“I, Tancredi Lisini, representing my consorteria, wish to bring attention to the document here presented. My brothers and I were taken into custody for the injury to the father of the Regnoni family, but the heirs have hereby produced this instrumentum pacis, eliminating the possibility of legal recrimination, and allowing us to participate in the Feast of the Assumption. We request that the state drop all criminal action in the resolution of this dispute.”
One of the Nine, centrally placed and apparently the chairman, squinted at Tancredi. “Even those producing instruments of peace must pay a penalty. The representative of the Lisini family must produce ten percent of the fine in lire for the crime with which the family has been charged, deliverable within seven days from this council.”
Tancredi retreated, bowing. I made a silent note to add lire to my list of fourteenth-century Sienese currency.
After fifteen more petitions, I started to feel faint. My last meal had been much smaller and longer ago than I would have liked. I started fantasizing about the water bottle in my bag but thought it might draw unhealthy attention, since there was no stainless steel in fourteenth-century Siena. Plus I didn’t want to have to find another restroom equivalent. Then, suddenly, it was my turn.
“Messer Stozzi, representative of the Donnaio of Siena, please step forward with your claim.”
I tried to stay calm. I couldn’t imagine my décolletage warranted hanging, but my lack of funds, inconsistent pilgrim story, and being a lone woman made a risky combination.
Stozzi began his formal address. “I Noveschi Onorevole, I present to you a self-proclaimed grieving widow and pilgrim from Lucca, incongruously dressed for her declared purpose. I discovered her parading in the piazza with no regard for modesty, and with no source from which to draw the required fine regarding her neckline. I present her case to you today rather than during the session established for pursuance of sumptuary infractions because of the singular nature of the situation in which I found her, and await your respected judgment.”
A sharp, high voice broke the silence after Stozzi’s account of my wardrobe offense. “The mantellate of the Ospedale della Scala—in particular I, Suor Umiltà, their humble representative—under the guidance of our esteemed rector, petition i Noveschi to fulfill their civic duty to the bereft widow and penitent pilgrim.” The speaker was the nun whom I’d seen earlier. Her voice was surprisingly loud, coming from such a small body. She took a huge breath and continued with her appeal. “This is the duty to which the Ospedale has devoted itself for centuries, with the Grace of God and the support of our magnificent commune, in the hands of its greatest rulers, whose purpose is to make the light of this gleaming republic shine all the brighter.” She had to take another breath. “I combine this plea for beneficence toward traveling pilgrims, whose good fortune it is to arrive at our gates, with a request for the funds to enable the completion of the fifth fresco on the facade of the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala, the very site into which we welcome these souls in their journeys toward redemption.”
By now most of those present were staring at the speaker. She was dressed in black robes over a white scapular but clearly not cloistered. I wondered what mantellate meant in this context—“cloaked” was as far as I could get from the Italian. Her black and white robes were decorated with a curious insignia of a golden ladder.
“We welcome the generosity and beneficence of the commune in supporting the Ospedale, an august institution whose walls await the further attentions of Siena’s painters whose aim is to honor the Blessed Virgin who protects us.” That sounded good to me; I hoped it did to the experts. “I humbly suggest that the portion of the fine required for the unfortunate error of this young woman’s dress be subtracted from what I am sure will be a much greater sum intended for the beautification of the Ospedale with the aforementioned commission, which accounts can be settled at the next meeting of the Biccherna, until which time we request that this widow and pilgrim return with us to the Ospedale.” With that, Suor Umiltà clamped her lips shut and smiled winningly up at the platform on which the Nine were seated. She was clearly an expert at this.
One of the Nine responded. “Granted, on both counts, Suor Umiltà. The lady can return with you to the Ospedale, hereby spared a sentence for her violation of sumptuary laws. And the rector may invite submissions for the new fresco, with communal support.” I stopped registering anything after that, as my rescuer grabbed my elbow to hurry me out of the Sala.
