From: In the Frame, edited by Rowena Edlin-White, Five leaves Press.
Assunta turned her back on the window and the snow barging against the glass. "It's five hundred years since Florence saw snow like this." She put the coffee on a tray set with three cups.
"Is it?" I said.
"Not only that," her busy hands added milk, sugar and a plate of pastries, "today the planets and the stars are aligned in the same pattern as then.”
"What does that mean?" I asked, swallowing the last crumbs of pastry she'd let me steal.
"It means that something will happen." Her dark eyes were troubled. The something was bad.
"The only thing that's going to happen is that my father's going to be more bad-tempered than usual because he's quarrelling with the other professors and they're winning."
Assunta tutted at such disrespect: she loved me, but she worshipped my father. He does that, inspires worship. He has charisma.
Assunta thrust the tray at me. "Take the coffee and try to behave like a well-educated child."
I carried the heavy tray carefully across the big, stone-flagged kitchen and turned to push the door open with my back. Assunta was watching the snow again,
whirling and cavorting outside the piazza. As I backed through the door I saw her eyes close and her mouth move in what I suppose was a prayer, or maybe an invocation, to her favourite saint, Gennaro. My mother is right: the Italians are a superstitious people.
I went up the back stairs of our house, the ones built hundreds of years ago for servants and anyone wanting discreet access to one of the upstairs rooms. This way, I could get into the library via a little carpeted lobby where I could eavesdrop on my father's meeting. When I got there, his loud voice was furious.
"Any fool can see they’re genuine," he roared.
"Are you calling us all fools?" I recognised the voice of Professor Carbone, the world's second-greatest authority on the artists of the High Renaissance.
"It was a figure of speech." That was the closest to an apology that Father was going to give her. "The drawings are genuine, the paper is genuine, the provenance is indisputable."
Professor Koningsburg joined in: "But the medium is graphite and graphite did not exist in Italy in the fifteenth century - or anywhere else at that time. I admit the drawings are convincing, but the anomaly of the graphite cannot be ignored."
The professor's voice was weary. I knew the argument had been going round in circles for a long time. The professors deserved their coffee. I took it into the library, warm and cosy with its coal fire.
"What do you want?" my father snapped.
"I've brought the coffee," I said. I swear I meant to be careful; I meant to behave well, as Assunta warned me to, and I did clamp my mouth shut. Only my hands, shaking the slightest hit, showed that my father's attitude had got to me again. Of course he noticed.
"Be careful, you stupid child!"
That made me shake more and the coffee cups jumped in their tiny saucers, the sugar and milk and the plate of pastries slipped sideways on the tray.
"The drawings!" As he lunged forward, Father's elbow jogged the tray. A cup tipped and coffee slopped onto an angel. We all stared at the drawing - me, my father and the two art experts. Behind me the fire spat in derision.
"Sorry," I said. And I meant it. Fake or not, the drawings had been beautiful.
"Why," my father said, "do you always have to behave like an imbecile?"
I kept a grip on my temper and picked up the cup, intending to put it back on the tray.
"It's too late for that, you little fool," Father said.
So I poured the rest of the coffee over the drawing. "I hate you," I said, and left the library.
I couldn't believe what I'd done: ruined, totally ruined a masterpiece that might be worth thousands, just because I was angry with my father. I walked carefully: I couldn't see clearly through my furious, terrified tears and I didn't want to stumble.
"Come back!" my father ordered. I took no notice. I ran down the stairs and slammed into the kitchen. "I hate him! I hate him!"
"What's the matter?" Assunta said. There was no point in telling her: she'd been the family maid since before I was born, she was bound to take his side.
I ran out of the kitchen, the house, across the piazza and down the winding white streets, past the bell tower and the cathedral, its dome veiled in bridal swirls of snow. I ran down more streets, faster and faster until I could scarcely breathe. I stopped and leaned against a wall, up to my knees in the snow, wind-piled against the freezing stone. Now, instead of anger, it was the bone-biting cold that made me shiver. The worst snowfall in Florence since Assunta's legendary winter of 1494and I was in the middle of it. Snow hurtled silently downwards, blotting out the sky, the roofs, the high walls. A great gust of it came billowing like a giant's sigh from a narrow alleyway. It rolled over me in a cloud, wet and cold. All I could see was whiteness, all I could hear was my breathing and my father calling my name from far away: "Anna! Anna!"
How dare he use that name? Only my mother called me Anna; only she had the right. Was he trying to pretend he was concerned about me? I didn't believe it for a minute. I plunged on into the furious whiteness.
"Anna! Anna, where are you?" His voice was fainter.
Why didn't he leave me alone? He didn't want me around. He didn't even like me. I ploughed on in the blinding whiteness. Snow seeped through my clothes like a virus and chilled my skin; even my blood felt like it was slowly freezing in my veins. I stopped and blinked away the ice crystals forming on my lashes. I couldn't control my shivering. Like it or not, I was going to have to go back. But I wasn't going to call for help from my father; there must be some Fiorentini around the streets.
"Hello?" The snow muffled my voice like a cold hand. "Hello!" I yelled, as loudly as I could.
"Andrea?" Father was using my proper name now. It meant he'd stopped feeling worried and was just angry with me as usual. I tramped forward, wondering how he'd managed to get ahead of me.
''Andrea!'' I wasn't sure now that it was my father's voice, it sounded younger, lighter, and more excited than worried. Before I could make up my mind about that, the cloud whirled away down the alley, leaving me in a place where the air was clear and the snow settled over the street and houses, its millions of crystals winking in the high, pale sun. I knew where I was – on the Via Cavour beside the solid bulk of the Medici Palace. But it was all wrong: there was no traffic, except for a couple of carts and some horses, and the people streaming along to the palace were dressed in fifteenth century costume, perfect down to the last belt and button. I knew it was perfect because my father and mother had steeped me in Renaissance art and history from the day I was born.
