The Enchantress of Florence Read Free

Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk, recovering his poise with admirable celerity. “Now that does give us something in common.”
    He was a much-traveled milord, this Hauksbank of That Ilk, and older than he looked. His eye was bright and his skin was clear but he had not seen his fortieth year for seven years or more. His swordsmanship was a byword and he was as strong as a white bull and he had journeyed by raft to the source of the Yellow River in the Kar Qu lake, where he ate braised tiger penis from a golden bowl, and he had hunted the white rhinoceros of the Ngorongoro Crater and climbed all two hundred and eighty-four peaks of the Scottish Munros, from Ben Nevis to the Inaccessible Pinnacle at Sgurr Dearg on the island of Skye, home of Scáthach the Terrible. Long ago in Castle Hauksbank he quarreled with his wife, a tiny barking woman with curly red hair and a jaw like a Dutch nutcracker and he had left her in the Highlands to farm black sheep and gone to seek his fortune like his ancestor before him and captained a ship in the service of Drake when they pirated the gold of the Americas from the Spanish in the Caribbean Sea. His reward from a grateful queen had been this embassy upon which he was presently embarked; he was to go to
Hindoostan
where he was at liberty to gather and keep any fortune he might be able to find, whether in gemstones, opium, or gold, so long as he bore a personal letter from Gloriana to the king and fetched home the
Mogol
’s reply.
    “In Italy we say,
Mogor,
” the young prestidigitator told him. “In the unpronounceable tongues of the land itself,” Lord Hauksbank rejoined, “who knows how the word may be twisted, knotted, and turned.”
    A book sealed their friendship: the
Canzoniere
of Petrarch, an edition of which lay, as always, by the Scottish milord’s elbow on a little
pietra dura
tabletop. “Ah, mighty Petrarca,” “Uccello” cried. “Now there is a true magician.” And striking a Roman senator’s oratorical pose he began to declaim:

    “Benedetto sia ’l giorno, et ’l mese, et l’anno,
    et la stagione, e ’l tempo, et l’ora, e ’l punto,
    e ’l bel paese, e ’l loco ov’io fui giunto
    da’duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno…”

    Whereupon Lord Hauksbank took up the sonnet’s thread in English:

    “…and blessed be the first sweet suffering
    that I felt in being conjoined with Love, and the bow,
    and the shafts with which I was pierced,
    and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart.”

    “Any man who loves this poem as I do must be my master,” said “Uccello,” bowing. “And any man who feels as I do about these words must be my drinking companion,” returned the Scot. “You have turned the key that unlocks my heart. Now I must share a secret that you will never divulge to anyone. Come with me.”
    In a small wooden box concealed behind a sliding panel in his sleeping quarters Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk kept a collection of beloved “objects of virtue,” beautiful little pieces without which a man who traveled constantly might lose his bearings, for too much travel, as Lord Hauksbank well knew, too much strangeness and novelty, could loosen the moorings of the soul. “These things are not mine,” he said to his new Florentine friend, “yet they remind me of who I am. I act as their custodian for a time, and when that time is ended, I let them go.” He pulled out of the box a number of jewels of awe-inspiring size and clarity which he set aside with a dismissive shrug, and then an ingot of Spanish gold which would keep any man who found it in splendor for the rest of his days—“’tis nothing, nothing,” he muttered—and only then did he arrive at his real treasures, each carefully wrapped in cloth and embedded in nests of crumpled paper and shredded rags: the silk handkerchief of a pagan goddess of ancient Soghdia, given to a forgotten hero as a token of her love; a piece of exquisite scrimshaw work on whalebone depicting the