Quattrocento Read online

  Matt ran down the broad stairway to the lobby and then out to the steps of the theater. He came to an abrupt halt at the sight of the throngs promenading along the sidewalk. Passing in and out of the pools of lamplight were men wearing powdered wigs and tricornered hats. Dressed in gaily patterned coats and breeches, they escorted women in wide skirts that took up half the narrow sidewalk. The din of shod hooves and iron wheels clattering over cobblestones and the ammonial stench of manure and sweat pressed against him as he walked down the steps of the theater. Which way? Right or left, he had no idea where Anna might have gone.

  Matt fell in with the passing crowd, drifting along as he tried to grasp what had happened. The world he knew, already falling apart, was now completely gone. Kalil was right, he thought; time is not linear. But what comfort was that? He had no control over it. He was still in Prague, but in the eighteenth century, and he had no money and no friends and no idea of how to get where he wanted to be. Thinking might not be the answer, but what was he supposed to do now? Just go with the flow?

  “Gott im Himmel!” a man cried out as Matt, preoccupied with his thoughts, ran into him. Staggering back, the man had his sword half unsheathed.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Matt replied, his hands up.

  “Watch where you go,” the man replied, switching to a heavily accented English.

  “Yes,” Matt agreed, picking up the man’s hat and dusting it off before offering it to him. “My fault entirely.” He bowed, one hand over his chest, the other extended with the hat still in it.

  The man glared at him as he snatched the hat. The woman at his side murmured in his ear, tugging at his arm, and he reluctantly sheathed his sword. He glanced around, sharp eyes taking in the crowd that parted around them, searching for any sign of an accomplice while feeling his pockets, satisfying himself that he still had all his effects. He settled the tricorner on his powdered wig and then stalked off, hand on the woman’s elbow.

  Matt, panicked by a sudden thought, drew into a doorway out of the flow of the pedestrians. Searching through the inside pockets of his own coat, his hand found the wavy spikes of the prism. It was still there. And so was Anna’s compresa. He took it out and looked at it, just to be sure, and then put it back.

  What would Kalil say now? Matt could see him in his chair, lighting a cigarette. “If you want to meet someone, Mr. O’Brien, what do you need? A time and a place.” Matt felt a faint stab of hope. Perhaps this wasn’t such a disaster after all. Yes, time is a variable, and one that he couldn’t control. But the place—those were just coordinates, like a map, and he could set them. And if he did, then time might follow. But where? He could go to Gubbio, and try to retrace his steps to the villa, but he might never find it. Was it even a part of this world? And even if it had survived, the chances were that it would be changed, and he knew that to see it, so far removed from Anna and the world he had known, would be too sad to bear. He had to find a place that was as timeless as the studiolo had been, where he could free himself from the larger world. He was ready, he could see the land that lay beyond, he could taste it and smell it. He felt like the neophyte that Anna had drawn, the man waiting to be baptized in the fresco in the Brancacci chapel. The chapel—

  Of those three, which is the most important? Anna’s voice came back to him. Time was a flower, and the flower was an iris, and it stood for faith. The Brancacci chapel was where they had found each other, when he had taken out her drawings and together, looking at them, they had discovered the world that they shared. Time, and the changes wrought by time, were the varnish on top of the painting that lay beneath, unchanged and unchanging. The outer world, whether the one he had been born in, or this one of eighteenth-century Prague, even the Quattrocento, those were the facets—but the jewel itself was the world he had found with her, and it was there, in the Brancacci chapel.

  Three balls over a shop across the street proclaimed a pawnbroker. Matt dodged between the carriages and entered the store, a space barely large enough for the man in a Turkish fez and a brocade smoking gown ensconced behind the counter, let alone the myriad of odds and ends lining the walls and hanging from the ceiling. Matt eased the ring off his finger, the first time it had left his hand since he had received it from his parents the day of his high school graduation. With reluctance he placed it on the green baize pad in front of the man, who watched him impassively. Before he could reach for it the ring was gone, scooped up by a brown blur.

