Chapter Fifty-Nine
Casa delle Volpi is utter chaos the day Niccolo and I sit for our portraits.
Footmen race up and down the stairs, arranging the flowers and paintings and candelabras just so. Mamma follows them with her list, cheeks rouged with excitement.
One of the first things Niccolo decided to do when he came home was redo every room in the place, and to my shock, Mamma committed to the plan like a knight on a crusade.
Every reminder of Niccolo’s absence, of Father’s thunderous, commanding ghost, has been replaced with something different, something that feels more like us.
The house is unrecognizable from the building I grew up in. It’s almost starting to feel like home.
The last things to change are the three horrible portraits in the foyer. Father’s will be brought to Mamma’s parlor, and as much as I tried to dissuade him, Niccolo insisted that mine needed to hang next to his, right there where everyone can see it.
“I might be head of the household, but we do things together. I always want you at my side.”
After years apart, I didn’t want to argue with him anymore, so I just smiled and said yes.
On one condition.
A very specific condition.
I hold my breath when the footman announces the arrival of the painter.
He steps inside and stops beneath the three portraits. He frowns at the name placards—likely thinking to himself, Surely there’s been a mistake. There couldn’t be three Niccolo Pittis in the same house, could there?
He stares the longest at mine, eyes getting wider and wider. He tears away with a snort, clapping a hand over his mouth, but helpless giggles spill out the side anyway.
“See something interesting?” I ask.
The artist spins around. His rust-gold hair is slightly shorter now, falling around his face in soft, big waves. My fingers flex, wanting to know how it feels pulling my fingers through it.
Instead I cross my arms and stuff my hands deep in my armpits. I tip my head toward the deeply unfortunate likeness of my younger self. “My deceased father’s doing. I think you can see why my brother and I have need of you.”
His dark eyes snag on the pearl hanging from my earlobe before slowly dragging back to my face. He smiles, slowly, widely. As if he’s not sure why, but he’ll go along with it. “Someone summon the magistrate. I’d like to report a crime against a child.”
I laugh and step closer. He’s the same, but different.
There’s a new white scar bisecting the smallest finger of his left hand.
One knuckle is stained with ultramarine paint.
I wonder if the boys still have a bet going on how many Virgin Mary commissions Verrocchio will get before the end of the year.
I want to know if he still skips the morning exercises, if he ever finds a half-drawn face among the piles and piles of sketches in his disaster of a room that makes his heart stop for no reason.
“Welcome, Leonardo da Vinci. My family and I appreciate you coming here.”
“Of course. Niccolo Pitti, I presume?” His mouth kicks up in one corner, our own private joke. As if I could be anyone else.
That little smile does unspeakable things to my composure. “Virgil, actually. We met once before.”
His smile slips. “We did?”
I swallow. An entire swarm of bees is trapped inside me, the stinging buzz more than I can stand.
“Yes, the day the angels attacked.” I don’t know how his bargain works.
Did it erase me from his future as well as his past?
Will he ever remember? Or are we doomed to meet over and over again, leaving me forever gutted by the lack of recognition in his eyes?
He glances at his feet. “I… suppose I forgot.”
This close, I swear there are more freckles on his skin now than there were before, a hundred little galaxies of them. I let out a rush of air, tearing my eyes away from his face. “Please, come inside.”
He fumbles with his notes as we walk through the airy rooms. Though calling them notes is a generous stretch.
More like an armload of paper scraps, each one containing some detail about the Pitti family portrait commissions in curiously large handwriting, except for one that just says CATS!
and is underlined three times. I bite the inside of my cheek to stop from laughing.
He drops them once, twice, and even though I’m utterly, completely charmed by it, he’s gotten so nervous, he keeps stammering apologies, so I force him to let me carry the stack while he goes through them.
“So the smaller pieces. Per my conversation with, erm, the other Niccolo Pitti—your brother, I’m guessing? Right, then. So I’ll do ‘Giovannia, writing poetry at her desk,’ ‘Mamma in her rose garden,’ and… ‘Elisabetta with her sword’?”
“Emilo.” I smile softly. It’s compulsive—I can’t stop it whenever I think of the day my little brother took me aside and asked me what it took to change a name. How my heart swelled so big, I thought it would pop right out from my ribs. In the end, one Pitti brother escaped the curse of Niccolo.
