Chapter Three
I stand outside my family home and feel like a stranger.
Casa delle Volpi looks no different from any other of the merchants’ houses save for the pair of marble foxes bracketing the front stairs. I place my hand on one of their heads, thumb brushing the familiar chip in its ear.
Verrocchio gave everyone the week off. I’m not the only artist who’s missing his magic, and he saw no point asking people to work when it would take twice as long and be half as good.
Most of the other apprentices have gone to visit family for the unexpected holiday—even poor Giorgio found someone to take him to his nonna’s house—but I stayed behind, until it was time for me to visit the bank.
“Fret not,” Verrocchio said as I left. “We’ll get a new angel soon, and then we’ll all redo our bargains, and everything will go back the way it was.”
When I hear the soft sounds of life from inside Casa delle Volpi, I sigh and trudge to the door. The sooner I go in, the sooner the nerves twisting in my belly will disappear.
“My boy.” I’m greeted by my mother’s camphor-scented embrace. Her too-powerful perfume hits me like a gut punch. I hug her back and breathe through my mouth.
“Hi, Mamma.”
She holds me out at arm’s length, frowning at the paint on my skin. “Could you not have scrubbed this off before you came?”
I flex my stained fingers. “Still worried about what the neighbors think?”
She scoffs and lets me go. One son disappearing was bad enough—but then the one left is an artist?
Mamma has never gotten over the scandal of it, as if I chose my career on purpose to annoy her.
As if we both don’t know the real reason why a wealthy merchant’s son left home at thirteen for a tradesman’s apprenticeship across the river.
Mamma spots my gift. “What’s that?”
“I stopped by the flower stall on the Ponte Vecchio.”
One of her dark eyebrows rises. “And you bought stinging nettles?”
Feeling nettle-stung myself, I fling the plants onto a sideboard.
In truth, they were the only thing I could afford, and it felt rude to show up empty-handed.
“I thought the cook could use them. Elisabetta likes nettles.” I hate how defensive I sound.
Coming home always turns me into the worst version of myself.
Perhaps I should step out and come back in.
Start on a fresh page like this visit is a sketch I’ve already botched beyond saving.
Mamma’s smile glitters. “Of course. How practical. I have something for you, as well.”
She leaves me under the foyer’s three monstrous, overbearing portraits, all of them Niccolo Pitti, because either my father was cursed by a primordial deity on a trading trip to name all his sons after himself, or because nine months was somehow not enough time for him to come up with another boy’s name.
My father’s portrait is the biggest: a glaring, gray-bearded man. He was old before he married my mother and older still when I was born. He died when I was fourteen.
The second portrait is my brother, Niccolo. My sight goes fuzzy when it passes over it.
Last, and smallest, is the portrait of me.
I was in the throes of puberty when it was painted, and dear God, does it show.
My face is entirely round, a burst of pimples scattered across my forehead that the painter tried and failed to transform into charming freckles.
I’d begged Father not to make me sit for him.
I wasn’t daft. I knew what the girls were giggling about when I was forced to dance with them.
I didn’t want a record of the ugliest, most insecure period of my life hanging where everyone could see it.
Father had laughed and said it was his house and he could do as he pleased with it.
I’ve since grown into my looks, but I’ve never been able to fill the part of me he hollowed out.
Mamma returns in swirl of crimson brocade. “Your father’s solicitor stopped by. He’s done up the papers for you.”
I whip toward her with a skeptical, narrow-eyed look. “What papers?”
Mamma’s eyebrows lift. “Shall I read them to you?”
The implication that I’ll take forever to read them myself—even though it’s true—stings worse than the nettles.
I take the stack and slowly leaf through them until three things become clear.
The word “marriage,” Giovannia’s name, and a rich old man I vaguely remember nodding off at my father’s parties.
“An ancient man wants to make a bride of my baby sister? Absolutely not!”
“She’s fifteen. Hardly a child anymore. It gets her out of the house and cuts our expenses.”
“Over my rotting corpse it does.”
“Niccolo, you’re nearly eighteen. You’re the only man in the family. You’ve had your time to play at being an artist, and now it’s time for you to be head of this household. It’s what you were born to do.”
Merda, not this again. “Don’t call me that.” I mean it to be a growl, but the words are a whisper. “It’s Virgil.”
We’ve been over this a dozen times, but she still doesn’t get it.
None of father’s old business associates want to work with a boy who can barely read and do his sums. I’ve asked them.
A job working with my hands is the best I can do, and it wouldn’t be an issue if Father hadn’t magnificently fucked us all over.
Before he died, my father had struck a deal with the Medici bank. Mortgaged Casa delle Volpi to pay for his final trading voyage, promising them a handsome cut of the profits. He was so confident it would work, even though other merchants had told him there were rumors of bandits in the mountains.
And when it didn’t?
The Medici bank was more than happy to come collecting.
