The church bells of Santa Croce had been tolling for the dead so often that most of Florence no longer noticed them. But I noticed today. Today, they rang for Lucia.

  I stood rigid beside my sister’s grave, the June sun beating down mercilessly upon our funeral party. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades beneath the heavy black wool of my mourning dress, but I remained motionless, my eyes fixed on the wooden coffin being lowered into the earth. Inside lay my sister, my brilliant, beautiful sister—and the tiny infant son who had never drawn breath.

  “Mia figlia,” our father murmured beside me, his voice breaking. “My daughter.”

  I could not tell if he mourned for Lucia or for the grandson who had died with her. The grandson that was supposed to untie our family, the Medici, with the powerful Alberti family through Lucia’s marriage. The grandson who killed her as surely as he might’ve wielded a blade one day.

  I caught the tremor in father’s hand as he made the sign of the cross.

  The priest’s Latin droned on, but I had stopped listening. I had attended seventeen funerals in the past month—plague victims mostly, neighbors and distant relatives claimed by the pestilence sweeping through Florence. But Lucia had not died of plague. Lucia had died as our mother had, as countless women did: in a bed soaked with blood, bringing forth new life.

  A fly buzzed lazily above the grave, drawn by the sweet scent of decay that hung over the entire city now. The sound seemed obscenely loud, an insult to Lucia’s memory. Without thinking, I swatted it away with a quick, fierce motion.

  I felt a hand close over mine, bony fingers squeezing with surprising strength. My grandmother Sofia stood beside me, face like weathered parchment beneath her widow’s veil. Those dark eyes, so like my own, held a warning. Control yourself. Even in grief, a Medici daughter must maintain dignity.

  Across the grave stood Lucia’s husband of thirteen months. Paolo Alberti wept openly, his handsome face contorted, handkerchief pressed to his mouth. Twenty-six years old and already a widower. He had genuinely loved Lucia—rare enough in arranged marriages. I wondered how long before my father would arrange another marriage for him, perhaps to one of the younger Strozzi girls. The alliance was, of course, too valuable to abandon.

  “Earth to earth,” the priest intoned as the first shovelful of dirt hit the coffin with a hollow thud.

  I flinched, my composure finally breaking. I felt my grandmother’s grip tighten.

  “Breathe,” Nonna Sofia whispered. “Just breathe.”

  But I found I could not fill my lungs. The stench of the city—decay and waste and too many bodies—seemed to press in around me. More plague victims had been buried that morning; I had seen the death carts on our way to the cathedral. The gravediggers worked day and night now, their shovels beating a steady rhythm as they cut against wood and roots. Florence was dying by inches.

  “She was happy, you know,” my father said suddenly, leaning close as the dirt continued to fall. “In her marriage. Paolo was kind to her.”

  I nodded, unable to speak past the stone in my throat. It was true. Paolo had been kind, gentler than most husbands of her acquaintance. Lucia had written of it in the letters she sent from their villa across the city, near the Arno. He asks my opinion on matters. He brings me pomegranates because he knows I favor them. He reads to me in the evenings. She had expressed her hopes for the child growing within her.

  And now she is dead at eighteen, just as I will be soon enough.

  At seventeen, I was now the oldest Medici daughter. The next to be married off. How long would it be, I wondered, before another husband would stand with that same expression at my grave? That thought sent a chill through to my very bones, and despite the summer heat, my teeth chattered until my jaw ached. Lucia had been his favorite, the beauty of the family with her golden hair and laughing eyes. I resembled our mother more with my darker coloring and serious nature. I was ripe for marriage—a fact Father had been lamenting even before Lucia’s death.

  I pushed the thought away, ashamed of thinking of myself while Lucia lay cold in her coffin. I searched the small crowd for my younger half-sisters: Maria, age twelve, and little Bianca, just eight. They stood with our aunt, Maria sobbing quietly while Bianca started wide-eyed at the grave, too young to fully comprehend what was happening. I was grateful they had been sheltered from Lucia’s difficult labor, from the screams that still echoed only in my very worst nightmares.

