The Scribe of Siena

by Melodie Winawer

  “No other living woman has found her way into my art.”

  I let that sink in, recalling the painting of Saint Christopher that had sent me stumbling into the Duomo, in my last few minutes in the twenty-first century. Had he painted it before we’d met?

  “I’m very happy to see you,” I said simply, not finding any more energy or reason for artifice.

  “As am I.”

  I stared at this man who had pursued me across Tuscany and then onto a ship bound five hundred miles from his home. I had seen Gabriele many times since my arrival in medieval Siena and had imagined him for weeks before I left my own time. But I found something in his face now that I’d never seen before. A current of emotion ignited him, just under the surface.

  “You look different,” I said, not quite capturing all I’d been thinking.

  “I am the same man.” Something had changed—was it him or me? Gabriele looked at me carefully. “Monna Trovato, the wind is cold, and you are shaking. May I help you to your accommodations?”

  I couldn’t imagine returning to my cabin. “I don’t want to disturb Clara. She’s been horribly seasick and is probably resting.” Gabriele was quiet for a few seconds, as if gauging how to proceed. There were faint lines at the corners of his eyes I’d never noticed before. I knew from his journal’s dates that he was a bit older than me: born in 1311, and this was 1347, so he was thirty-six, give or take six-hundred-plus years. I allowed myself to study the angle of his jaw, the way a few days’ growth of beard had begun to darken his chin during his travels. I could see the dip at the base of his throat where his cloak parted. He watched me as I studied him, and I wondered what details he was taking in with those otherworldly gray eyes. Finally, he reached out his hand to touch my shoulder.

  “Come below with me, then. I have a spare cloak, and another blanket to ease your chill.” I nodded, not trusting my voice. He turned, guiding me gently with one hand. “My accommodations are not as comfortable as yours. But they are warm, and quiet.”

  “It sounds perfect,” I said, and followed him, leaving the bucket on deck.

  Gabriele struck a flint and lit a candle, placing it carefully in an iron wall sconce. He’d led me to a storage space in the bow where bolts of woven wool and raw sheepskins were kept. The hides were stacked in high piles, and where they ended the rolls of fine cloth began, making a makeshift chamber. It smelled like sheep but it was warm and private. Gabriele wrapped me in his cloak and then in a coarse blanket, and we were quiet until I stopped shivering. He sat across from me on a low pile of sheepskins.

  “Beatrice . . . may I call you Beatrice? It seems we are on good terms again, enough to merit less formality.” I nodded, happy to hear my first name. “What led you to be in Messer Lugani’s presence on deck at midnight, if I may ask?”

  “Lugani seduced Clara, and now she’s under the false impression that he plans to marry her. The man is a”—I remembered my conversation with Clara before we left for Pisa—“lascivious wolf. I wanted him to take responsibility for his unscrupulous behavior.”

  Gabriele raised one eyebrow.

  “You went up on deck in the middle of the night in your shift and blanket, confronted your employer, and accused him of deceiving your maidservant?”

  “Pretty much.” It did sound unbelievable.

  “How extraordinary.”

  “Can we start this conversation over? This isn’t how I’d envisioned it.” I cleared my throat. “How are Bianca and the baby?”

  “Bianca is very well, and so is Gabriella, whom you helped bring into the world. “

  “She named the baby after you? Rinaldo must have loved that.”

  Gabriele laughed again. “In a short time you have come to know my family well.”

  “It must be nice, having a baby in the house.”

  Gabriele sighed. “I was hardly there long enough to benefit from her arrival. But Gabriella’s tiny presence has blessed my uncle’s home with a sweetness that had been long absent.” Gabriele paused expectantly while I gathered my courage.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why I was there, in your house at the crack of dawn, delivering Bianca’s daughter?”

  “I was grateful for your presence. But I did wonder.”

  I said it fast, before I could lose my nerve. “I came to find you.”

  “I am deeply flattered. But how did you manage to acquire such skill as a midwife, while also training to be an accomplished scribe?”

  I hesitated. Lie yet again, or try him with the truth? I imagined my old life: the cool blue of the operating room, the warm hideaway of Nathaniel’s bookstore, the feel of Donata’s daughter’s hand in mine.