"Andrea!" It was the voice I'd heard through the cold cloud that drew me down the alley. Now I could see it belonged to a boy of about sixteen, flushed with excitement and the cold, but it wasn't me he was calling to, it was another boy across the road. I should've known from the way he pronounced 'Andrea', the boy's way - An-drey-a - with the stress on the drey instead of the an part.
"Is it true, Francesco?" Andrea asked as he reached his friend. "That arrogant stone-cutter brat's been ordered to build a giant snowman?"
"Yes, everyone's going to watch, including me."
Francesco knocked Andrea's fancy pancake-shaped hat off. "And he's more than a stone-cutter, which is why you're so jealous."
He hurried into the palace with his friend following, furiously brushing the snow off his hat. I lost sight of them in the growing stream of Fiorentini who jostled me down the road and through the great, iron-banded, wooden doors of the palace. I was too numb with cold and shock to resist. Anyway, where else can I go? I thought, as I was swept down the stone-flagged passageway and into a courtyard filling up with people chattering and exclaiming in a peculiar, throaty Tuscan accent.
I managed to get behind one of the columns supporting the cloisters running all the way round the courtyard and tried not to believe the impossible thing that had happened to me. I made myself go over the evidence in order, step by step, in the process Father had taught me. I'd been lost in a snowstorm; I'd run into the cold cloud, then walked towards someone calling my name. After that, the blinding cloud had left me here, on a bright winter's day, with a settled snowfall over the Via Cavour, which had no cars or scooters running down it. Now I was in the Medici Palace with people all around me wearing fifteenth century clothes. Then there was the way they spoke. It sounded a bit like the poetry of Dante that Father had made me learn and which was the equivalent of Shakespearean English. It was this last fact, more than anything, which forced me to accept that Assunta's 'something' had happened: I'd gone from one day in 1994 to the exact same time five hundred years before.
I tried to remember what I'd learned about time, relativity and the physics of string theory. It wasn't a lot; my home education programmes didn't include much science. I was scared. Renaissance Italy was a cruel and barbaric place. On the other hand, I'd got here so there must be a way back. But how was I going to find it? I had no idea. I leaned on the pillar and tried not to panic. What would my father tell me to do? Stop worrying about events over which I had no control, keep my eyes open for the way back and make the most of this chance to live inside history. I decided the only thing I could do was to stay on the sidelines for now, and observe.
I pulled my jacket tightly round me and crept from the shelter of the pillar into the crowd gathered round the edge of the courtyard. I've been there quite a lot in my time and it didn't seem much different from what I was used to: a square, open, courtyard enclosed by a colonnade of arches with huge stone medallions mounted on the inner walls. There were a few statues that were new to me, though the biggest difference was the gigantic pillar of snow at the far end, heaped up and squared off into a thick, straight-sided column. I worked my way closer till I was next to Francesco and his friend. They were tormenting a skinny, dark-haired boy, standing beside the column of snow sparkling in the sunlight slanting into the courtyard.
"Angelino," Francesco called, "this is your greatest commission yet - a snowman!"
His friend joined in: "It will last forever as a testament to your genius." The boy ignored the taunts and the laughter from the crowd, though the red flush on the back of his neck told me he was angry. He'd got more self-control than me. He swung off the heavy violet cloak he was wearing and held it out to Francesco. "Bring me a spade," he said.
It was Francesco's turn to blush. "Oh, I'm your apprentice now, am I?" He bowed and took the cloak. "Maestro."
The crowd laughed again and people began to bow or curtsey too. I can't stand being laughed at - it's one of the things Father does when he thinks I've been particularly stupid - and from the way the flush spread up to Angelino's face, neither could he. I forgot about trying to be inconspicuous. I shoved Francesco out of the way and grabbed two spades from the pile of tools propped up against a pillar.
"Which one?" I asked Angelino.
He took the larger one. He didn't thank me, only gave me a nod and went straight to work scoring deep lines from top to bottom of the pillar of snow. He had amazing energy for such a slight boy; snow flew over his clothes, his hair, his face, as he chopped with the wooden blade, like a soldier hacking at an enemy. A figure began to emerge from the snow, liberated by the ferocious slicing; a figure in long flowing robes, its head turned toward the sun.
Chop - slash - chop - slash. The robes turned to wings poised against the body at the exact moment before spreading wide and lifting in flight. Angelino tossed the spade away, clicked his fingers at me. I gave him the smaller spade. He worked away at the limbs, the planes of the head, the streaming hair, began to cut a suggestion of feathers into the wings, flowing like the liquid the snow once was. The second spade was hurled away.
"I need a knife," Angelino said, "and a ladder."
Francesco brought both. He wasn't laughing now. Angelino balanced the ladder carefully against the snow statue and went lightly, quickly up to chip and slice the imprisoning snow away from the frozen face. He turned the blade in his hand, touched the point to the blind white eyes and with two deft twists, opened them and let them look out onto the world. The yearning in those cold eyes made me ache with longing for things I knew I'd never have.
Angelino came down from the ladder and this time Francesco took it away without being asked. Angelino gave him the knife back. The crowd broke into applause and roared its approval.
"It's truly an angel of God," Francesco said.
Angelino grunted and wiped chunks of melting snow from his hair.
"It looks sad," I said. I was sad too. "He'll melt away when the sun warms up. It'll be as though he never existed."
"Of course," Angelino said.
I understood. "It's not an angel!"
"No."
"It's Icarus."
My mother had told me the story long ago. Icarus and his father were prisoners on an island and his father made them both wings with the feathers held in place by wax. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but he forgot.
"He flew too high, the wax melted and he fell into the sea and drowned."