  The funeral procession had been small by Medici standards. The plague had thinned the ranks of mourners; many families had fled to country estates, and others feared any gathering. Even some of our own relatives had sent regrets rather than risk exposure. Cowards, my father had called them, though I had seen the fear in his own eyes each time the death carts rattled past our palazzo.

  As the service concluded, the small assembly of mourners filed past to offer condolences. I accepted them mechanically, noting which business rivals had come despite the danger, calculating alliances and obligations as my father had taught me to do. The Albizzi were notably absent, though they had sent an extravagant arrangement of lilies. The Strozzi had come in force, suggesting they sensed weakness in the Medici position. The Pazzi family was represented only by their steward, a deliberate slight that made father’s jaw tighten.

  My gaze drifted past the steward to the Pazzi family chapel nearby. The cool shadow of its doorway stirred memories of whispered conversations, of Matteo Pazzi pressing a folded piece of parchment, a sonnet, into my palm during High Mass three months ago, his fingers lingering against mine longer than allowed, of Matteo Pazzi’s smile when—

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  “You are too pale,” Nonna Sofia murmured, cutting through my fog as we finally turned to walk slowly back toward the Medici palazzo. Her arm found mine, linking for support. Though she was past sixty, she moved with surprising vigor. “We should prepare you a tonic with valerian root when we return home.”

  “I’m fine, Nonna,” I replied without thought.

  “You are not fine. None of us are fine.” Sofia glanced over her shoulder to ensure my father was out of earshot, deep in conversation with Paolo’s father. “Come to my room tonight, after vespers. There are matters we must discuss.”

  I nodded, curious despite my grief. My grandmother’s rooms had always been a sanctuary—filled with dried herbs hanging from the rafters, mysterious potions, and books father would have burned had he known of their existence. The old woman had taught me to read not just Italian and Latin, but Greek as well, all in secret. In Sofia’s rooms, I could occasionally forget the narrow confines of a woman’s existence.

  Behind us, the bells began again—another funeral commencing. I didn’t turn to look. Instead, I gathered Bianca into my arms as she ran to me, her small face wet with tears.

  “Will Lucia come back from heaven?” She asked, her voice small against my shoulder.

  “No piccola,” I said gently, stroking her dark curls. “She stays with the angels now.”

  “But I don’t want her with the angels. I want her here.” Bianca cried.

  I had no answer for that. None of us did.

  Through the setting sun, I watched a cart laden with plague victims rumble past on its way to the mass graves outside the city walls. The wooden wheels creaked under their burden, and the driver’s monotonous call, “bring out your dead!”echoed down the narrow street. The sickly-sweet odor of rot reached us even from this distance.

  The dying and the dead.

  And I, Elisabetta Medici, walking precariously in between.

  * * *

  The Medici palazzo near the Ponte Vecchio was smaller than those of our more illustrious cousins, but father had spent lavishly on its restoration five years earlier, when the silk trade with the East had brought unprecedented profits. It boasted three stories of magnificently carved stone rising around a central courtyard where a fountain played day and night. The sound of water splashing against marble usually brought me comfort, but today it only reminded me of Lucia’s love of sitting beside it on summer evenings, trailing her fingers through the cool water.

  Even the palazzo’s grand halls felt oppressive today. The windows had been shuttered against the cruel summer heat, leaving the rooms and their lofted frescoed ceilings in shadow. The acrid smell of sulfur and rosemary hung in the air, due to my grandmother’s last attempt to ward off the plague miasma. I ran my fingers along the wall as I walked, feeling the subtle imperfections in the plaster beneath the painted scenes of saints and martyrs.

  Father retreated almost immediately to his study, while Aunt Vittoria took Maria and Bianca to the kitchens for warm milk and honey—a childhood comfort we were certainly all too old for, but needed desperately today.