  “Bring that back,” the man in the fez ordered, looking up at the elaborate swirls on the top of a rococo cabinet.

  A monkey in a short red jacket chattered in reply, waving the ring like a trophy.

  “Now, Farouk!” the man barked. “Have you already forgotten what happened to your brother?”

  An even more animated reply from the tiny primate set the tassel of his own miniature fez swinging wildly.

  The pawnbroker reached for a long stick with a metal tip next to him. Before he could touch it the ring was on the baize, the monkey back complaining from his perch. The pawnbroker picked up the ring, his fat fingers surprisingly quick and nimble, and examined it through a loupe. “Plate,” he announced dismissively, “and look at this stone. Cut glass. Half a pistole. What am I saying? That is too much.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Matt replied, reaching for the ring.

  The man drew it back. “Permit me,” he muttered, making a show of examining it again. “The light,” he said. “So easy to make a mistake, and my eyes are not what they once were.” He sighed. “Six.”

  “Twelve,” Matt replied.

  The man made as to give the ring back but held on as Matt took it, their fingers meeting around the gold coils. “Nine,” the pawnbroker amended. “I’m a fool,” he added with a shrug. “I should know better than to bargain this late in the day. I always regret it.”

  “I need enough to get to Florence,” Matt said.

  “Four, then,” the man cried with pleasure, and reached under the counter. He laid four gold coins on the green baize. “You rob me,” he said as Matt just stared at him, but added five more to the pile. “I am a fool,” he repeated, taking the ring as Matt scooped up the coins, but he was still rubbing it between his fingers as the door closed.

  Matt woke as the coach lumbered to a halt. Getting out and stretching, he could see Florence in the valley below, the last glow of dusk illuminating the white ribbed helmet of the Duomo and turning the Arno into a silver vein in a piece of black marble. When the luggage for the passengers making the penultimate stop at San Miniato had been taken down, Matt and the other travelers climbed back into the creaking Berlin, the large carriage springing under their weight like an ungainly ship. It lurched forward, soon gathering speed down the steep hillside as the horses sensed the end of their journey. The interminable week suddenly seemed as though it had passed in a blur. The coach entered the narrow streets of the city, the thundering of the hooves and wheels almost deafening as it echoed off the tall buildings crowding in on each side. The driver went at a pace that had seemed to be crawling when they had been in the open country but now was at breakneck speed. Driving along the river, Matt could see the lights on the Ponte Vecchio closing in ahead, the tall arches of the Uffizi barely visible in the moonlight to the right.

  “Stop!” Matt cried out, and seized the gold-headed cane from the gaunt gentleman who had been staring at Matt since he had changed coaches for the last leg of the trip two days before, nodding whenever Matt met his gaze but saying nothing. Matt vigorously thumped the roof until the carriage ground to a halt.

  “Che fai?” the driver snapped, but Matt was already gone, racing back to catch the carriage he had just caught a glimpse of as they made the turn onto the Ponte Vecchio. It had been heading in the opposite direction, toward the Pitti Palace, ablaze with lights just up the hillside. The large, open forecourt was crowded with carriages drawing up, letting their passengers off, driving away. Matt joined the crowd making their way up the steps into the
palazzo, faces all hidden behind simple black dominoes or more fanciful masks. In the press at the top of the steps Matt caught sight of the man he had seen in the carriage passing on the bridge. Dressed in a long dark blue coat, he had silver hair falling loose to his shoulders. Klein. As Matt fought his way through the crowd his friend disappeared from sight into the palace, listening to the man who had just greeted him.

  As Matt hurried up the stairs, a hand stopped him. Looking up, he found himself in the grip of an immense landsknecht, one of two soldiers standing guard on each side of the grand stairs, dressed in uniforms with garish striped hose and puffed sleeves, their cuirasses of polished steel almost hidden under flowing white beards. The landsknecht leaned his two-handed sword, as tall as he was, against the wall and drew a domino from the bag at his waist. Wordless, he handed it to Matt before resuming his statuelike pose.

