* * *
It was then that Iacopo became acquainted with the Becchini, the city’s pallbearers. The Becchini roamed the city, robed in black or dark red cloaks that fell nearly to the ground, and wore hoods and masks so that only their eyes showed. They would enter a house touched by the Pestilence when no others would, extorting exorbitant sums for their services, and demanding those under threat of violence. Few would do their job, and they could set their own price. Some said the Becchini were unhinged by their proximity to death, and the consequences of their contact with the festering bodies of the victims. They acted as if they had no fear of purgatory. Bands took to entering homes where none had yet died and demanding gold before they would leave the premises, for they were known to carry the contagion with them, bringing destruction wherever they went.
“Iacopo, where are you going?” The undercurrent of fear in Immacolata’s voice was audible, and with reason, for a man who left his house to walk Firenze’s streets might die before the sun rose on the following day.
“Il Ponte Vecchio, Mamma.” The lie came haltingly off his tongue. “I have business to resolve with a goldsmith there.”
“Your father never did business there before. Why should you start now, when the smiths have begun to abandon their shops?”
“My father’s business is my task, not yours.”
But Iacopo’s mother read him as well as she had when he was a child, catching the thread of a lie easily. He closed his eyes to an old memory—he had spilled a jug of wine climbing up on the supper table, then blamed the cat. Immacolata had recounted the improbable story to his father at the supper table, protecting him from a beating. When Iacopo opened his eyes again he was startled by his mother’s aging face.
“Iacopo, you need not shoulder your father’s burdens alone.”
He was silent, longing to confide in her. Since his father’s death she seemed to have grown in size, filling in the space left by her husband’s departure. Iacopo’s solitude and his twisted thoughts made him yearn for the promise of her comfort. But he was past that possibility. “My father charged me to carry on his work, here in Firenze and abroad.”
“You are still my son, though fully grown in both stature and purpose. Tell me what you are about, caro Iacopo.”
He could in no way reveal his dark purpose: this planned partnership with the Mortalità itself. “I cannot.” When Iacopo left the palazzo, he knew his mother watched him.
Iacopo had arranged to meet a leader of the Becchini, steeling himself against revulsion and fear. He’d been assured that the man showed no signs of illness, but the Pestilence might be boiling invisibly in a man’s blood, waiting to burst out into the buboes that heralded certain death. The appointed meeting place, an abandoned calzoleria whose owner had perished in the Mortalità, was unlit and musty. Unfinished hose and patterns for shoes lay on the table in the center of the workshop with no one to resume their making. The pallbearer called himself only Angelo, and he kept his face hidden. Angelo—the Angel of Death.
“I have a proposition for you,” Iacopo said, dropping a bag of gold onto the table between them.
“Tell me of your plan, and I will tell you the price,” Angelo said.
Iacopo, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task he had been set, found his mouth trembling so violently he could barely speak. “I would have your men travel to Siena,” Iacopo said, “and bring your contagion with you.”
“We will need more gold than this to travel the distance you require,” Angelo’s voice rasped.
“You will have it in allotments as you perform what I have bidden. I know better than to pay too much in advance of the task.”
“We will need full names, and places of residence and work, if we are to visit your acquaintances in Siena.”
Targets, rather than acquaintances, would be nearer the mark. “You will have those as well.” The Accorsi household first, and after that, the cathedral builders,who dared to make Siena’s duomo “the greatest church in all Christendom,” the Lorenzetti brothers, whose paintings decorated the palazzo, civic leaders, judges, architects, members of the Biccherna, i Noveschi: all those whose industry, art, power, and renown graced Siena would be struck down by a blow too savage to withstand. He imagined a swarm of Becchini fueled by the Brotherhood’s gold, winging toward their targets like deadly birds of prey.
Iacopo’s step felt lighter with the gold gone as he left the abandoned shop and reemerged into the sun. But soon doubt, his familiar companion, came back to accompany him on the walk home.
