The Scribe of Siena

by Melodie Winawer

  “My own mother would forsake me?”

  “I will deny I ever had a son.”

  “My father’s blood runs in my veins. His blood and his cause.” Because I had failed to find the record of Iacopo’s birth, I did not need supernatural empathy to know what Immacolata was about to say.

  “You do not share his blood, and need not share his cause. You are a foundling whom I called my own. And now I see the evil in the child I chose.” Immacolata’s words created a stillness after them. The wind whistled through the breaks in the Torre’s top, a high, mournful keening. Then Iacopo’s shoulders straightened, as if a weight had lifted from his narrow back.

  * * *

  Giovanni de’ Medici is not my father. At first the words brought Iacopo sweet relief. My father did not beat his wife until her shoulders bloomed with bruises. My father did not rain blows down on my head while I cried for help that never came. My father did not kill a man of Siena’s night watch and hang from the gallows for his crime.

  “If he is not my father, then I am free of him, and free to do as I wish.” Iacopo’s heart lifted as the words left his mouth.

  Immacolata had not moved from her spot at the top of the stairs. “You are free to spare the life of this innocent man. But any sins you have already committed, and any sins you commit from this day forth, will rest upon your head, and upon your soul for eternity.”

  In the wake of his mother’s words, Iacopo’s relief faded as fast as it had come. For if he could not blame his birthright, he had only his own miserable self to blame. His words in Angelo’s ear had carried the Mortalità’s curse to Siena’s most noble citizens, and his own shaking hand now held a knife to Accorsi’s neck. All that Iacopo had once thought to be true crumbled beneath him—his parentage, and his purpose.

  “He despised me, because he knew I was not his. Do you despise me too?”

  “I am your mother, and I love my son as much as any woman who bears a child from her womb. What I reject in you is not your blood, but your evil acts. Listen to me now, and drop the knife. Let no more sin stain your soul.”

  Iacopo lowered his hand slowly, letting the knife slide out of his grip. The three watched him: Accorsi, wary and still, the black-haired woman who had discovered his secret, and his own mother, familiar and strange all at once. Iacopo felt as if he were receding irrevocably away from the shore on which they stood. They belonged to the world of the living, a world he could not rejoin.

  Iacopo climbed the wall separating him from the dizzying drop to the Campo.

  “Iacopo, come down.” Now his mother’s voice held fear. Perhaps she does love me. But her love is not enough.

  “I will let the painter live, Mamma”—even now Iacopo could not keep from calling her by that lovely name—“but I shall not come down. There is nothing that holds me to this earth now, neither your fear nor your love. I am beyond both.”

  * * *

  Iacopo edged sideways along the wall until he was out of Gabriele’s reach. Seconds stretched as the four of us stood, one above and three below. It could have been a painting: Iacopo’s shape loomed dark against the backdrop of moving clouds, and Immacolata’s hands emerged white from the sleeves of her cloak like a pair of doves. I had the feeling that Iacopo was part of the wall, the sky, the wind that blew his cloak out around him like an angel’s wings. Then into the silence, the tower’s bell began to ring for Vespers: the evening prayer.

  “God forgive me,” Iacopo said, “and keep my mother safe.” Then he stepped off the wall, and into the view around us.

  Immacolata’s howl split the air as Iacopo’s body hurtled toward the distant shell-shaped Campo below. For a fraction of a second Iacopo looked, splayed out with his arms and legs outstretched, as if he might fly.

  PART XVI

  HOME

  Somehow I was standing with my hands pressed against the cold wet stone of the parapet. From the Torre’s height, I watched Immacolata run across the crowded Campo, her cloak a blur of dark green. The crowds parted before her as she fell onto Iacopo’s prostrate body, covering him like a blanket while the rain beat down upon them both.

  Gabriele and I stood next to each other, silently looking down. We watched city officials in their black and white take Iacopo’s body away. We kept watching until the crowds dispersed, and then until the wind died and the heavy rain faded to a quiet mist.

