Quattrocento Read online

  “Porcini would be nice,” Matt said. “But what I would give my soul for right now is a strudel.”

  “Ach, a strudel,” Lisl said, pushing the lump of dough with the heel of her hand. “Apples. Mein Gott. Here they have no decent apples.”

  “We have the best apples in the world,” a boy said from the door behind Matt, correcting her with complete self-assurance, as though Lisl had asserted that the earth circled the sun. There was something familiar about him, Matt thought, as the boy came to the table and reached for a wedge of cheese. What could it be? Not his face, although there was in the line of his jaw and his sea green eyes an echo of someone he had once known. He was around ten, Matt guessed, but he had the confident manner of someone who is more often deferred to than deferring.

  “Not now, Orlando, you will ruin your appetite,” Lisl admonished him.

  “But that’s exactly what I want to do,” Orlando replied. “I’m hungry now. What’s the point in waiting? Why is it that eating at certain times that bear no relation to anything as far as I can tell is satisfying your appetite but any other time is ruining it? The cheese is the same, I’m the same, the only difference is where the sun is in the sky, and I don’t think the sun cares.” He glanced down at the smaller boy who stood in his shadow, who nodded vigorously in agreement. “Cosimo, may I offer you some cheese?” Orlando asked.

  The boy paled, caught between the Scylla of loyalty to his friend and the terrifying Charybdis of Lisl. He looked from one to the other, unable to speak.

  “Allow me,” Orlando said with exaggerated grace, like a host refilling a wineglass, and handed Cosimo a piece of cheese that he cut off with a quick stroke of the knife before the boy could find his voice. Cosimo took it with a wary half-glance in Lisl’s direction. Matt saw Rodrigo struggling to keep a straight face. “The guest in my house is hungry,” Orlando announced to Lisl. “It is my duty as a host to see to his needs and wants. Father Bonifacio told me this just yesterday when we read Lucullus. ‘It is of primary importance for the proper host to attend to the needs and wants of his guest before all other obligations, for the way we treat those who depend on our beneficence is the truest reflection of our humanity,’ ” he intoned, mimicking his tutor. He took a piece for himself. “And so it would be equally rude for me not to join him. He is a guest, after all, not some mendicant pilgrim. Let’s go,” he said to Cosimo, hearing the laughter of a party approaching from outside.

  “… depends on what time everyone gets up,” a young woman said, walking into the kitchen, to the man following her. Young and vivacious, with fawn-colored hair pulled back and braided in a French knot, she wore a pale red dress over a white chemise with a scalloped neckline. Embroidered on the shoulder of her blue cape was a golden star with curved tongues of fire. Her only jewelry, aside from the thin gold band encircling her forehead, was a pin on the bosom of her dress, three irises with emerald and azurite blossoms set in gold with silver stems.

  A villa, Matt thought. That’s what Rodrigo had said. We’ll meet the duke on his way to Mantua. But he hadn’t said which villa, or who the owner might be. Matt should have known when he saw Orlando, for now the resemblance was unmistakable. It was Anna, but not as he had imagined her at all. Younger, she had an animation and quickness that was both entrancing and unsettling, too, since it was so different from the pensive quiet he had assumed, from the painting, was her nature. While he had no doubt that was a part of her, he could tell already it was not her usual disposition.

  “Orlando!” she said, as the boys wormed their way by the two women who had also come in. “Father Bonifacio is looking for you.…” But they were already gone. “That boy!” she said, and turned to one of the women. Older than Anna by a few years, and with a quietly observant air, she was wearing a dress of dark blue, unadorned but for a simple gold braid piping around the square bodice and at the hem. She was the only one of the group, Matt had noticed, to have taken in him and Rodrigo.

  “Francesca,” Anna said. “I want Father Bonifacio to see me immediately after dinner. Lisl,” she continued, turning to the cook, “we are going to Virgil’s cave Friday. There will be twenty of us. The duke is quite fond of your trout, is there any chance we might have some? We’ll be leaving midmorning. Very good,” she added, tasting the sauce in one of the pots hanging to the side of the fire. “It needs more honey, don’t you think?”

