Chapter Thirty-One
The fox statues outside Casa delle Volpi fill me with a familiar sinking feeling.
But the silence after I knock? That’s far worse.
I rap my knuckles again and wait, a high anxious whine in my head.
The satchel with my pathetically few things bites into my shoulder, heavier than it has any right to feel.
Giorgio caught up with me before I crossed the Arno River, his eyes wide like was seeing a ghost. Carrying the bag feels like lugging home all of my failures and disappointments.
Every time I close my eyes, Leonardo’s pale, shocked face is there.
Knowing I’ve hurt him weighs on me heaviest of all.
The door cracks open.
“Virgil!” Giovannia hisses. “We expected you here an hour ago.”
They… did? For one horrible moment, I fear Verrocchio has met with my mother and discussed what an utter disappointment I’ve been, but no, he wouldn’t. Verrocchio isn’t one of my old tutors who tattled to Father every time I misspelled the Roman emperor Titus as “tits.”
“Right. Where should I go?”
She points me to the dining room.
A man wearing the insignia of the Medici bank sits at the table’s head, Mamma off to the side. Her face is huge with concern, moon-pale, almost frantic. When she sees me, she gasps, a beringed hand fluttering to her bodice. “I thought you couldn’t make it.”
“So did I.” I sit down in the chair heading the opposite end of the table. Spread my legs wide. Seeing him in my father’s chair stirs the dregs of my anger. This banker doesn’t get to intimidate my mother just because he’s a man. It’s not his house; it’s ours. “Where did you two leave off?”
Mamma gulps. The banker doesn’t notice—he’s busy rearranging his papers. “We were discussing your mother’s line of credit and the second mortgage on the house. If she cannot clear her account with us by the end of the month, I’m afraid this fine house will belong to the bank.”
The words jumble in my head. They don’t make sense, but the sickening lurch in my gut tells me what I already know.
My family is losing their home in weeks.
And I just lost my job.
Numbness trickles from the tips of my fingers to my toes. I try to speak—to make my mouth move and form words and thoughts—but I can’t.
We’re going to lose everything.
When the banker leaves, Mamma closes the doors to the dining room before turning to me, her face so pale, it glows in the darkness. She hasn’t even lit candles for this, as if the expense was too much. “I can explain.”
“Can you?” She flinches from the gravel in my voice, and I clear my throat, angry with her even as I’m angry with myself for frightening her. I won’t be my father. Mamma is an adult, much as the world pretends women are children. She must have her reasons for the debt. I’m going to listen to them.
“I know you’ve worked your culo off for this place. For us.” Her hands twist together. “But it wasn’t enough. Giovannia needs a dowry, and I didn’t want to ask for more money when I knew you couldn’t do it. Men don’t care about marriage the way women do. You don’t need it.”
Actually, I care a great deal about my little sister being married off to a toothless man five times her age. “I thought we agreed Giovannia wouldn’t marry this year?”
Mamma drags a hand down her face, smearing her cosmetics.
She gestures to the unlit room, the moth-eaten drapes.
“What other choice do we have? Do you want them homeless? No man worthy of Giovannia would look at her twice if he knew how far her family had fallen. A boy can forge his own future, but a girl can’t. ”
The quiet despair in her voice ices under my ribs.
Women aren’t allowed to apprentice in the trades the way men are.
If they can’t marry, they’re forced to work as laborers.
My sisters would be at the mercy of men who looked down on them, men who thought they were only there for their own entertainment.
Men who might be worse than the brother who can’t protect them or an indifferent husband.
I didn’t want to agree with Mamma months ago. I still don’t. But I understand now that I simply didn’t want to hear what she had to say.
Ever since Niccolo disappeared, we’ve been slowly sliding off a cliff, scrambling for purchase on the way down, but now the abyss yawns deep and horrible beneath our feet, and there’s nothing we can do to stop the fall.
Mamma thrusts her hand under my nose. Pops the giant sapphire out of her ring.
I catch it before it falls, only to gasp when I crush it.