* * *
“Whom do I have the pleasure of having snatched from Messer Stozzi’s grasp?” The diminutive sister spoke to me in her surprisingly large voice. “Your plight became evident to me, aligned as it was with my request for a supplement to our communal funds. I usually achieve my aims, with God’s help of course. Please allow me to introduce myself. You may call me Suor Umiltà.”
The tiny woman’s fingers were firmly around my wrist. She could have been anywhere from forty to eighty years old, and the pointed stare from her dark eyes made me feel like I was being X-rayed.
“I am Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, from Lucca, recently widowed and on a pilgrimage. I am very grateful for the Ospedale’s welcome.” I was getting good at that story. The word ospedale encompassed the institution’s multiple roles as hospital, pilgrims’ hospice, and protector of widows and orphans. I congratulated myself on having created a fictional identity that put me in more than one category that the Ospedale ministered to.
“Trovato: found, as in a foundling, or orphan. An auspicious name for a recipient of the beneficence of the Ospedale.” Umiltà beamed, deeply satisfied with the linguistic tidiness of it all. “Do tell me of your travails, Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, and be assured that we will provide you the assistance for which the Ospedale is renowned.” Faced with the first directly sympathetic ear since my arrival in 1347, I was overwhelmed with the desire to tell her everything. Instead I said:
“Thank you for rescuing me. I can’t imagine what would have happened if you hadn’t.”
Umiltà smiled in a self-satisfied way. “Did you encounter difficulties in your trip through the Maremma? I have heard tales of vicious bandits along the route. I hope your traveling companions were not lost to violence?” I was stumped for a moment by the questions—Maremma, bandits, companions? What was the Maremma? It must refer to the land between Siena and Lucca. To buy time, I put my face in my hands. Umiltà put her arm on my shoulder and leaned in solicitously.
“The tribulations of pilgrimage weigh heavily upon those who take up the path, but rest assured it brings us closer to God in the process.” I kept my hands over my face, still thinking furiously. “Can you speak of your losses?”
I opened my eyes inside the darkness created by my hands. The invitation to consider my grief brought back a memory of the day I’d said good-bye to Ben for the last time. “My brother,” I said, my voice breaking.
“My child, you have lost so much in such a short time,” Umiltà responded, her hand still firm on my shoulder. “Rest assured the mantellate will care for your spiritual wounds. Many come to us with losses such as yours, and we are well equipped to find balm for suffering souls.”
“Mantellate?” I blinked back tears.
“We are religious women, doing the work of God by charitable acts in the world of men, rather than the cloister. Have you no equivalent in Lucca?”
“Yes, yes, of course, we just call them something else.” It sounded lame to me, but she let it go. When Umiltà spoke again it was with a new undercurrent of interest.
“What can you do?” Umiltà looked at me appraisingly. “Sew, embroider, spin, recognize and prepare medicinal herbs?”
The question was clearly intended to discover whether I’d be of any use, or just a burdensome charity case. I considered my options. Most of my sewing had been related to wound closure. Billing myself as a physician might get me into trouble, and I knew nothing about herbal medicine. My first and only experience with a spinning wheel had been dur
ing an elementary school trip to a model early American village.
As we walked across the courtyard to the entrance of the Ospedale, Umiltà put her hand firmly on the small of my back to guide me through the doorway. I was still trying to think of something that would support my stay when I remembered my hours copying Ben’s manuscripts.
“I can read and write. Is that helpful?”
She looked at me with new interest. “Assuredly. Of course, the charity of the Ospedale would extend to you in any case, but the additional assistance you might provide to our great institution as a scribe, supporting its noble mission through your skill, would be most welcome.”
“It would be an honor to contribute to the Ospedale and its inhabitants, and by extension the commune of Siena, whose beneficence and protection serve as a beacon to travelers and citizens alike.” I wondered whether Umiltà’s verbiage might be contagious. But the more I sounded like the people around me, the less alien I’d seem, and that might keep me out of trouble. All those medieval documents I’d read back in modern Siena gave me language I could draw upon to sound more like a fourteenth-century native. That thought made me wish that I still had Gabriele Accorsi’s journal to keep me company.
