The Thief Of Peace Read online

  Copyright 2019 © by Jess Whitecroft

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  Cover photography by Romas_Photo, licensed by Shutterstock.

  The Thief Of Peace

  by

  Jess Whitecroft

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  Chapters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Si dederit homo omnem substantium domus suae pro dilectione quasi nihil descipient eum.

  “If a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he shall despise it as nothing.”

  The Song of Songs

  *

  To Mimi

  Sorry, but there was no avoiding the tonsures.

  1

  Everyone loved a wedding.

  There was money in it. People needed fancy clothes, so the tailors were happy. And banquets needed fancy cakes, so the bakers got paid. All those expensive bridal gifts, too – silver and glass and jewellery. And art. Nothing like furnishing a new home to whet the appetite for art. A blank wall could make even the thriftiest new bride finger her purse strings, and this was no ordinary bride. She was Joanna of Austria, sister of the new Holy Roman Emperor. And she was marrying a Medici.

  The groom’s father, Duke Cosimo, had spent money lavishly since taking up the post vacated by the murder of his relative, Alessandro. He had moved from the Palazzo Vecchio to the old Palazzo Pitti, found he needed still more room for his uffizi and now half of the city felt like a construction site, old buildings falling and new buildings rising at the orders of the great artist and architect, Giorgio Vasari.

  Vasari’s patronage – or its denial – could make or break an artist. For the bride, he was currently decorating the inside of the Palazzo Vecchio with pastoral scenes of her native Austria, and had called on some of the greatest muralists in the city to assist him. One such muralist now stood at the door of the Palazzo Vecchio, craning his neck in an attempt to meet the eyes of a six- and half-foot palace guard.

  “Listen, could I…?”

  “No,” said the guard.

  “You’re not listening,” said the artist.

  “No.”

  The artist, whose name was Niccolò – sometimes Nico, other times Nicci and most times mud, depending on to whom he owed money – sucked in a breath between his teeth and changed strategy. “Look,” he said. “We’re both working class, right? Ordinary people trying to make a living?”

  “No,” said the guard.

  “No?” The paucity of the guard’s vocabulary was apparently contagious.

  “My father is a lawyer. Not working class at all.”

  “Then he must be very proud of you,” said Nicci. Poor man. All those years studying the law in an attempt to better himself, and then his wife gave birth to this ox? Annoyed, Nicci gave up appealing to class solidarity and got to the point. “Could you please tell Signor Vasari—”

  “—no.”

  Nicci sighed. “There are walls in that palazzo that are begging for my attention,” he said. “Do you understand me? If walls could cry out, those walls would be saying ‘We need Niccolò di Volpaia to paint us with beautiful scenes of the Austrian countryside!’”

  The guard frowned down at him. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “Yes, it’s me. Do you know me? Does Messer Vasari know me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then can I…?”

  The guard held his pike out, blocking Nicci’s way. “No.”

  “Does my reputation not precede me?”

  “Oh, it does. And that’s the problem.”

  Damn it. Was Vasari still hugging that grudge? “Look,” said Nicci, trying to ignore the pike now pointed at his ribs. “You’ve got it wrong. Whatever happened in the past, I am an excellent muralist.”

  “Good for you,” said the guard, and poked him – none too gently – with the tip of the pike.

  Nicci stepped back, hands raised in surrender. “All I ask,” he said. “Is that you mention my name to Vasari. Can you do that?”

  The guard nodded. “I’ll be sure to do that,” he said. “Next time Messer Vasari needs a drunken nancy boy with a reputation that would shame the devil. Now fuck off.”

  “It’s a disgrace,” Nicci said, later, when he was several cups deep in Bianca’s kitchen. “That’s what it is. Whole city is making money off the back of this wedding, and I remain unappreciated.”

  Bianca, who was scaling a carp, didn’t look up from her work. “Mm. It’s a terrible life.”

  “It is, though. It absolutely is. Have you seen those frescos up at Poggia?”

  That made her look. “When were you at Poggia a Caino?” she said, referring to the Duke’s favourite country villa.

  “I was there,” said Nicci, reaching for more wine. “I was there with Vasari. They’ve got this one fresco – The Triumph of Cicero…”

  “Mm-hm?” She picked up the bottle, and – finding it light – arched an eyebrow.

  “Franciabigio. Vasari says himself that Franciabigio was one of the greatest muralists in Italy. So you can imagine my reaction when I look at this thing and see that someone has been making alterations. Several figures that were very clearly not painted by the hand of the master.”

  “Shocking,” said Bianca, scraping away at the fish.

  “They stuck out like a broken tooth. I’m sorry, but they did. Someone had gone in there with a heavy hand and gone mad with the chiaroscuro. The work was hacky, and I said so.” He took another drink and sighed. “How was I supposed to know it was Allori’s work? And that Allori had his tongue so far up Vasari’s bottom that he could taste what he had for lunch?”

