The Thief Of Peace Read online

“He has, yes,” said the abbot. “But don’t worry. I told your father that you would leave here of your own will or not at all.”

  Teo sighed. “Thank you, Father. Thank you.”

  “Not at all. I wanted to see how you were feeling. A visitor from the outside can sometimes be difficult…”

  “I know. My father has suffered a great deal, and I wish there was something I could do to help him, but…” He sighed again. “I can’t give him what he wants.”

  The abbot’s thin smile at that moment was one of the most perfect expressions that Teo had ever seen in his life. It said we love you and you belong here. “Do you question your vocation?” the abbot said, but the question held no weight any longer. It bounced across the room like a plaything, like a ball of yarn for a kitten to bat.

  “No,” said Teo. “No, I don’t. It’s just strange, that’s all. Seeing someone from the outside where all of that matters – position and fortune and family name.” In his mind’s eye he saw the boar’s head on the family crest. Striped piglets, squealing with fear as they darted through the bracken. Blood in his mouth. “I know in my heart that my father still harbours bitterness towards the Ribisi family, and how happy they’ll be when a monk is the last of the Albani.”

  The abbot – who had been here since he was a boy of fourteen – looked blank.

  “It’s an old feud,” Teo said. “Almost a century old. You’d think they’d be over it by now. The Ribisi were partisans of the Pazzi and the Albani of the Medici. There was…violence in the wake of the Pazzi’s fall.”

  “They were dark days for the Medici, I’m told.”

  “Worse for the Pazzi. And look at the Medici now.” Dukes of Florence, about to ally by marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor. Caterina de Medici still held sway as Queen Dowager of France, and a Medici – once more – sat on the throne of Saint Peter. “My family was always loyal to them, and we should be ascendant, but here I am. My father’s last hope. Hiding out in a monastery to spite him.”

  “Is that how you feel?”

  “No,” said Teo. “I imagine that’s how he feels, but I made my choice with no consideration for partisan squabbles or old vendettas. I came here for God, Father. Nothing more.”

  The bell rang for Vespers, putting an end to their meeting. The abbot led the way to the chapel, where the crucified Christ hung on a gilded cross. The sun had long since bleached the red from Christ’s wounds and the blood that flowed from them was now the same pale pink as the flesh of a cooked trout. The roof was in need of repair, and importunate, chirping sparrows flitted in and out, oblivious to the lesson of Saint Paulinus.

  Old Brother Sandro, whose feet and hands ran with fresh blood daily, was carried to Vespers in a chair. He was as bony as a relic and he was one, in a way. A living saint, a mystery among them. Whenever Teo saw Brother Sandro he fell prey to unworthy emotions – envy, green and sour as bile. He was sure he wasn’t the only one in the monastery who hadn’t held out his hands to the Lord and prayed for the same holy affliction, but the shame of it was enough to remind him to do better.

  But as Teo took his place in the chapel, he found his thoughts darting from the elderly stigmatic back to Niccolò di Volpaia. No doubt Volpaia had felt envy often enough. He’d hinted at it when he talked about the riches of Teo’s father’s house. Envy, Pride, Sloth, Wrath, Gluttony, Avarice and Lust – Volpaia was probably swirling with every last sin and never once had to examine his feelings the way that Teo had to.

  There was a flutter in the rafters. Teo looked up and saw a pair of sparrows tussling. One darted out through a hole in the roof and into the pale blue evening sky, weightless and unprotected. And free.

  The other hung back, as if fascinated by the strange songs of the big, flightless birds beneath him.

  Teo had always loved vespers the most, because at vespers they sang the Magnificat, the words that had poured from the lips of Mary when the Holy Spirit came upon her.

  Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.

  Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes.