Angelino smiled at me. He was never going to be good-looking, not with his jug ears and his flat, broken nose, but his smile was like a gift. It lit up his strange yellow-brown eyes and it was that light which told me who he really was. I'd read the famous description too often to be mistaken: his friend Giorgio wrote that Angelino's eyes were, 'the colour of horn with yellowish gleams'.
"I envy you," I said, "for what you've done and what you will do."
The eyes gleamed again. "Who are you?" Angelino asked.
"My name's Wyatt, Andrea Wyatt." For once I was glad of my ambiguous name: it didn't conflict with the fact I was wearing trousers, which I knew made everyone think I was a boy. And being foreign might account for my clothes being a bit odd.
"I'm a visitor from England. My mother is Italian. My father, he..." I didn't know how to describe him; there weren't any art historians in the fifteenth century. "He's a scholar." That was true.
"He's searching for paintings and sculptures to take 'back to England." That was true as well, sort of. Now I'd got the knack of telling almost truths, I plunged on recklessly.
"He's heard of how promising your work is and is eager to learn more."
The crowd pressed in, impatient that I was monopolising Angelino. They wanted to congratulate him on his angel. Francesco shouldered me aside to drape the violet cloak over Angelino.
"I'm not cold," he said and shrugged it off.
"I meant it to cover you," Francesco said. "The Prince is coming to inspect your snowman." He nodded up at the balcony running around the courtyard, where a couple of servants were opening a door. He tried again to cloak Angelino's black clothes stained with sweat and melted snow. "You look like a workman."
"To him 1 am a workman."
Angelino gave the cloak to me. "You're cold. Go to my rooms. You can get warm there and we'll talk about your father. Francesco will show you the way."
"I want to see the Prince," Francesco objected.
"Then you'd better hurry."
Francesco gave in. He led me at a run through the Palace and up wide stone stairs, along back corridors and through doors until we came to a large room carpeted in scarlet and with a fire burning steadily in the grate. It made me think of the one in my father's library. 1 wondered if it had burned out or if Assunta had built it up. Ragged cheering and uneven clapping came filtering through the cloth shutter over the window.
"The Prince!" Francesco left quickly.
I lifted the shutter. On a balcony overlooking the courtyard, a man stood in the middle of a group of lords and ladies in bright brocades and silks and velvets. He peered down his long nose at Icarus and at Angelino, who was the only person in the crowd whose head wasn't lowered.
"I didn't want an angel," the man said, "1 wanted a grotesque."
Angelino shrugged the tiniest hit. One of the ladies whispered in the man's ear.
"The Principessa tells me the angel is very beautiful, nevertheless," he said.
"Then I thank the Principessa." Angelino bowed to her.
The crowd held its breath at the insult, and so did I. Angelino was playing a dangerous game. This was 1494 and I knew that meant the man was Piero de' Medici, self-styled 'prince' and ruler of Florence. It didn't matter that Angelino had been a favourite of Piero's father, had grown up with Piero, eaten at the same table, been taught alongside him by the most famous scholars of the age: Piero was weak, rich and. arrogant. The people of Florence lived and died on his uncertain word.
He looked at Icarus again. "It is indeed a very beautiful angel," he said. "But next time you will make a grotesque."
He held out his hand and a servant put a little bag in it. He threw it down to Angelino who caught it and bowed. He kept his head down until Piero and his party moved back into the palace. As the doors closed behind them, he straightened and hefted the pouch. In the clear air, I heard it jingle.
The crowd broke up, some taking a closer look at the snowman, some leaving, some like Angelino and his friends going into the palace. I took out my sketchbook and the tin of pencils that go everywhere with me. I draw all the time. It's one of the things Father approved of, though he disparaged my skills. I leaned on the broad window ledge and drew Icarus. It was difficult, the perspective was acute from this high up and no matter how I tried I couldn't get it right. How Father would enjoy that. I could hear his voice in my mind: "Perspective is only a technique, a basic skill, simple enough."
I blew on my hands, my sigh of frustration turning to a cloud of frosty breath.
"That's good," a voice said. How long had Angelino been there watching me try to draw? He took my book and studied the picture, then drew a few eloquent lines with my pencil. They transformed my sketch. "You see?" he said.
"Yes."
He showed me more, exploring the wings, the face, the twists and turns of the body - every line, every mark defining a longing for freedom. He thrust the book back at me.
"Thank you," I said.
He took no notice; he was too busy turning the pencil over and over, running his rough fingers across the black and red surface, reading the white lettering. Abruptly he said, "Sit!"
I dropped into a chair under the window where the pure, cold light streamed through. Angelino snatched up a thick sheet of paper, pushed aside the saffron and blue crockery littering the table and began to draw, his strange, fierce eyes flickering from me to the paper and back again. I didn't dare to move or speak. I fixed my attention on a little shrine hanging on the opposite wall, its gilded doors shining with a buttery gleam from the votive lamp flickering and smoking in front of it. I'm not religious, despite my mother's efforts, but I thought it wouldn't do any harm to try praying for guidance on getting home, especially as the saint kneeling in front of the Madonna and Child was Assunta's favourite, Gennaro. My stomach rumbled. It was a long time since I'd eaten Assunta's pastry.
I wasn't any good at praying. All I could think of was getting home. I forced myself to concentrate on the painting, trying to assess it in the way father had taught me. It was very old, old even in Angelino's time. The rules of painting were different then: Mary and her baby were bigger than the saint because they were more important than him. The artist was telling you to concentrate on them. The background was plain gold to show how precious the picture was, and the Madonna's gown was painted in the most expensive blue made from ground up lapis lazuli.
Concentrating on the picture didn't stop my muscles getting stiff as the pleats in its sharply painted folds of drapery. How long had I sat here? Long enough for the tiny lamp to burn down and fill the air with a thick smell of hot oil.