“Plaster and stone dust. I’ve been replacing all my gems one at a time.
I’ll smelt the gold next, but ’tis harder to hide what I’m doing from the girls.
” She gestures to the garden going rogue outside the windows.
Not the roses she loves, but beans, fat, shiny pods hanging from their vines.
“I tore out the flowers for food. Your sisters never come to this side of the house.”
I see them outside now, skirts butterfly bright against the late-spring green. Elisabetta whacks a book from Giovannia’s hand with a sword, screaming with glee. I plant my hands on the windowsill, knuckles white.
Mamma’s done everything she could to protect them—protect me—and it’s still not enough.
I take my mother’s hand, rubbing my finger over her ring’s empty setting. This whole time, I thought she was coldhearted and calculating for the wrong reasons. My ribs squeeze at how badly I’ve misjudged her.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve helped.” Taken on more commissions. Left Verrocchio’s workshop for another job, a better-paying one.
Mamma’s eyes fill with tears. There are more lines around them than I’ve ever seen.
How long has the stress of all this hollowed her out?
“I didn’t want you to blame yourself. It’s not your fault your father made a bad deal and your brother disappeared.
You deserved to have a chance to live the life you wanted. ”
Not your fault. Not your fault. The words ricochet in my empty chest. At some point, I knew this, but I forgot after Niccolo disappeared. The responsibility and blame became one, a burden too big to carry alone, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
I wrap my mother in a hug, a crushing one that says all the tender things I can’t put into words without weeping. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for giving me a chance.
She lets out a shaky breath. She feels like a reed under her dress, too thin and brittle. Have I always been this much taller than her? “If Giovannia is engaged before the month is over… if I rent out some of the other rooms, I think we’ll be all right.”
I don’t correct her. She needs something to believe in, even if it’s wrong. The Medici bank will always have their gilded hands around our necks. They’ve been trying to take our house for years.
Niccolo can fix this. I’ll get him back. I cling to the hope, stubborn as dried glue. Getting fired was a good thing. I lock up the memory of a freckled face collapsed in despair in a place where it can’t haunt me anymore. I had to hurt him. He wouldn’t have let me go otherwise.
“The girls don’t know?” I say.
“Not Elisabetta, but Giovannia…” Mamma doesn’t need to finish the statement. My sister is too clever by half.
I nod and squeeze her one last time. “I need to see her.”
Mamma darts her thumbs under her eyes, so quick, I almost miss it. “The garden wall needs fixing. I hate to ask, but…”
I bend down and kiss her forehead. Normally a request like this would rankle my pride. Earn a snippy comment about how working with statues is nothing like mortaring stone, and I’m a painter, anyway.
But this time I don’t. “We’ll be all right.”
Giovannia is already perched on the crumbling wall outside. “You seemed surprised to see the banker.”
Oh, she absolutely knows something’s wrong. “What have you been doing lately? Working on becoming Florence’s finest poetess, I hope?”
She rolls a stone under her slipper. Sends it flying with her toe. “No. I’ve been negotiating my own marriage. While you’re here, I’d like you to sign the betrothal papers.”
I rake through my curls, sighing. “I won’t.”
She makes a frustrated noise. “You will! I’m not daft. If I marry, then Elisabetta can have a chance to live the life she wants.”
It feels like some sort of Biblical atrocity, the kind Verrocchio’s workshop is always painting to terrify people into behaving.
Each family member sacrificing themselves so the next one can do better, have more.
I’ve been stuck in the cycle long enough to know that Giovannia’s sacrifice isn’t going to work.
“I won’t let you do this.”
Giovannia’s eyes flash. “I don’t care if I’m married to an ancient man if he leaves me alone to write. You got to choose your own path, Virgil. Or am I not allowed the same courtesy because I’m a girl?”
No! I want to shout. You’re not allowed to do this because you’re my little sister, and I know that you deserve better.
“Be honest. Does this plan truly make you happy?”
Her stare hardens into a stony mask I know all too well: the same one I’ve worn every day for the past two years. “Someone needs to make sure this family survives.”