  …he has put down the mighty from their seat, and has exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent away empty…

  He counted himself fortunate to know the Latin, because the meaning was so very beautiful. A young girl on her knees in a dusty room, the walls made of baked wattle and the floor strewn with palm fronds. Her mind almost breaking at the enormity and the insanity of what was happening – feathers and light filling the house until surely it should burst at the seams, but then the angel spoke and its voice beamed like light into the very centre of her heart. And she knew that she had been chosen. Blessed. And this was her song. My soul doth magnify the Lord…

  There were days when the words got lost in the grumbles of the flesh – a stiff neck, a poor sleep, a stomach that kept threatening to growl irreverently whenever there was a moment of hush between hymns. But not today. Today he grasped the certainty of it, that this was the closet to perfection that mere humanity could ever reach – Mary of the Magnificat – in that moment when she surrendered her destiny and let God’s grace stream from her like light refracted through a jewel.

  Surrender. That was what he had to strive for.

  3

  Wings beat at the edge of Nicci’s dreams. A vast expanse of sun warmed feathers, thrumming against the rippling air. He glimpsed bare legs, dusty boy feet leaving the ground, borne upwards, trailing in their wake the memory of last night’s love. A warm body, a ripe cock, hot and hard as a flaming sword. The wings beat louder now, dragging him out of sleep.

  Pigeons.

  That was what the feathery noise was. Two pigeons fighting – or perhaps fucking – on the windowsill.

  Nicci rolled over and pulled the pillow over his head. The night came back to him in flashes. Red wine running down the white throat and between the painted nipples of one of Bianca’s girls. A lovely young man with fair Florentine hair, but eyes as black as those of any son of Naples, and when the hose came off the bush between his legs was bright copper. Giancarlo – that was his name, although there was no sign of him now. Nicci was alone in the big bed, and about to give the boy up as a beautiful dream when his fingers beneath the pillow found the edge of a piece of paper.

  It was a drawing. A good one, obviously done from life. Nicci – not being a contortionist – had never seen himself from that angle before, but he recognised the freckle on the head of the lovingly rendered penis on the page.

  “I’ll have a studio soon,” he remembered saying, slurring into Giancarlo’s ear. “And then you can come and work for me. I’ll make you famous, wait and see.”

  I didn’t make him famous. I made him come. Or at least I hope I did, otherwise I’m a lousy lover on top of everything else.

  He felt like a fraud, which he was. He was in no position to help other artists. He could barely help himself. Here he was, cavorting in the beds of the Albani, hired not for his talents as an artist but his reputation as an amoral alcoholic.

  On the wall opposite the bed was an Annunciation, a peeling old tempera with a white, spindle limbed Madonna and an angel whose wings looked like limp leaves of lettuce. He guessed it was there to inspire the occupant of the bed to similar but less heavenly begettings. Legitimate, dynastic begettings. The sort that old Albani wanted his last remaining son to get to post-haste, no doubt with some nervous girl who barely knew him. A girl with a fortune and a family name and all of the other things that nobles looked for in a bride.

  She would have to be a virgin, of course. But what about him? Was he a virgin? He was twenty years old, and he’d gone into the monastery some four years ago. Just a boy.

  Someone tapped on the bedroom door. It was the maid, a buxom, round faced girl who wore virtue like a scowl. She averted her eyes at the sight of his bare chest. “Messer Vicini is downstairs, sir,” she said, speaking in the general direction of the back of the door.

  “Why?”
<
br />   “He didn’t say.”

  “Well, can you ask him?”

  Vicini appeared in the bedroom doorway beside the maid. “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Sleeping,” said Nicci. “Or at least I was.”

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” said Vicini. “Put some clothes on. And come downstairs.”

  So much for living la dolce vita at Albani’s expense. Nicci dressed in a hurry and went down to see what the retainer wanted. Vicini was waiting in the dining room, looking as sour as Savonarola himself.

  “Where is Teodoro?” he said.

  “Uh…”

  “I understood you visited the monastery?”

  “I did,” said Nicci.

  “And you left him there?”

  “Yes. I thought you wanted to persuade him, not abduct him. Besides, he insisted on staying. That’s something you didn’t warn me about, by the way. He’s quite stubborn.”

  Vicini drew in a sharp breath, flaring his narrow nostrils. “And am I to understand that the young Signor Albani has made no plans to leave the monastery?”

