David by Mary Hoffman Page B

it behind me. It was probably her last duty of the night.
    ‘I can tell you what I have learned in the previous few days if you come to my room before you leave,’ she said. ‘I have a room to myself.’
    That meant she was a favoured and superior servant. But the thought of being alone with her in her bedchamber put me in a new kind of danger. I needed her information to help my chosen companions, but the price I would certainly have to pay for it, though sweet, would cost me dear.

    Angelo had nearly finished the statue. We had turned it again so that he could work in more detail on the front.
    ‘I am going to leave the top of his head unfinished,’ he said.
    I climbed up to have a look. There, at the crest of this David’s curls, was a rough patch of unchiselled marble. My hand went unconsciously to my own hair and Angelo laughed his harsh, grating laugh like a key turning in a rusty lock.
    ‘Why?’ I asked.
    ‘It marks the extreme limit of the original block,’ he said. ‘That way the Operai will see that I have used every bit of it and added nothing.’
    It was a matter of pride with him that he had looked at the botched slab of marble and found a way of creating a figure in the round that had been buried exactly within its confines.
    ‘You have such genius,’ I said. And I meant it. Who but my brother could have pulled off a commission like this? That was why he had accepted, of course. It was the challenge of working within prescribed limits that excited him. He didn’t want just to make a passable statue out of a discarded block, but to turn that overlooked and ignored slab of marble into a work of art that would make people gasp.
    It made me gasp and I had posed for it and seen it grow out of the stone day by day. Apart from the Sangallo brothers, no one else had had that privilege. I could just imagine how it was going to shock the citizens of Florence once the public were allowed to see it. At least some of them. The frateschi were going to love it but not the de’ Medici supporters.
    It said as clearly as if it were chiselled into a stone scroll in the shepherd boy’s hand that here was defiance: the ordinary working man from the fields going out against a giant clad in armour, with only a slingshot and stone. And we all knew the outcome of that story. Angelo didn’t have to show it. There would be no head of Goliath in his helmet lying bloodily under this David’s foot.
    The determination in his eye and the concentration of his frown meant that the stone would land squarely between the brows of the Philistine giant and fell him at a blow. I know that this David looked like me but for the first time I felt like him. Armed only with a little knowledge and a lot of idealistic feelings about the Republic, I was daring to pit myself against the most powerful family the city had ever known.
    No wonder Angelo had wanted to show the hero naked; when you were faced with a seemingly impossible task, that’s how you did feel. I climbed down from the scaffolding and found him waiting for me, smiling.
    ‘I saw you with another pretty girl the other day,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you are following my advice, as you said you would?’
    I didn’t know what to reply. The consequences of going to Grazia’s room to talk about the pro-Medici conspiracy had been inevitable. But I had thrust down my guilty feelings about Rosalia – whose very existence Grazia was still unaware of, thanks to my cowardice – by telling myself that what I learned from Grazia was vital in order to foil their plots.
    It was some weeks since this arrangement had begun and I had passed on much useful information to the frateschi . It appeared that this time the compagnacci were taking it much more slowly. Neither Piero nor any other de’ Medici prince would appear suddenly at the gates at the head of a hastily assembled army. These conspirators would take every precaution to make sure their own followers were safe before letting the