Angelino gave a little grunt of what sounded like satisfaction and stopped drawing. He held the pencil out to me, reluctantly.
"Keep it," I said.
"Then you have this." He gave me the drawing.
It was me, yet not me. The face was my face, yet beautiful; my face, yet a boy's face; my face, yet seen through the eyes of the past. It was exquisite and it told me I had no business being here.
"It's wonderful," I said.
"Show it to your father. If he likes it he might commission work from me to take back to England."
I thought of Father and took a risk. "You have to sign it, so he truly knows which artist did it."
I knew that in all his long life, Angelino never signed his work, except for once. But he wrote his name on his picture of me.
As he wrote, the light falling on the paper turned from pale gold to blue white. "It's snowing!" I slid the drawing into my book and ran out of the room, out of the palace and into the courtyard.
Angelino followed me. "Wait!"
"I can't." I'd arrived in a blizzard; it stood to reason I had to leave in one. I flew past Icarus, down the stone passageway and into the road. The cloud billowed from the alleyway.
"What's that?" Angelino was beside me.
"My way home." I unwound the cloak and shook off the snow settling like ermine along its shoulders and gave it back to Angelino.
"Here." He took a coin from the pouch Piero had thrown to him and put it in my hand. A golden florin.
"Why?"
"Because you helped me with Icarus and asked no questions.”
I took my precious tin of pencils, a present from my mother to help pass the time during the access visit to father. "This is for you."
I ran into the roiling whiteness. "Adio, Angelino!" I shouted without looking back. I felt my way blindly forward, groping at the freezing air, on and on, step by step. What if I wasn't going forwards at all? What if I went round and round forever, trapped between then and now? I wanted to go home. I wanted my present, my future. "Father!" I shouted.
"Anna? Anna, where are you?"
"I'm here." I stumbled numbly towards my father's voice. In one step, I was out in the road, the white cloud boiling backwards down the alley behind me. My father stood in the moonlit street, his arms wide. "Anna!"
"I got lost," I wailed.
Father wrapped me up in his coat and scarf and hat and helped me pull gloves over my frozen hands; there was no lecture, Father only said, "Let's go home."
We walked back to the house through the snow, the moonlight silver-plating the city. 1didn't ask how long I'd been missing, not till after I'd had a bath to warm up and Assunta had brought me dinner in bed while my father rang the Polizia to tell them 1 was back. I'd been gone for twelve hours. Time had passed much faster inside the cloud, as it moved me through the five hundred years.
"I didn't mean to cause trouble," I said to Assunta, who'd stayed to look after me.
"You never do," she said, collecting my tray of empty dishes. "You are a foolish and stubborn child," she scolded. "And your father is a foolish and stubborn man. You should have talked long ago. Now would be a good time to start, while you are both ashamed of yourselves and willing to listen to each other."
She was right. Father and I talked for a long time and it was a new beginning. It was only when there was nothing left to say of our past history, that Father asked me where I'd been after I ran away from the house. I'd already thought about how to tell him. I was going to give the facts and nothing else, and let father work it out to his own satisfaction.
"I got into the Medici Palace courtyard. A boy about my age, you'd call him a youth, was building a snowman, more of a snow sculpture really, and I stopped to help. He paid me." I held out the florin.
While Father examined the five-hundred-year-old, newly minted, gold coin, I opened my sketchbook. "This is the snowman he made."
"You did this drawing?"
"Yes. And Angelino - that was the boy's name - corrected it. Then he drew these other studies. People came to laugh at him because he was an artist who'd been ordered to make a snowman but he decided to make a work of art, even though the sun would melt it. They thought he'd made an angel but I worked out it was Icarus because he was destroyed by the sun too."
I tweaked my portrait from the book and gave the sheet to my father.
"Later, Angelino drew me. I asked him to sign the drawing and he did. Look, at the bottom."
Father studied it for a long time. I had no idea what he was thinking. At last he said, "Anna, tell me everything that happened."
It took a long time as he interrupted me over and over again with questions. Before, I'd have lost my temper and told him to leave me alone, but now I understood it was his way, it was nothing personal. In the end he stopped and said he was sorry, he'd forgotten how tired I must be.
"You do believe me?"
"Of course, you couldn't possibly have invented that mass of impeccable detail. And don't forget, I'm the world's greatest authority on this artist's work." I think he was teasing me.
"You're not the world's greatest authority on me."
"I'm getting there."
"At least you know you were right about the graphite drawings. Angelino must've done them with my pencils."
I shouldn't have mentioned it - we both remembered the coffee incident.
"I'm sorry about the angel drawing, Dad, especially now. Is it ruined?"
"I'm afraid it is. Let's forget it. My real regret is that I'll never be able to prove to my colleagues that I was right all along."
I understood how hard that was for him, academics are proud of their reputations. "I know you're right. That makes two of us."
He nodded. I wasn't sure it was enough for him.
"Dad." I liked being this informal. "The drawing of me isn't the angel I ruined, but - would you like it?"
He didn't protest or say, Are you sure? Only, "Thank you."
He loved that drawing. He had it framed and hung it near his desk in the library. That was ten years ago. I'm looking at the picture now as I wait for Dad to take me out to dinner to celebrate the opening of my first solo exhibition in Florence. He would still rather I was a scholar, like him, but he's learned to live with it. I never forgot my drawing lesson with Angelino or his determination to make even a snowman a work of art. Stubbornness can be a positive thing when you don't allow it to blind you to other possibilities.
I smile as I look at Angelino's signature on my portrait. Of course he didn't sign it 'Angelino' – that was only his nickname, as mine's Anna. He signed it with his proper name: Michelangelo Buonarotti. Michelangelo. According to my father, the greatest artist who ever lived and I've never quarrelled with him about that.