  In the stillness after the storm, I began to hear sounds around us—a flock of sparrows chittering in the Torre’s overhanging roof, the drip of water from a beam to the stone floor, Gabriele’s breathing next to me. I could feel the warmth emanating from him, and I smelled his cloak’s wet wool. The sun was low over Siena’s surrounding hills when Gabriele turned from the view to face me, and took my hand in his.

  “Andiamo a casa?” Gabriele said—Shall we go home?

  Home. The weight of all that home meant—what it used to mean and what it had come to mean for me—rested on those three sweet Italian words.

  “Sì,” I answered. Yes.

  And we walked home together in the fading light.

  PART XVII

  EPILOGUE

  The night after Beatrice confirmed her flight to Siena, Ben dreamed that he took her to the Museo. In the dream they were walking hand in hand from one empty room to the next. Beatrice kept consulting a creased museum brochure; the outlines of the gallery map wavered in the dim light. They walked for hours, the odd surreal fabric of the dream stretching and distorting the passage of time. At last they reached Ben’s favorite gallery, where the unfinished Accorsi Messina altarpiece hung alone against the back wall, filling the space with its power.

  Hey Little B, here’s a painting I’ve always wanted to show you—Ben’s waking thoughts infiltrated the realm of sleep—even half done, doesn’t it blow your mind? But in the dream he felt Beatrice moving away from him, the contact between their two hands lost.

  He stood in the doorway of this last gallery, unable to cross the threshold. Beatrice walked to the altarpiece and stopped, looking at the painting as if it were a window rather than a work of art. He could tell from the set of Beatrice’s shoulders and the angle of her head that she was thinking hard, her black hair falling down behind her like a dark waterfall. Beatrice’s hand disappeared into the flat canvas, then her other hand, then her body and head, moving into the painting as if it were a still lake. The long strands of Beatrice’s hair were the last to vanish, and the painting closed over them without a ripple.

  Ben woke alone in his Siena bedroom, where maps of the city covered the walls and piled books formed unsteady towers by the bed. But as the dream faded, the image of Beatrice stayed behind in his mind. She’d be here soon, his little sister neurosurgeon who wasn’t so little anymore. “Maybe you’ll end up getting into history after all, Little B,” Ben said aloud, smiling in the dark, “just like me. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” And this time, he drifted off into a sweet, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  It was Sebastiano’s second birthday. Donata knew she must leave work soon to buy ingredients for the ricotta cake Felice and Gianni loved. Her youngest child was not quite old enough to choose a dessert for himself, but would eat it willingly, as he did most things. Donata lingered in the reading room of the university library on that bright March afternoon, fingering the binding of the book she’d requested from the archives. The leather cover was worn and stamped with a faded pattern of leaves and vines in gold. Donata rested the manuscript on the velvet-lined stand. A painting of Siena’s Campo illuminated the flyleaf. Donata knew that perspective well—it was a view of the piazza seen from the Torre’s height, its nine sections fanning out from the Palazzo Pubblico, the Duomo rising gravely over the city it protected.

  Donata bent to look at the next page, and as she read a feeling came over her, as if someone were standing at her shoulder, close enough to touch.

  To my beloved Siena

  The city that opened her gates and heart to me across the centuries
>
  And in my Brother’s memory

  Written by my hand in this year of our Lord 1349

  Beatrice Alessandra Trovato

  Donata sat staring at the inscription. Outside, the trees had not yet begun to leaf, and the light streamed in through the tall leaded glass windows. She sat without moving until the bells began to ring the hour of Nones, then put away the book and went home to make a birthday cake.

