The Enchantress of Florence Read Free Page A

hunting of a stag; a locket containing a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen; a leather-bound hexagonal book from the Holy Land, upon whose tiny pages, in miniature writing embellished with extraordinary illuminations, was the entire text of the Qur’n; a broken-nosed stone head from Macedonia, reputed to be a portrait of Alexander the Great; one of the cryptic “seals” of the Indus Valley civilization, found in Egypt, bearing the image of a bull and a series of hieroglyphs that had never been decoded, an object whose purpose no man knew; a flat, polished Chinese stone bearing a scarlet
I Ching
hexagram and dark natural markings resembling a mountain range at dusk; a painted porcelain egg; a shrunken head made by the denizens of the Amazon rain forest; and a dictionary of the lost language of the Panamanian isthmus whose speakers were all extinct except for one old woman who could no longer pronounce the words properly on account of the loss of her teeth.
    Lord Hauksbank of That Ilk opened a cabinet of precious glassware that had miraculously survived the crossing of many oceans, took out a matched pair of opalescent Murano balloons, and poured a sufficiency of brandy into each. The stowaway approached and raised a glass. Lord Hauksbank breathed deeply, and then drank. “You are from Florence,” he said, “so you know of the majesty of that highest of sovereigns, the individual human self, and of the cravings it seeks to assuage, for beauty, for value—and for love.” The man calling himself “Uccello” began to reply, but Hauksbank raised a hand. “I will have my say,” he continued, “for there are matters to discuss of which your eminent philosophers know nothing. The self may be royal, but it hungers like a pauper. It may be nourished for a moment by the inspection of such cocooned wonders as these, but it remains a poor, starving, thirsting thing. And it is a king imperiled, a sovereign forever at the mercy of many insurgents, of fear, for example, and anxiety, of isolation and bewilderment, of a strange unspeakable pride and a wild, silent shame. The self is beset by secrets, secrets eat at it constantly, secrets will tear down its kingdom and leave its scepter broken in the dust.
    “I see I am perplexing you,” he sighed, “so I will show myself plainly. The secret you will never divulge to anyone is not hidden in a box. It lies—no, it does not lie, but tells the truth!—in here.”
    The Florentine, who had intuited the truth about Lord Hauksbank’s concealed desires sometime before, gravely expressed proper respect for the heft and circumference of the mottled member that lay before him upon his lordship’s table smelling faintly of fennel, like a
finocchiona
sausage waiting to be sliced. “If you gave up the sea and came to live in my hometown,” he said, “your troubles would soon be at an end, for among the young gallants of San Lorenzo you would easily find the manly pleasures you seek. I myself, most regrettably…”
    “Drink up,” the Scottish milord commanded, coloring darkly, and putting himself away. “We will say no more about it.” There was a glitter in his eye which his companion wished were not in his eye. His hand was nearer to the hilt of his sword than his companion would have liked it to be. His smile was the rictus of a beast.
    There followed a long and lonely silence during which the stowaway understood that his fate hung in the balance. Then Hauksbank drained his brandy glass and gave an ugly, anguished laugh. “Well, sir,” he cried, “you know my secret, and now you must tell me yours, for certainly you have a mystery in you, which I foolishly mistook for my own, and now I must have it plain.”
    The man calling himself Uccello di Firenze tried to change the subject. “Will you not honor me, my lord, with an account of the capture of the
Cacafuego
treasure galleon? And were you—you must have been—with Drake at Valparaiso, and Nombre de Dios, where he took his