A Golden Web (3 page)

Nicco had decided it would be best to have Alessandra ride behind
him on Nero, at least at the start, until she grew enough to handle a full-size horse on her own.

She wondered if they would find a hare or a partridge, and whether Nicco would kill it—and whether she would be able to bring herself to look, rather than turn away as she often did when faced with the sight and smell of blood.

She thought of and then brushed away the memory of her mother’s body split open from chest to just below
the naval. She smelled the hot blood and felt her father shaking with sobs and watched between her fingers as the midwife pulled Dodo out, still in his caul.

Alessandra held on tighter to Nicco and pressed her cheek against his back, willing the image away. She felt some comfort in knowing that he, too, had been there and seen what she had seen. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to their mother, asking her to watch over them.

They spent that first day in the border of sunlight and gloom at the edge of the forest. Alessandra practiced climbing up and down off Nero’s back, using the low branches of a tree as her ladder. She learned the proper way to tie Nero to the tree—which turned out to be the same as the bookbinder’s knot she’d seen so many times before but never bothered to learn how to make. She and Nicco climbed the tree and found some feathers that Nicco said were the remains of a red falcon’s meal. And Nicco told her how this was a falcon he hoped to trap one day and train to hunt with him.

They sat in the canopy of the tree, and Nicco, in a
whisper, told her everything he knew about the sounds they heard there: the names of birds, and which were good to eat and which made songs so beautiful that it would be a sin to kill them, especially now that the years of rain were over, and not nearly so many peasants were dying of hunger as before.

To both of them, the tree seemed filled with the breath of God. When they climbed down, they saw that this tree was part of a ring of trees growing around a clearing. Nicco stuck his fingers inside a mound of leaves at the base of the roots and pulled out a mushroom that was shining white and the size of Alessandra’s thumb, with a slantwise cap as delicate looking as a piece of skin.

Alessandra’s eyes grew even wider than they were already in the half-light of the clearing. “Isn’t that—?”

“The very kind our own dear Cook once paid for with a fine, plump hen—and Father had her flavor a broth with it that he served to the Bishop.”

“I saw nothing before you dug it out! How did you know it was there?”

Nicco screwed up his face, trying but failing to find the clue that had let him know. “Perhaps the way the
leaves there looked a little more disturbed—but I think it’s something else about things that are hidden underground. I just feel them sometimes—like heat, only it’s not heat, but something else.”

It was Alessandra’s turn to be rapt with admiration. Her heart beat a little faster, thinking about how there might well be as many wonders beneath the surface of things as there are above, if one could but figure out how to see them.

They untied Nero and walked deeper into the woods. Nicco found the delicate skull of a vole and the scat of the bear that had eaten the animal. The horse clearly didn’t like being there. “But how can he know,” asked Alessandra, “that a bear was here, perhaps weeks before?”

“Because bears, like all creatures, have their pathways—and Nero no doubt smells or else somehow senses the presence of the bear, from whenever it passed by and ate this vole.”

Alessandra took the clean, white, beautiful skull—as delicate as the carved ivory elephant she once saw in a stall in the marketplace in Bologna, when her mother had taken her along to buy spices. Alessandra had been allowed to hold the tiny elephant in the palm of her hand.

She wrapped the vole’s beautiful little skull carefully in a broad leaf and put it in the pocket where it was most likely to stay safe and whole.

By the end of the day, she had a new respect for her brother, filthy hands, and an ache inside her to find out more. “No wonder you find Aristotle dull, Nicky! Why read about learning, when the entire world spreads its wonders at our feet?”

They ate the hunk of dried fish and two hard rolls Nicco had taken from the kitchen when Cook’s back was turned. (In fact, she had seen him—but she doted particularly on the Master’s elder son, and allowed him the pleasure of thinking he was outsmarting her.) Then they went to a special little place Nicco knew about, beside a stream, and gorged themselves on blackberries until their teeth were blue.

Alessandra nearly fell asleep as she rode behind her brother on the way home. She was roused by the sound of the church bells tolling Vespers, telling her that they’d stayed away too long, and that even if Pierina had played her part brilliantly, there was no way Alessandra’s absence from home could have gone unmarked.

Nicco pleaded ignorance about Alessandra’s whereabouts when he reached the table, dirty and out of breath, midway through the meal. Pierina blushed to the roots of her blond hair.

“Well, young lady,” said their father, cocking his head to one side.

Taking a big swallow of water from her goblet, Pierina nearly choked. “I thought she was with Nicco,” she spluttered between coughs. “Cross my heart and hope to die!”

“Hush, child,” said her stepmother. “You ought to be more careful about what you say.”

Carlo Giliani glanced across the table at Nicco, who could almost look at him eye to eye now. Nicco tried his best, without any words at all, to plead with his father:
It will be bad for Alessandra if you pursue this!
He chose the biggest piece of bread on the platter at the center of the table, and then heaped some fish for himself on top of it. “My favorite sauce!” he said to no one, a little too cheerfully.

Ursula banged the flat of her palm on the table, making
the crockery tremble. “Where is your firstborn sister?”

Pierina’s goblet fell to the floor, where it broke in several jagged pieces on the alternating black and white tiles.

“You will be the death of me, you three!”

“
Ecco!
Here she is,” said Nicco, staring past his stepmother’s head at the doorway, where Alessandra stood, dressed as herself again. She stretched and yawned in a perfect mime of sleepiness, as if she’d just woken. Her curly hair looked even more untidy than usual, and her cap was askew. Nicco could sense rather than see the rapid beating of her heart beneath her shift, as if she were a rabbit in a trap.

