The streets had turned into streams by the time Iacopo left the following morning, and refuse overflowing from the alley cesspits made the air rank. Iacopo’s fear for the condition of the road was well founded; as nightfall approached he had only reached a hamlet outside Arezzo, where he was forced to spend the night at an inn, along with other travelers who had failed to reach their destinations. Iacopo shared a bed with a corpulent and gassy wine merchant who talked endlessly until the Matins bells, then fell promptly asleep in the center of the bed, leaving Iacopo clinging to the edge of the mattress for the rest of the night.
The following morning, Iacopo struggled into his damp clothing and mounted Pellegrino with reluctance. The rain had slowed but the clouds stayed low and dense, dripping monotonously for the entire journey. Iacopo arrived at the prison mud-spattered, hungry, and short of sleep. The headache still lurked behind his eyes, waiting for the slightest provocation to worsen.
Iacopo secured his mount and entered the guardroom, greeted by suspicious looks when he announced his purpose.
“You’re the Medici boy? You don’t look a bit like him. Perhaps your mother looked elsewhere for a moment, during one of her husband’s business trips.” The guards guffawed loudly, patting their crotches. “You’re a scrawny fellow. Is the bull proud of the little calf he’s made?” Iacopo’s vision swam with fury and he grabbed the pouch from his waist, slamming it on the table.
“I will see that my father and I receive the good treatment our station deserves. This should pay for your respect.” The guards looked approvingly at the pouch from which two lily-stamped gold coins had spilled out.
“You may not be much to look at, but your money’s handsome. Gerardo, show the gentleman to his father’s cell.”
Iacopo looked down at himself as he trailed the second guard through the prison corridors. The hose sagged on his slender legs and were streaked with mud. The wool of his cloak was damp and smelled like dirty sheep. He had no glass to see his face, but he knew his own flaws well enough. His long chin and narrow-set eyes attracted little admiration, though he suspected some feigned it because of his family’s power and wealth. He had come of age without managing to elicit respect for his accumulating years—remaining always his father’s underwhelming only son.
The guard stopped in front of a wooden door. His keys jangled as he opened the padlock and pushed the bolt back with a grunt.
“I shall be outside, lest you think to try any tricks, little calf.”
Iacopo prayed that Giovanni did not hear the insult, nor the quiet “moo” and laughter that followed him into his father’s cell. The guard shut the heavy door behind him.
The light from a slit of window illuminated Giovanni from behind, haloing his mane of hair but leaving his features in darkness.
“Late, as I might have expected, and looking more like a ditch digger than the son of a nobleman.”
“The rain detained me, Father.”
“I have no interest in your musings on the weather. I have a task for you that will require all the resources you can muster.” Giovanni turned so that his features were lit from the high window, and Iacopo saw unfamiliar signs of strain lining his father’s face. Iacopo searched for a sign of the spirit that had given rise to his father’s last letter, but was not sure what to look for.
“Will they release you?”
“I thought promise of additional payment might afford me greater liberty, but I have not been allowed to leave this cell, even to take my meals.” Iacopo produced the almonds and fruit his mother had packed the night before, holding them out to his father. Giovanni took a handful of dried figs, eating them rapidly. Iacopo tried not to stare as he watched his father devour the fruit, putting more into his mouth before he had finished the first handful. Iacopo had never seen his father in a position to want or need anything. “They have told me nothing. I intend to vouch I acted in defense of my life.”
Giovanni had finished the figs and reached for the almonds, eating them quickly one after the next. “You look as if you’ve been rolling in a pen, and smell worse.”
Iacopo did not contradict him. After a few seconds, his father sighed, as if resigned to make the best of the material he had been provided, however unsatisfactory.
“Now—the matter I alluded to in my letter. My arrest has resulted from the work of an informant who denounced me in writing. The guard told me the man’s name—such information can be bought, for a good price: Accorsi. Now you must find him.”
Iacopo swallowed with difficulty, his throat dry. “And if I find him?”
