It was a peerless summer day when the Abbess and the artist reached Castello. Sister Bianca recognised the place from the fresco of the dedication of Saint Maurice, for Bernardino had painted this very house in San Maurizio down to the last window and gateway, the last tile and stone. The rose honey of the brick, the shady arches of the loggia, all were there before her eyes; just as they appeared on the great panel in the Hall of the Believers, providing an exquisite background for the story of Saint Maurice. Square, elegant and intensely separate; the house was at once welcoming and forbidding.
Bernardino, who had been in a jitter along the road these past few hours, stood at the gates almost exactly two years since he had been there last, the day Simonetta had turned away from him with his drawing in her hand. He found the place much changed.
The winter rose hedge from whence he had taken his leave of Simonetta was now green with glossy leaves and bursting with coral buds. The almond groves were pollarded and ordered in their neat lines, the fruit trees now espaliered neatly on the garden walls. The pleasure gardens of old were restored, new trout ponds reflected the sky and even the little conical dovecot had been washed and whitened. The house itself had been improved, the arches of the loggia were repaired, the old ivy stripped and the faded lilac of wisteria twisted up the frontage. There were new gates on the new columns, and glass quarrels in the casements. Bernardino noted this new prosperity and his heart sank. Was it a new husband who brought new life to this place? Sister Bianca laid a hand on his arm to quiet him but he shook it off and strode up the path, unable to bear the suspense for a moment longer. He must see her, even if it were for the last time.
Sister Bianca followed and saw her at the same time that Bernardino did. Miracle of miracles; she wore the red dress of his picture, crossed with golden thread and fretted with seed pearls. Her hair was bound with a pearl cincture and glowed the red of carnelians. But she was so alive, so animate! She was no painting. Her white face was flushed with laughter, and her red curls escaped from their binding to wind about her neck and ears. Her skirts were kirtled to her waist as she ran round the largest tree in the grove in a scene of domestic felicity. But there was no husband in the case; just a pair of golden children, laughing, and tumbling, both holding a switch of green and white almond blossom, chasing the lady. Cutting and thrusting with their harmless swords. At length she would catch one or other of them and kiss their little cheeks or necks in a picture of maternal love.
Bernardino was deeply moved – she could have been their mother, were it not for two things; their ages made the thing impossible, and the older one he recognised. Could it be true? It was Elijah, the Jewish boy for whom he had painted the dove, and bought the marble. Evangelista, the candle angel with the red wings that lived forever on the walls of San Maurizio.
Bernardino marvelled at this new Simonetta, the laughing, smiling living woman, not racked by the pains of love or bereavement, of disloyalty and disgrace. Not penurious, or proud, as she came to him for help in her husband’s clothes. Not chilly and remote as she sat for him posing as the Queen of Heaven, as far above mortal passions as the cold moon itself. She too had changed, and he had never wanted her more. Sister Bianca saw too – her good heart thrilled at the scene and she recognised Saint Ursula playing with the candle angel, but she feared for Bernardino – how could he forget a woman like this? This was not the distant, proud lady she had envisaged; the cold chatelaine who tortured her lover. Here was a warm lovely creature who could make a man’s life an earthly paradise. What would her friend do if she would not have him?
At last Simonetta tired of the game and fell in the groin of the roots of Rebecca’s tree, on the green grass above Manodorata’s grave. She leaned back, exhausted, on the trunk where her friend had breathed his last as his sons fell in her lap. She had seen to it that they played here, she had banished superstition and made it their playground, and she spoke openly of their father and mother until they did too.
She held the boys tight with one head on each shoulder and closed her eyes. The sun was so bright she could still see the almond leaves shifting above her like dark fishes that switch back and forth with the tide. When she opened them again she thought she had the sunblindness, for there stood Bernardino Luini.
Sister Bianca’s doubts vanished as Simonetta stood wonderingly and took him in her arms, both laughing and crying. Both said the other’s name over and over, and both thanked the God that they had each separately come to know in the dark days of their separation. Their mouths met in a long hard kiss, their eyes closed as they drank each other in; thankful, profoundly thankful, that all that had been wrong was now right. The Abbess, only human after all, strained to hear what they said, but could not understand what came next. For between kisses, Bernardino called Simonetta ‘Phyllis’, and she laughing, as if completing a password, replied, ‘Demophon’. The Abbess might have been shocked to learn that the two invoked a pagan myth from ancient Greece, where a woman who thought she had lost her love was turned into an almond tree, but was saved by his return, and blossomed in his arms as he brought her back to life and to love again. But the Abbess did not understand the reference, nor was she in the mood for censure. Instead she took a little boy’s hand in each of hers, and drew them to her. ‘Could you show me the game you were playing just now?’ she said. ‘I would very much like to learn it.’