  “Gabriele, I’m not from Lucca.”

  “You did tell me that.”

  “I’m from somewhere so far away, it’s unimaginable.”

  “I will do my best to comprehend.”

  “It’s worse than not being from Lucca.” The truth couldn’t be restrained any longer. “I’m not even from your time.” I heard my own words in a vortex, the truth spinning out into darkness, incomprehensible and dangerous.

  “What time are you from then, Beatrice?” Gabriele looked perfectly normal despite what I’d just said.

  “From the twenty-first century. About six hundred and fifty years from now, two thousand years after the birth of Christ . . . our Lord,” I added, for clarity.

  I waited for the worst. I had to wait quite a long time—Gabriele stood up and began to pace, alternately looking at me and looking at his feet. When he finally responded I was cursing the idiotic impulse that had led me to confide in him.

  “I admit that many thoughts moved through my mind at your revelation, Beatrice. I wondered—had you perhaps injured your head in the storm, and were you suffering from the effects of an injury? Had you been given some draught unbeknownst to you, perhaps even by Ser Lugani, in preparation for the seduction that fortunately did not transpire? But then . . .”

  I realized I was holding my breath, and my hands and face had started to tingle. I reminded myself to continue breathing.

  “But then I reflected upon the oddness of your language and bearing, peculiarities that ought not to arise simply because you come from Lucca.” He stopped in front of me and paused to collect his thoughts before he finally spoke again. “How lonely you must be . . . how terribly lonely.” The poignant accuracy of this response, the only right response he could have made, struck me at the core.

  “It’s been an awful burden, having this secret that I can’t possibly tell, one that has kept me separate from everyone around me. I don’t know what I thought might happen when I finally told the truth—the last thing I’d imagined in return was sympathy.”

  “Empathy, Beatrice,” Gabriele said, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the sleeve of his shirt.

  * * *

  Without the sound of church bells I had no way of marking the time, but I know the truth poured out of me like a river through a breaking dam. Gabriele weathered it all without flinching, sitting across from me in our woolen chamber below the ship’s deck.

  His first question surprised me. “Why did you come to this time and place?”

  “Why? I have no idea.” I’d never even stopped to ask why—the question of how had occupied most of my thoughts and I hadn’t made much progress on that.

  “Perhaps as you talk we will be able to make sense of it?”

  We. I felt a warmth in my belly as the pronoun sank in.

  “I’ve always reacted to other people’s experiences intensely—in a way that sends me into the heart and head of the person I’m with.” I’d never articulated this before. “I think that’s why I became a doctor. I wanted to do something constructive with that access and information. But I didn’t realize how strange it was until very recently.”

  “And did you move into the head and heart of someone from this century? Is that what brought you to us?” I was stunned by his concise and accurate summary of my nebulous suspicion, but
wasn’t ready to tell him whose head and heart.

  “It’s possible,” I said, weakly. “You’re good at this.”

  He smiled. “Do you miss your home very much, Beatrice?”

  “At first that was all I could think of: how to get back.”

  “And now?”

  “Now? I’m not sure.” When I imagined home now, I saw my little room in the Ospedale, the scarred surface of my desk in the scriptorium. It seemed I was accumulating homes to be sick for. “I was set adrift when my brother died. I’d been certain for so long—about where I lived and how I spent my time, about surgery, about everything. Now I’m certain of nothing.” I had to pause here to explain the modern version of surgery, since the medieval one was more like first aid.

  “You entered people’s heads in more ways than one—with your hands, and with your heart?”

  “Right.” I remembered the feel of the curve of cortex under one gloved hand, the cool weight of a scalpel in the other. Did I miss that? “Medicine was becoming a dangerous job for me—I couldn’t protect myself from my patients’ suffering anymore. And once I started doing research for Ben’s book . . .” I stopped talking, thinking of how I’d felt discovering documents that gave me a window into the past. “Then I found other work to fall in love with.” It had felt like love too, that heady absorption and exhilaration.

  “I know that love of work,” Gabriele said gently. “Ben was your brother?”

