Read Online Wolves in Winter by Lisa Hilton - Free Book Online Page A

remained in the city. The courtyard still thronged with Medici familiars, and I often recognised
Messr Bibbiena, Piero’s secretary who ordered the household, passing to the great staircase with a stern, urgent expression.
    Something had entered the palazzo that summer, something that groped with cold, probing fingers into the upper regions of the house, seeking to clutch Piero in its chilly fist. I listened more
intently than usual to the talk in the kitchens and the laundry, but the world of the slaves was so confined, contained within the tiny limits of the offices and those brief moments of leisure
beneath the tree that we servants might well have been as mute as I feigned each night with Margherita. I sensed that something had changed. I felt the same rage I had experienced on the Genovese
ship that brought me to Italy – I was no more than a mote of dust, swirled about in the robes of the great and shaken off where they would. I never understood the forces that moved me. I
wanted
to understand what was happening in Florence, but the coins Margherita gave me were too precious for me to dawdle on my nightly walks to Santo Spirito in the hope of overhearing the
citizens gossip as they gathered on the benches. I could hardly ask questions, for my dumbness, which I had adopted in fury, was now my most precious disguise. Yet there
was
something awry
in the city, a hint of suspicion and fear that I recognised from my last months in Toledo; and angered as I was by my own insignificance, I was determined that this time I should protect
myself.
    With the long evenings, I grew bold, relishing my freedom from the confines of the palazzo. The gates were barred at the last bell, but I discovered a way to prolong my absences. Set into the
wall near the porters’ bunk was a tiny window, for putting out alms, or receiving supplies in plague times, when big houses were shuttered down to keep quarantine. I found I could wriggle
through it, small and slight as I was. It was hard to hoist myself up the wall outside, but I had always been light and agile and my muscles were lithe and taut from the hard work in the kitchens.
If I wanted to return after the bell, I would push the shutter ajar as I left the courtyard and work my fingers above the wooden lintel when I returned. I was not afraid of the porters –
rough men who spent their evenings in the taverns and slept it off in the lodge – and even if I were discovered I didn’t imagine I had anything worse to fear than a whipping. The
thought of a few minutes of pain did not deter me. It was a strange way to learn courage, I thought ruefully; that it comes when one has nothing one cares to lose. But I was never caught.
    As the city emptied during the suffocating heat, business grew slow. One evening, Margherita and I had sat a long time in the porch, with no clients to serve. As the sky turned from bright blue
gold to a soft purple, she stretched herself, sending up the usual foetid whiff from her nest, and asked me if I was hungry. I nodded. There was plenty of plain food for the servants at the
palazzo, but I hankered after the savouries I smelled in the streets each night.
    ‘Come on then, mooncalf.’
    She tottered to her feet and arranged herself for travel, which took quite some time, as all her oddments and mysteries had to be stored in two sacks, which she pushed into a corner of the
porch. Presumably no one would dare to steal them. As she stood, it occurred to me that I had never seen her legs, but she set off at a sort of bounding hobble, and I was surprised to find I had to
trot to keep pace with her. We turned to the left, slapping at mosquitoes as we followed the river along the Borgo San Frediano until we reached the city gate, which Margherita circled around,
taking us up a rise covered in scrubby trees, where the city wall ran flush against the steep hillside. We climbed laboriously up the slope and descended on the other side, leaving Florence