A Hidden Fire

He arranged the blankets over her before crawling in the bed, and settling a warm arm around her waist. “It had no equal I have ever seen.  Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hebrew, Persian.  Even some Sumerian clay tablets.  He’d amassed it over twenty-five hundred years, and inherited other manuscripts from his own sire, who I never met.  It was an astonishing collection.”

Since he’d woken her from the nightmare that had plagued her for weeks, Giovanni couldn’t seem to stop touching her.  As tumultuous as her feelings toward him were, she found his presence comforting, and his touch seemed to warm the persistent chill that had tormented her since the night she’d fallen into Lorenzo’s hands.

“And Lorenzo still has it?”

He shrugged.  “He must.  It was all housed together after my uncle died.  So if he has my uncle’s books—”

“At least you got those back, right?”

She felt his arm tighten around her waist.

“I did.”

There was a long silence as the memory of that night nudged at her.  Finally, she heard him whisper, “I haven’t even looked at them.”

Her breath caught. “None?”

“Caspar had them shipped here for safekeeping, but…”

She nodded and put her hand over his arm, weaving her fingers with his.

“We should look at them.”

“Not tonight.”

“No, tell me more about when you met your uncle.”

He paused before he continued.  “It was all in 1484.  It was a very eventful year.”

“What else happened?”

She felt him sigh and she curled into his chest.  “He met Lorenzo de Medici that trip, and then me, and then Andros, of course.  Andros had been lingering in the Medici court.”

“Why?”

“Why was my sire in Florence?  He told me later he was ready to create a child—he never had before—and he wanted to pick from the brightest of the city.”  Giovanni propped his head up on his hand and looked at her.  “He was looking for a ‘Renaissance man,’ I suppose.  Initially, he set his sights on my uncle, but then my uncle disappointed him.”

“How did he disappoint him?  Not smart enough?”

“Oh no, my uncle was brilliant,” he said wistfully.  “No, Giovanni fell in love.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat and remembered the slim book of sonnets he’d held in his hand the night she was taken.  “With Giuliana?”

He nodded, and lay his head on the pillow next to hers, lifting a hand to play with a strand of her hair.  “He met her in Arezzo, visiting an acquaintance.  She was married…not her choice, of course, but it never was then.  Her husband was cruel and dull.  Even Lorenzo hated him, though he was a Medici cousin.  But Giuliana and Giovanni…they were so beautiful.”

“She was beautiful?”

He paused, and she rolled onto her back so she could see his expression.  His eyes were narrowed in concentration while he thought.  “It’s difficult to say.  My human memories are not always clear.  I remember her as beautiful, but that could be a child’s perspective.  I remember the way my uncle smiled at her.  She was very kind to me; she liked to play games.  I don’t think she could have any children of her own.  She never did in all the time they wrote to each other.”

“What happened?”

“She was married, and my uncle was thrown in prison when their affair was discovered.  Though Lorenzo de Medici found my uncle entertaining, so he intervened.”

“But they stayed in contact?”

He nodded and let his hand stroke along her arm.  Everywhere he touched gave her goose bumps, but not from the chill.  His energy, which he normally kept on a tight lease, seemed to hum along his skin as he reminisced.  She could see him taking longer and longer blinks, and could only assume the sun was rising in the sky.

“They wrote beautiful letters to each other,” he said quietly.  “He locked them away; I never discovered where he put them.”

“But why did that matter to Andros?  They couldn’t marry anyway, why—”

“My uncle fell into a depression toward the end of his life.  After his imprisonment in Paris, he lost his spirit.  He stopped writing Giuliana.  He no longer had the same joy he’d always carried before.  He destroyed his poetry.  He burned many of his more progressive philosophical works and corresponded more with Savaranola, who had become so radical by then it taxed even Poliziano and Benevieni’s friendship.”

“When were the bonfires?”

“The ‘bonfire of the vanities?’” he murmured, and she was reminded of the book she had been reading so many months ago when they had first met.  His amusement at hearing the title finally made sense and she smirked.

“Yeah, those bonfires.”

“It was after I had been taken, but before I was turned.  My uncle left me everything; though he wasn’t exorbitantly wealthy, his library was substantial and Andros wanted it, so he took it.  When Lorenzo told me years later that everything had burned in the fires, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine.  Many of his books would have been considered heretical, and so many things were lost.”

“What did your uncle write about?”