  Bianca frowned slightly. “Alessandro Allori?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of him.”

  “Of course you have,” said Nicci. “This is the city we live in, where even a bawd knows the name of Alessandro Allori but somehow I can’t make a living as an artist.” He cringed a little in the face of her glare. “Not that you aren’t a very…talented bawd…”

  “That’s better,” she said, her knife held an unsettling angle. “I’m sorry you’re not painting the salons of the Medici, but may I remind you that I’m the one who pays you to paint naughty nymphs on my girls’ bedroom walls? Take a lesson from this, Niccolò: if you’d kept your tongue still – or better still, up the right bum – you might have been in Rome painting the Papal Apartments.”

  She wasn’t wrong. That was the worst part. The world was changing so fast these days, but the old systems, of clients and patronage and kissing the right arses remained the same. And Nicci could paint. He knew he could paint. He just wasn’t very good at the arse kissing part.

  “It was hacky. I stand by it,” he said, his mind still fixed on the salon wall. Then there had been the lunette by Pontormo, pretty and pastoral and full of chubby cheeked putti, and on the left was a beautiful naked youth, his cock wilted fetchingly across the top of one spread thigh as he languidly stretched up to pick fruit. One of the other appre
ntices had muttered that it was wrong for the room, but Nicci had thought the opposite. If anything the serious-minded Triumph of Cicero had been all wrong for a country villa, but for once Nicci had held his tongue. Didn’t want anyone to think he liked the lunette on account of the pretty boy with the nice-looking cock. “Actually the Franciabiago wasn’t that great either,” he said. “Heavy. Ponderous. Would have been better in a town house. Or an office.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Bianca. “You know your problem, Nicci? You talk too much. And you drink too much. And when you drink too much you talk even more, and it gets you into trouble.”

  *

  The next morning, he woke with the queasy sensation that the world beneath him was moving. He’d been drunk the night before. That much he remembered. So drunk that he’d reached the point where even lying down was difficult, because the very floor seemed to be in motion. Which explained – and yet didn’t explain – why it was still moving, because surely he should have slept it off and passed through that phase of drunk by now?

  It was morning. That much he did know, because the light was needling through the thin, fleshy screen of his eyelids. He was parched and his brain felt like a desiccated orange, a hard and heavy thing that rattled unmercifully against the inside of his skull. Nicci tentatively peeled open his eyelids and saw the sun, shining from behind a large grey cloud with gilded edges. It, too, was moving.

  The next thing to assault his fractured senses was the smell. Hay. Grass. A background whiff of manure, but still a million times more pleasant than the stinks of the city. Very carefully, Nicci raised his spinning head and squinted through his lashes at his surroundings.

  Florence lay behind him, and it was getting smaller by the minute. At some point during the night persons unknown – and he wasn’t ruling himself out of the description of ‘persons unknown’ – had deposited him on the back of a hay cart. And the cart had left the city.

  “Shit,” he said, and sat up. He turned around and saw a road stretching ahead of him, tall cypresses standing sentinel at either side. And two figures sitting at the front of the cart. “Excuse me! Hello?”

  One of the men turned. The other – who was driving the two oxen – kept his eyes on the road.

  “Ah. You’re awake,” said the first man.

  He didn’t look like the kind of man who rode around in ox carts. He wore a black velvet cap and a robe like the old fashioned lucco, the dress worn by officials of the old Republic. His hair was invisible beneath the cap, but from his eyebrows Nicci guessed that his hair was that mousy shade that presumed to be neither blond nor brown. His lips were narrow.

  “Yes, I’m awake,” said Nicci. “Would this be a good time to ask where the hell we’re going?”

  “Prato,” said the man. “Won’t be long now.”

  “Prato? Why? Who are you? Did we…?” It seemed like a long shot, but he asked anyway.

  The man’s lips thinned so much that they almost disappeared. “We most certainly did not,” he hissed. “I am a respectable man.”

  “All right. Sorry. Sorry. Just asking. I was quite drunk last night.” The lips relaxed a little, but the eyes remained hostile. “Do you have a name?”

  “My name is Vicini. I am a retainer to Giovanni degli Albani.”

  “Oh,” said Nicci, and then, “Ohh.”

  Had his luck changed? The Albani were one of those old Florentine families who – as Bianca might have put it – had survived by knowing which bum to tongue and when. Unlike the infamous Pazzi and other families which had fallen foul of the Medici, the Albani had successfully rode the tides of shifting favour. Giovanni degli Albani currently sat on the consigliere, the council of four which formed the duke’s closest advisors, although these days it was hard to tell which duke they served. Duke Cosimo – broken by the death of his duchess and two of his sons – had effectively retired to the country to hawk, hunt and read, leaving the young bridegroom Francesco to rule as regent. Some days Cosimo washed his hands of all government, and other days stepped in and interfered, much to the annoyance of his regent and heir. It wasn’t the most functional form of government, but at least this time around the Medici weren’t literally assassinating one another. Not yet, anyway.

