Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

On my eighth birthday everything changed.

  He had taken me to a cave that, until then, he’d kept secret from me. It was dark except for a single shaft of light that shone in from its rocky roof. We’d stood silently in that beam of sunlight, altogether illuminated yet surrounded by utter blackness.

  “Eight,” he said, his portentous voice echoing in the cavern. “Eight is the greatest of all numbers.”

  “Why, Papa?”

  “It is the number of Infinity.” At our feet in the sand he drew the number and the symbol, and taking my finger traced it round and round, showing me how it had no beginning and no end. “Eight is the number of endless possibility. Worlds untold. You are eight years old, Caterina. Now begins your true life. Now begins your education.”

  And so it had.

  That evening after Magdalena had gone home, Papa, carrying a torch, took me up the stairs past our bedrooms to the third-floor landing. Here were two rooms, his sanctum sanctorum, that until then had been locked and I’d been forbidden to enter. Obedient child that I was I had obeyed his prohibitions.

  First he had unlocked the street-side door. When we entered I found myself in a bright, airy, but unadorned room. It was filled with tables, and the surface of every one of them was covered in books.

  Certainly I had seen books before. Papa would always have one near his bed at night. Sometimes if I couldn’t sleep and wandered into his room for comfort I would find him, by the light of a candle, leaning on one elbow over the open pages. He would always close the book and welcome me into his bed to warm me and rock me, and tell me a story. He kept a book of medicines in his apothecary—a list of the curative properties of plants. I thought nothing of these books, no more than I did of the Bible from which the Vinci friars read every Sunday at mass.

  But here were dozens of hand-copied books lying on the tables, some of them very large, their pages spread open. Papa held his torch over one of these and I saw not just written words but beautiful golden leaves and vines intertwined with giant letters, and tiny pictures on the pages in every color and hue.

  “This manuscript,” he told me, his voice suffused with awe, “is one thousand years old.”

  One thousand? “Where did you get such a book, Papa?” I asked as I moved slowly round the tables looking at the volumes, which he allowed me, very carefully, to open. I saw many in Latin, which, though I had not learned to read or write, I recognized as such. But there were others with letters that appeared in strange jagged shapes, and others in graceful curves.

  “Tell me, you must tell me how you came to have so many books.”

  As I was doing, he now began to move about his library, stopping to gaze at a text, holding his torch above his eyes, squinting down and reading a bit, nodding now and again. After a while he began to talk, weaving a story in the same way he had done on those sleepless nights of mine. But these were no stories of dragons and their mountain lairs, or spirits that inhabited the heads of waterlillies.

  This was the story of his adventurous youth and his apprenticeship to the notorious Florentine historian and scholar Poggio Bracciolini, himself in the employ of the greatest man in Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici.

  “He is still today much loved for his modesty and humble leadership despite his astonishing wealth,” Papa told me, “but in the old days Cosimo took up the notion that the learned men of his beloved city must begin reading the ancient Greek and Roman writers, scrolls and codices that had been scattered all around the world after the destruction of the great library in Alexandria—that is, Egypt. Many of them were hidden from the Christian church fathers, who thought them heretical.”

  “What is ‘heretical,’ Papa?”

  “Heretical is believing any notion that the priests cannot find in the Holy Scripture. Heretical is a dangerous thing to be. Heretical is what I am, sweet girl.”

  I must have looked terrified, for he picked me up and smothered me in a warm embrace. Then, clearing a place on one of the library tables, he sat me down on it.

  “Dangerous or not, Caterina, what lies within the pages of these books are truths that we must never allow to be lost to the world. Truths that must be learned by you.”

  “Me?” My voice was very small and filled with dread. Hadn’t Papa just told me that the books were heretical and that this was dangerous?

  “Listen to me.” He knelt before me so his face was close to mine and he spoke with a passion I had never before heard in his always kindly voice. “You are a female child. In this society of ours you might as well be a clod of cow manure.”