Assunta turned her back on the window and the snow barging against the glass. "It's five hundred years since Florence saw snow like this." She put the coffee on a tray set with three cups.
"Is it?" I said.
"Not only that," her busy hands added milk, sugar and a plate of pastries, "today the planets and the stars are aligned in the same pattern as then.”
"What does that mean?" I asked, swallowing the last crumbs of pastry she'd let me steal.
"It means that something will happen." Her dark eyes were troubled. The something was bad.
"The only thing that's going to happen is that my father's going to be more bad-tempered than usual because he's quarrelling with the other professors and they're winning."
Assunta tutted at such disrespect: she loved me, but she worshipped my father. He does that, inspires worship. He has charisma.
Assunta thrust the tray at me. "Take the coffee and try to behave like a well-educated child."
I carried the heavy tray carefully across the big, stone-flagged kitchen and turned to push the door open with my back. Assunta was watching the snow again,
whirling and cavorting outside the piazza. As I backed through the door I saw her eyes close and her mouth move in what I suppose was a prayer, or maybe an invocation, to her favourite saint, Gennaro. My mother is right: the Italians are a superstitious people.
I went up the back stairs of our house, the ones built hundreds of years ago for servants and anyone wanting discreet access to one of the upstairs rooms. This way, I could get into the library via a little carpeted lobby where I could eavesdrop on my father's meeting. When I got there, his loud voice was furious.
"Any fool can see they’re genuine," he roared.
"Are you calling us all fools?" I recognised the voice of Professor Carbone, the world's second-greatest authority on the artists of the High Renaissance.
"It was a figure of speech." That was the closest to an apology that Father was going to give her. "The drawings are genuine, the paper is genuine, the provenance is indisputable."
Professor Koningsburg joined in: "But the medium is graphite and graphite did not exist in Italy in the fifteenth century - or anywhere else at that time. I admit the drawings are convincing, but the anomaly of the graphite cannot be ignored."
The professor's voice was weary. I knew the argument had been going round in circles for a long time. The professors deserved their coffee. I took it into the library, warm and cosy with its coal fire.
"What do you want?" my father snapped.
"I've brought the coffee," I said. I swear I meant to be careful; I meant to behave well, as Assunta warned me to, and I did clamp my mouth shut. Only my hands, shaking the slightest hit, showed that my father's attitude had got to me again. Of course he noticed.
"Be careful, you stupid child!"
That made me shake more and the coffee cups jumped in their tiny saucers, the sugar and milk and the plate of pastries slipped sideways on the tray.
"The drawings!" As he lunged forward, Father's elbow jogged the tray. A cup tipped and coffee slopped onto an angel. We all stared at the drawing - me, my father and the two art experts. Behind me the fire spat in derision.
"Sorry," I said. And I meant it. Fake or not, the drawings had been beautiful.
"Why," my father said, "do you always have to behave like an imbecile?"
I kept a grip on my temper and picked up the cup, intending to put it back on the tray.
"It's too late for that, you little fool," Father said.
So I poured the rest of the coffee over the drawing. "I hate you," I said, and left the library.
I couldn't believe what I'd done: ruined, totally ruined a masterpiece that might be worth thousands, just because I was angry with my father. I walked carefully: I couldn't see clearly through my furious, terrified tears and I didn't want to stumble.
"Come back!" my father ordered. I took no notice. I ran down the stairs and slammed into the kitchen. "I hate him! I hate him!"
"What's the matter?" Assunta said. There was no point in telling her: she'd been the family maid since before I was born, she was bound to take his side.
I ran out of the kitchen, the house, across the piazza and down the winding white streets, past the bell tower and the cathedral, its dome veiled in bridal swirls of snow. I ran down more streets, faster and faster until I could scarcely breathe. I stopped and leaned against a wall, up to my knees in the snow, wind-piled against the freezing stone. Now, instead of anger, it was the bone-biting cold that made me shiver. The worst snowfall in Florence since Assunta's legendary winter of 1494and I was in the middle of it. Snow hurtled silently downwards, blotting out the sky, the roofs, the high walls. A great gust of it came billowing like a giant's sigh from a narrow alleyway. It rolled over me in a cloud, wet and cold. All I could see was whiteness, all I could hear was my breathing and my father calling my name from far away: "Anna! Anna!"
How dare he use that name? Only my mother called me Anna; only she had the right. Was he trying to pretend he was concerned about me? I didn't believe it for a minute. I plunged on into the furious whiteness.
"Anna! Anna, where are you?" His voice was fainter.
Why didn't he leave me alone? He didn't want me around. He didn't even like me. I ploughed on in the blinding whiteness. Snow seeped through my clothes like a virus and chilled my skin; even my blood felt like it was slowly freezing in my veins. I stopped and blinked away the ice crystals forming on my lashes. I couldn't control my shivering. Like it or not, I was going to have to go back. But I wasn't going to call for help from my father; there must be some Fiorentini around the streets.
"Hello?" The snow muffled my voice like a cold hand. "Hello!" I yelled, as loudly as I could.
"Andrea?" Father was using my proper name now. It meant he'd stopped feeling worried and was just angry with me as usual. I tramped forward, wondering how he'd managed to get ahead of me.
''Andrea!'' I wasn't sure now that it was my father's voice, it sounded younger, lighter, and more excited than worried. Before I could make up my mind about that, the cloud whirled away down the alley, leaving me in a place where the air was clear and the snow settled over the street and houses, its millions of crystals winking in the high, pale sun. I knew where I was – on the Via Cavour beside the solid bulk of the Medici Palace. But it was all wrong: there was no traffic, except for a couple of carts and some horses, and the people streaming along to the palace were dressed in fifteenth century costume, perfect down to the last belt and button. I knew it was perfect because my father and mother had steeped me in Renaissance art and history from the day I was born.