  “Not as such,” said Nicci. “No.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because – like I just said to you – quite stubborn. And religious, as it turns out. Very religious.”

  “He’s a monk,” said Vicini, ushering Nicci towards the door.

  “I’m aware of that,” said Nicci, as Vicini hustled him into the street. “I was just…I was under the impression that they’d be a lot more like the monks in Boccaccio. Look, all I’m saying is that it’s not going to be the work of five minutes to persuade that young man to turn his back on his vocation and…may I ask where we’re going?”

  “I am returning to Prato. You are going back to the monastery.”

  Two horses stood saddled in the street, one an elegant bay, the other the same flatulent black mare who had carried Nicci to San Bendetto the day before yesterday. Across the street next to a fruit stand stood a cluster of boys, the kind that hung around artists’ studios looking for work and a bed for the night. They wore tight hose and overstuffed codpieces, and when Vicini sneered at them they giggled and wiggled their bottoms at him.

  “Filthy little sodomites,” he said, and stood scowling as Nicci hauled his hungover bulk into the saddle. “You needn’t think I don’t know your game, Volpaia,” Vicini said. “The longer you take to do this, the longer you live well at my master’s expense. You have a job to do. Please make an effort to look as though you are trying to do it, otherwise you insult everyone’s intelligence, including your own.”

  Nicci swayed slightly in the saddle. The sunshine pierced his eyeballs like hot needles, and he was badly in need of a drink. Again. “I like you, Vicini,” he said. “And I think that secretly you feel the same way about me.”

  Vicini smiled narrowly. “I assure you that I do not.”

  “Not even a little bit?”

  Vicini swatted the horse into motion. “Off you go.”

  It was too hot to ride at anything faster than a brisk trot, and the horse always farted even more furiously than usual after a burst of speed. Nicci let her set the pace, since it was fewer than five miles. You could see the cross on top of San Bendetto’s spire from the Porta Romana. The sun was bright, the countryside was beautiful, and he would have done anything to be back in bed with a jug of wine and a saucy aspiring apprentice who wanted to do nothing but drink, fuck and draw rude pictures of Nicci’s favourite body parts.

  But he had, as the man said, a job to do.

  The job was in the kitchen garden again, tending to his seedlings. When he saw Nicci he raised his eyebrows. “You again?”

  “Me again. What are we planting this time? Sage? Cabbages?”

  “Cucumbers,” said Teo. The leaves looked bigger and fleshier than those of the basil seedlings he’d been planting last time. He handed the tiny plant to Nicci, who held it very gently by the stem as he’d learned before.

  “So,” Teo said, as he piled up the soil around the fragile white roots. “What means of persuasion do you mean to employ this time, I wonder? Another appeal to my compassion?” He glanced up and there – around the corners of his mouth – was that play of light and shadow, a Mona Lisa dimpling that spoke of a keen sense of the ridiculous. His eyes were not brown as they had appeared at first glance, but the deep, expensive blue reserved for the robes of Madonnas. “Or perhaps you’ll appeal to my more venal instincts?”

  “You have venal instincts?”

  “I try very hard not to,” said Teo, with a wry smile that was almost flirtatious.

  Nicci looked down at the soil covered fingers brushing against his and tried to scrub his mind clean, but it was no good. He couldn’t help but picture them wrapped around Teo’s cock, in those sweet, sinful moments when the young monk couldn’t stand the temptation any longer. He was twenty years old, for God’s sake. That thing was probably like a broomshank every morning, and he – Nicci – was most definitely going to Hell.

  “Actually,” Nicci said, finding inspiration in his own moral turpitude. “I was hoping you might be able to help me.”

  “How so?”

  “I have the most appalling reputation.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It is. So appalling that I won’t trouble your innocence with the details, but…”

  Teo interrupted him with a slight laugh. “My innocence? What makes you think I’m innocent?”

  How could he be anything other than innocent? He was rosy brown and blameless, his face almost as smooth as a girl’s. The sun slipped from behind a passing cloud and cast a beam of light right across Teo’s eyes, making him squint and turning the ends of his eyelashes to gold. “You see God in cucumber seeds,” said Nicci, conscious that he was staring.