* * *
The fresco season had the brevity and intensity of an adolescent love affair. On this hot July day, well into the season of paint and plaster, Gabriele was deep in the passion of a work in progress. He awoke before dawn to the mattino bells sounding from the Torre del Mangia—marking the end of curfew and the opening of the city gates—and made his way to Mass in the little contrada church. Instead of focusing on the sermon, Gabriele imagined the face of Santa Anna, the Virgin’s blessed mother, gazing with wonder at her newborn daughter being bathed in a basin. Gabriele felt the weight of an imagined brush in his right hand, and his left hand’s fingers moved as if he were checking the plaster to be certain of its dampness. Gabriele could feel Anna’s ache to hold her daughter, a child who would someday bear, to her joy and despair, the son of God.
“Dreaming about your painting again?” Gabriele’s cousin Ysabella peered up at him as the congregation filed out.
“The arm of the Virgin’s mother today, Ysabella, but, by the feast of the Birth of the Virgin, Anna in her entirety.” Gabriele’s face lit briefly with a smile, and Ysabella smiled back, looking at Gabriele for clues to his mood. Since his wife had died a few years before, Gabriele had become impenetrable. He looked like a Lorenzetti painting himself, with his still features. He was unlike anyone else in the family, tall where they were small, and with an unhurried long-limbed grace. Gabriele’s uncle, Ysabella’s father Martellino, was a baker with a round, cheerful face, and the spherical motif persisted throughout. His protuberant belly strained against his tunic, his short legs bowed out in an arch. Ysabella had inherited her share of roundness; she reminded Gabriele of a nesting wren, bright-eyed and quick. But Gabriele had the look of a falcon. Gray had come to his hair early, and it gave him an otherworldly quality, striking against his olive skin. His arched brows remained dark, in contrast to his prematurely silver hair. Gabriele and his cousin walked next to each other through the lightening streets.
“Your paintings see more of you than we do,” Ysabella jested, taking his arm. “If you can make your way home for supper, we would welcome your paint-spattered self. I’m making mutton tonight—perhaps that will entice you?” Gabriele nodded absently, in his mind already climbing his scaffolding. He saw his cousin to the door.
“Gabriele.” Ysabella hesitated. Gabriele could see her reluctance to let him leave. Her cheerful presence was a pleasant distraction from his preoccupations. She was eminently practical, talkative where he was quiet, and she made him smile, even when he did not intend to. “I wish I could go with you.”
“Ysabella,” Gabriele said, smiling at her broad, open face, “my painter’s life is not as thrilling as it might appear.”
“It is thrilling compared to mine, assisting father in the bakery all day and trying to put off his suggestions of marriageable young men. He worries that no one will want a wife past her twenty-fifth year. As if I had any interest in marriage at all.” Ysabella laughed. “All the girls ask me whether you might marry again.”
“Your companions should turn their attention to more worthy targets of affection,” Gabriele said. “The life of a painter’s wife is not an easy one.” He wondered, looking at Ysabella’s bright, intelligent face, whether she would ever marry. Her father had only half tried to find her a match, no doubt welcoming his daughter’s presence too much to imagine losing her, now that her mother was gone.
“But will you ever marry again, Gabriele?”
“Truly, I cannot arrive late to work for one of my few dedicated patrons. My reputation is at stake, and my imagined future brides can wait.” Gabriele patted Ysabella’s hand gently and started down the narrow street that led to the private chapel in the Signoretti palazzo. His performance on this commission might determine a future of more important work. Martellino’s generosity was welcome, but Gabriele wished he could take less and offer more to the upkeep of the household. As he walked, practical concerns faded and he turned his thoughts to the patterns of light and shadow and the wings of angels beating at the edges of his vision.