  “Yes.” I pushed down tears. “He wrote about Siena in this time. I immersed myself in the world he’d re-created, and began living it more intensely than my own. And now here I am, stuck in it.” I wished that I didn’t know what I knew, and that I wasn’t in a position to tell Gabriele where his history was headed. “Siena magically manages to exist in more than one time at once. Maybe that’s why I was able to move from then into now.”

  Gabriele nodded. His acceptance of what I said was startling, given the subject matter. Was it something about the medieval mind, or was it unique to him?

  “I don’t know whether it’s more frightening to realize that I might rather be a scholar of Siena’s history than a neurosurgeon or . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Or to realize that I might feel more at ease in the fourteenth century than my own.”

  “Why is it so disturbing to you that you should find yourself happy here?” The gravity of his question did not escape either of us.

  “I’m afraid that if I get too content I might lose my ability to go back. Not that I have any idea how to do that. Maybe it’s not possible.”

  Gabriele studied my face with concern. “Do you wish to return to your cabin? I am afraid I have fatigued you with my probing.”

  I didn’t want to leave yet. I was thinking of the first time I’d read Gabriele’s own handwritten words. “I read about you. Back in my time, I mean. Not just about you—I read what you’d written.”

  He looked puzzled. “I am no writer, Beatrice, I am a painter. What words can you possibly mean?”

  “Don’t you have a book where you record your thoughts?”

  He paused, then reached behind him and brought out a leather shoulder bag, placing it between us. Opening the flap he drew out a small, familiar little book, simply bound and tied with a leather thong. It looked weirdly new, incongruous in its brightness. I stared at the book anxiously, wondering whether it had the power to throw me forcibly through the fabric of time.

  “This? This of all things will survive me?” His voice sounded incredulous.

  “You never know what’s going to end up as history.” I smiled cautiously. “May I touch it?”

  “Of course,” Gabriele said, holding it out to me. The book felt perfectly ordinary, and when I opened the pages nothing happened. But of course it was where it belonged, settled in its own time, as was its author.

  Gabriele stood up abruptly. “We will be plunged into darkness if I do not replace the candle.” I watched him use the nearly spent taper to light a new one. The new candle burned brightly, limning his features with gold, and my desire for him suddenly sharpened, astonishing me with its force. I had to lower my eyes, and sat there wrapped in the cloak and blanket, feeling the heat rise in my chest. The only sound in the room was our breathing until he spoke.

  “Look at me,” he said gruffly.

  I let the journal drop into my lap. Gabriele knelt down on the floor until our heads were on the same level, forcing me to meet his gaze. “Beatrice, I would be deeply honored if you would allow me the pleasure of taking your hand.”

  I felt like I was falling, like I had forgotten how to breathe. In the OR my hands never shook, no matter how urgent or deadly the problem might be, but now I watched my outstretched hand tremble.

  His long fingers closed around mine, startling in their warmth. I felt every joint, every inch of skin, each tiny nerve exclaiming at the contact. One part of my brain rebelled—I can’t possibly be holding hands with a 700-year-old fresco painter. The rest of my brain was, mercifully, silent.

  After a few moments Gabriele smiled. “Perhaps that is all that we can manage.” He released me, pulling his hand back reluctantly. “At least for now.” He touched my chin and gently raised my head toward his. “Do you concur?”

  I could feel my heart pounding. “Stop now?”

  “There is nothing I would like more than to continue, Beatrice, truly.”

  “You’re refusing me?”

  “Do not mistake my restraint for lack of desire. I am only asking for a postponement, Beatrice . . . until you are my wife,” Gabriele said simply, “if that is a palatable consideration.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Is this as shocking to you as your suggestion that I proceed to ravish you was to me? What a strange world you must come from.” He was smiling now.

  “Totally shocking.” My heart was racing, and I felt like I might pass out.

  “Beatrice, I must confess that since the earliest days of our acquaintance, I have thought many times of asking you to be my wife. But your revelations tonight have made my thoughts more urgent, as I fear the time we have remaining together may be shorter than I could have imagined. Is it so difficult for you to believe that I might know, without doubt, that I wish your life to be entwined with mine?”