When he arrived at the family palazzo, one of the chambermaids had drawn a bath for him. Immacolata would not let any member of the household back inside without cleansing the dirt from the street, for who knew how the illness spread? He lay in the tepid water, but when he closed his eyes he saw the pallbearer’s bony hand extending to grasp the pouch of gold.
Two disembodied voices warred within him now, one questioning his purpose as the other spurred him on.
Now, I shall follow in my father’s footsteps.
-You are not your father, Iacopo.
I shall prove myself to be his equal.
-And is that what you desire, to be your father’s equal? To walk his violent path?
Iacopo was not sure whether he uttered these words out loud or whether they stayed silent in his own head. It had become difficult for him to tell the difference.
* * *
Ysabella took up her apprenticeship with Monna Tecchini just as the long winter began to release its grip on Siena. She accompanied the midwife at every hour of the day or night, learning to coax new lives into the world. One particular birth, twin babes each vying to be first to take a breath outside their mother’s womb, kept Ysabella late. Both infants survived, but there were moments when, struggling to untangle the wet limbs, Monna Tecchini had feared they might lose not just the babes but the mother as well. When Ysabella left the house, all three were safe at last, two wrapped tightly in linen, the third holding her miracles against her chest.
The streets were dark when Ysabella began her walk toward home. As she passed the house of the Lorenzetti brothers, she saw an odd sight and slowed to watch. Two men cloaked in black stood at the grand house’s front door, lit eerily by the lamp at the top of the entrance stairs. It was odd enough to see a visitor at this late hour, but these gave her a chill, for she recognized the distinctive garb of the Becchini, the pallbearers’ faces hidden under their wide hoods. Their presence always meant death, a body waiting to be carried to its grave. Tonight their sight sent fear snaking through Ysabella’s chest and into her limbs. She had seen the Lorenzettis only that morning when she’d passed the house as the bells were ringing Prime, on the way to the twin birth she’d spent half the night attending. Had one of the brothers sickened and died in just that short time? And if the pallbearers had not come to pick up the dead, why had they come at all, in this secret dark after moonset?
When the door opened and the two figures disappeared into the doorway yawning black against the stuccoed walls, Ysabella slipped from her post and headed quickly home, trying to erase the image of the grim twin silhouette that shadowed the Lorenzettis’ door.
Two days later, she heard that Pietro first, then Ambrogio, had died, the new Pestilence from the Orient raging in their blood like demons let loose from hell. Ysabella did not understand what she had seen, for certainly the Becchini came to take death from a household, not to bring it. Afterward, though, her dreams were haunted by the image of two cloaked men, angels of death bringing despair in their wake. In the weeks that followed, when the Becchini passed in the street outside the bakery, she barred the door against them, but that did not protect their home from death’s entry.
Gabriele had not returned to his uncle’s house by the time the dying began in Siena. Ysabella prayed at first for her cousin to return to them, but as each day brought new horrors, she began to wish he would stay away. Her father, Martellino, went first—one night in May, he too
k to his bed early complaining of a mighty headache. The next dawn, when he failed to come down to stir the coals in the bakery oven, Ysabella sought him out.
They no longer shared a room; since Gabriele’s departure for Messina, Martellino had offered the top floor camera to his daughter. “You are nearly a woman now, though it seems only a few days ago that you wore a child’s long-hemmed gown. Might the space serve as a studium for preparation of your herbs and tinctures?” He had smiled, touching her cheek with a hand that smelled, as it always did, of fermenting yeast—but he would not smile again, and her herbs could do nothing to save him. Ysabella found her father in bed that morning, shivering so violently she could hear his teeth clacking in his mouth, and the boils stood out florid against the pale skin under his arms. The doctor would not come, fearing for his own life. Ysabella tried to nurse her father back to health, bathing him in her own urine mixed with fresh water from the Fonte Gaia, for the urine of a virgin was said to hold exceptional powers of purification. She surrounded his head with bundles of sweet-smelling rosemary, and burned lemon leaves and juniper until the smoke filled the room and she could hardly see her father’s face.