  I stared at him without understanding. I was loved, even coddled in my home. If other girls my age were treated differently, I was yet unaware.

  “Soon your ‘only worth’ will become apparent—your ‘marriageability.’ If you should marry higher than your station, you will be thought to be increasing your family’s wealth, its standing and connections.”

  I really did not comprehend his meaning. Wealth. Standing. Connections. These were words never spoken in our household. I guessed they were in short supply here. Surely I had heard the older girls and women speak of marriage as they sat in their basket-weaving circles by the Vincio River, and until then I had always expected to marry.

  “But in other places, other times, Caterina—ancient times, pagan times,” he went on, “females were revered. They were high priestesses. Rulers of great lands. They were even supreme goddesses, worshipped by all.”

  “Goddesses?” I said uncomprehendingly. “Like the Virgin Mary?”

  “No.” He shook his head and laughed a small laugh, then picked up a book with the strange angular letters, and placed it in my lap. “This is the Greek language,” he told me. “In this book the author speaks of Isis, Egyptian goddess of life and love and all of Nature.”

  “Does she know Jesus?” I asked.

  “No, Caterina, Isis had been a goddess for thousands of years before Jesus was born. But you,” my father told me as he lifted me down off the table, “you will learn to read Greek and Latin and Hebrew—the language of the Jews. I believe that if a female is good enough to become a goddess, then a little girl is good enough to become a scholar.”

  “You will teach me, Papa?”

  “Yes, I will teach you.”

  “But you never told me how you came to have all these books. Or about Poggio.”

  “Quite right. I’m afraid I went off on a tangent.”

  “What is a ‘tangent’?” I said. “And what is a ‘pagan’?”

  He laughed again. “I can see that I have the makings of a true scholar before me, for a true scholar has a mind full of endless questions. Now come along. There’s much more to see.”

  Much more! I thought, my brain suddenly afire. What wonders could he possibly have left to show me?

  I watched breathlessly as he put the key in the door to the third-floor room overlooking the apothecary garden and unlocked it. Neatly organized as this top-floor chamber was, a darkness pervaded it, so unlike the cheerful apothecary on the ground floor, or the many-windowed library. A sharp biting smell assaulted my nostrils, so different from the shop’s vegetal fragrance.

  Immediately apparent were the tables upon which stood connected arrays of vials, funnels, and oddly shaped vessels. Along one wall was a large furnace with bellows attached, and a store of various fuels for it—from coal and wood to rushes and pitch.

  Near the garden window a large manuscript lay open on a pedestal. One wall of shelves held trays, scales, strainers, basins, and ladles. There were flasks of myriad shapes, some with long necks, some with two spouts, and one that coiled like a serpent.

  What arrested my attention most, however, were two beakers—one that appeared stained with soot and was like a great egg that, with a hinge, opened and closed at the top, sitting perched on a three-legged cradle. Another of clear glass stood on the floor, two whole feet wide at its bottom, and as high as Papa’s chest. Where had such amazing artifacts come from?

  Now my no
strils were assailed by a familiar smell, but one that occurring inside our house mystified me.

  “Papa,” I said, “I smell horse droppings.”

  “You’ve a good nose, Caterina. It is as you say, but the dung is ‘fermenting.’” He showed me an earthen vessel that, when I moved closer, emitted a stronger smell of the stuff. “In a closed vessel it will work upon itself and create a gentle source of heat. Most all of my work here, my ‘experiments,’ require some form of heat. Come closer, let me show you the furnace. It is called an athenor. Don’t be afraid,” he said gently. “You and this furnace will soon be very well acquainted.” He took my hand and led me close. Even with its door closed the thing gave off a withering heat.

  “Child, I am what is called an alchemist, and this furnace is the heart and soul of this chamber, this alchemical laboratory, for it is through fire that nature itself can be changed. Alchemists, they say, are the Masters of Fire.”

  From the hook he removed a leather apron and, slipping it over his head, pulled the garment over his body, crossing its long thick straps behind his back and knotting them in front. Then to my amazement and delight he took a second leather apron from the hook—one much smaller, just my size—and slipped it over my head.