They demanded the first payment the day after Father’s burial, colder and less forgiving than winter’s first frost. It was grueling, but when Niccolo had still been around, when he was running what was left of the family business, we could make the payments.
Since he’s been gone? I’m barely keeping us afloat.
There’s a series of frantic thuds overhead before my two younger sisters burst from the staircase. They tackle me from either side, shrieking. “You’re back!”
I laugh and hug them. At fifteen, Giovannia looks more like a young woman than a girl, and Elisabetta is going through her own mortifying adolescent journey.
And, Madonna santa, has she gotten taller?
Again? The hem of her dress barely goes past her knees.
“You need a trip to the tailor,” I say, tapping her on the nose.
Elisabetta scrunches her face and pulls away, revealing my brother’s old practice sword in one hand. “Mamma has already bought me dresses, but I don’t like them!” She spins away, thwacking a chair with the flat of her blade. “No one’s going to slay Cerberus in a dress!”
I swallow and try to keep my voice light, teasing. “Fighting is no pastime for young ladies.” What would the neighbors think? Two of Lucrezia Pitti’s children have already caused enough scandal. There doesn’t need to be a third.
Elisabetta stops, cheeks going pink with anger. Giovannia tugs her arm before a fight can break out. “Mamma also bought us more poetry. Let’s show Virgil, shall we?”
New dresses? New books? I bite the inside of my cheeks, feeling the expenses pile up like bricks.
“You were like that too, once,” Mamma chides when the girls disappear. “Be more patient with them.”
Niccolo would be.
Mamma is always making comments like this, not comparing me outright to Niccolo, but letting the words hang unsaid like rotting figs.
The worst thing is that she’s right. Niccolo would know what to do with Giovannia and Elisabetta, how to care for them and give them room to grow.
The panic simmering in my stomach billows to a boil.
The first fall he was gone, I had dreams that he came back whole and unharmed.
Sometimes he was married to a Napoletano princess.
Sometimes he’d return with ink-stained fingers, a famous poet from the royal Valois court of France.
In my dreams, he clasped my face and kissed my brow.
I imagined him saying, You were right, Virgil.
But I always woke up before he could say the words. Even dream Niccolo knew the truth that I would never, ever share with anyone.
It’s my fault Niccolo is gone.
Mamma’s cold fingers are a jolt on my skin. For the first time, she appears concerned for me. “You could look for Niccolo again—”
I laugh bitterly, because of course she’d suggest that. Niccolo was as good at doing the right thing as I am at doing the wrong thing. If he were here, he’d find some handsome, age-appropriate boy for Giovannia to marry who just happened to be a minor prince.
But he’s not here. He’s either dead, or he’s not coming home, and Mamma refuses to believe it.
“We all wish it was me missing and not Niccolo,” I say. Mamma flinches like I’ve stabbed her with her own sewing needle. “But unfortunately, you’re stuck with me, and I’m not marrying my sister off to a lecherous old geezer so she can be miserable like you were with Father!”
Mamma’s mouth flops open like a dead fish’s.
Behind us, a throat clears.
I turn around, and guilt runs me over like a wagon.
My sisters stand in the parlor carrying shiny new books. I can tell from how Elisabetta clutches Giovannia’s elbow that they overheard all sorts of things they weren’t supposed to hear. Giovannia crosses her arms. “Sorry, who’s getting married off to a gross old man?”
I choke and flush from head to toe.
Luckily, I’m spared from having to explain anything by a knock at the door.
Mamma nods curtly to me like I’m one of her long-dismissed footmen.
I open the door to a courier boy, his light brown cheeks pink with cold.
“I bear a message, signore! Master Verrocchio bids you to return to the workshop. The new angel is arriving, and he requests your presence for the blessing.”
Gesù Cristo, about time. The news stops up the cracks in my composure, lets me breathe fully for the first time since I saw the stone foxes.
Elisabetta’s shoulders slump. “There’s no time for poetry, then?”
“A pity, isn’t it?” Mamma crumples up the betrothal papers with a shaking hand. Without my signature, they’re useless to her.
My smile is brittle. “Perhaps next time, cara. Quick visit. More of an errand, really. See you soon?” Ignoring Elisabetta’s shrieks of protest, I kiss her on the cheek.
“You’ll come back next week?” she begs, her eyes two little moons.
Behind her, Giovannia turns away, already knowing my answer.
I try not to let it cut me. How the way I disappoint her is becoming so familiar, she knows precisely how I’ll let her down before it happens.
I smile at Elisabetta instead, infusing the expression with all the aching, terrible warmth I can never quite put into words. “We’ll see, all right?”
Hopefully, next week I’ll have new bargain marks racing across my skin, and I’ll be too busy to do anything other than work.
I’ll be the breadwinner my family needs and not the brother they want.
’Tis the best I can do.