So as Bernardino and Simonetta plighted their troth under the almond trees as the blossom drifted across their lips and lashes, the Abbess of San Maurizio hoisted her habit above her knees, exposing her pale hairy legs to the sun for the first time in years, and ran round an almond tree chased by two little Jewish boys, laughing like a parrot and whirling like a dervish.
Simonetta di Saronno and Bernardino Luini married in the Sanctuary of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno, the church of the Miracles. Simonetta decided that she must look the past in the face and be churched publicly in order to begin her new life in the open. In a change to her first marriage though, they married not at the main altar but in the Lady Chapel where the bride watched herself from the walls – peering down from the frescoes painted by the groom. They were attended by a brother and sister in Christ, and a brother and sister in blood, for Alessandra and Anselmo Bentivoglio met and forged a friendship at once; the bond of the same character and the same father more than outweighed the division of a different mother and upbringing.
Even the townsfolk blessed the match – the Amaretto liquor had brought great prosperity to the area, and the mistress of Castello was a wealthy patroness of the vintner, the butcher and every other victualler in the town. Not the baker though – he had died mysteriously some weeks past; and only Father Anselmo, administering the last rites, had noticed a wicked dagger in the shape of a Maltese cross buried deep in the man’s chestspoon. The priest kept his peace though, and so did Simonetta; and if she knew that a large part of her popularity stemmed from her being a known anti-semite who had personally dispatched the vile Jew Manodorata, she did not question it. Better to be reputed as such and keep her little family safe.
For it was at home, with her family, that the real wedding took place. Under Rebecca’s tree, they said their vows again as the boys held an arch of blossom over their heads. Bernardino and Simonetta exchanged an almond, and this time she crushed it with her teeth, chewed it well and swallowed it down, tasting at once the full sweet flavour of the nut. Another difference: they toasted this wedding with Amaretto, the drink Simonetta had made for Bernardino. They drank from two sides of the same silver cup and Bernardino marvelled at this surpassingly fine liquor that his new wife had made. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, a small wrinkle of anxiety sitting atop her brow.
He smiled. ‘I think that true art is not only found on the walls of churches,’ he said.
They feasted there under the trees till the boys’ golden heads drooped. A strange feast indeed – attended by a nun and a priest who sat like bookends, for all the world a modern day Benedict and Scholastica. Also in attendance, drinking from the same flagon, were a Jewish tutor and his lady – a mute convert from Taormina – who nonetheless laughed and sang as readily as the rest. For their feast there were a mixture of Christian and Jewish dishes, and the songs that they sang as the Amaretto flowed came from the four points of the compass: folk songs of Lombardy, wedding hymns from Milan, Hebrew chants from the east and peasant airs from Taormina and the hot south.
At length Veronica put the boys to bed and Anselmo and the Abbess took their leave, to return to the priest’s house in the town. Bianca had taken a sabbatical of a sevennight from the monastery, leaving the business of the place in the hands of her trusted sub-Prioress. She intended to spend the week as the guest of her brother, in prayer and contemplation and joyous conversations to fill in their missing sibling years. Then she would return willingly to her home, refreshed and ready to implement the changes in her ministry that she had resolved upon on the day of the death of the Countess of Challant. She privily hoped that she could persuade Anselmo to come with her, for a short sojourn in Milan, to be re-united with his father.
The newlyweds sat on as the stars came and the luna moths began to glow and flutter above them. Night was another country, and their discourse changed with the territory. The frivolity of the day was gone. Their joy remained, bone-deep, but with a new sobriety they talked of all that had passed in the last two years. Simonetta told Bernardino of her distillery, and the terrible story of Manodorata and Rebecca.
Bernardino recounted the tales of the Saints to whom he had given his wife’s face, and the awful and important death of the Countess of Challant; an event that had changed him forever. At last they fell silent and sat, just holding each other, glad that they had found the way home from where they had both been.
‘Did it need to happen?’ asked Bernardino at length. ‘Did we waste those two years? Might we not have begun our journey then?’
Simonetta’s head was on his chest, listening to his heartbeat as he spoke. He felt her shake her head. ‘No. Those years were not a waste. And our journey did begin then, it began the day we met. We just needed to travel our roads alone for a while.’
‘For what reason? I who am older than you, have less time left. Should we not have remained together?’
Simonetta was frightened by his heartbeats now; she knew they were finite in number and shifted her head so that she may no longer hear them counting down. Yet she stood by her position. ‘I could not accept you then. There was too much to do – to atone for. Now enough time has passed– we both did penance for what we did, and we have both come to Faith at last. I, who was brought up in religion, turned my back on it for a while, when I thought God had forsaken me. But he was there all the time, watching. He gave me back myself and my house, he saved the boys, and I returned to Him again.’