When he began vomiting blood, staining the linen coverlet rusty red, Ysabella went out into the streets to find a priest. Even the parish priests remained behind locked doors, unwilling to pave their own roads to death by smoothing their parishioners’ paths to the afterlife. Within the day Martellino was dead, and Rinaldo had begun to weaken, unable to rise from his bed to help. Ysabella wandered the streets, where bodies were piled alongside buildings, trying to find a gravedigger to bury her father. None would help, at least not for a reasonable fee. The Becchini requested an exorbitant price, far more than she could ever amass. When Ysabella blanched, the leering pallbearer suggested her body might serve as currency. Ysabella shrank back from the hands extending from the long, black Becchini cloak, and ran back home, where the closed shutters hid the once-fragrant bakery. She washed her father as best she could, though the stench of his body resisted all her efforts. She dragged his heavy corpse down the stairs legs first, head bumping on each step, but she could get no farther than the doorstep of the bakery. She left him there, covered with a linen shroud.
Rinaldo died a day later. His final hours were much the same, but the last weeks of his life had been vastly different from his father’s. When the Mortalità had first begun to wreak its madness upon Siena, Martellino had turned to penitence, prayer, and simplicity of living—eating little, and that which he ate barely seasoned, kneeling to pray at each peal of the bells. Rinaldo had turned instead to debauchery, carousing with bands of men in the streets, drinking in taverns, gambling, and brawling. He returned home long after dark, often with a new cut on his cheek or a blackened eye. Ysabella, when she had a moment to think at all, reflected upon the two men’s souls and the opposite ways they chose to meet the looming threat of death.
Ysabella burned the bedding and clothing Rinaldo had worn, and Bianca sequestered herself with little Gabriella in what had once been her marital chamber, covering the baby’s face with cloths soaked in aromatic oils. Ysabella did not ask for her assistance in managing Rinaldo’s corpse. She dragged his body just far enough outside so she could shut the door. This time, she found a beggar willing to carry the bodies in a cart for a few soldi, and she followed her brother and father to a huge ditch in the parish churchyard where their bodies fell with a soft thump and a scattering of flies upon the heaps of corpses layered there. The house was thus stripped of its men.
Ysabella fully expected that she would succumb, but after a month of watching those around her fall ill and be carted away, she feared her own death less. Bianca and Gabriella were also spared, perhaps because of their isolation—they never left Bianca’s bedchamber. The baby slept in a cradle suspended by ropes from a beam in the ceiling, and each time she cried out Bianca leaped up from her bed, with heart pounding. But miraculously, the babe stayed well and cried out only for ordinary reasons: hunger, thirst, or a soiled cloth. Gabriella was taking a bit of poratta now from a wooden spoon, and Ysabella brought that and all Bianca’s meals to their camera, and made sure the oiled cloth and wooden shutters barred the miasma entry.
Every few days Ysabella left the confines of their house in search of food. The mercato had shut down and nearly all the businesses were shuttered against traffic that might bring the Pestilence with it. Those that were left sold their goods at exorbitant prices because so few dared to stay and sell at all. Ser Tornabuoni put forth eggs and capons for three times what they had brought before the Pestilence came, and sugar was beyond reach, as it was used for bolstering the diet of the sick. Many shops were left unmanned. Ser Buonacorsi, from whom Ysabella’s father had always purchased the wheat and barley for his loaves, had fled to lodgings in the contado, along with many of the more prosperous merchants. Some houses lay empty because all within had died, and looters had stripped the buildings bare and left the front doors ajar, creaking on their hinges.
