of higher mathematics, the nature of man’s highest vocation.
They did not care for dancing, either. Or even for the art that was Isabella’s life-sustaining joy. And her mother’s relatives had no use for a connection who was only a scholar, no use in a battle or at forming new alliances.
The house came into view at last and Isabella paused to catch her breath at the edge of the wild, overgrown garden. When the villa was new-built, it had been a deep ochre colour, thickly stuccoed, set off by the green-painted shutters and carved wooden doors. Now it was faded to the uneven colour of a ripe peach, the stucco flaking away in places to reveal the stone beneath, the shutters peeling. A few of the terracotta tiles of the roof were missing and the garden where Isabella’s mother had danced was a wild snarl. Statuary that once came all the way from Rome tilted this way and that amid the tangled vines, the haphazard spill of flowers. A chipped Cupid with bow drawn, a smiling Venus, Neptune with no trident.
The windows of the upper floors were dark, blank, but the doors were open, casting golden light out into the courtyard. The lower windows were thrown wide to the twilight breeze and Isabella could hear the laughter and chatter of the servants as they finished preparing supper. A table was set up near the old fountain, laid out with pitchers of wine, loaves of fresh-baked breads and ewers of olive oil.
The conversation was a high hum, an ebb and flow, but it became clearer as Isabella moved ever closer to the open doors, coalescing into words.
‘...wasn’t sure his grand relations even remembered he was here,’ she heard the cook, Flavia, say. The woman’s comments were punctuated with the click of pottery bowls. ‘He hasn’t heard from them in months.’
‘And a messenger came today?’ Mena, the housekeeper who also served as Isabella’s maid, said.
A messenger? Isabella paused, her foot on the stone step. Flavia was right—they seldom heard from their relations, not that there were many of them left. Her father’s family was not a fertile one and her mother’s cousins, the Strozzis, were people of high position in Florence. Isabella had only met them a few times, and knew little about them except that their lives sounded like a dream of beauty and culture. Why would they send a messenger now?
‘I saw him myself,’ one of the footmen commented. ‘Very grand, in a livery of blue-and-cream velvet.’
‘The Strozzi colours,’ Mena murmured. ‘What would they want now? I did hear...’
Her words were shattered by the crash of a falling bowl, the excited bark of one of the kitchen dogs.
‘Maledizione!’ Flavia cursed.
Isabella glanced back over her shoulder, as if she could see the ‘grand’ messenger, but there was only the empty garden.
‘Signorina Isabella!’ Mena called, startling Isabella back to the present moment, the reality of her place. Her head whipped back around to find Mena standing before her in the doorway, balancing a large bowl of boiled greens. ‘So, here you are at last. Are you quite all right?’
Isabella blinked at her, the woman’s familiar, creased, olive-complexioned face coming into focus. Her dark eyes were narrow with concern. Isabella gave her a reassuring smile. ‘I am very well, Mena. Just a bit too much sun, I think.’
Mena gave a disapproving cluck and moved around Isabella to set the bowl on the waiting table. ‘You spend far too much time wandering about outdoors, signorina. Soon you will be dark as a Moor!’
Isabella laughed. ‘I hardly think it matters! No one will see me, dark or fair. Besides, I need the light for my work.’
Mena tossed her a speculative glance but said nothing. She merely made that clucking sound again, a symbol of disapproval Isabella had known since she was a babe in arms. ‘Go fetch the pottage.’
Isabella nodded and stepped into the kitchen. The heat of the cooking fires hit her in the face, thick and humid after the cooling evening air, filled with the scents of roasted chicken, spices, boiling vegetables, burned sugar.
Flavia, a plump, red-faced woman who had also been with their family for as long as Isabella could remember, was stirring a vat of stewed chicken in cinnamon. She merely nodded towards the pottage and Isabella snatched it up to carry it back outside, away from the scalding heat.
Mena lingered by the table, pouring wine into pottery goblets. As Isabella set down the pottage, she leaned close and whispered, ‘Cousin Caterina sent a letter?’
Mena did not meet her gaze. She shrugged, fussing with the wine. ‘A letter did come, but who can name the sender?’
‘Mena! How many other Strozzis do we know? What do you think she wants?’
Mena’s lips tightened. She was a country woman, bred of sturdy Tuscan stock, and had lived all her life in this spot. She knew little of Florentine doings, and what she did know she disapproved of. Learning old, pagan ways, looking at paintings of naked goddesses and gods—it went against God and the saints. Even as she loved Isabella, had practically raised her after her mother died, Isabella knew well she did not understand Isabella’s longing for a life that was not her own.
‘Oh, signorina,’ Mena said, strangely sad. ‘Why can you not just...?’
‘Is this my supper?’ a puzzled voice enquired, thin, confused.
Isabella gave Mena one more searching look, but it was obvious that the maid knew no more of their mysterious messenger. She had only lectures about appreciating one’s place in the world, the place where God placed one. Isabella had heard it all before.
She glanced over to see her father standing at the edge of the garden. It was his practice every evening to emerge from his library when it grew too dark to see the pages of his books and wander out the front doors around the house until he found someone to tell him what to do, where to go. It was no use to have servants remind him of the time, or guide him to the supper table—the same table they ate at every night.
Isabella smiled at him gently. His long, white hair stood out in a thick, uneven corona around his round, ruddy face and his beard was too long, his brows wild above faded green-grey eyes. The green-grey eyes Isabella inherited. Despite the warmth of summer, he wore an old, patched velvet robe trimmed with moth-eaten fur.
‘Sì, Father, it is your supper,’ she said, hurrying over to slip her arm through his and lead him to his chair.
‘Vegetables?’ he asked, absently surveying the offerings.
‘And some stewed chicken with cinnamon,’ said Isabella, sitting down next to him. ‘You like cinnamon. Flavia is just finishing with it.’
‘I will go fetch it,’ Mena said and left them to return to the kitchen. The hum of voices resumed in there as Isabella pressed a cup of wine into her father’s hand. How she yearned to ask him about the letter, to discover what was happening with their Florence relations! But she knew full well it would never work to press him. Until her father had some food, some wine, emerged from his dream world of study, he would not even remember what she talked about.
‘How was your day?’ she asked, spooning out a portion of the pottage on to his plate. ‘Did you finish the new essay on the Aeneid?’
‘No, no, not yet. But I am close, I think. Very close. I must write to Fernando in Mantua.