  Siena University News; Issue 213; March

  Three scholars, working consecutively, have uncovered surprising new information about Siena’s medieval past. However, this work appears to have taken a toll on those scholars who undertook it. Beniamino Emilio Trovato, the well-known Sienese historian who began the project, died suddenly of a heart ailment before he could complete his work. The second scholar to become involved, his American-born sister, Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, mysteriously disappeared before she could finish the project. The trail of their efforts to uncover the secret of a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old conspiracy has been picked up by Professoressa Donata Guerrini, a notable scholar of art history at the Università di Siena. Prof. Guerrini has publicly declared the work to be Beniamino Trovato’s discovery, and insisted that it be published in his name, angering some competing scholars who would speak against the veracity of his sources and methods of scholarship. Most disturbingly, the evidence appears to implicate members of the well-known Signoretti family of Siena as co-conspirators of the Medicis in a plot to overthrow Siena’s Nine more than six centuries ago. Since Prof. Guerrini began work on the project, her office has been broken into twice, fortunately without loss of any crucial documentation or injury to her person. The reason for the break-ins is suspected to be related to the alleged Signoretti controversy, though it remains unproven at this time. In an interview, Prof. Guerrini has revealed startling facts regarding the Medici involvement in Siena’s terrible losses during the Plague, and implications for the violent fall of Siena’s Nine seven years later.

  With the assistance of local archivist Emilio Fabbri, Prof. Guerrini has identified the writings of a previously unknown Sienese medieval chronicler. Interestingly, the author shares her family name with Dr. Trovato and her brother. Dr. Guerrini, when interviewed about this remarkable coincidence, had no comment. In a harmonious marriage of text and art, the chronicle is illustrated by the fourteenth-century painter Gabriele Beltrano Accorsi, a pupil of Simone Martini. Accorsi’s work was not previously known to include manuscript illustration, and the numerous illuminations will provide academics dedicated to post-Plague Sienese art with a wealth of new material. The chronicle itself gives insight into the appearance of the original Fonte Gaia and suggests that Accorsi himself was the painter of the long-debated fifth fresco on the Ospedale facade. Finally and most dramatically, the research into this trecento chronicler’s work has uncovered evidence to illuminate Siena’s particularly devastating losses to the Plague, and its failure to recover after the Black Death’s retreat. These Trovato historians, both past and present, have together added a new and startling chapter to Siena’s great history.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a particular sort of historical fiction—an invented narrative embedded in a real place and time. Historical fiction demands accuracy, and that requires research—research to answer not only large questions about major historical events and conflicts—such as the centuries-old bitter rivalry between Siena and Florence—but also smaller questions about daily life. Does a medieval Italian child drink milk? What language was spoken in what would eventually become Tuscany in the 1340s, and would it sound like Italian? Was intellectual life and literacy possible or likely for women in fourteenth-century Italy? And how were criminals denounced and tried?

  But research, though it provided the necessary scaffolding for this story, wasn’t enough. Because this isn’t history, it is fiction. And fiction, by definition, goes between and beyond the facts. That is the privilege, and the heady pleasure, of the novelist.

  Where do the facts end and where does this fiction begin? Medieval Siena did fall from its economic, cultural, and political prominence after—and partially as a result of—the great Plague. And it fared worse during and after the Plague than other Tuscan cities that were its contemporaries and rivals. A number of Medici ancestors were tried for capital crimes in the fourteenth century, but sources vary as to whether one was executed for his crimes, and when that might have occurred. There was a failed plot backed by Florence’s Walter of Brienne to unseat the Sienese regime, and powerful Florentine families appear to have been involved—but the specifics of the Medici family in this plot are my own fabrication, and there was no well-known Signoretti family in Siena in the fourteenth century. There was a Giovanni de’ Medici born a few years after the one in this book; I did not intend to portray him, but his existence planted the seed of an idea. Immacolata and Iacopo are invented, too. There is also no mysterious conspiratorial text written by a plotter against Siena in “real” history. And, as far as I know, there is no painter named Gabriele Beltrano Accorsi who trained with the very real Simone Martini. There is, however, uncertainty about the creator of the Ospedale of Siena’s fifth fresco, which has proved to be a useful foundation for invention. Uncertainty is inherently interesting, and it has allowed me to create people and events. You won’t find them in primary sources. At least, I don’t think you will.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It was a delight to write this book, but readers made the words take flight. I owe enormous gratitude to the dedicated people who gave comments and encouragement: Hannah Stein, Alex Bassuk, Heidi Hoover, Christine Leahy, Paul Josephs, Loren Levinson, Michael Rose, Jason Wexler, Julia Stein, Helaina Stein, Adam Grupper, and Carol Higgins-Lawrence. Some emailed me at 2 a.m. pleading for the next installment, some spent vacations buried in my book, some copy-edited on a buggy Google doc across time zones, and some, solo parenting heroically, put their children in front of a screen for hours so they could keep reading.