Gabriele passed the Ospedale, which loomed above him, bright with the four painted scenes from the life of the Virgin. One empty space remained over the entrance, its blank stone beckoning. For a moment Gabriele lost his hold on the present, and he was high again on the scaffold next to his former teacher, working to finish the last of the four Ospedale frescoes before nightfall. The depiction of four-year-old Maria taking leave of her family always evoked powerful emotion in him. Maria’s mother and father, blessed with the conception of a child long after it should have been possible, dedicated the unborn baby to God’s service, and this promise was fulfilled when the time came. Maestro Simone Martini had sat down with him the night before Gabriele began to paint the Virgin’s face.
“Her innocence is held in tenuous balance against the powerful future foretold for her. If you cannot feel the gravity of this moment, do not climb the scaffolding tomorrow.”
Gabriele had stayed up long into the night imagining the state of the child Maria’s heart. In that fresco, under Martini’s tutelage, he had reached the pinnacle of his career to date, but since the Maestro’s departure for Avignon and his death there, Gabriele’s reputation had been slow to build. He was well regarded—“the silver-haired pupil of Martini”—but not yet renowned.
At the far edge of the piazza, he looked back toward the Ospedale. “I will find myself on scaffolding before you again, I swear to it,” he said, under his breath. He smiled, imagining how Ysabella would poke fun at him for talking to a building. Maria Santissima Annunziata should fill that space, Gabriele thought, and I should like to be the author of that prayer in paint.
* * *
When Umiltà and I reached the entrance of the Ospedale, I stared up at the wall. In my memory I could see the blank brick of the facade, but in front of me the entry was painted with the scenes depicting the life of the Virgin that Donata had told me about. The fifth space over the doorway was still empty; Umiltà had only just petitioned the Nine for money to commission it. Umiltà peered up at me, squinting.
“I will show you to a room where you can rest and seek solace in contemplation. Have you need of food?” I started salivating when she said food. She eyed me speculatively. “Fasting may bring us closer to God, but at a price. I will have a meal brought to you this evening, rather than have you brave company in the refectory.” Umiltà turned and led me through the doorway, under the stretch of blank wall.
As we stepped into the pellegrinaio—the pilgrim’s hall of the Ospedale—I saw why Messer Stozzi had found my story hard to believe. Most of the pilgrims in the hall wore rough sackcloth, looking far more penitent than I did. Exhausted families huddled together while robed friars examined lone travelers. Part of the room was organized int
o curtained beds from which a few faces and hands appeared to accept bowls of food.
Umiltà narrated for me as we walked. “The physically infirm pilgrims stay here in the pellegrinaio. That young man is on a barefoot pilgrimage from Roma to Venezia to visit the brachium of San Magnus in the reliquary—his feet have required a great deal of our attention over the past few days.” She pointed discreetly.
“He’s walking barefoot across Italy to see the arm of a saint?”
“Ee-tah-lee?” Umiltà looked at me strangely. “I have not heard that word before. Is it Luccan dialect?” Neither the word Italy nor the unified country existed yet. I covered up as quickly as possible.
“Yes, we use it to mean . . . a great distance.”
Umiltà accepted my explanation and went on. “His wife is ailing in childbed, swollen and full of ill humors. His parish priest advised he embark upon this journey for the sake of his wife and unborn child.” This was probably pre-eclampsia—she needed medical attention to keep her blood pressure under control, not prayers.
“And that man is a knight from Orvieto on his way to Roma, seeking absolution for the blood he has shed on the battlefield.” I stared at my first real knight, but he just looked like an ordinary, if muscular, individual. I suppose if you are on a pilgrimage to repent violent acts of warfare, you leave your armor at home.
“There don’t seem to be many women in here.” I hesitated, not sure whether I might be making another mistake.
“Our last rector, the esteemed Giovanni di Tese dei Tolomei, supported the creation of our new Ospedale delle Donne, dedicated to the care of women pilgrims and invalids. You will find your quarters there.”
Umiltà stopped in front of a young man lying on a cot against the wall. He was drenched with sweat and covered with a rash—small, raised, pale, tense-looking bumps dotted his face, trunk, arms, and legs. He moaned in agony as Ospedale staff tended to him.
The Scribe of Siena Page 7