The church rightly declared the angels’ monstrous transformation and flood an attack from the devil: an envious assault on Florence and her divine beauty. And the name of the brave hero who saved the city? They’re calling him Lorenzo the Magnificent.
I’m not sure I quite agree yet—seems a smidge pompous—but perhaps it’s a name he can grow into.
When my brother’s soul rushed back to him with his memories, he found and threatened the Medici heir at sword point.
Said the price of Lorenzo’s life was Casa delle Volpi and a fortune to make the Pitti family rich beyond compare.
I don’t need to work anymore, but Giorgio assured me that Verrocchio would be happy to have me back.
I decided to stay away. Not just because Leonardo’s memory loss around me and only me would be horribly confusing for everyone, but because Niccolo wanted to take over Father’s old business and I asked if I could help.
I wanted to stay with my family, at least for a little bit.
Leonardo gave me a gift, and I owed it to him to see who I was beneath the hurt I’d held close my entire life before trying to bring him back to mine.
The art can wait. I’m no longer afraid of losing that part of me. It’s who I am, and whenever I decide to pick up a brush again, I know the spark of creation will be there, even more brilliant for my time away from it.
No one quite knows what a world without magic means for Florence yet, but I’m optimistic about it. Not that anyone would ask me, but it feels like a rebirth, a renewal.
A renaissance, if I may.
“We’re painting you outside?” Leonardo hesitates at the open doors leading to the gardens.
He frowns and riffles through his notes, losing a few of them to the chill-fingered breeze.
“You know what? It doesn’t say where I’ll be painting you.
With your brother and you having the same name, I didn’t know—I’d assumed there was only one Niccolo. ”
I smile, so nervous, the expression barely touches my eyes. I must look deranged. “There is. I’m Virgil.”
“Right. But…” There it is again, that divot on his brow. I want to press it with my thumb, rub it away until a scrap of me comes back to him. But I don’t. Not yet.
“We met before!” he blurts out, eyes big and wide as bronze coins. “The day of the flood.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, a terrible ache opening under my ribs. Please don’t go. Not yet. “Yes. I remembered you said you were a painter.” I gesture grandly to the hedges beyond. “Shall we?”
Leonardo hesitates for a long, long moment. Then his body swells with a big breath, as if he’s made some sort of decision, and he walks past me.
There’s a crispness in the air, the edge of Florence’s too-hot summer finally tipping into fall.
The trees burn ocher and crimson, a flame-colored carpet strewn between the deep green hedgerows.
Leonardo walks through it with eager eyes and twitchy fingers.
He’s so distracted, he doesn’t notice when we come to the rose-filled grotto.
“Have you ever wondered why leaves change color? I know it’s supposed to be God’s doing, but I can’t help but notice it always happens right when the air turns cold. ”
Madonna santa, he’s so him. How did I ever keep him at arm’s length? How did I ever once fail to recognize how the cinders in my chest flared to life for him and no one else?
I press my mouth together, desperate to hold the smile back. “How interesting.” I let out a long, shaky breath as we round the last corner, as I bring him to the place I want him to see.
“Do you really think so? My master says it’s a waste of time and—oh.”
He stops so suddenly, I nearly walk into him.
“Your family… keeps your art outside?” He stops at the first canvas.
A night over the city’s skyline. The duomo is front and center, two faceless silhouettes before it.
The artist has clearly used his fingers to paint, and he’s massacred the details of the piece with his clumsy prints.
It’s unquestionably terrible—too personal, too strange.
It’s my very favorite of the new paintings I’ve created.
“Not always. But when the occasion calls for it, yes.” I gesture for him to follow me deeper into the roses. There’s another finger painting of two faceless boys at a river bridge, pigeons flying off with their food.
Then a red-roofed workshop with ivy crawling up its face.
He lifts a finger to that one, mouth going slack. “I think… I think I’ve been here.”
“You haven’t,” I say softly. “Not yet.”
Around the next corner, it’s just a sketch of me. His sketch. He makes a soft sound when he sees his name in the corner.
“You might be wondering why my brother and I chose you among every other artist in Florence. I’m not sure if you remember, but you’ve drawn me before.”
After Leonardo lost his memory, I bribed Giorgio to go through Leonardo’s room and bring me any sketches the Medici had missed.
He only found one, hidden under the mattress, just beneath the spot where Leonardo dreamed each night.