‘And I,’ said Bernardino, ‘a faithless heathen, with no stomach for religion, found the true path in San Maurizio. You have returned to it, and I have found it anew.’
‘And how strange,’ went on Simonetta, ‘that my contact with those of another faith has brought me closer to God, not further from him. I have learned, at last, that God is God; he is the same for all of us, it is only our worship of him that differs.’
Bernardino closed his hands over hers, imprisoning them. Her long fingers steepled within his; a prayer within a prayer. ‘Might we not have learned this together?’
Simonetta shook her bright head. ‘I think not. We needed to heal, to be whole before we united. And from our sorrowful separation has come good things – you have done the best work of your life which will be admired for generations.’
‘And you have invented Amaretto, which will be enjoyed for just as long!’
Bernardino’s voice was teasing, and Simonetta smiled; but her face was soon serious again. ‘And yet these things were not the best of it. The best of it was the friends that we made and lost.’ Simonetta thought of Manodorata, and Bernardino of the Countess who Bianca mourned.
‘And the friends we have made and kept. The Abbess, Anselmo.’
‘And the boys,’ Bernardino smiled fondly.
Simonetta warmed at the thought of her sons, and how they had taken readily and unquestioningly to Bernardino’s presence. Elijah, already acquainted with the man who had once painted his hand, had noted, with his beady intelligence, how happy his mother had become since Bernardino had come to them. The boys missed their father enough to yearn for a replacement, but there was much here that was new. Bernardino had a lively humour, and a quick, teasing wit that Manodorata – an excellent father in so many ways had lacked. Bernardino’s accessibility and playful sense of the ridiculous, the very characteristics in which he differed so wildly from their dead father, only served to endear the children to him. Bernardino, in turn, set out with determination to make a friend of the boys. As Simonetta watched the three of them play – for all the world as if there were no difference in their ages – she pondered on the stories that Bernardino had told her of his lonely childhood. She sensed, now, that he was so ready to love them; he was ripe for it. The sluicegates had opened and his affection flooded forth. She knew he intended to love them as he was never loved as a boy, and was heartily glad of it. Simonetta noted that already, in the short time Bernardino had been at Castello, he had kissed and held the children more than she had ever seen Manodorata do in a brace of years. She saw him looking at the boys with an air of revelation; and his next words echoed her thoughts.
‘The boys best of all.’ He took his arm from round her shoulders and rubbed the back of his neck, as if perplexed. ‘It is passing strange for me. I never longed for children, always thought myself too selfish to take joy in them. I thought I could never be happier than if I possessed you at last,’ he clasped her tight once more. ‘And yet here I am with not only the woman of my heart, but a ready-made family whom I adore.’
‘And now they will be happy,’ she rejoined. ‘The townsfolk will leave us be. We will be celebrated; you for your art, me for Amaretto, and the boys will be safe.’
They were silent for a time, lost in the past and the future. The sky darkened or the stars brightened, and the wind murmured through the almond leaves, prompting their fair owner of something she had forgot. Remembering, Simonetta pulled a small piece of vellum from her bodice. She handed it to her husband, battered for she had carried it every day since he had gone, warm for it had lived next to her heart. ‘Do you remember this?’ she asked, with half a smile.
Bernardino took the parchment. ‘Of course I do. I painted it on the unhappiest day of my life, the day I thought I had lost you forever. And I painted it again, tens, scores, hundreds of times on the walls of San Maurizio. Every single Magdalene, and most of your Saints wear that emblem somewhere on their raiments. ’Twas the secret code of my love for you – at once hopeless and hopeful – and only Bianca found the key.’ He traced the symbol, so well known to him, with his fingertips. ‘And now, my dear heart, do you know the meaning of the rune, you for whom it was designed?’
Simonetta rested her head between his neck and shoulder, and breathed in his skin. ‘I think I do. I did not know for ever so long, but I have learned much in your absence.’
‘Go on.’
She pointed at the cognizance, her hands pale in the moonlight. ‘There is a heart, of course, and within it, a trinity of leaves, like a fleur-de-lys.’
She felt him nod. ‘What leaves are they?’
‘The leaves of the almond tree.’
‘And is there more?’ he prompted her, gently.
‘No. No nut or fruit is depicted there. Just the leaves inside the heart.’
‘Why?’
She heard the urgency in his voice; it was too dark, now, to see his dear face, but it suddenly seemed terribly important that she knew the answer to the riddle. ‘Because we were not together; and without our union there could be no fruit. The tree would be barren. No flowers or harvest; just artifice and ornament. Beauty without fecundity. Phyllis did not blossom until her Demephon came home and freed her from desolation.’