  “We speak in a secret language—though the church abhors and forbids it—seeking truth through knowledge, rather than through faith.”

  I was very still and silent as he fitted the apron around me. It was reminiscent of a religious ceremony before this fiery altar, Papa’s movements no less reverent than the local priest’s as he placed the wafers on our tongues and the wine chalice to our lips during communion.

  “You should never approach the open furnace without protection,” he said, now placing a small leather mask over my face, doing the same with one of his own.

  As he opened the furnace door I had gone beyond awe—this magical chamber, its sights and smells, we two like mystical creatures in our animal-skin costumes approaching the profane and sacred alchemical fire.

  “The flames can never be allowed to burn out. Everything is done to maintain a steady temperature.” He pulled from the woodpile a fat log and set it on the stone floor in front of the athenor. Then with a brush he’d removed from a bucket of thick black pitch, he slathered the log with a coating of the stuff. Now donning heavy gloves and with almost tender care he placed the pitch-covered wood into the fire. “I will set it at night before bedtime, and see to it in the morning, first thing waking.” As the heat flared he closed the furnace door. “Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake, worried that the fire has gone out. I come upstairs . . . move back, Caterina. . . .” Now he pressed the arms of the bellows several times together. “. . . and I feed the dragon.”

  I wondered then why I had never noticed his comings and goings.

  “But since I first lit it all those years ago, I have never once let it die. Your mother helped me before she passed away”—he pulled off his mask and gently removed mine—“and now you will become the keeper of the alchemical fire.”

  And so I had.

  I’d learned the secret language of the alchemist and assumed, even in my youth, the healthy, patient, and humble attributes of the profession that my father instilled in me. He taught me the modes of fermentation, distillation, putrefaction, and extraction. Reduction, coagulation, tinction, and crystallization. My small fingers were thrust into coal, dirt, and sand baths. I became adept at handling pelican beakers, earthenware crucibles, and calcinating dishes. I became proficient in measuring substances on a scale, and the correct use of a dissolving furnace.

  There were different classes of alchemists, Papa told me. Ones who sought spiritual transformation from the philosophic teachings. Ones who put great stock in the mineral sphere, and others—like himself—who were more attuned to the “vegetable world,” seeking applications for use in the apothecary. But most alchemists were amateurs—“puffers,” he called them—who sought the “philosopher’s stone” or “elixir” that would transmute base metal into gold. These men were not simply greedy, he’d told me, but caused men like himself serious trouble with the church. Anyone known as an alchemist, no matter his motives, was branded as a heretic, an evil sorcerer. But in the end, if caught, even a man like himself—who used the results of his experiments to heal the sick—would suffer on a pyre in as much agony as a man seeking fame and the glitter of gold.

  Too, I began in earnest my education in the apothecary arts—how and when to cut the leaves of a plant just at the moment its flowers came fully into bloom, when the active principle of the herb was at its strongest. How seeds needed to be harvested when most mature, and that roots were best lifted in autumn, once the top growth of the plant had begun to die back.

  I became expert at drying and preserving leaves for winter use. That muslin bags placed over the hanging flower heads would catch escaping seeds. How one should gather certain plants early in the day and gently shake the dew from them, and to be sure that everything used in our medicines was free from insects and disease. Papa taught me very carefully that in certain plants one part—say the flower—might contain a medicine, but the root of the same might be poisonous.

  I most enjoyed tending our apothecary garden, watching the seeds we buried in the moist earth sprout, grow to seedlings, and bush into fine plants. We grew agrimony for tonic, and chamomile for soothing tea. Clary seeds steeped in water formed a paste that was used to bathe the eyes or draw thorns from the hands. Dandelion helped kidneys, and water made from soaking dill helped farting babies.