Ysabella could not imagine reopening the bakery after her father’s death, but the remaining family must have some livelihood. Monna Tecchini had died in the first few months of the contagion, but she had taught Ysabella well, passing on her knowledge of herbal lore and training Ysabella’s hands to coax babies from their watery homes into the perilous world. Ysabella drew upon her knowledge of midwifery and healing, and made a livelihood of it, supporting the three of them. Few doctors would attend to the sick in these times, and those that did often died in the attempt. The beak doctors—armed with birdlike masks against contagion—walked the streets, ominous in their disguises, trusted less and less as the scourge ground on. Ysabella’s aim to comfort even when she could not cure made her a welcome visitor. It seemed to Ysabella that each birth was evidence of God’s desire that the race of men should continue to inhabit the earth. These thoughts gave her some comfort that the Divine still smiled upon Siena, even as the Pestilence ravaged the city.
* * *
One incongruously bright day, a visitor came to the door. Ysabella nearly leaped out of her skin at the knocking, so unfamiliar was the sound. In these times of terror and contagion no soul would enter a house marked with death as theirs had been. She raced down the stairs from her studium where she had been drying herbs for a poultice. The smell of lemon balm and rue followed her to the front door.
She did not recognize the visitor. His neck lay in thick folds above his dark wool tunic, and the pallor of his skin reminded her of maggots that multiplied in meat left too long in the sun of the market. Ysabella held the door partially ajar, barring the entrance with her body.
“I am seeking Gabriele Accorsi, the painter. Does he reside here?”
Ysabella started at the name of her cousin; it had been many months since she had heard it anywhere other than within her own head. “He is not here.”
“But this is his residence?”
“He is away on a commission.” Ysabella’s response was just within the boundaries of propriety. It would not do to anger this unknown gentleman, with no man in the house to protect her. But she took an immediate dislike to the caller and could not bring herself to be civil.
“And is he expected back soon?”
“Who are you, to come with probing questions, but no introduction?” Ysabella had never been timid, and her months of survival in the face of overwhelming death had strengthened her already substantial will.
“I am a friend to Accorsi. Giovanni Battista is my name. Your kinsman and I became acquainted during his time at the Ospedale where I am a scribe, assistant to Fra Bosi.”
Ysabella narrowed her eyes. He had not counted on her knowledge, and it betrayed his lies now. But she let him continue, gathering information by listening.
“I and the other staff of the Ospedale are concerned for his whereabouts, and hoped there was no news of his demise at the hands of the Pestilence.”
Ysabella could see the man’s small eyes shift to the left, then right, as
if he were reading the next untruth from an invisible page in front of him.
“It is a boon to know that my cousin still has friends, despite the friendless times in which the Mortalità has left us. But I know as little as you, Messer Battista.” The man was dangerous. She would have known it even had he not invented a story she knew to be untrue, having met Fra Bosi’s scribe herself. And what had become of Monna Trovato, after she left Siena under the Genoese merchant’s employ? Gabriele had told the story the night before he left for Sicily himself, his pleasure at the new commission tempered by worry for the scribe’s welfare. Ysabella hoped Messina had provided a haven for both travelers.
“Your expression of concern is gracious, Ser Battista. Where can my messenger look for you, if I hear any news of my cousin?”
Battista, if that was his real name, hesitated before he gave his address, further raising her suspicions. What sort of man is it who does not swiftly recall his own place of residence? When the visitor took his leave, Ysabella made certain he was well out of sight before she closed the door again.
* * *
By the height of spring, the Becchini had turned to looting and pillaging, and the mere sight of a dark-robed figure at a distance would send gentlefolk rushing home to bar themselves behind locked doors. But Iacopo continued to meet with his messengers of death, slipping out of the palazzo late at night to avoid his mother’s gaze, and sending them on continued trips to strip Siena of her greatest men.
The first of the Brotherhood met his death at the hands of the Pestilence in May, speckling the walls of his bedchamber as he sputtered his last breaths. Within a month, half the Brotherhood was gone. Albizzi, Ridolfi, and Acciaioli survived, as did Iacopo himself, crossing one name after another off the list of Siena’s most respected citizens that he kept hidden close to his heart. There were moments Iacopo half wished the Mortalità would take him as well, and allow him oblivion. But through some odd perverse good fortune, it spared him, to bear witness to all that he had wrought.
The Scribe of Siena Page 29