And that someone hasn’t been you.
The unspoken words are a chisel to my chest, the single too-strong hit to an incomplete statue that makes the entire thing crumble. I blink, the garden’s colors smearing. “I’ve been trying.”
Giovannia claps a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Her voice is ages younger, the little girl who cowered against my side even as she leaned breathlessly forward at the scary parts in Dante’s Inferno.
“I know you’re doing your best. We all do.
It’s not your fault the bank is greedy and dreadful. I just want my brother back.”
Soon, I think. I’ll bring him back soon; I promise. “I know. I miss him too.”
She punches my shoulder. “I’m not talking about Niccolo. I’m talking about you!”
“Me?”
“Yes, you! When Niccolo disappeared, you became a ghost.” She wipes her own tears away with an angry, defiant gesture. “Sometimes it feels like I lost two brothers.”
Slowly, slow enough that she can back away if she wants to, I gather my sister into a hug. She lets me, fists curling against my chest. I didn’t know she was lonely like me.
“I’m right here. I’ve always been here for you. I’m sorry you didn’t know that.”
Her head notches into the divot between my neck and shoulder. “I know.”
We have a nice, tender moment that lasts maybe half a second before she wriggles away, her look sharpening. “Now tell me what you’re really doing home.”
Curse those terrifying gears of intelligence in her skull! I’ve been away so long, I forgot she’s smarter than me. I shift my weight from foot to foot, unsure how much to say.
Her eyes narrow. “Don’t you dare try to lie—I’ll know.”
She’s right. She’s absolutely right, but there’s still an anxious, scraping feeling inside me. If I tell Giovannia about Niccolo, I can’t take it back. If I let her into the parts of my life I’ve tried my hardest to keep walled off, there’s no asking her to leave.
But aren’t my walls already crumbling?
Lupa crashed through the stones, and then Leonardo came creeping in after her, both of them like the horrible cats I couldn’t keep from my attic. I didn’t want them there, but after they insisted on it… I didn’t want them to go.
I thought my distance kept my sisters safe, but it’s hurt them instead. I don’t want Giovannia to feel like she’s lost me before I’m gone.
My throat squeezes around the impossible truth. “What if I told you Niccolo is alive, but doesn’t remember a thing about us?”
She rears back, eyes going huge. “I’d say… it sounds impossible. A bargain?”
“Something worse, I fear.” I’m not ready to share the truth about his missing soul and the demons. I don’t want to put her in danger.
Elisabetta’s voice rings through the garden, startlingly close. “Virgil, Giovannia! Where are you?”
Merda, she can’t know the truth. I pull Giovannia closer, our brows near touching. “He’s pretending to be a man named Soderini. Do you know anything about the family?” I’ve been out of the wealthy circles of Florence for ages, but my sister hasn’t.
Giovannia drags her thumb across her bottom lip. “The family has been in power for ages and hate the Medici. The patriarch used to vote against Piero’s wishes just to spite him.”
“Vote against what?”
Giovannia frowns, her expression askance, as if I should know this already. “The priori have suggested Florence do away with elections for the Gonfaloniere of Justice. Soderini never let it pass.”
“Which means…?”
Giovannia mashes a hand over her brow and groans. “I cannot believe that you are a voting member of this city and don’t—”
“Yes, yes, we all know you’re the smart one, and it’s entirely unfair. Take pity on your helpless sot of a brother, will you?”
“The Medici don’t want a republic: They want to rule Florence outright.”
My fingernails drag along my thighs, the memory of Soderini’s blood drying on my skin a phantom itch.
The Medici murdered their most outspoken enemy and replaced him with Niccolo. I have an awful, certain feeling the new head of the Soderini family will be much more amenable to allowing the Medici to take over the city than the old one.
“The Medici are keeping Niccolo close. I need to get into their wedding next week to talk to him. Can you help me?”
Giovannia’s breathless smile takes a moment to find its feet, and when it does, the look is worth more than all the gold in the city’s cathedrals. “Depends, dear brother. How do you feel about thievery?”