  “You make me sound like some kind of holy fool.”

  “Quite the opposite. I see great wisdom in your point of view. I was hoping you could somehow steer me onto the path of virtue.”

  Teo reached for another seedling. “Are you thinking of joining San Bendetto, Messer Volpaia?”

  “Niccolò. Call me Nicci, and no. I don’t think so. Seems to me it would require a strength of character I don’t have.”

  “You mind find – when you put it to the test – that you have a great deal more strength of character than you imagined.”

  “Maybe,” said Nicci. “But I’m fond of feather beds. Rich dinners. Late nights. And wine. Lots and lots of wine.”

  “There’s none of that here, I’m afraid,” said Teo. “The food is good, but simple. No feather beds. And even if there were, you’d be obliged to get out of them in the darkest part of the night for Matins.”

  Nicci shuddered. He had heard monastery bells clanging in the witching hour, but never really equated it with actual people. People who had to get up at what-on-earth o’clock to pray to a sullen, indifferent God who had come up with plague and the pox but – when asked to display his beneficence from time to time – could apparently come up with nothing better than basil and cucumber plants.

  “Walk with me?” said Teo. “I have to attend to the pigs now.”

  He led the way through the maze of vegetable beds. Some of the other monks paused to stare and one of them even crossed himself, perhaps shocked by the shortness of Nicci’s doublet and what it left exposed. “So do you really get out of bed to pray in the middle of the night?” he said.

  “No. Not the middle of the night. It’s more around two or three o’clock in the morning, depending on the season and the sunrise.”

  “And then what? You go back to bed?”

  “After Matins is Lauds,” said Teo. “Dawn prayer. Then we have breakfast and go about our work, then we have two morning prayers – Prime and Terce – followed by Sext at noon, and…” He stopped and shaded his eyes with a hand, as if checking the position of the sun in the sky. “Shortly I will be called for None, which is around three o’clock.”

  Nicci did a brief mental count. “You pray
six times a day?”

  “Eight,” said Teo. “In the evening is Vespers…” He smiled like a lunatic. “I like Vespers the best…then before we go to bed we have Compline, night prayers.”

  “When do you go to bed?”

  “Early.”

  “I should think so,” said Nicci, his head spinning. “You have to get up at two o’clock in the morning and start all over again.”

  Teo picked up a couple of pails of food slops from the base of a pillar. Nicci guessed they were passing the kitchens, because the wholesome smell of baking bread drifted from the small, arched windows.

  “It’s not so bad,” Teo said. “The Liturgy of the Hours. Its rhythm is a kind of prayer in itself.”

  “I don’t know how you do it. Eight times a day? And you still find time to run the monastery? The gardens, the building upkeep, the animals?”

  “We are a community. We spread the duties.”

  “Even so,” said Nicci.

  He followed Teo to a sty, where a large sow lay in the shade, suckling a litter of pink, squirming piglets. Teo, seemingly indifferent to the smell, emptied the slop pail into the trough. The sow stirred and lumbered to her feet, the babies squealing their protests at the drinks supply being suddenly withdrawn. As she buried her nose in the trough, noisily slobbering down stale bread and old milk and vegetable peelings, Teo reached down and scratched between her ears.

  “Look how sweet they are,” he said. “I know I’m not supposed to get attached to farm animals, but there’s something about pigs. They can be as fond as dogs sometimes, and they’re far from stupid.” He pointed to the way the sow leaned against the fence, her fat flank pushing against a gap in the boards. “She always knows to lean that way when I’m the one who comes to feed her,” he said, picking up a stick and scratching her through the gap. “Don’t you, Margarita? Always know you’ll get a good scratch from me.”

  Teo scratched and smiled, serene as a Virgin. He could have had it all. The grand house filled with treasures, Venetian mirrors that cost more money than the house itself, beautiful gardens filled with the rainbow drops from fountains. But here he was, scratching the backs of swine and feeding them slops. And, by all appearances, more than happy to do so.