  Leaves from our elderberry hedge we took up to the alchemical laboratory. Heated together with lard and suet, then strained through a fine sieve, this was a wonderful treatment for burns, chilblains, and the bite of certain insects. An infusion of feverfew, also concocted on the third floor, was invaluable for bringing down a person’s temperature. I learned to grind marigold into ointments for ulcers and wounds, and decoct the syrup of mallow for stubborn coughs deep in the lungs.

  But just as important, Papa taught me that in speaking with those in need of care, we should always make little show of ourselves and refrain from praising our remedies. Gossip was forbidden, as idle chatter was never a help for the sick. An apothecary was best when in full harmony with his work. “Scholarly and intelligent,” my father would remind me to be. The famous Greek physician Galen had always said that a doctor was, by nature, a philosopher.

  But that was not all I learned. Not the least of it! Having been allowed admittance into my father’s library, I became its most frequent visitor. Early morning and every evening after the shop was closed the contents of those books and manuscripts was shunted into my head. Papa was a stern tutor, though always kind, for he found me a perfect student—diligent, quick to learn, and “once taught, never forgotten.”

  But how could I forget that which was written on those pages? The wisdom of the ages. Fantastical stories of gods and men. The way to know right from wrong. The magic in numbers. The evil in men’s hearts. Heroic adventures and the throes of romantic passion.

  I came to understand that two thousand years had passed since some of the books I was reading had been written. And by whom. The Greeks—Plato, Euripides, Homer, Xenophon—and the ancient Romans—Ovid, Virgil, Livius, Cato.

  And I heard, too, the story—this was Papa’s favorite—of how an apothecary from the tiny Tuscan village of Vinci had come to acquire such a remarkable library. Poggio Bracciolini became a legend in our house. In the pay of Cosimo de’ Medici, Poggio’s many missions to the farthest reaches of Europe, Persia, and Africa had delivered untold treasures into the hands of the richest man in the world. Not gold. Not jewels . . . but books.

  Those that were lost after the barbarian invasion of the Roman Empire.

  Some were originals, the ones that could be pried or bribed away from their owners. Others could only be copied in the hand of Poggio himself. He had found in Ernesto a willing assistant, fearless no matter where their travels took them
—into the frozen wastes of the Swiss Alps or the burning deserts of the Holy Land. Sometimes they were confined to a dark, moldering basement cell with only the light of a single candle to work by. Sometimes they were chased from mosques by irate Mohammedans with flashing scimitars who saw the pair as thieves and invaders.

  My father had been tireless and, more, appreciated fully the gift of this unique profession. Day after month after year he copied, then learned, the sacred languages of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He was so quick and adept he found he had time to spare, and Poggio, endlessly grateful for this enthusiastic protégé, allowed Ernesto in the times he was meant to be eating, sleeping, or resting to make copies of the books for himself.

  With all these manuscripts delivered into the Medici’s hands, the adventurer Poggio grew rich beyond his wildest dreams. In Florence he retired to a life of writing and dissolution. His own father had been a poor village apothecary, and the son had bought the man a shop and the house above it in the great city. It was into a second apprenticeship with the elder Poggio that my father learned his present trade. Living and working there Ernesto, like a sponge, had soaked up the knowledge of herbs and the compounding of medicine, and the other “secret endeavors” old Signor Bracciolini had shared with him.

  Florence, however, held no magic for my father. With his priceless books and his new profession, he moved from the big city to the small mountain village of Vinci, a day’s ride due west of Florence, along the Arno River. There he had found love with my mother, after whom I was named, and the respect of his neighbors for his careful ministrations. Of the secret heresies he practiced in the third-floor laboratory of his house, none of them were aware.

  So from the age of eight I had developed an understanding of, and strict adherence to, the principle of secrecy. Perhaps the greatest of my father’s secrets was that he was, in his deepest heart and soul, a pagan. I had learned the meaning of that word as well. He worshipped the natural world, the Elements and the Cosmos, all of which he believed were more potent forces than the Judean teacher and healer called Jesus, and the dangerously corrupt church that had grown up around him. He never forced me to share in his beliefs, but in time I found them very comfortable to my nature.