. And I haven’t described it well at all, I’m afraid.”

  “No, you’ve caught it perfectly.” He wanted to say that she had achieved it, too, in the painting of the swallow that he had seen in her secret studio. “Paintings are why I know flowers,” Matt said. “Their symbolism, I mean. If you don’t know that, you lose so much of what there is to find in paintings—” He almost said paintings of the period, but caught himself in time. “Why is it that of all things they have come to have so much meaning invested in them?”

  “Pure beauty must have some meaning. Otherwise it’s as frightening as pure evil.”

  Pure beauty, Matt thought, aware of Anna sitting so close to him, is a prism, refracting what lies within. It’s that sense of time suspended of which she spoke—of what came before and what lies ahead and everything she is now. “They’re not entirely of this world, that’s true,” Matt said. “They stand somewhere in between—a link, a connection to a larger world. Like the moment between sleeping and waking.”

  The youthful voice of Orlando was heard, echoing from the lower garden. He appeared, hair tousled and cheeks red, and ran over behind Anna, where he wedged himself into the hedge, his green coat blending in with the thick foliage. Cosimo burst through the hedge and slowed to a walk, coming up to Anna and Matt.

  “Good morning, Contessa,” he said.

  “Good morning, Cosimo.”

  “Have you seen—” he began, but stopped as he heard Orlando, laughing, take off on the other side of the hedge. Cosimo followed like a flash, gravel spraying from his feet as he disappeared around the turn.

  “An interesting man, this Matteo O’Brien, who is made up of all the things he is not,” Anna said. “You know a haggard, and yet you don’t hawk. You know the secrets of the Netherlandish painters well enough to say they aren’t secrets, and yet you are not a painter. You know flowers better than my own gardener, and yet you are not yourself a gardener. Is there anything else you are not?”

  “A husband,” Matt replied.

  “And you are not home. Do you have a home?”

  “Who doesn’t have a home?”

  “And where is yours?”

  “An island, far away. It would take a long time to get there.”

  “Tell me what it’s like.”

  Matt considered where to begin. “Well, first of all—”

  “Wait,” Anna cut him off.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a better idea.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “You’re a master of poetry,” Anna said, laying her hand on the book that he had forgotten was still in his hand. “Let me have one of your own po
ems. That’s the best way to learn about a foreign land, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “But I’m not—”

  “A poet, I know. Then if not one of your own, one from your own land.”

  Caught unprepared, Matt searched his mind for a poem. Ironic, he thought, that the only ones he had studied she would know also—Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, or the sonnets of Lorenzo II Magnifico. But from his own land? Only one came to mind, from so long ago that he couldn’t even remember memorizing it.

  “ ‘ ’Twas brillig,’ ” Matt said.

  Anna waited for him to continue.

  “ ‘ ’Twas brillig,’ ” he said, “ ‘and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogoves …’ ” he continued, surprised as he reached the last line that he had remembered it all.

  “What does it mean?” Anna asked.

  “It means … It’s kind of hard to find the words. Some things just can’t be translated.”

  “I like it,” she said. “It’s amusing, in a funny way. Just the sound of it, regardless of what it means. You don’t have a compresa.”

  “I do, I’m just not wearing it,” Matt replied.

  “And what is yours? A … borogove? Was that it?”

  “It’s a swallow.”

  “And what does that symbolize? Are you an authority on birds as well as flowers?”

  “I only know what mine stands for. Love and friendship.”

  “I thought they stood for freedom,” Anna said. “Have you ever—” She paused at the sound of boots crunching on the gravel path.

  Leandro came up to them and bowed to Anna, followed by the slightest nod in Matt’s direction.

  “Leandro,” Anna greeted him. “Any luck?”

  “Luck?” he replied. “It was a hunt, not a game of cards. A fine stag. A clean shot. The dogs finished him off.”

  “Poor Actaeon,” Matt said.

  Anna laughed. Leandro gave Matt a penetrating stare.

  “Have I ever … you were about to ask?” Matt asked.

  “It’s slipped my mind,” Anna replied. “Is it time?” she asked Leandro. “You will excuse us,” she said to Matt, who bowed in response.