  Her voice, too, was not as Matt had imagined—vibrant and laced with humor, but with an underlying foundation of authority.

  “At the end,” Lisl replied, chopping the dough into half with a huge knife held in both hands, and then into quarters, and then again. “If I put it in now, it makes it mush. I put it at the end and it makes the best flavor but not mush. If you want I add it now.”

  “Not at all, you know best. Cinnamon, too. I would add more cinnamon. You did well with just one kid,” she said, putting down the spoon.

  “Three, madam.”

  “Three?”

  “Yes. But there are pies with what was left,” she added, pointing with her chin to the row resting on the shelf by the window.

  “Well, there are twenty of us,” Anna said. “It’s like feeding an army.”

  A laugh rumbled from the man who had accompanied her into the kitchen. “It is an army,” he said, his voice like a shovel biting into gravel. He leaned against the table, arms crossed, with the latent power of a strung bow. Powerfully built, and with features as strong as forged metal, he was clothed in black from his short jacket, crossed with belts and a broad dagger hanging at his side, to his tall leather boots. “We’re going hunting tomorrow,” he said to Lisl. “Would you like boar, or stag?”

  The cook shrugged, not looking up from the dough as she shaped it into round loaves. “Either one,” she answered. “See where the arrows land. You dress it, I cook it. But save the organs,” she ordered, sliding one of the loaves onto the wooden paddle. “This time, please do not give them to the dogs.”

  “They expect them.”

  “I expect them.”

  “Then you shall have them,” the man responded with a bow. “We’ll be leaving at the crack of dawn,” he added.

  “That is, if the crack of dawn is loud enough to wake the dead,” Anna said. “The sleep of the just is nothing compared to that of the just in bed, and your party has a habit of keeping the stars company.”

  “We’ll be away at daybreak,” the man repeated to Lisl.

  “Yes, Your Excellence,” the cook replied, her precise Germanic inflection masking the tartness of her words.

  “Master Rodrigo,” Anna said. Matt tensed as she turned in his direction, but her eyes stopped just short of him, coming to rest on his escort. “You don’t have much to say. That’s not like you.”

  “Contessa,” he replied, with a deep bow. “The mere thought of daybreak has rendered me speechless.”

  “So you will not be joining the hunt?”

  “It would not be a good idea,” he replied. “Keeping in mind Saint Augustine’s dictum that we are what we eat, I must admit that I am as much quarry as hunter.”

  Anna shifted her gaze to Matt. This, he thought, was exactly as he imagined, but even more so; eyes of deep green like sunlight filtering through the stillness of a forest. I am a mountain lion, and I beg for mercy—Ginevra de’ Benci would know her, he realized; they weren’t that far from Florence. They might be friends.

  “Madama la Contessa Amoretti de Cavalcaselle,” Rodrigo announced. “Matteo O’Brien,” he added, hand on Matt’s shoulder. “He made the journey with me from Gubbio.”

  Returning Anna’s steady gaze, Matt felt Rodrigo’s hand, still on his shoulder, push him. Remembering himself, he bowed, sweeping his hand before him just as Rodrigo had shown him.

  “Leandro Castellano da Montefeltro,” Rodrigo said.

  The man, still leaning against the table, bowed slightly in response to Matt. “From Ireland?” he asked.

  “No,” Matt replied. And who are you? he wondered.
Da Montefeltro; that meant he was a member of the duke’s immediate family. The duke had two sons who had survived to manhood, Matt knew—one legitimate, named Guidobaldo, who would succeed his father as duke but would never achieve the same success as a condottiere. The older son, Antonio, a bastard, died fighting in the service of a neighboring state. But Leandro? The name was new to him.

  “We must go,” Anna said to Leandro. “If the count’s meal is ready, we shall take it with us,” she said to Lisl, who deftly ladled soup into a tureen, which she then covered and put on a tray with some bread.

  “Antonio,” she called out, starting the boy like an ungainly rabbit from the shadows where he had retreated when Anna and her party had come in. He took the tray and followed them out the door.

  “Lisl, we must leave you, too,” Rodrigo said.

  “I am heartbroken.”

  “Take solace, then, Liebchen—it’s only temporary. We’re here until the duke moves on, like the invisible finger writing on the wall: ‘Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.’ ”

  “A movable feast,” Lisl said.

