Obviously the great castle, being of no strategic use to Milanese or German or French 
or Papal authority, or to Florence, was not being restored or repaired, merely shut down.
  Well before dawn, we left my home, but before going, I took leave of my father's grave.
  I knew that I would come back. I knew that soon the trees would climb the mountain to 
the walls. I knew that the grass would grow high through the crevices and cracks of the 
cobblestones. I knew that things human would lose all love of this place, as they had 
lost their love of so many ruins in the country round. I would return then. I would come 
back.
  That night, Ursula and I hunted the vicinity for the few brigands we could find in the 
woods, laughing gaily when we caught them and dragged them from their horses. It was a 
riotous old feast.
  "And where now, my Lord?" my bride asked me towards morning. We had again found a cave 
for shelter, a deep and hidden place, full of thorny vines that barely scratched our 
resilient skin, behind a veil of wild blueberries that would hide us from all eyes, 
including that of the great rising sun.
  "To Florence, my love. I have to go there. And in its streets, we'll never suffer 
hunger, or discovery, and there are things which I must see with my own eyes."
  "But what are those things, Vittorio?" she asked.
  "Paintings, my love, paintings. I have to see the angels in the paintings. I have to... 
face them, as it were."
  She was content. She had never seen the great city of Florence. She had, all her 
wretched eternity of ritual and courtly discipline, been contained in the mountains, and 
she lay down beside me to dream of freedom, of brilliant colors of blue and green and 
gold, so contrary to the dark red that she still wore. She lay down beside me, trusting 
me, and, as for me, I trusted nothing.
  I only licked the human blood on my lips and wondered how long I might have on this 
earth before someone struck off my head with a swift and certain sword.
  
  
  15
  THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
  
  
  THE city of Florence was in an uproar.
  "Why?" I asked.
  It was well past curfew, to which no one was paying much attention, and there was a 
huge crowd of students congregated in Santa Maria Maggiori - the Duomo - listening to a 
lecture by a humanist who pleaded that Fra Filippo Lippi was not such a pig.
  No one took much note of us. We had fed early, in the countryside, and wore heavy 
mantles, and what could they see of us but a little pale flesh?
  I went into the church. The crowd came out almost to the doors.
  "What's the matter? What's happened to the great painter?"
  "Oh, he's done it now," said the man who answered me, not even bothering to look at me 
or at the slender figure of Ursula clinging to me.
  The man was too intent on looking at the lecturer, who stood up ahead, his voice 
echoing sharply in the overwhelming large nave.
  "Done what?"
  Getting no answer, I pushed my way a little deeper into the thick, odiferous human 
crowd, pulling Ursula with me. She was still shy of such an immense city, and she had not 
seen a Cathedral on this scale in the more than two hundred years of her life.
  Once again I put my question to two young students, who turned at once to answer me, 
fashionable boys both, about eighteen, or what they called then in Florence giovani, 
being the most difficult of youths, too old to be a child, such as I was, and too young 
to be a man.
  "Well, he asked for the fairest of the nuns to pose for the altarpiece that he was 
painting of the blessed Virgin, that's what he did," said the first student, black-haired 
and deep-eyed, staring at me with a cunning smile.
  "He asked for her as a model, asked that the convent choose her for him, so that the 
Virgin he painted would be most perfect, and then..." The other student took it up.
  "... he ran off with her! Stole the nun right out of the convent, ran off with her and 
her sister, mind you, her blood-kindred sister, and has set up his household right over 
his shop, he and his nun and her sister, the three of them, the monk and the two nuns... 
and lives in sin with her, Lucrezia Buti, and paints the Virgin on the altarpiece and 
does not give a damn what anyone thinks."
  There was jostling and pushing in the crowd about us. Men told us to be quiet. The 
students were choking on their laughter.
  "If he didn't have Cosimo," said the first student, lowering his voice in an obedient 
but mischievous whisper, "they'd string him up, I mean her family, the Buti, would at 
least, if not the priests of the Carmelite Order, if not the whole damned town."
  The other student shook his head and covered his mouth not to laugh out loud.
  The speaker, far ahead, advised all to remain calm and let this scandal and outrage be 
handled by the proper authorities, for everyone knew that nowhere in all of Florence was 
there a painter any greater than Fra Filippo, and that Cosimo would tend to this in his 
own time.
  "He's always been tormented," said the student beside me.
  "Tormented," I whispered. "Tormented." His face came back to me, the monk glimpsed 
years ago in Cosimo's house in the Via Larga, the man arguing so fiercely to be free, 
only to be with a woman for a little while. I felt the strangest conflict within, the 
strangest darkest fear. "Oh, that they don't hurt him again."
  "One might wonder," came a soft voice in my ear. I turned, but I saw no one who could 
have spoken to me. Ursula looked about.
  "What is it, Vittorio?"
  But I knew the whisper, and it came again, bodiless and intimate, "One might wonder, 
where were his guardian angels on the day that Fra Filippo did such a mad thing?"
  I turned in a mad frantic circle, searching for the origin of the voice. Men backed 
away from me and made little gestures of annoyance. I snatched up Ursula's hand and made 
for the doors.
  Only when I was outside in the piazza did my heart stop pounding. I had not known that 
with this new blood I could feel such anxiety and misery and fear.
  "Oh, run off with a nun to paint the Virgin!" I cried out under my breath.
  "Don't cry, Vittorio," she said.
  "Don't speak to me as if I were your little brother!" I said to her, and then was full 
of shame. She was stricken by my words, as if I'd slapped her. I took her fingers and 
kissed them. "I'm sorry, Ursula, I am sorry." I pulled her along beside me.
  "But where are we going?"
  "To the house of Fra Filippo, to his workshop. Don't question me now."
  Within moments we had found our way, echoing and clattering down the narrow street, and 
we stood before the doors that were shut up and I could see no light, save in the 
third-story windows, as though he had had to flee to that height with his bride. No mob 
was gathered here.