  I thought about my answer. When I was a child, Ben told me the story of our grandparents, Sofia and Luca, whom I’d never met. Luca first saw Sofia behind the counter at her father’s grocery store in Brooklyn. “That’s the girl I’m going to marry,” he’d said. Sofia ignored him for six months while he courted her doggedly, and then she realized she was in love with him. They were married for fifty-two years, until they died within a week of each other in their respective sleep.

  Gabriele cupped my face in his hand and put his thumb against my lips, silencing and caressing me at the same time. “Do not answer me now,” he said firmly. “A husband is a difficult enough matter to decide upon; a century is another choice entirely. I will understand if the creation of a tie that would bind you to this time might make it impossible for you to accept my offer. But if you do choose me, and the time I inhabit, I will make your wait worthwhile, I promise you.” He leaned forward to put his lips to my forehead. “No part of you will be spared when you are mine.” I wanted him so much I would have attacked him in the storage hold of the ship, but I could tell he wouldn’t bend. “May I offer you an escort back to your cabin now? It would not be seemly for you to be found here at daybreak.”

  “I’ll take the escort,” I said, feeling like my voice wasn’t in my control. “And . . .”

  “And?”

  “Don’t propose marriage to anyone else in the meantime, all right?”

  “I will restrain myself,” Gabriele said, bowing. He saw me to the door of my shared cabin with Clara. My legs were trembling from fatigue and desire, but I managed to get myself into the room and fall into bed.

  PART VII

  MESSINA

  I woke to the sound of waves slapping
against the hull. I stretched out under the weight and warmth of the wool blanket. Blankets? I found two piled over me, and a third layer came from a dark wool cloak. I buried my face in the cloak and the scent—a faint tang of plaster and paint and the almost herbal muskiness that I now recognized as Gabriele’s own—brought a full-fledged memory of the night with it.

  Finally, someone knows the truth. The exquisite liberty of that realization, dispelling months of fearful silence and deceit, coursed through me. Had Gabriele really asked me to marry him? I tried to imagine what a medieval wedding might be like. Feeling suddenly hot, I threw off the layers of wool, dressed quickly, and went up on deck.

  Clara accosted me within seconds of my appearance, bubbling with excitement.

  “Signora, have you heard the news? The sailors say the storm gave our ship great speed, and we should enter Messina’s port sooner than expected! I can hardly imagine what Sicily must be like.” Clara stopped effervescing and peered at me with concern. “Monna Trovato, are you seasick?”

  “I’m well enough, thank you, Clara,” I managed to say. But my thoughts answered silently—where we are headed, no one will be well again for a long, long time.

  Clara raced off to tidy our cabin while I remained on the deck of Il Paradiso. Three months had passed since my arrival in the fourteenth century, months during which I should have done more to prepare for this looming disaster. I scanned the horizon for the first sight of our deadly target, the port of entry to Europe for one of the greatest public health disasters in the history of the world. I had modern knowledge but no modern tools to change the path of the Black Death through Europe. No city, village, or tiny hamlet would be spared the assault, and eventually there would be nowhere to go.

  I walked back to my private space behind the barrels and sat down on the deck. My reading hadn’t often veered into fantasy, but obviously any story about time travel, mine included, posed difficult logistical and philosophical problems. Had my arrival already shifted the fabric of history to accommodate my appearance? Would any attempts I made to alter the course of events be rolled into the relentless forward motion of time’s wheel, picked up and scattered like gravel from the tires of a car? Or perhaps small changes could go unnoticed while the great ones hurtled along—deaths, births, battles, peace treaties, the building of cathedrals, all a massive backdrop to the mutable tiny movements of daily life. Could I get in the way of the forces that doomed Siena to her particularly brutal losses? I had no idea. I thought of Gabriele’s painting, the one with me in it, painted before July of 1347. Had the past made space for me in preparation for my imminent arrival—or had I always been here to be painted? The deterministic pondering gave me a headache. I didn’t even know whether I could die here. And Gabriele—I hadn’t seen any entries in his journal that were dated after the arrival of the Plague. Was there a terrible reason for that silence? Or had I simply not read far enough?