“You will do what must be done. Call upon the members of our confraternity; there are men in the Brotherhood of San Giovanni who will follow your lead if I am indisposed.” Giovanni did not speak for some time. From deep within the prison a man began screaming shrilly. The silence after the screams lasted a long time, and when Giovanni spoke his voice was quieter than before. “I may never leave this prison, Iacopo.”
“Certainly the judges will accept the argument of self-defense?”
“In Firenze, where all respect the Medici name, my arguments would not have met with any question. But our power is worthless here. This place has robbed me of my certainty.” Giovanni looked into his son’s eyes, and Iacopo could not tear his gaze away. “In the event that I am not allowed to return to the life I once enjoyed, if the worst should transpire and I am hanged for my acts, you must avenge my death. I speak of the coward Accorsi who spoke against me, but also the city that dares to punish a nobleman of Florence for defending himself. A city whose pretentions to greatness we men of Florence have long had occasion to despise.”
We men of Florence. Iacopo leaned in closer to hear Giovanni’s words, close enough to feel the warmth of his father’s breath, smelling of figs and the fear of death.
* * *
July 28, 1347
Dear Nathaniel,
I feel like writing to you even though I have nowhere to send this letter. Did you suspect before I did that my preoccupation with the past had gone too far? “You’re getting in over your head, Dr. Trovato,” I can hear you saying, as if you’re standing here next to me, but of course you’re not. You don’t even exist yet but I like to think that somewhere you and Charles are rolling out of bed, emerging from your hem-stitched linen sheets, and padding into the kitchen to make espresso. God, I miss coffee. And toilet paper, and . . . Ben. I’m sure he’d be amused to be in the same category as toilet paper. But even if I came home I couldn’t have Ben. Not anymore.
What I miss most is not the conveniences of modern life; I miss being known. Everything I say about myself is fabrication, but there’s no alternative, because the truth is impossible. There are moments when I forget my old life, when I’m happily writing and the dust motes are swirling in the air above me, catching the light through the rippled glass windows. But underneath the day-to-day rhythm here, I’m homesick, or maybe timesick is a better word. With no way of getting home.
This is better than a postcard, right? I don’t think they had postcards, I mean HAVE postcards, in the 14th century.
Love,
B
I’d made no progress on how to get home again, but at least I had a job, which at this moment entailed drafting an agreement with the Grance di Grossetto accounting for the proceeds of twenty bushels of barley. Egidio had been sent on an errand and I was alone in the scriptorium. I could hear street sounds as I worked—laughter from a group of children playing, a peddler calling his wares. That morning, an intermittent loud banging had started, as if someone were building something just outside, but I couldn’t see anything through the leaded glass windows. As I finished the agreement, I began to feel sleepy. I’d slept badly the night before, awakened by nightmares of the Plague, reenacted by flat medieval figures from the chronicles I’d read in my old century. I slipped the letter to Nathaniel under the ledger and put my head on the desk. The agreement could wait a few minutes, unlike neurosurgery. Soon I was dreaming: I was
lying on my belly in the sun on a sandy beach, letting the warmth soak into my back. Then I was feverish in my childhood bed, getting an alcohol rub from Benjamin to bring my temperature down. The images fragmented, a bonfire at the camp I’d gone to when I was nine, faces distorted through the wavering heat above it. When I woke up, I was lying in the street.
* * *
Gabriele had not asked for help from any of the laborers at the workshop, preferring to limit expense by doing the preparatory work himself. The single fresco over the doorway would not require a team of carpenters to build the scaffolding or painters’ assistants to prepare plaster, bag spolvero, and mix the pigments daily. Tommaso, his closest friend from Simone’s workshop, questioned his sanity, but Gabriele enjoyed the physical effort.
He extended the boards to allow access to the wall over the Ospedale entrance. Soon he was too warm for his tunic and worked in his linen long-sleeved undershirt, humming under his breath in harmony with the sparrows that gathered in the piazza. As he hammered, he began to smell the cooking from the Ospedale kitchens, smoky and pungent. But after a few more minutes, the smell became unpleasant, and his eyes stung. Gabriele rapidly made his way down the scaffolding to the front entrance. The two guards at the entrance moved to block his entry until they recognized his face.
