The Scribe of Siena

by Melodie Winawer

  “May I join you, gentlemen?” Iacopo returned the title, though nothing would have convinced him that these men merited it.

  “You can if you’re willing to lose.” The pale man pulled out an empty stool.

  The next speaker was as unpleasantly thin as his companion was heavy with flesh, and spittle flew from his mouth when he spoke. “P’raps we should have a round of introductions. I like to know the names of the people I’m about to beat.”

  “Matteo di Giunta. I am a wine merchant from Milan, in Siena for trade,” Iacopo said. Wine seemed a common enough business to arouse no particular interest. Milan too would not be questioned, known for its superior vintages.

  “Guido Baldi,” the pale man said, “a great lover of wine.” He laughed and slapped his protuberant stomach, making the flesh wobble. He turned to his companion. “And this here is my good friend Fanti. He’s too thin for more than one name.” The dice players burst into appreciative laughter.

  When the guffaws died down, Baldi spoke again. “Your turn then, but let us see your money first.”

  Iacopo played several rounds, making sure he lost enough to keep the men from changing their mind about his presence at the table. After a particularly bad loss, he feigned distress and slapped his legs appreciatively. “I’ve met my match among you fellows.”

  Fanti grinned broadly, but Baldi was a harder man to amuse. “Are you done with us?”

  “In fact, I wondered whether you might be of some help. I am searching for a man who’s cheated me of a good profit, and if any of you might be able to direct me to him, there will be some money in it.”

  Baldi grabbed Iacopo’s shoulder with his meaty hand. “What’s your man’s name? Perhaps I can assist you.”

  “Gabriele Accorsi. Do you know where I might find him?”

  Baldi’s eyes narrowed into fatty slits. “We should speak in private. I rented my chamber for a woman, but now that she’s gone there are two free chairs. It smells of a good rutting, but it faces the courtyard and it’s quiet-like.”

  Iacopo rose and followed Baldi. His source might not be gentlemanly, but he appeared to know something and to want to impart it. The sound of dice rolling did not resume immediately, and he could feel the curious eyes of Baldi’s companions fixed on his back.

  PART V

  THE FOURTH ANGEL

  The morning after the execution I got to the scriptorium late. Fra Bosi gave me a sideways look, but no reprimand. Someone had repaired the broken window of the scriptorium; no more spontaneous visits from Gabriele to look forward to. I had a few remaining libri documenting the tributes of the Feast of the Assumption to complete, but every time I picked up a pen, an image from the trial flashed into my head—Giovanni de’ Medici, his jaw clamped shut and the cords in his neck prominent above the collar of his robes, watching Gabriele give his damning testimony. A man like Giovanni de’ Medici could cause trouble, even after death. I felt the gathering danger, like dark clouds massing before a storm.

  My memories of the trial were troubling, but the flashbacks of the execution were worse. I kept seeing Giovanni’s legs scrabbling for a foothold as his perch was yanked away, and the slow discoloration of his face. I was sure it would feed my nightmares for months.

  I put the final flourishes on the libri and put down my pen. I sat still at the desk, thinking. I thought of Nathaniel welcoming me with a recently acquired Henry James first edition and an invitation to afternoon tea. I thought of the coffee date I’d had with Donata, the easy rhythm of our conversation. She must have wondered why I’d left without so much as a good-bye.

  I had found pleasure here—my work, new friends and colleagues, and also something intangible, a surprisingly pleasurable medieval-ness. And, of course, I’d found Gabriele. The slow-growing pleasure of that friendship had an undeniable pull. But enough of a pull to compete with my old life? And even if it did, along with pleasures of this new time came the looming Plague and the terrible feeling of powerlessness I felt in the face of the impending devastation, and now the hanged Medici murderer whom Gabriele had testified against, and who might have dangerous friends. I had to get back. But how?

