with her charcoal box and the remains of a long-consumed picnic meal. She would have to leave soon, as well, and abandon this secret, enchanted grove for the prosaic real world of the villa. Her father would be emerging from his library, looking about for her in his absent way.
Not just yet, though. Isabella lay back in the warm grass, staring up at the sky through the long, lacy pattern of the olive branches. The bright blue of afternoon had faded to a paler, rose-tinged hue, but the air still hung heavy, not yet cooled by the onrush of evening. She smelled the green freshness of the grass, the sulphur-tinged sweetness of wild jasmine. It was a beautiful time of day, her favourite, when it seemed she was all alone in the world, that nothing could touch her, hurt her, change her. There were no responsibilities, no demands. No wild longings.
Isabella closed her eyes, feeling the soft caress of the wind across her cheeks, through the fall of her loose, thick black hair. The song of the birds was muted now, as if they were far away. What would it be like to fly free as they did, to feel the breeze bearing her up, up, up? To soar above the earth.
She imagined a painting in her mind, a canvas washed with an expanse of clear, priceless sky-blue, dotted with grey-tipped white clouds. At the very bottom of the scene, a string of buildings, villas, farms, the dome of a church. Perhaps the tiny dots of people going about their daily business. And above, hovering in the heady, thin air of perfect freedom, Icarus. A handsome young man, naked but for the pointed wings arcing above his head. A single moment of untainted glory. But high above, at the top edge of the canvas, the hot, waiting rays of the harsh sun. The fall that lurked for all men who dared fly too high.
Isabella opened her eyes and for an instant she fancied she saw a tiny figure soaring towards the sunset. His face was indistinct, she couldn’t yet envision it, though she dreamed of just such a man. Somewhere out there, waiting for her.
She laughed wryly. That was hardly likely. Their home here was beautiful, safe, tucked far away from the dangerous doings of the great men in Florence. The men of her Strozzi cousins’ circle. There were no dangerous suns here. But neither were there wax wings to bear a soul to freedom.
The sky was streaked with vivid orange and gold now, a paint palette that signalled the close of one more day. She had stayed here too long.
Isabella pushed herself up, rising slowly to her feet. Her legs were stiff from sitting too long, from balancing the sketchbook on her knees. Her dark blue skirts were streaked with ochre-coloured dust and grass blades, but she had no time to worry about that now. She had to get home, to make sure supper was waiting for her father.
* * *
The farm was slowly coming to life for the evening, after the long siesta of the sleepy afternoon. Outside the cottages, tables were being set up beneath the trees, candles lit against the gathering darkness. Children raced around, energized by the cool breeze that crept over the dusty land, banishing the heat of the day. Laughter, the barking of dogs, the fresh song of awakening night birds followed Isabella as she hurried down the pathway, dirt billowing around her sandal-clad feet, the hem of her gown.
‘Buona notte!’ people called after her and she answered with quick waves, smiles. At last she came to the top of the slope that led to her father’s villa.
It was quieter there, the ebb and flow of life in the rough stone cottages muffled by a ring of scrubby olive trees, and by something else, something intangible yet ever-present. The barrier of being different. Her father’s family had lived on this estate for decades, had overseen the fields, the orchards, the grapevines. Isabella had known all those people since she was in swaddling clothes, the poor little bambina with no mother who thus became the child of all. Or none.
But truly they were different. She and her father. The scholar, the man so wrapped in his dusty books, his ancient world, his memories of her mother, that he never walked the fields as his own father had. He cared little for the things that absorbed the days of others, the mundane work of feeding families, worshipping God, living life. And she, his daughter, his only child, was worse. A woman who would rather scribble strange images on parchment than marry and raise children.
Isabella absently twisted her untidy black hair up into a knot, thinking of the whispers people thought she couldn’t hear. This was her home, the only one she had ever known. Yet she didn’t belong here. She thought again of Icarus, soaring free on his fatal wings. What she would not give for just a taste of that freedom! Yet it was impossible. She was a woman, she had her duties, her destinies. Wings could not be hers.
But there was one choice she could make, a gift of her father’s hazy unworldliness, his carelessness. She could choose not to marry some country lordling and lose her youth and vitality in endless tasks, endless childbearing. Even if it meant she stayed frozen for ever.
Isabella secured her hair with a comb from her pocket, brushed off her skirts and tugged the ruffled cuffs of her chemise down to cover the worst of the charcoal smudges. She was as tidy as she could make herself, so she continued on her way down the shadowed slope towards the villa.
Their house had once been the grandest in the neighbourhood, back in her grandfather’s youth, when it was newly built. The latest design, with all the most modern conveniences, the most luxurious furnishings. Her grandmother was a great beauty, a daughter of the Strozzi family, and she gave banquets and dances that were talked of even in Florence.
That was a long time ago.
Isabella’s grandparents had been gone for many years and under her father’s stewardship the villa had fallen silent. Isabella heard tell that her mother, another Strozzi, had also given banquets, had danced under the moonlight with all her stylish Florentine friends. But she’d died at Isabella’s birth and that sparkling life ended for all of them. Her father detested dancing without his wife, was indifferent to food and feasting. Oh, they did sometimes have guests to be sure, other scholars who came to debate with her father over the philosophies of the ancient Greeks, the concepts of higher mathematics, the nature of man’s highest vocation.
They did not care for dancing, either. Or even for the art that was Isabella’s life-sustaining joy. And her mother’s relatives had no use for a connection who was only a scholar, no use in a battle or at forming new alliances.
The house came into view at last and Isabella paused to catch her breath at the edge of the wild, overgrown garden. When the villa was new-built, it had been a deep ochre colour, thickly stuccoed, set off by the green-painted shutters and carved wooden doors. Now it was faded to the uneven colour of a ripe peach, the stucco flaking away in places to reveal the stone beneath, the shutters peeling. A few of the terracotta tiles of the roof were missing and the garden where Isabella’s mother had danced was a wild snarl. Statuary that once came all the way from Rome tilted this way and that amid the tangled vines, the haphazard spill of flowers. A chipped Cupid with bow drawn, a smiling Venus, Neptune with no trident.
The windows of the upper floors were dark, blank, but the doors were open, casting golden light out into the courtyard. The lower windows were thrown wide to the twilight breeze and Isabella could hear the laughter and chatter of the servants as they finished preparing supper. A table was set up near the old fountain, laid out with pitchers of wine, loaves of fresh-baked breads and ewers of olive oil.
The conversation was a high hum, an ebb and flow, but it became clearer as Isabella moved ever closer to the open doors, coalescing into words.
‘...wasn’t sure his grand relations even remembered he was here,’ she heard the cook, Flavia, say. The woman’s comments were punctuated with the click of pottery bowls. ‘He hasn’t heard from them in months.’
‘And a messenger came today?’ Mena, the housekeeper who also served as Isabella’s maid, said.
A messenger? Isabella paused, her foot on the stone step. Flavia was right—they seldom heard from their relations, not that there were many of them left. Her father’s family was not a fertile one and her mother’s cousins, the Strozzis, were people of high position in Florence. Isabella had only met them a few times, and knew little about them except that their lives sounded like a dream of beauty and culture. Why would they send a messenger