Revelations

EIGHTY-TWO

But Claudia would later come to love her visits to the estate in the hills above Florence that Ezio and Sofia found, more or less falling down, but bought and, with the proceeds from the sale of the Constantinople bookshop to the Assassins, and Ezio’s own capital, restored and turned into a modest, but quite profitable, vineyard within two years.

Ezio became lean and tanned, wore workmen’s clothes during the day, and Sofia scolded him, telling him that his hands were getting too gnarled for lovemaking from working on the vines.

But that hadn’t prevented them from producing Flavia in May 1513, and Marcello arrived a year later, in October.

And Claudia loved her new niece and nephew almost more than she thought possible, though she made quite sure, given the twenty-year difference in their ages, that she never became a kind of ersatz mother-in-law to Sofia. She never interfered, and she disciplined herself to visit the Auditore estate near Fiesole no more than half the number of times she would have liked to. Besides, she had a new husband in Rome to think about as well.

But Claudia couldn’t love the children as much as Ezio did. In them, and in Sofia, Ezio had at last found the reason, which he had spent a lifetime seeking.