"Andrea!" It was the voice I'd heard through the cold cloud that drew me down the alley. Now I could see it belonged to a boy of about sixteen, flushed with excitement and the cold, but it wasn't me he was calling to, it was another boy across the road. I should've known from the way he pronounced 'Andrea', the boy's way - An-drey-a - with the stress on the drey instead of the an part.
"Is it true, Francesco?" Andrea asked as he reached his friend. "That arrogant stone-cutter brat's been ordered to build a giant snowman?"
"Yes, everyone's going to watch, including me."
Francesco knocked Andrea's fancy pancake-shaped hat off. "And he's more than a stone-cutter, which is why you're so jealous."
He hurried into the palace with his friend following, furiously brushing the snow off his hat. I lost sight of them in the growing stream of Fiorentini who jostled me down the road and through the great, iron-banded, wooden doors of the palace. I was too numb with cold and shock to resist. Anyway, where else can I go? I thought, as I was swept down the stone-flagged passageway and into a courtyard filling up with people chattering and exclaiming in a peculiar, throaty Tuscan accent.
I managed to get behind one of the columns supporting the cloisters running all the way round the courtyard and tried not to believe the impossible thing that had happened to me. I made myself go over the evidence in order, step by step, in the process Father had taught me. I'd been lost in a snowstorm; I'd run into the cold cloud, then walked towards someone calling my name. After that, the blinding cloud had left me here, on a bright winter's day, with a settled snowfall over the Via Cavour, which had no cars or scooters running down it. Now I was in the Medici Palace with people all around me wearing fifteenth century clothes. Then there was the way they spoke. It sounded a bit like the poetry of Dante that Father had made me learn and which was the equivalent of Shakespearean English. It was this last fact, more than anything, which forced me to accept that Assunta's 'something' had happened: I'd gone from one day in 1994 to the exact same time five hundred years before.
I tried to remember what I'd learned about time, relativity and the physics of string theory. It wasn't a lot; my home education programmes didn't include much science. I was scared. Renaissance Italy was a cruel and barbaric place. On the other hand, I'd got here so there must be a way back. But how was I going to find it? I had no idea. I leaned on the pillar and tried not to panic. What would my father tell me to do? Stop worrying about events over which I had no control, keep my eyes open for the way back and make the most of this chance to live inside history. I decided the only thing I could do was to stay on the sidelines for now, and observe.
I pulled my jacket tightly round me and crept from the shelter of the pillar into the crowd gathered round the edge of the courtyard. I've been there quite a lot in my time and it didn't seem much different from what I was used to: a square, open, courtyard enclosed by a colonnade of arches with huge stone medallions mounted on the inner walls. There were a few statues that were new to me, though the biggest difference was the gigantic pillar of snow at the far end, heaped up and squared off into a thick, straight-sided column. I worked my way closer till I was next to Francesco and his friend. They were tormenting a skinny, dark-haired boy, standing beside the column of snow sparkling in the sunlight slanting into the courtyard.
"Angelino," Francesco called, "this is your greatest commission yet - a snowman!"
His friend joined in: "It will last forever as a testament to your genius." The boy ignored the taunts and the laughter from the crowd, though the red flush on the back of his neck told me he was angry. He'd got more self-control than me. He swung off the heavy violet cloak he was wearing and held it out to Francesco. "Bring me a spade," he said.
It was Francesco's turn to blush. "Oh, I'm your apprentice now, am I?" He bowed and took the cloak. "Maestro."
The crowd laughed again and people began to bow or curtsey too. I can't stand being laughed at - it's one of the things Father does when he thinks I've been particularly stupid - and from the way the flush spread up to Angelino's face, neither could he. I forgot about trying to be inconspicuous. I shoved Francesco out of the way and grabbed two spades from the pile of tools propped up against a pillar.
"Which one?" I asked Angelino.
He took the larger one. He didn't thank me, only gave me a nod and went straight to work scoring deep lines from top to bottom of the pillar of snow. He had amazing energy for such a slight boy; snow flew over his clothes, his hair, his face, as he chopped with the wooden blade, like a soldier hacking at an enemy. A figure began to emerge from the snow, liberated by the ferocious slicing; a figure in long flowing robes, its head turned toward the sun.
Chop - slash - chop - slash. The robes turned to wings poised against the body at the exact moment before spreading wide and lifting in flight. Angelino tossed the spade away, clicked his fingers at me. I gave him the smaller spade. He worked away at the limbs, the planes of the head, the streaming hair, began to cut a suggestion of feathers into the wings, flowing like the liquid the snow once was. The second spade was hurled away.
"I need a knife," Angelino said, "and a ladder."
Francesco brought both. He wasn't laughing now. Angelino balanced the ladder carefully against the snow statue and went lightly, quickly up to chip and slice the imprisoning snow away from the frozen face. He turned the blade in his hand, touched the point to the blind white eyes and with two deft twists, opened them and let them look out onto the world. The yearning in those cold eyes made me ache with longing for things I knew I'd never have.
Angelino came down from the ladder and this time Francesco took it away without being asked. Angelino gave him the knife back. The crowd broke into applause and roared its approval.
"It's truly an angel of God," Francesco said.
Angelino grunted and wiped chunks of melting snow from his hair.
"It looks sad," I said. I was sad too. "He'll melt away when the sun warms up. It'll be as though he never existed."
"Of course," Angelino said.
I understood. "It's not an angel!"
"No."
"It's Icarus."
My mother had told me the story long ago. Icarus and his father were prisoners on an island and his father made them both wings with the feathers held in place by wax. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but he forgot.
"He flew too high, the wax melted and he fell into the sea and drowned."