  I cleaned my pens and neatened the stack of parchment on the desk. Was there something I’d missed, some key element that might reverse my trip through time? I’d gone back to the Duomo; that hadn’t helped. I retraced my steps, mentally. I’d been reading Gabriele’s journal when I left—that seemed promising as a bridge to the past, but I could not imagine demanding he show me his private writings. In any case, the journal seemed like a one-way bridge, if it was a bridge at all—the past had come to life for me through his writing, but the present wouldn’t. What else? I’d been in the Museo. The Museo . . . where I’d seen Gabriele’s painting of Saint Christopher. The memory made the hair on my arms rise. Was it something about the painting, and seeing myself in it, a painting linking our two times? Where could I find another painting by Gabriele with me in it? The idea hit me like a jolt of electricity: right outside the Ospedale. Buzzing with my new plan, I made my way to the entrance. It was time for another art history lesson.

  Outside, Gabriele was perched on his platform with a brush in his hand. He had completed the likeness of the Virgin Mary rising to her heavenly reward, and there was a lightness in her body that suggested a pull from a celestial source. But this heavenly grace combined with surprising—for a medieval painting—human emotion. She looked apprehensive, afraid to leave her earthbound existence, but drawn to what awaited her. Gabriele was working on the angels now. They surrounded Mary protectively, wings aloft and shining with gold. Three of the angels’ faces were completed and Gabriele was painting the fourth. For the first few minutes his body blocked the image he was working on. When he lowered his brush arm and I saw what he’d painted my heart skipped a beat—I felt the pause, the silence, then a little late, the next beat, blood moving again. I saw the fourth angel’s black straight hair, gray-blue eyes, and long-fingered hands. She looked just the way a medieval angel should look, and would have been at home in any fourteenth-century fresco. But anyone who knew me would realize who her model was. I felt the heat rise into my face and the urgency I’d felt in the scriptorium faded as I stood there, watching. The idea that the painting might transport me forward in time seemed silly now that I stood in front of it. And not entirely desirable.

  Gabriele lifted his brush from the plaster and tilted his head to look down at me, raising his voice loud enough to be heard from above. “Have you been waiting long? I regret my absorption prevented me from noticing you earlier.”

  “I just got here,” I called back, craning my neck to look up at him. “Do I really look like that?”

  I heard Gabriele’s laugh above me. “You ask the most extraordinary questions. Let us say that you provide inspiration. Will that suffice?”

  “For the moment.”

  “Signora, I would greatly enjoy talking with you at length, but the drying plaster calls to me, and the hot sun demands a rapid pace.”

  “I should get back to the scriptorium,” I said, disappointed.

  “If you are not excessively busy, I would welcome your company on the scaffolding.”

  It was an unusually light workday. “How do I get up?” I heard another laugh from above. Gabriele put down his brush and rapidly descended from the platform, landing next to me. Up close, I could see the fine beads of sweat glistening on his tanned face, and the linen of his shirt clung damply to the muscles of his arms.

  “I will guide you,” he said, “but watch your step. I would hate to lose you to a scaffolding accident so early in our acquaintance, with only a half-painted angel to recall you by.”

  “I just escaped my first brush with death, thanks to you. I’d rather not risk a second,” I said.

  Gabriele held out his hand to help me climb, and I managed to scramble up after him despite the interference of my skirts. I settled myself on the platform, trying not to look over the edge. Gabriele turned back to the wal
l to continue his work.

  I sat listening to the muted sounds from below carried up to our perch on the faint breeze. Once, the cathedral bells rang, marking the passage of time, but I was lost in the painting unfolding in front of my eyes—the faint flush on the fourth angel’s cheeks, the gentle curve of her neck disappearing into a blue gown, the gesture of her hands guiding the Virgin upward. Gabriele’s left hand moved across the plaster as he painted, feeling for the readiness of the intonaco to receive the touch of his brush. He painted with a languorous grace despite the imperative to finish the section before sunset. It reminded me of the hushed, deliberate rhythm of surgery. But he was creating beings from paint, or from some mysterious combination of pigment and what resided in his heart and soul. I’d fixed people; I hadn’t made them from scratch.

  Gabriele stopped and put down his tools. “I must descend for a brief respite. My spirit is satisfied with painting all day, but my body requires attention.”