  I slipped away to Lucia’s old bedchamber, the one she had occupied before her marriage. It remained unchanged since her departure, Father having forbidden the servants from re-purposing it despite our growing household’s need for space. I closed the door behind me and stood in the center of the room, breathing in the fading scent of the lavender sachets she had always kept among her clothes.

  On her dressing table sat a small silver mirror—her prized possession, gifted by Father when she turned sixteen. I lifted it, seeing my reflection distorted by tears. I had the same high forehead as Lucia, the same straight nose, but where her eyes had been a lively hazel, mine were dark and solemn. “Eyes like wells,” our mother had reportedly said after my birth, just days before childbed fever took her life.

  A soft knock interrupted my thoughts. I hastily wiped my eyes and opened the door to find Maria, her face still blotchy and swollen from crying.

  “Zietta Vittoria says you need to eat something,” she said, holding out a small plate with bread, cheese, and sliced pears.

  I took it, though my stomach rebelled at the thought of food. “Grazie, little one.”

  Maria stepped into the room, looking around as if expecting to find Lucia’s ghost. “Father is meeting with Signor Visconti in his study,” she said with the casual indifference of a child repeating adult conversations. “Zietta says it’s indecent with Lucia not yet cold.”

  My hand froze halfway to my mouth. “Lorenzo Visconti? The wool merchant?”

  Maria shrugged, already losing interest in the information she’d delivered. She picked up one of Lucia’s combs, running her fingers over the pearl inlay. “Can I have this, do you think? When enough time has passed?”

  But I barely heard her. Lorenzo Visconti. Forty-five years old and three times widowed, each wife perishing in childbirth. A merchant richer even than Father, desperate for a male heir to inherit his fortune. I had met him once at Easter mass, had seen how his gaze lingered on me even as he offered condolences on my mother’s long-ago death.

  I set the plate down with a clatter, my decision immediate and almost shocking. I will not be the fourth wife to die in Lorenzo Visconti’s bed.

  “Betta? Are you listening?”

  I blinked, finding Maria staring at me with concern. “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

  “You should rest before dinner,” she said with the premature authority of a girl raised among too many women. “You look very faint.”

  “I will,” I promised, setting down the untouched plate. “Go help Zia Vittoria with Bianca. I’ll join you shortly.”

  Once alone again, I sank onto Lucia’s bed, my hands trembling. So it had already begun. With Lucia not yet buried, Father was already negotiating my future. I knew how these discussions proceeded, first it was the haggling over dowry, then the assessment of family connections, and then the cold calculation of advantage. In normal times, such negotiations might continue for months, but with plague ravaging the city, families were rushing to secure advantageous matches before more died.

  I thought of Lorenzo Visconti’s sagging jowls and the way his eyes had swept over me, assessing like a farmer with prized livestock. I thought of Lucia’s swollen, lifeless face when they had allowed me to see her body, the tiny stillborn son tucked against her breast.

  I thought of our mother, whose face I knew only from a small portrait Father kept, dead before she could see her first daughter’s second birthday.

  Death had even taken little Maria and Bianca’s mother, my father’s second wife, when Bianca was but a mere child of four.

  I crossed myself and whispered a prayer for Lucia’s soul. Then, because no one was there to see, I buried my face in her pillow and sobbed until my throat was raw and my eyes burned. I wept for Lucia and her lost child, for my mother whom I had never known, for my little sisters who would someday face the same fate that awaited all women of our station.

  And I wept for myself, for the life I had imagined in girlish daydreams: a life of learning and discovery, of choice and freedom and love. A life that would never be mine.

  When the tears finally ceased, I washed my face in the basin, pinched color back into my cheeks, wiped a gentle dash of soot over my eyelashes, and straightened my mourning clothes. Then I descended to join my family for dinner, my face composed into the mask of dignified grief expected of a Medici daughter, while within my chest, my heart hammered with dread.