  Nicci didn’t pretend to know much about the ins and outs of the court, but what he did know was that a member of the consigliere – and a member of the Albani family at that – represented a shot at some very serious patronage. Goodbye naughty nymphs, hello lavishly appointed salons in country residences. And town residences. Dining rooms and private chapels and gardens. God, the Albani owned half of Prato. He could be to them what Vasari was to the Medici. He wouldn’t need to lick anybody’s arse. He’d have his own arse lickers.

  “So,” he said. “What am I doing on his hay cart, exactly?”

  “My master has need of your services,” said Vicini. “I found you passed out next to a horse trough and didn’t have time to sober you up. I assumed your consent would be taken as a given.”

  “That was very presumptuous of you,” said Nicci.

  “We can turn around and go back to Florence if you prefer?”

  “No. This is fine.” He swallowed down an acid burp. “Is your master a patron of the arts?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Good,” said Nicci, growing smugger by the second, in spite of the pounding in his head. “Good. I’m guessing he knows of my reputation?”

  “He does, yes.” Something resembling a smile curled the corners of Vicini’s barely-there lips. “In fact, it’s the very reason he sent for you.”

  “Huh. Well, it’s nice to be appreciated.”

  A little while later they arrived at the Villa Albani on the outskirts of Prato. The Albani were old money, but the house itself couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. One of those constructions that popped up like mushrooms whenever Florence was at peace and people had money to spend. The plaster was pale gold in the morning sunlight and the decorative roof edgings were still as white as baby teeth.

  Vicini led the way into a marble floored hallway. The first thing Nicci saw was himself, reflected in a mirror of such clarity and magnificence that he gasped. The thing was almost three feet square, enclosed in a gilded frame, and the reflection it gave back was both wondrous and appalling. There he was, dropping hay stalks on the marble floor, his mouth half open in peasant-like gawp. He had never seen such a clear reflection of himself and the effect was disconcerting. The mirror gave back every line and shadow – the dark circles under his brown eyes, the tangle of black curls that hung to his shoulders, and there…was that a thread of white in his beard already? He wasn’t even thirty.

  “It’s Venetian,” said Vicini, gesturing for him to follow. “Very expensive. Please try not to breathe on it.”

  At the rear of the building was a loggia formed by three enormous arches. Two rows of steps curved down to a sumptuous garden full of squirting fountains and impeccably pruned hedges. Vicini led the way through it, and Nicci followed, mouth still half open. The cool of morning was about to surrender to the warmth of a spring noon, but here the fountains had left the air mild and refreshing and full of fractured rainbows. Nicci fought the urge to stick his head under the nearest fountain. He was terribly thirsty.

  They came upon a huge round pond, with a statue of Neptune at its centre. The old sea god stood poised, frozen forever with his trident poised to smite the still waters with a storm that would never come. The water was almost as clear and flat as the Venetian mirror. Money, Nicci thought, made everything smooth. Orderly. The pond was a perfect circle. The tops and sides of the hedges were flat, their angles as sharp as carpentry. With money you could carve even nature itself into tidy, geometric shapes, and never have to be troubled by its mess.

  A greyhound scampered out from behind a hedge. Someone whistled and it stopped, turned around and rejoined its master – Giovanni degli Albani. That was when Nicci realised he’d been wrong, because there were still
some messes that no amount of money could rectify.

  Albani wore black. Mourning black.

  Nicci vaguely remembered hearing something about it. The son. He’d died recently, and violently, too. A tomb, then, Nicci thought, envisaging his commission. Or a nice altarpiece to grace a church and grease the wheels in the next life. Money couldn’t raise the dead, but it could still scrub some of the grime off a dead man’s soul.

  “So you’re the famous Niccolò della Volpaia?” Albani said, after Nicci had made his bows.

  Not quite. He was Niccolò di Volpaia, from the town rather than a member of the wealthy family who had taken its name, but he was happy enough to let this small error work in his favour.

  “Wonderful place, Volpaia,” said Albani, shooing Vicini, who promptly and discreetly disappeared. “Divine vineyards. Exquisite wine.”

  “Some of the best in Italy,” said Nicci, conscious that he smelled like someone who’d been putting that boast to the test all night. “I’m told, anyway. I’m not much of a drinker myself.”

  “Ingenious people, the Volpaia. I believe it was Benvenuto della Volpaia who assisted Leonardo da Vinci on technical matters. And who would ever have believed Leonardo needed help?”

  “Well, indeed.”

  “A streak of genius runs deep in your family. Do you know I have a clock indoors made by Girolamo della Volpaia?”

  “Really?” said Nicci, as they turned back towards the house. He was beginning to wonder if he should just come clean.

  “It’s never wrong,” said Albani, and paused at the top of the steps to glance down at Nicci. “And then there’s you. Just goes to show – family reputation is such a fragile thing.” He beckoned. “Come.”