  “Sometimes I think it’s too bad there’s a body at all,” I said, wistfully. “Its needs get in the way.”

  “But the pleasures and possibilities of that limited body keep us marvelously—if painfully—human. Do they not?” He said this so quietly I wondered whether he really wanted me to hear.

  * * *

  Guido Baldi watched Accorsi and that woman scribe descend from the scaffold and disappear into the Ospedale entrance. The painter was with the whore who’d usurped his position in the scriptorium. The wine merchant’s gold had given him incentive to return to the Ospedale; wine, dice, and flesh required a substantial budget.

  How sad it would be if the painter were to fall from his high platform. Scaffolding could be quite unstable—he’d heard of accidents befalling artists often. So very, very sad. Baldi wondered if the scribe would return with Accorsi after their rest. He hoped so. Even if the wine merchant was only interested in one victim, Baldi himself thought it was a tidy way to solve two problems at once. He looked again at the structure rising in front of him. Nice angels, he thought, too bad they won’t be finished. He squinted at one angel, thinking her face looked familiar, but perhaps he’d had a bit too much wine at lunch.

  * * *

  Iacopo de’ Medici did not trust his new hire. Why should he—any man so easily convinced to kill could not be trustworthy. It had been easier than he imagined to explain what he wanted done, and to hand over the soldi to Baldi to see that the job was completed. But his father had told him—“You must supervise the work of those you call into service, or they will take advantage of your absence.” Some part of him cringed from watching this endpoint of his plan, but he forced himself, finding a spot where he could lean against a building’s wall with a full view of the scaffolding, and those who climbed it.

  My father would watch with pleasure, Iacopo thought, and though he knew he should respect his father, even in death, the thought made his stomach turn. I will watch, to be sure it is done, and done well. But I will not enjoy seeing my enemy fall to his death. And he stood, out of sight, his eyes reluctantly fixed on the scene.

  * * *

  After climbing down from the scaffolding, I headed to the Ospedale kitchens, where a wedge of creamy yellow cheese and a handful of tiny purple plums made a delicious lunch. I peeked into the empty scriptorium and decided a few more hours off wouldn’t hurt. Outside, Gabriele had already climbed the platform and was working on the angel’s hair, somehow making black look like it harbored a thousand other colors in its depths.

  I stared up at the scaffolding, watching the clouds drift behind it. The movement made it look like the scaffolding was moving too. I shook my head to dispel the illusion, feeling dizzy. Even looking down, the feeling persisted, as if the ground were tilting under my feet.

  A high whine began in my ears, and the aftertaste of the plums intensified in my mouth. When the familiar dampening of sound came, I finally recognized the episode for what it was. I slowed my breathing and forced my eyes into focus. Ordinary strangers were milling about the piazza, doing their business. But when I looked back at the scaffolding, I had a vision of Gabriele falling, limbs outstretched, down past the wooden beams toward the paving stones below. Along with the vision came a rush of satisfaction, the satisfaction someone else would have watching him plunge to his death. But Gabriele was still up there, painting as if the world didn’t exist. The wind had died down, but the scaffolding was swaying. I called up to him.

  “Are you all right up there?” He was deep in his work and didn’t hear. “Messer Accorsi!” He dropped what he was holding—I heard a clatter as his tools fell—and he spun around to look down at me. It felt strange calling him Accorsi when he was Gabriele in my head.

  “Is something amiss?”

  “Come down.”

  I saw him hesitate. Most people would have at least asked why, but Gabriele nodded and began to pack up his equipment. The whine in my ears grew louder until I could hardly hear anything else. “Please hurry!”

  He left his tools behind and abruptly started his descent. He’d only made it halfway before the platform above him began to tilt. Then I heard the real crack of splintering wood as the joints of the scaffold gave way, and after that everything happened in terrible slow motion. Gabriele gripped one of the wooden supports with one arm, swinging wide of the massive planks as he fell, as the structure he’d so carefully assembled fell apart like a huge, out-of-control game of pick-up sticks. He hit the ground with an audible thud, and the boards of the platform crashed to the ground a few feet from his head.