“Fire,” Gabriele barked, then raced past them into the Ospedale’s entrance and up a flight of marble steps, following the smell of smoke. When he reached the landing he dropped to the ground and crawled until he reached a closed door. The door was warm to the touch but he rose and threw it open.
Gabriele’s heart sank at the sight of billowing smoke and tongues of orange flame curling around stacks of books in the Ospedale’s great scriptorium. He could see a large cistern in the corner of the room with a bucket and dipper hanging next to it, and scrambled on his hands and feet toward the water source. As he passed the scribes’ desks he stumbled over something soft and yielding. Looking down he saw, with shock, a woman’s foot, wearing a sandal with fine leather straps. The billowing smoke isolated the foot strangely, as if it were disembodied. As the smoke drifted, Gabriele made out a calf above the ankle, and the edge of a skirt—all attached to a woman, slumped over the copyist’s desk.
Gabriele pulled himself to stand. His mind allowed him a peculiar slow clarity, enough to capture detail despite the situation’s urgency. The scribe’s cheek rested on the ink-stained wood and her slender fingers still curled around a pen. A few fine strands of black hair escaped from her plaits to touch the curve of her neck. In that fraction of a second Gabriele caught the subtle lift as a shallow breath moved her shoulders. Alive.
He grabbed the scribe under her arms and dragged her toward the doorway. As he did, he heard a terrible splintering sound—a full bookcase detached from the wall near the door, swayed and pivoted, showering sparks as it fell. It crashed to the floor in front of him in flames, effectively blocking his exit. He pulled himself and his limp burden back down to the floor, scanning the room for possibilities. High windows paned with thick glass lined the left wall, and he could see a path through the flame and smoke to reach them. He grabbed a heavy inkwell from the desk and crawled, dragging the scribe behind him. At the windows he rose, hefting the inkwell with one hand, and swung hard to smash the diamond-shaped leaded panes. The windows broke around him, the thin seams of lead bending and fragments of glass showering him and the motionless scribe.
Gabriele had chosen his escape route well; outside the broken window were the poles of his scaffolding. He knelt down to lift the woman and threw her over his shoulder. As he struggled to climb through the jagged opening he found himself thinking, with the same odd crystalline detachment, how bizarre it was to be carrying another person, the second in a few weeks, to either death or recovery. He hoped for the latter as he flung the woman out the window onto the small platform he had built just that morning, and burst gasping into the fresh air after her.
With a final surge of effort, Gabriele managed to climb down, carrying the woman draped over his shoulder; later he could not imagine how. His knees buckled and he folded slowly onto the ground where he rested for a moment to catch his breath. He lay there, seeing the Duomo sideways, stripes flipped to vertical and changing color from green to black to green again as he watched.
A small army of young wards raced out of the Ospedale door carrying buckets, heading for the nearest fountain. Gabriele felt he might lie there forever, as if he were merely enjoying a languorous moment in bed, rather than lying on the ground outside a burning building. The sound of a ragged cough followed by a sharp intake of breath brought him back to the present, and he pushed himself up to a sitting position and looked into the scribe’s face.
Gabriele held his breath and stared. He did not think to question why the vision that had haunted his dreams and populated his paintings should be a flesh-and-blood scribe in the Ospedale, now lying before him on the pavement. The woman’s cheeks were flushed from the heat of the fire, but not a single hair was singed, nor the fabric of her green dress—somehow she had escaped the flames. And, he thought somewhat irrelevantly, he had guessed right by choosing a green gown for the bystander in his painting of Saint Christopher. Dante’s verses rang in his head, and he spoke the name of the poet’s muse aloud.
“Beatrice.”
* * *
Through layers of sleep I heard a voice say my name in that marvelous Italian way, the way Dante might have said it. The sound made me open my eyes, and I found myself lying on the pavement outside the Ospedale, looking into the face of a stranger.