  “Feast or famine, such is the way of the world; and all is famine, my dear, when compared to this oasis of plentitude and succor. Let’s go find our room and get settled,” he said to Matt. “Dinner is soon enough.”

  “So that’s Anna,” Matt said, almost to himself, as they left the kitchen.

  “The contessa?” Rodrigo asked. “How did you know her name?”

  “You must have told me,” Matt replied, flustered to discover that Anna was her real name.

  “Did I?” Rodrigo asked. “I don’t remember— Not that one!” he yelled to the servants who were starting to unload the last of the horses they had brought with them from Gubbio, a massive gray dray horse with a single large oaken box on his back.

  “Give me a hand with this,” he said to Matt, as he went to the horse.

  “Did Saint Augustine really say that?” Matt asked. “You are what you eat?”

  “He most certainly did,” Rodrigo replied, working free the tongue of one of the heavy straps securing the box.

  “Unfortunately it was lost, or perhaps just never written down. It’s a shame, really. So little of what is said survives in recorded history. Even by someone as monumentally important as Saint Augustine.”

  “Then how do you know he actually said it?”

  “It’s right there, in everything else he said. Ready?” he asked, and then together they lifted the box free and set it on the cobblestones next to the wall. “There,” Rodrigo said with relief. Matt wondered again what could be inside the box to warrant such care. Rodrigo, who had encouraged his questions about everything under the sun, and had kept up a steady commentary about the things Matt hadn’t thought to ask about, had cut him off abruptly when he had shown curiosity in the stoutly built box, crossed with leather straps and brass studs. The box might have contained gold for all the care that had been taken with it on the trip. Rodrigo, allowing no one to handle the box without his supervision, had set an armed guard to watch over it every moment they weren’t on the road. It couldn’t be bullion, though, Matt thought; a box that large filled with gold would have been too heavy to move. He picked up his bag and walked with Rodrigo into the interior courtyard of the villa.

  chapter 10

  The house was quiet, the morning light just beginning to warm the shadows of the halls, tiled in cool terrazzo. Matt leaned on the windowsill of the stairs down to the second floor, enjoying the morning air. The hunting party was already in the valley below, setting off through one of the fields and leaving a wake of bent wheat like a fleet of tiny ships crossing the yet-to-be discovered Sargasso Sea. Rodrigo was not with them; he was still asleep in the bed Matt had fallen into early the night before. Exhausted by the unaccustomed exercise and fresh air, Matt had slept soundly with only Rodrigo as company, a welcome change from the inns where as many as six might pile in together. The bed, blissfully, was free of the fleas and bedbugs that had so tormented him the first week, leaving him sleepless as well as bone-weary and sore from the unaccustomed exertion of riding a horse day in and day out.

  Matt, curious as to the extent and layout of the complex of buildings that surrounded the villa, decided to explore. Rodrigo had told him before he fell asleep that the first meal of the day was after the morning service. The villa was built around an internal courtyard, with the main living areas on the second floor. Their room was on the third floor, with a tiny window that boded sleepless nights if the weather turned sultry. Small as it was, though, at least it was not on the even more cramped top floor, under the roof with the servants.

  Matt passed the dining hall, quiet and dark, where the night before he had sat unnoticed at the foot of a table at the end of the long, high-ceilinged room. Anna, whose laugh he could occasionally pick out over the buzz of conversation and the music from the gallery, where two lutenists kept up a lively succession of dances and frottole, had sat at the head table between the duke and Leandro. That there was something going on between Anna and this Leandro, Matt thought, was made more obvious by the transparent way they tried to conceal it. Listening intently to the duke, her back to Leandro, Anna inclined her head very slightly when he leaned over and, not looking at her, made a very brief comment. Did they think that everyone was so oblivious as not to notice?

  “He’s the duke’s natural son,” Rodrigo said.

  “Who?” Matt asked, nettled that Rodrigo had seen through the air of indifference he had assumed. Until he knew more he thought it only prudent to conceal any interest he might have in Anna.