  I am indebted to two scholars—Jane Tylus at New York University and Neslihan Şenocak at Columbia University—whose generosity and expertise helped me bring the fourteenth century to life. Rita Charon, head of the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia, in the hallways of the medical center and over wine and oysters, illuminated the delicate balance of the physician/novelist’s existence. Heartfelt thanks to my eleventh-grade English teacher and poet, Harry Bauld, who, decades after he’d last taught me, helped my book find a home.

  I had the good fortune to work with three skillful editors—Judy Sternlight, Julie Mosow, and Tara Parsons—who made the challenges of editing exhilarating and genuinely fun. I am deeply grateful to my publisher, Susan Moldow, president of the Scribner group, who championed my book, and to my assiduous and insightful copy editor, Shelley Perron. I am indebted to Richard Mayeux, Chair, Department of Neurology, Columbia University, who provided an academic second home and unflagging support of my career as a physician, scientist, and author. I also owe special thanks to the MTA of New York City for providing and maintaining the subway trains where I wrote most of this book.

  The manuscript would still be languishing on my laptop without my wonderful agent, Marly Rusoff. Her belief in my story, intellectual companionship, and unflagging emotional support are more than I could ever hope for. Michael Radulescu, unflappable master of foreign sales, provided constant good humor and enthusiasm while guiding me through incomprehensible international paperwork.

  Finally, thanks to my mother, Bonnie Josephs, who was my first editor, a devoted reader, and much more than that; to my father, Herb Winawer, who died while I was writing this book but who knew it would be published someday; and to my children, Ariana, Chiara, and Leo, who listened to me tell the story, gave me courage and good ideas, and followed me to the top of Siena’s Torre del Mangia during a terrifying thunderstorm. And I could not have done it without Susanna Stein, who told me the book was good in my gravest moments of doubt, read and commented and criticized and c
omplimented, played medieval music and cooked medieval dinners, and did everything I couldn’t do because I was (and still am) writing.

  Touchstone Reading Group Guide

  The Scribe of Siena

  This reading group guide for The Scribe of Siena includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Melodie Winawer. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  After Beatrice Trovato’s brother, a scholar of medieval history based in Siena, Italy, dies unexpectedly, she travels to Siena to take care of his estate. As Beatrice delves deeper into her bother’s affairs, she discovers files from his unfinished research—all of which seem to point to a 700-year-old conspiracy to annihilate the city of Siena.

  After uncovering the journal and paintings of Gabriele Accorsi, the fourteenth-century artist at the heart of the plot, Beatrice finds a startling image of her own face in his work and is suddenly transported to Siena in the year 1347. She awakens in a city on the eve of an unimaginable disaster—the Plague’s imminent arrival. Yet when Beatrice meets Accorsi, something unexpected happens: she falls in love—not only with Gabriele but also with medieval life. As the Plague and the ruthless hands behind its trajectory threaten Beatrice’s survival and the very existence of Siena, Beatrice must decide in which century she belongs.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. Discuss the significance of the title. Does it give you any insight into Beatrice’s priorities throughout the novel? How do you think she would choose to identify herself?