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him, for just a moment, that she was withholding her hand from him, rather to be trampled by the mob than to be at his side. “Mother,” he called out. “Don’t leave me.”
    And then he had her hand and pulled her back to him. People flowed around them and he regained his feet. Then his mother looked into his face and placed a hand against the side of his face. Slowly she bent his head to her bosom, the way she had always done when he had come to her as a boy with some seeming great injustice. “My Cosimo,” she said. “My troubled little Cosimo. You’ll always be my first born.”
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XI
    â€œThe cook’s assistant has been murdered.” The kitchen girl who found the dead cook’s assistant told the kitchen hand who told the cook who told the steward who told the Captain of the Guard who told the Duke of Lorraine, who insisted for himself on seeing it, and then summoned Leonardo. It was inexplicable. The man had been murdered in the kitchen at some hour in the night, and lay dead over the kitchen bench, with his fat face in a bowl of soup and his fatter penis out, pointing into a soup pot.
    â€œWhat does it mean?” the steward asked, as each person had asked their superior upon seeing the dead man.
    â€œIt is a warning,” the Duke said. “I have seen such before. They had intended to cut the man’s manhood off and stuff it into his mouth. It is a punishment for betrayal.”
    â€œWho did he betray?” the steward asked.
    But the Duke only shook his head. “We have been attacked in our own house,” he said. “It is an outrage.” He fretted a little for what his wife would say and knew he needed to put on a face of rage while seeking good counsel from Leonardo. There were more mysteries here than could easily be answered by blaming the Medici deathseekers, and he was still pondering the possibility that one of the lesser houses was trying to trigger a war between the Lorraines and Medicis.
    The cause of death was apparent enough, as the man had a short metal arrow protruding from the back of his skull. “It has been fired through the open window,” the steward boldly asserted. “A deathseeker has been prowling around the house looking for any target and found this unfortunate man.”
    â€œBut somebody must have been inside the room to take the poor man’s tower of ivory out of his trousers,” said the cook.
    The kitchen girl, who had been trying to steal surreptitious looks at the dead man’s member, thought it looked nothing like a tower of ivory and a more apt metaphor might have alluded to a chicken’s neck or perhaps a snail. But she knew nobody wanted to be disrespectful of the poor dead man and so said nothing. At least not until she was with the other kitchen girls later that day.
    â€œPerhaps there were two assailants,” said the steward. “One who shot him and the other who did this thing. Or perhaps the man climbed in the window after slaying him and did this?”
    â€œImpossible,” said the Captain of the Guard. “The window is too small for a man to climb in.”
    â€œPerhaps a boy?” asked the steward.
    â€œPerhaps,” said the Captain of the Guard. “That would mean two attackers. They would have had a harder time getting past our guards though. We would have noticed a man with a boy.”
    â€œThen how they do this?” asked the cook.
    â€œLeonardo will know,” said the Duke. The Captain of the Guard pouted his lips a little as if he doubted that the man could determine any more from the scene than he could himself. “I think the assassin fired the arrow from a long distance away. A lucky shot. He probably couldn’t even tell who he was shooting at and was hoping it was a more senior member of the household. I mean, why kill a cook’s assistant?”
    â€œAnd who had he betrayed?” asked the cook, a little