I, Mona Lisa Read Online Free PDF Page B

her to Rome and grow tired of her. You’ll want to come home to Florence. And what will she have left?”
    Angry words scalded Giuliano’s tongue. He wanted to say that although Lorenzo had married a harridan, he, Giuliano, would rather die than live in such loveless misery, that he would never stoop to fathering children upon a woman he despised. But he remained silent; he was unhappy enough. There was no point in making Lorenzo suffer the truth, too.
    Lorenzo emitted a growl of disgust. “You’ll never do it. You’ll come to your senses.”
    Giuliano looked at him a long moment. “I love you, Lorenzo,” he said quietly. “But I am going.” He turned and moved to the door.
    “Leave with her,” his brother threatened, “and you can forget that I am your brother. Don’t imagine I am joking, Giuliano. I’ll have nothing more to do with you. Leave with her, and you’ll never see me again.”
    Giuliano looked back over his shoulder at Lorenzo and was suddenly afraid. He and his older brother did not joke with each other when they discussed important matters—and neither could be swayed when he had made up his mind. “Please don’t make me choose.”
    Lorenzo’s jaw was set, his gaze cold. “You’ll have to.”
     
    Later, in the evening, Giuliano had waited in Lorenzo’s ground-floor apartment until it was time to meet Anna. He had spent the entire day contemplating Lorenzo’s comment about how she would beruined if she went to Rome. For the first time, he permitted himself to consider what Anna’s life would be like if the Pope refused to grant an annulment.
    She would know disgrace and censure; she would be forced to give up her family, her friends, her native city. Her children would be called bastards and be denied their inheritance as Medici heirs.
    He had been selfish. He had been thinking only of himself when he made the offer to Anna. He had spoken too easily of the annulment, in hopes that it would sway her to go with him. And he had not, until that moment, considered that she might reject his offer; the possibility had seemed too painful to contemplate.
    Now he realized that it would save him from making an agonizing choice.
    But when he went to meet her at the door and saw her face in the dying light, he saw that his choice had been long ago made, at the moment when he gave his heart to Anna. Her eyes, her skin, her face and limbs exuded joy; even in the shadowy dusk, she shone. Her movements, which had once been slow, weighed down by unhappy consequence, were now agile and light. The exuberant tilt of her head as she looked up at him, the faint smile that bloomed on her lips, the swift grace with which she lifted her skirts and rushed to him, relayed her answer more clearly than words.
    Her presence breathed such hope into him that he moved quickly to her and held her, and let it infuse him. In that instant, Giuliano realized that he could refuse her nothing, that neither of them could escape the turning of the wheel now set in motion. And the tears that threatened him did not spring from joy; they were tears of grief, for Lorenzo.
    He and Anna remained together less than an hour; they spoke little—only enough for Giuliano to convey a time, and a place. No other exchange was needed.
    And when she was gone again—taking the light and Giuliano’s confidence with her—he went back to his own chamber and called for wine. He drank it sitting on his bed and recalled, with exquisite clarity, an incident from childhood.
     
    .  .  .
     
    At age six, he had gone with Lorenzo and two of his older sisters, Nannina and Bianca, for a picnic on the shores of the Arno. Attended by a Circassian slave woman, they had traveled by carriage across the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge built a millennium before by the Romans. Nannina had been captivated by the goldsmiths’ shops that lined the bridge; soon to be married, she was already interested in womanly things.
    Lorenzo had been restless and glum. He had just