Angelino smiled at me. He was never going to be good-looking, not with his jug ears and his flat, broken nose, but his smile was like a gift. It lit up his strange yellow-brown eyes and it was that light which told me who he really was. I'd read the famous description too often to be mistaken: his friend Giorgio wrote that Angelino's eyes were, 'the colour of horn with yellowish gleams'.
"I envy you," I said, "for what you've done and what you will do."
The eyes gleamed again. "Who are you?" Angelino asked.
"My name's Wyatt, Andrea Wyatt." For once I was glad of my ambiguous name: it didn't conflict with the fact I was wearing trousers, which I knew made everyone think I was a boy. And being foreign might account for my clothes being a bit odd.
"I'm a visitor from England. My mother is Italian. My father, he..." I didn't know how to describe him; there weren't any art historians in the fifteenth century. "He's a scholar." That was true.
"He's searching for paintings and sculptures to take 'back to England." That was true as well, sort of. Now I'd got the knack of telling almost truths, I plunged on recklessly.
"He's heard of how promising your work is and is eager to learn more."
The crowd pressed in, impatient that I was monopolising Angelino. They wanted to congratulate him on his angel. Francesco shouldered me aside to drape the violet cloak over Angelino.
"I'm not cold," he said and shrugged it off.
"I meant it to cover you," Francesco said. "The Prince is coming to inspect your snowman." He nodded up at the balcony running around the courtyard, where a couple of servants were opening a door. He tried again to cloak Angelino's black clothes stained with sweat and melted snow. "You look like a workman."
"To him 1 am a workman."
Angelino gave the cloak to me. "You're cold. Go to my rooms. You can get warm there and we'll talk about your father. Francesco will show you the way."
"I want to see the Prince," Francesco objected.
"Then you'd better hurry."
Francesco gave in. He led me at a run through the Palace and up wide stone stairs, along back corridors and through doors until we came to a large room carpeted in scarlet and with a fire burning steadily in the grate. It made me think of the one in my father's library. 1 wondered if it had burned out or if Assunta had built it up. Ragged cheering and uneven clapping came filtering through the cloth shutter over the window.
"The Prince!" Francesco left quickly.
I lifted the shutter. On a balcony overlooking the courtyard, a man stood in the middle of a group of lords and ladies in bright brocades and silks and velvets. He peered down his long nose at Icarus and at Angelino, who was the only person in the crowd whose head wasn't lowered.
"I didn't want an angel," the man said, "1 wanted a grotesque."
Angelino shrugged the tiniest hit. One of the ladies whispered in the man's ear.
"The Principessa tells me the angel is very beautiful, nevertheless," he said.
"Then I thank the Principessa." Angelino bowed to her.
The crowd held its breath at the insult, and so did I. Angelino was playing a dangerous game. This was 1494 and I knew that meant the man was Piero de' Medici, self-styled 'prince' and ruler of Florence. It didn't matter that Angelino had been a favourite of Piero's father, had grown up with Piero, eaten at the same table, been taught alongside him by the most famous scholars of the age: Piero was weak, rich and. arrogant. The people of Florence lived and died on his uncertain word.
He looked at Icarus again. "It is indeed a very beautiful angel," he said. "But next time you will make a grotesque."
He held out his hand and a servant put a little bag in it. He threw it down to Angelino who caught it and bowed. He kept his head down until Piero and his party moved back into the palace. As the doors closed behind them, he straightened and hefted the pouch. In the clear air, I heard it jingle.
The crowd broke up, some taking a closer look at the snowman, some leaving, some like Angelino and his friends going into the palace. I took out my sketchbook and the tin of pencils that go everywhere with me. I draw all the time. It's one of the things Father approved of, though he disparaged my skills. I leaned on the broad window ledge and drew Icarus. It was difficult, the perspective was acute from this high up and no matter how I tried I couldn't get it right. How Father would enjoy that. I could hear his voice in my mind: "Perspective is only a technique, a basic skill, simple enough."
I blew on my hands, my sigh of frustration turning to a cloud of frosty breath.
"That's good," a voice said. How long had Angelino been there watching me try to draw? He took my book and studied the picture, then drew a few eloquent lines with my pencil. They transformed my sketch. "You see?" he said.
"Yes."
He showed me more, exploring the wings, the face, the twists and turns of the body - every line, every mark defining a longing for freedom. He thrust the book back at me.
"Thank you," I said.
He took no notice; he was too busy turning the pencil over and over, running his rough fingers across the black and red surface, reading the white lettering. Abruptly he said, "Sit!"
I dropped into a chair under the window where the pure, cold light streamed through. Angelino snatched up a thick sheet of paper, pushed aside the saffron and blue crockery littering the table and began to draw, his strange, fierce eyes flickering from me to the paper and back again. I didn't dare to move or speak. I fixed my attention on a little shrine hanging on the opposite wall, its gilded doors shining with a buttery gleam from the votive lamp flickering and smoking in front of it. I'm not religious, despite my mother's efforts, but I thought it wouldn't do any harm to try praying for guidance on getting home, especially as the saint kneeling in front of the Madonna and Child was Assunta's favourite, Gennaro. My stomach rumbled. It was a long time since I'd eaten Assunta's pastry.
I wasn't any good at praying. All I could think of was getting home. I forced myself to concentrate on the painting, trying to assess it in the way father had taught me. It was very old, old even in Angelino's time. The rules of painting were different then: Mary and her baby were bigger than the saint because they were more important than him. The artist was telling you to concentrate on them. The background was plain gold to show how precious the picture was, and the Madonna's gown was painted in the most expensive blue made from ground up lapis lazuli.
Concentrating on the picture didn't stop my muscles getting stiff as the pleats in its sharply painted folds of drapery. How long had I sat here? Long enough for the tiny lamp to burn down and fill the air with a thick smell of hot oil.
