Free Signora Da Vinci by Robin Maxwell Page B

longs for you so desperately. You know that, don’t you?” When I did not answer he went on. “Everyone in the house can see it.”
    “Why did he do it?” I said. “Why did he promise to marry me when he knew it was impossible?”
    “Our father is a cold, unfeeling man. A man who beats his wife. Frequently. On a whim. He rules all his children with his fists as well . . . even his favorite, Piero.” The admission seemed to surprise Francesco as the words fell from his lips. “Piero believed that when he broke away to make a name for himself as a notary he would be free from our father’s law. He had dreams of his own family—one he could raise away from here, in Florence, with dignity and honor. A family so unlike our own.”
    Francesco grew embarrassed, his eyes dropping to where his booted toe pushed straw aimlessly around the earthen floor.
    “But Piero miscalculated his own strength, his own backbone . . . and our father’s outrage. ‘I always thought you had at least half a brain!’ he’d shouted that night Piero came home and announced he was marrying you. ‘You and your ridiculous dreams!’ ” Francesco had begun to enjoy playacting his angry father. “‘How could you be so stupid to think you could raise yourself in society by marrying a worthless village girl with no dowry! What could you have been thinking? You must believe that I would never disinherit you.’”
    “What was he thinking?” I asked quietly.
    “Piero did love you, Caterina. And he wished so heartily to be different from his father. Now . . .” Francesco was unable to go on. But I demanded with my eyes that he finish what he had started. “Now the love he had for you has turned to bitterness. Hatred, even. Having to see you at a distance every day eats at him. And his wife is furious that the woman Piero really desires, but is forbidden to touch, is living in the family barn with his beautiful son—his only child. And nothing Piero does causes her own belly to quicken.”
    I knew what Francesco said was true. Sometimes I would hear Piero and Albiera from their bedroom window. His joyless grunts, her pained whimpers. As every month went by with the laundress bringing out Albiera’s bloody rags to wash, it was clear even to me that the mood in the house was growing darker.
    Francesco shook his head morosely.
    I put my sisterly arms around him, feeling strangely light and happy for having heard such uncheerful news. “Then I suppose Leonardo and I are better off in this stinking barn than in your grim household,” I said.
    Francesco managed a smile. “We three have each other.”
    “Unca Cecco!”
    We turned to see my sparkling-eyed boy peeking his head over the edge of his hammock and grinning with delight. He threw his blanket onto the floor.
    “Play!” he demanded and began to giggle.

CHAPTER 5
    Those two bittersweet years ended suddenly one afternoon when I was summoned to the villa. The da Vincis were at their dinner, much as they had been when, after Leonardo’s birth, I’d barged in demanding to have my son back. This time they were expecting me, prepared with their rod-straight spines and expressions that looked as though the lot of them had swallowed sour dishrags. Only Piero’s grandfather seemed diminished. He was very thin and frail, and his eyes glittered brightly with the dementia that Francesco told me had overtaken him in the past years.
    Once again Piero was like a small boy cowering in the shadow of his father, saying nothing at all but leveling me with a look of furious impotence. With his eyes, poor Francesco implored my forgiveness for what was to come.
    “My wife informs me,” Antonio da Vinci began, “that in the case of Piero’s son, the time for a wetnurse is long past.”
    “I still have milk in my breasts,” I answered him quickly, “and Leonardo—you persist in refusing to call him by name—is thriving on it. Many children are nursed till they are—”
    “There is more,”