  I found myself standing next to Gabriele, who lay on his back on the pavement. His eyes were closed, and I wasn’t sure whether he was breathing. His face was pale. Look before you act—years of training had taught me that. The position of Gabriele’s head was natural. Good. I watched for a breath. One, two seconds, three. Come on, breathe. There: his chest rose and fell once. A for airway, B for breathing. Circulation next. I reached out carefully to feel for a pulse at his wrist—strong and even—and felt the reassuring warmth of his skin. I saw his fingers move, then relax again—not quadriplegic. His feet flexed in their soft leather boots. Four limbs working: even better. I watched his face for a sign of alertness. What if he never woke up? The watching might have lasted five seconds but it felt like an eternity. That’s when my nondoctor side took over.

  I closed my eyes and then I whispered a visceral impromptu prayer. Don’t take him from me; I can’t bear it. I can’t. I thought I might sink down and never resurface, hundreds of years from any familiarity and comfort, without mooring in time and space. I opened my eyes again.

  The corners of Gabriele’s mouth curled upward. Had I spoken out loud? His eyes stayed closed.

  “Messer Accorsi? You can’t be smiling.”

  The gray eyes opened. Equal pupils, round and rapidly shrinking in the light. I couldn’t help the quick assessment.

  “I am smiling, strangely enough,” he said, fixing his gaze on my face. “Why are you crying?” I started to sob then, in earnest. “I do not know how you thought to save me but I believe I owe you my life, Beatrice Alessandra Trovato.”

  I did not explain. “Then we’re even,” I said, gasping between sobs that turned into laughter.

  * * *

  Gabriele was whisked to the Ospedale infirmary and I went back to the scriptorium to work, but it was understandably impossible. Clara came in periodically to give me updates on the painter’s well-being, and by the end of the day she announced that Gabriele had been proclaimed sufficiently recovered to go home. I was glad to hear that, but that didn’t eliminate the fact that someone might have tried to kill him, someone whose malicious intent I had experienced firsthand as the scaffolding began to fall. I left the scriptorium and went to bed early.

  That night I dreamed about my old life. I was in the OR, working alongside Linney on a falcine meningioma resection. The tumor had gotten so large, growing from the tissue that separates the two hemispheres of the brain, that it had squeezed the surrou
nding brain into a flat ribbon on either side of it. Linney was by my side, competent and quiet. It was a perfectly normal episode from my prior life, but I had a feeling of overwhelming uneasiness in the dream, a sensation of having missed something important. I tried to tell Linney what was wrong, but she couldn’t hear me. Then I was awake, panting and drenched with sweat on my narrow bed in the Ospedale women’s quarters. For the first time since I’d arrived in the fourteenth century, I was flooded with relief to be exactly where I was, and when.

  * * *

  The following day Clara came into the scriptorium breathless with another announcement: Umiltà wanted to see me immediately in the pellegrinaio, the hall where I’d seen the man with smallpox on my first day in the medieval Ospedale. I washed the ink off my hands and followed Clara out.

  Umiltà explained. “A young priest—one Fra Bartolomeo—is receiving care for his injuries. He speaks in a jumble of confused words, but I believe he is asking for you.”

  “Why on earth would he ask for me?”

  “I am as baffled as you, Beatrice, but in rare moments when he becomes lucid, he calls for the tall woman with raven hair and eyes like the sea.” She pulled me along to a cot where a man lay with his eyes closed and a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. I hoped there weren’t any brains hanging out under there; even an accomplished neurosurgeon would be hard pressed to handle that in such medieval circumstances. I recognized his face—the tongue-tied man whose mind I’d entered, the priest who had accompanied Giovanni de’ Medici to the gallows.

  He looked as if he might merely be sleeping, except for the dressing on his head. His flushed cheeks and his faint fuzz of light brown hair made him look like a peach.

  “He was trampled by the crowd at the hanging,” Umiltà said, “and the guards brought him here.” The priest started moaning but didn’t open his eyes.