  The ballroom was already packed with guests standing in tight groups or promenading around the grand space, two stories high and running the entire back of the first floor of the palazzo. At one end an orchestra played, the festive strains of the spring movement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons weaving through the buzz of animated conversation that filled the room. Matt wended his way through the crowd, searching for the dark blue coat and silver hair as the violinist, who had been conducting the orchestra, turned to face the audience and launched into the solo. Klein was nowhere in sight, not in the ballroom or the smaller room adjoining it where many of the guests were intent on a spinning roulette wheel and the soft slap of cards dealt by men in Pierrot costumes and blank white masks.

  “Cento luigi,” Matt heard a man in a painted leopard mask say, advancing a pile of gold coins. A spectator, feathered hat under his arm, inhaled a pinch of snuff from the back of his hand, sneezing violently as the card was slipped across the felt. Continuing on, Matt scanned the crowd at the far side of the ballroom. The tall French doors stood open, the long gold curtains barely stirring in the light breeze that did nothing to lessen the almost suffocating heat from the dozens of chandeliers and tall candelabra ranked along the walls that made the room as bright as midday. Matt saw a shadow on one of the balconies, black on black, silver against the dark.

  “A beautiful evening, isn’t it?” Klein asked as Matt came up next to him, his mask dangling from his hand as he leaned against the old marble balustrade.

  “Johannes, what’s going on?” Matt asked, taking off his domino.

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “Do I? I know things are coming apart. Literally.”

  “It’s the nature of things. The second law of thermodynamics states it clearly—disorder always increases.”

  “Thanks,” Matt replied. “That’s a real help.”

  Reaching into the inside of his brocade waistcoat Klein came up with a small coin, which he tossed out into the dark. The gold disk spun in a long arc up and then down, landing with a tiny splash in the still fountain. A faint grin deepened the lines in Klein’s angular face.

  “You know how to look below the surface of a painting,” Klein said, “how to see the things that others find invisible. But that’s only half the equation. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear. Isn’t that how it goes? You must listen the way you look. Music of the spheres or string theory, call it what you will—there is a chord that is the sum of all things. A wave of possibility that each of us collapses into the music of our own world.”

  “The wolf tone. Is that what you mean?”

  “In part. But don’t confuse cause and effect. Musicians talk about centering the note. A note might be in tune, but not really ring. When it’s centered, it comes alive. All the overtones sound, all the harmonics. It becomes a chord, blossoming from a single note, and within a chord can be found an infinity of music, if you change the variable of time. An entire world, all within a single note.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” Klein answered. “Why does it have to mean anything?”

  “You’re not even trying to help me.”

  Klein laughed. “Yes, you’re right. I’m doing everything in my power to stand in your way.”

  “Where’s Anna?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not the answer man. The particular harmony of your world is something you can only find yourself. It’s your chord, not mine. You have to unscroll it.” He smiled. “It seems so long ago, I had almost forgotten what it’s like. Don’t worry, you’ll get there.”

  “How?”

  “I think you know the answer to that, too. What was it that brought you to Florence? It wasn’t me.”

  No, Matt realized, it wasn’t. All the way down from Prague he hadn’t thought of Klein once. He had just happened to catch a glimpse of his friend in a passing carriage, but he had been on his way to the Church of the Carmines. Which is where, he realized, he wanted to be now. There was one thing he did want to know, though, before he went.

  “Why? Why did you do all this?”

  “Me?” Klein asked in surprise. “Look to yourself, not to me. You’re what got you from there to here. You and only you. Each step along the way presented you with a wave of possibility, but it was you that collapsed it into a particular course of action. It was your choice, always.” He sighed. “But you’re right. I did intervene. Why? I have to admit that as a scientist I found the situation immensely appealing. But it was more than that. You might call it the rules of the road: a traveler always lends a helping hand. There was really not much else I could do. Under the circumstances, it was my obligation. My pleasure, too, I might add.”