  The sharp lines radiating from the corners of Rodrigo’s eyes deepened with amusement. “Leandro. You might try to be a bit more discreet,” he added. “I don’t know that he would find your attention entirely flattering. He’s the kind of man who thinks with his sword, and he doesn’t allow himself or others the luxury of a second thought.”

  “My attention was on the duke,” Matt protested. “He’s famous.”

  “Ah,” Rodrigo replied, with a noncommittal nod.

  “A pretty tune,” Matt commented.

  “By Tromboncino. One of his charming little barzallettes. You know it?”

  “No, this is the first I’ve heard it.”

  “It won’t be the last,” Rodrigo said. “It’s all you hear these days. Which raises a most interesting question. How is it that mediocrity is often elevated to the same level of acclaim as a work of true excellence? ‘Oh heaven or fortune, treat me well or badly as you choose.’ That’s a far cry from Dante, but people listen to it over and over. They even quote it with the same heartfelt conviction that they do the great canzoni, and the tears that come to their eyes are every bit as salty and wet. The corrupted scansion, the contrived rhyme—piace, audace, capace—the threadbare metaphors. ‘Fleeing the wounds of love.’ It’s true that he did kill his wife when he discovered she was unfaithful, so one must concede that he knows whereof he speaks, but unfortunately veracity is not an ingredient called for in the recipe of art. It doesn’t make the music any better or the poetry any finer. But look at them, they love it. Like love, it’s the sentiment aroused and not the thing itself that matters.”

  “Not everything has to be a work of genius,” Matt replied.

  “Of course not. I’m not talking about the work but the response it engenders. Let’s consider a different emotion, one just as strong as love but more often true: fear. Blind terror. The most beautiful sword or the crudest ax will elicit the same response if wielded with similar force. Or consider a passion more consuming than love, one that banishes fear. Intoxication. No matter how good or bad the wine the effect is the same.”

  The servants leaned over their shoulders, taking the large squares of bread, dripping with fragrant gravy, that had served as plates for the stew and putting them on platters for the dogs and beggars outside to fight over. They placed a glazed bowl brimming with scented water and rose petals before each of the guests.

  “Reduce the c
ause still further, to the purely physical,” Rodrigo continued, rinsing his fingers in the bowl. “Heat. Whether the stimulus is a fire, or the sun, or making love, or just being in love, the effect is the same: we feel warmth. From the basest urge to the most noble sentiments, it makes no difference. The stimulus may vary but the response is the same. Even beauty.”

  “Not beauty,” Matt said, looking away from Anna, who was smiling as she listened to the duke tell her a story. “Exquisite beauty has no equal.”

  “You are most certainly right,” Rodrigo said. “And said exquisitely well. I commend you. No equal indeed. Singular, unique, nonpareil. But I must ask—exquisite beauty by whose designation? Every man awards his own golden apple. Your rapture at a rare Greek statue is identical to that of a farmer beholding his prize pig. Every baby looks up and sees a beautiful mother. Just as every new husband sees the most beautiful woman alive and every weary traveler returns to the sweetest home on earth. We like to think that we grow more refined, increasing our ability to distinguish excellence in all things, but the truth is much more prosaic. We just get bored. The stimulus is most sharp at its inception. It fades with time and repetition. We don’t grow more refined, our senses just get dulled. Good or bad, you’re sated, and you move on to something else.”

  Rodrigo took a bunch of grapes from the large platter of fruit in front of them. “The most fortunate man, to my mind, is the least refined. His enjoyment is the most universal. And ecumenical. In fact, one might say he is the most universally refined, for he is open to all experiences equally.”

  “Or closed.”

  “Have some,” Rodrigo said to Matt, offering him a bowl of what looked like bright yellow gumdrops before taking a handful himself. “The refinement of taste, as we call it, is a narrowing of our perspective, not a widening. The world shrinks as you experience it. While the world of what we know is perhaps enlarged slightly, the wider world of the unknown is vastly reduced. That which you have yet to know is an undiscovered continent, an Africa of the imagination; those things once experienced, no matter how exotic, are taken from the realm of the imagined and become mundane. Wonder is the horizon, not experience; and knowledge is the death of wonder. Not for you?” he added, watching Matt’s tentative reaction as he chewed.