Angelino gave a little grunt of what sounded like satisfaction and stopped drawing. He held the pencil out to me, reluctantly.
"Keep it," I said.
"Then you have this." He gave me the drawing.
It was me, yet not me. The face was my face, yet beautiful; my face, yet a boy's face; my face, yet seen through the eyes of the past. It was exquisite and it told me I had no business being here.
"It's wonderful," I said.
"Show it to your father. If he likes it he might commission work from me to take back to England."
I thought of Father and took a risk. "You have to sign it, so he truly knows which artist did it."
I knew that in all his long life, Angelino never signed his work, except for once. But he wrote his name on his picture of me.
As he wrote, the light falling on the paper turned from pale gold to blue white. "It's snowing!" I slid the drawing into my book and ran out of the room, out of the palace and into the courtyard.
Angelino followed me. "Wait!"
"I can't." I'd arrived in a blizzard; it stood to reason I had to leave in one. I flew past Icarus, down the stone passageway and into the road. The cloud billowed from the alleyway.
"What's that?" Angelino was beside me.
"My way home." I unwound the cloak and shook off the snow settling like ermine along its shoulders and gave it back to Angelino.
"Here." He took a coin from the pouch Piero had thrown to him and put it in my hand. A golden florin.
"Why?"
"Because you helped me with Icarus and asked no questions.”
I took my precious tin of pencils, a present from my mother to help pass the time during the access visit to father. "This is for you."
I ran into the roiling whiteness. "Adio, Angelino!" I shouted without looking back. I felt my way blindly forward, groping at the freezing air, on and on, step by step. What if I wasn't going forwards at all? What if I went round and round forever, trapped between then and now? I wanted to go home. I wanted my present, my future. "Father!" I shouted.
"Anna? Anna, where are you?"
"I'm here." I stumbled numbly towards my father's voice. In one step, I was out in the road, the white cloud boiling backwards down the alley behind me. My father stood in the moonlit street, his arms wide. "Anna!"
"I got lost," I wailed.
Father wrapped me up in his coat and scarf and hat and helped me pull gloves over my frozen hands; there was no lecture, Father only said, "Let's go home."
We walked back to the house through the snow, the moonlight silver-plating the city. 1didn't ask how long I'd been missing, not till after I'd had a bath to warm up and Assunta had brought me dinner in bed while my father rang the Polizia to tell them 1 was back. I'd been gone for twelve hours. Time had passed much faster inside the cloud, as it moved me through the five hundred years.
"I didn't mean to cause trouble," I said to Assunta, who'd stayed to look after me.
"You never do," she said, collecting my tray of empty dishes. "You are a foolish and stubborn child," she scolded. "And your father is a foolish and stubborn man. You should have talked long ago. Now would be a good time to start, while you are both ashamed of yourselves and willing to listen to each other."
She was right. Father and I talked for a long time and it was a new beginning. It was only when there was nothing left to say of our past history, that Father asked me where I'd been after I ran away from the house. I'd already thought about how to tell him. I was going to give the facts and nothing else, and let father work it out to his own satisfaction.
"I got into the Medici Palace courtyard. A boy about my age, you'd call him a youth, was building a snowman, more of a snow sculpture really, and I stopped to help. He paid me." I held out the florin.
While Father examined the five-hundred-year-old, newly minted, gold coin, I opened my sketchbook. "This is the snowman he made."
"You did this drawing?"
"Yes. And Angelino - that was the boy's name - corrected it. Then he drew these other studies. People came to laugh at him because he was an artist who'd been ordered to make a snowman but he decided to make a work of art, even though the sun would melt it. They thought he'd made an angel but I worked out it was Icarus because he was destroyed by the sun too."
I tweaked my portrait from the book and gave the sheet to my father.
"Later, Angelino drew me. I asked him to sign the drawing and he did. Look, at the bottom."
Father studied it for a long time. I had no idea what he was thinking. At last he said, "Anna, tell me everything that happened."
It took a long time as he interrupted me over and over again with questions. Before, I'd have lost my temper and told him to leave me alone, but now I understood it was his way, it was nothing personal. In the end he stopped and said he was sorry, he'd forgotten how tired I must be.
"You do believe me?"
"Of course, you couldn't possibly have invented that mass of impeccable detail. And don't forget, I'm the world's greatest authority on this artist's work." I think he was teasing me.
"You're not the world's greatest authority on me."
"I'm getting there."
"At least you know you were right about the graphite drawings. Angelino must've done them with my pencils."
I shouldn't have mentioned it - we both remembered the coffee incident.
"I'm sorry about the angel drawing, Dad, especially now. Is it ruined?"
"I'm afraid it is. Let's forget it. My real regret is that I'll never be able to prove to my colleagues that I was right all along."
I understood how hard that was for him, academics are proud of their reputations. "I know you're right. That makes two of us."
He nodded. I wasn't sure it was enough for him.
"Dad." I liked being this informal. "The drawing of me isn't the angel I ruined, but - would you like it?"
He didn't protest or say, Are you sure? Only, "Thank you."
He loved that drawing. He had it framed and hung it near his desk in the library. That was ten years ago. I'm looking at the picture now as I wait for Dad to take me out to dinner to celebrate the opening of my first solo exhibition in Florence. He would still rather I was a scholar, like him, but he's learned to live with it. I never forgot my drawing lesson with Angelino or his determination to make even a snowman a work of art. Stubbornness can be a positive thing when you don't allow it to blind you to other possibilities.
I smile as I look at Angelino's signature on my portrait. Of course he didn't sign it 'Angelino' – that was only his nickname, as mine's Anna. He signed it with his proper name: Michelangelo Buonarotti. Michelangelo. According to my father, the greatest artist who ever lived and I've never quarrelled with him about that.