  “Good-bye,” Matt said, holding out his hand. “And thanks.”

  “Best of luck, my friend.”

  chapter 26

  Standing just inside the door of the church, Matt felt the deep stillness gather and settle into him, the sense of quiet, of timelessness, as familiar as if he had only just been there. But something was different, something essential had changed. The feel of the place was the same, the sense of space and the paving stones underfoot, but the scent was different. The sweet blend of incense and flowers and candle wax was gone, replaced by the sharper smell of smoke and freshly cut stone and raw wood. It was the fire, he remembered, reminding himself of when, not just where, he was. The church had burned only sixteen years ago, in 1771, a conflagration that had almost completely destroyed it. Only the Brancacci chapel had survived, although the paint had been irretrievably altered by the heat. But had it survived?

  Matt made his way in the almost complete darkness to the right aisle and up the long nave, relieved to see that they, at least, were as he remembered them. He stopped at a side altar and took a taper, lighting it from the single tiny flame that glowed before a sorrowing Madonna, and then continued on toward the chapel, hoping against all hope that it was still there. As he approached, the walls of the chapel gradually took form in the wavering light, one of them partly obscured by a rough scaffold.

  Figures appeared, Adam and Eve standing in the Garden. On the wall opposite, they were being driven from it, naked and sobbing, by an angel with a sword. Matt entered the chapel and turned, looking at all the panels one by one, his relief at finding the chapel intact overcome by the warmth of seeing old friends once again. Grouped in two tiers of panels, men were talking, listening, sleeping. He thought of the countless hours he had spent there sketching, studying, sometimes just letting go of all conscious thoughts as the forms and colors and people on the walls had come alive, suffusing him with their warmth. There was Masaccio himself, in the corner, reaching to touch the enthroned Saint Peter. And there, nearby, Alberti and Brunelleschi, architects of the age. Brunelleschi, Matt thought, who on hearing of Masaccio’s untimely death at only twenty-eight had repeated over and over, We have suffered a great loss, we have suffered a great loss. We …

  Matt turned to the wall opposite. There was Botticelli, looking out from the crowd of onlookers at Saint Peter’s crucifixion. And there, at the very edge of the last panel, was Fil
ippino Lippi, a questioning look on his face as though he were asking, Do you like it? Matt held the candle aloft. At the very moment that these figures had come to life, color flowing from Filippino’s brush into the wet plaster of the new chapel, Matt had been with Anna. And there was the neophyte she had drawn, standing with the others on the shore of the river, uncertain and awkward, each waiting for Saint Peter to sprinkle water on his head. He was next in line, arms crossed, shivering, naked but for the smallest loincloth. Matt held the candle up, captivated by the man’s expression. Why did I never notice him before? He has surrendered everything, placed himself at the mercy of an unknown future, but look at him: his face is alive with the radiant wonder of a man who has traveled to the ends of the earth and at last caught sight of the home he had thought he would never find.

  The candle guttered out, the figures on the wall fading as the light died. Matt, exhausted from all he had been through in the past few days, thought of a chapel across the nave. Secluded, it had a broad stone bench along the wall where, unseen, he had often fallen asleep in the long afternoons. It might still be there. He crossed the nave in the dark, seeing it in his mind, finding the single step to the chapel. With a cry of pain he stopped, barking his shin on an unexpected edge of stone.

  Matt limped back to the altar to get a fresh taper so that he could see what he had bumped into. It must be material for the reconstruction of the church, he thought, because the chapel had been empty when he had known it. Returning with a candle he found a family crypt, with a della Robbia glazed Madonna on the end wall and, in front of it, two sarcophagi carved of alabaster. An original della Robbia, he noted, not one of the garish confections churned out later by the workshop. The large caskets had no family name incised, but the one on the left had the head of a lion carved in the stone, watching the church with sightless eyes. The lid on the right was inlaid with an intricate porphyry pattern of sticks and swirls, and above it—