“What am I doing out here?” My throat was raw and painful, and my lungs burned. The man moved back and I was able to focus on his face. His hair curled silver-gray almost to his shoulders, and his eyes were gray too, fringed with long dark lashes, and angled slightly upward at the corners, irises flecked blue-black.
His mystified look made me realize I’d spoken in English.
“Mea scusi? May I help you sit up, Signora?”
Switching quickly back to Italian, I responded. “I think I can do it myself.” He watched me patiently as I struggled in my twisted gown, managing to get myself upright. I could hear a commotion going on inside the Ospedale. “How did I get here?”
“I found you in the scriptorium, my lady, and as it was engulfed in flames, I removed you from the building.”
I stared at him. “I’m sorry if I was impolite.”
“Not at all, Signora.” He inclined his head gently in a graceful gesture. I still wasn’t sure how he had known my name. Our interchange was interrupted by a horde of running Ospedale wards carrying buckets of water that splashed onto the paving stones. The yells of “Fuoco, fuoco!” drifted out from a shattered upstairs window along with tendrils of smoke.
“I suppose I can’t go back to work now,” I said blankly. Throngs of people were now rushing out of the open doors of the Ospedale. “But I should go help.” My words trailed off into a fit of coughing. I was clearly in no condition to help with anything.
“I would be happy to escort you to your home and family, or to a physician.”
“I live there. Or at least I used to.” I pointed toward the Pellegrinaio delle Donne. I was relieved to see Umiltà on the other side of a crowd of people, giving orders to everyone in sight. Clara stood beside her, staring upward. I hoped Egidio was still away on his errand.
“I hope you will accept an invitation to the home of my uncle where you can recover in greater safety and comfort. His home is not far, and if you find yourself unable to walk, I can carry you again.”
“No thank you, I think I can walk,” I said, but when I tried to stand my legs shook. “I need to tell Suor Umiltà where I’m going.” Billows of gray smoke wafted toward us, starting me on another spasm of coughing.
The thought of pushing through the crowd back toward the burning building was overwhelming. My rescuer stopped one of the wards heading back out to the fountain with an empty bucket.
“Young
man, please tell Suor Umiltà and the master of the scriptorium that the scribe is safe, and gone to the baker Martellino Accorsi’s home in the Civetta contrada. I will return her when she is well and the danger passed.” The ward nodded and took off with his bucket.
Accorsi, I thought, that’s interesting. How common was the name in fourteenth-century Siena? I supposed I should have thought twice before leaving the Ospedale with a stranger, but I didn’t. The last thing I saw as I looked back over my shoulder was Fra Bosi standing to one side of the Ospedale entryway with tears coursing down his ample cheeks.
Since my rescue from Stozzi’s clutches I had rarely ventured beyond the Piazza del Duomo. I wasn’t in the best condition to enjoy my first real excursion, but I couldn’t help noticing the hum of Siena’s life around us as we walked. Two young boys in parti-colored tunics and hose—half red and half yellow—juggled before a crowd of cheering spectators. They competed with a young peddler calling out her wares—a tray of buttons of different sizes and colors, some glinting metal, some whitish ivory or bone, others the brown of wood or leather. We passed a bookseller’s shop crowded with gowned and hatted gentlemen who looked as if they might be university professors. I stopped, thinking of the last visit I’d made to the university—in my old time. Then I realized I knew the route we were walking very well, and I felt my skin prickle. When we passed under a curved archway and stopped in front of a three-story house made from stuccoed stone with an inviting bakery storefront, I knew exactly where I was—standing in front of Ben’s house, my house. And, uncannily, it seemed to be my rescuer’s home too. I stared at the open door, the door I had once opened with my own key. The front hall was dominated by a huge brick oven. Despite its dislocation in time, this house was a place I knew, and a place I had begun to love. It was the first thing I had found in this century that felt familiar, and it made my knees weak with relief.
The Scribe of Siena Page 12