Bernardino exhaled relief, and pulled her close for a long kiss, the catechism over. They stayed thus till they felt warm raindrops fall on their faces. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘I have a new wife. And by this moon I think it is already my wedding night.’ He pulled her to her feet, softly laughing with delicious anticipation, but as they walked through the scented dusky groves, he began, again, to speak. ‘Strange,’ he said, ‘that in Saronno where we met I saw you as the Virgin and painted you as the Madonna again and again. Yet in San Maurizio I did not paint you as the Queen of Heaven but as Saints and martyrs, mortal women; and that other Mary, the Magdalene.’
Simonetta took his arm, and her voice when she spoke was teasing. ‘Perhaps you saw me then as a fallen woman, as Gregorio the squire called me; a woman who wantonly kissed you on the steps of the church.’ She was amazed how easy it was now to speak lightly of that shattering event.
He did not smile. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps I idealised you, made you my icon of womanly perfection, the Madonna personified. Mother, wife and all things loving and good.’ His voice was earnest and halting as he felt his way through the maze, in an effort to unravel the truth. ‘Then I taught myself to despise you once I had possessed you, despite the fact that I myself brought you low. Perhaps it had more to do with my own mother, and the way she denied me love, in the way that you denied me yourself too. For she was a Magdalene indeed – they even shared a profession.’ Now he smiled, but even in the dusk she could see that the hurt had not yet gone. She longed to take it all away, to love him as he deserved for the rest of his life.
Now they left the leafy alleys behind and walked the steps to the loggia, and it was she that spoke next. ‘And if you paint me again, my husband, what shall I be then?’
He turned her to him and took her face in his hands. She was bathed in the amber light from the house, the alchemy of candlelight turning her to gold. Yet she was not an icon or a statue, she was real, and his wife. He felt his heart fail. ‘I will paint you as you are,’ he said. ‘A mortal woman. But it may yet be that I will paint you as the Virgin once again. For in San Maurizio, in all the tales that were told to me, I have learned that all women, be they never so Holy, are all human; and all men likewise.’ He kissed her, to demonstrate the point, and they went inside.
They crept up the stair to her solar, following the trail of almond blossom which Veronica had scattered to guide their way. Bernardino was silent, thinking, and Simonetta waited.
‘One thing more before our discourse is done,’ he said, at last. ‘Do you remember once, in Saronno’s church, you held out your hand to me, and I turned away?’
She turned back on the stair and looked down on him. Noli me Tangere. His face was so raw and vulnerable. She loved him so much at that moment that she could not speak. She nodded.
‘I will not do so again,’ he said, in a voice so soft that it was almost a whisper.
She held out her hand to him, he took it, and together they climbed the stair.
His hard body lay atop her soft one, and they kissed a hundred, a thousand times until her lips and cheeks were raw with the scrape of his stubble. His hands were everywhere, charting the landscape of her body; on her breasts, between her legs, in all the places she knew she had longed for. Sometimes gripping so hard that there was almost pain, sometimes grazing her flesh so softly and unbearably that she became shameless, guiding his hands and forcing his touch. And then he entered her and the yearning stopped. He lay still for many moments, within her, above her; wolf-grey eyes locked into lake-blue ones, staring deep, deep into the depths. This moment of joining, that Simonetta now knew she had imagined for three long years, flooded her with such pleasure that she had to bite her lip to keep her from crying out. She marvelled at how different it was, this animal act, how different he felt; this new husband, from the old. He fitted, he filled her up. With Lorenzo she had been a girl; young and untried, half a woman who needed half a man – a boy playing at soldiers – to make her whole. With Bernardino she felt as if two people, who had suffered and learned survival apart, had at last come together to make a couple. A pair; equal in love and life and their separate endeavours. This was not the love of youth, it was the love of age and maturity; of adult passions so much more real and fulfilling than the courtly posturings of her adolescent union. It was so good, and so right, that she could hardly bear it. Bernardino began, at last, to move. And she forgot Lorenzo.
Hours later, Bernardino rose to close the casement against a sudden chill breeze. He saw dark storm clouds rolling in across the bottle-green plain from the direction of Pavia. There would be thunder and lightning this night but he cared not. He could not waste another moment on the vista when there was a view more beautiful awaiting him within the solar. His new wife: more lovely than ever, all tumbled and golden and abandoned on the bed. Their union had been more, so much more than even he had ever dreamed. How thankful he was now that she had not given herself to him cheaply, all those years ago; that they could now live honestly in the light, as man and wife, without the torture of conscience on the rack of scandal. His heart was full – he was at once completely happy and could ask for nothing, long for nothing. And as he slid beneath the coverlet and felt her arms close around him, he felt that nothing could ever divide them again.