Ursula turned around, and Alessandra curtsied. “Forgive me, Mother”—she nodded at Ursula. “Father”—at Carlo. She had almost made it to her place at the table when Ursula grabbed her—altogether too hard—by the wrist, pulling her up short.

Alessandra looked into her stepmother’s oddly amber-colored eyes, but couldn’t find even one drop of love for her there. She made herself remember her mother’s soft brown eyes and how they grew warmer and even
darker when they lit on her, smiling and filled with love. Alessandra looked at the amber eyes and said the words, slowly and softly, inside her heart:
My mother loved me.

“Your hands,” said Ursula, her voice perfectly calm.

“Madame?”

Ursula’s voice was a tad more urgent when she spoke again. “Show me your hands!”

Disengaging herself from Ursula’s grasp, Alessandra shot a pleading look at her father.

“
Amore
,” he said, “the fish is getting cold.”

“Your hands!” Ursula repeated in a voice as cold as the river from which the fish had been hauled up in a net that morning.

Alessandra raised her hands up and held them out, palms up. Ursula grabbed the candelabra and drew it closer to the edge of the table, dripping wax onto the white cloth.

“Turn them over!”

There was still dirt and mud and blackberry juice under Alessandra’s nails. A drop of hot wax fell on the back of her hand. Alessandra flinched but didn’t cry out. Another drop fell.

She thought about Aristotle’s treatise on bees: how bright and shiny bees are idle—like women. (It pained her that Aristotle never had anything good to say about women!) How honey falls from the air when the stars are rising in the night sky or the rainbow rests upon the Earth. How bees produce their young from the flowers of honeysuckle, reed, and olives. She reflected on all this and wondered how the first candlemaker ever thought of embedding a wick inside a rod of beeswax to conquer the darkness of night.

Nicco shot his own dirty hands out into the wavering circle of light. “Pierina told the truth, Madame—my hands are a fair match for Alessandra’s.”

Pierina knelt down on the floor to gather the broken pieces of crockery.

“Leave that!” Ursula looked from one child to the other. Alessandra, still lost in thought, was staring at the beeswax on her hand—thinking how, even in the candlelight, it wedded itself to the smallest subtlety of the surface of her skin. That is how the goldsmith plies his art, she remembered—making a ring or a brooch first in wax, and then filling the place inhabited by wax with gold.

Ursula’s voice was quite shrill now. “What were you doing to get such dirty hands?”

Nicco reached inside his doublet and brought out the mushroom they’d found in the forest. “We were going to give it to Cook, Madame, and it was to be a surprise for you.”

Carlo Giliani’s face broke into a broad smile. “By the saints!” he swore. “I didn’t think I’d ever see another of those in my lifetime! Well done, Nic!”

Ursula again looked from child to child, ending with Alessandra, whose face she caressed softly, so that the girl had to look up and meet her eyes.
How,
thought Alessandra,
can the hands feel so soft when the eyes look so hard?

“Clever girl!” Ursula said quietly, all the shrillness gone now from her voice. But her eyes bespoke mistrust of clever girls—mistrust and fear. She rang the little bell that sat at her place on the table.

The servant stepped out of the shadows to clear away the cold fish and the pile of sodden bread in the middle that would be given away as alms the following day, outside the church.

Alessandra slipped away and took her place at the long
table, between Nicco and Pierina, who wiped her saucy fingers on the tablecloth. Keeping her eyes downcast, Alessandra gave both her brother and sister a friendly pat under the table as the servant brought in a joint of meat. The food smelled good to her after her long day out of doors. She felt capable of eating the entire joint herself—and she no sooner had this thought than promised herself to confess her gluttony and repent of it at church first thing in the morning.

“Have you heard?” Ursula asked her family brightly after she’d taken her first bite of mutton on the point of her knife. “A witch is going to be burned tomorrow in the square. Alessandra,
cara
, would you pass the salt cellar, please?”

Alessandra said her prayers and hung her gown, kirtle, and
stockings on the rod that kept them out of reach of the mice, then jumped under the covers, next to Pierina, who was already naked.

“Get your feet away from me!” Pierina cried.

Alessandra slipped out of her chemise and put it on top of the covers with her sister’s. “I’m frozen!”

“Come closer then. But not the feet—not yet!”

The two smooth and silky girls cuddled together. After a time, Pierina said, “I fear for you, Alessandra!”

“I fear for myself! That was as much as a threat tonight. Where in Persiceto has someone discovered a witch?”

“It’s the old wet-nurse—the one who was convinced you were a changeling!”

“She must be even madder now than she was back then, living in that hovel at the edge of the swamp and without a friend in the world.”

“The crier said she’d caused the death of three babies!”

Alessandra thought about how close she herself had come to dying by the same hand. “Did she—stab them?”

“She wasn’t actually anywhere near them. But the authorities found rue in her pockets. Oh, Alessandra—they say it is the favorite plant of witches!”

“And what if that mushroom Nic found had been the favorite fungus of sorcerers? Would that make him one?”

“That’s different!”

“It’s only different because Nic has friends. Whereas the old wet-nurse has none.”

“If her hand hadn’t been stayed by our mother nearly
twelve years ago, Zan-Zan, you wouldn’t be here.”

What Pierina said was true. Who could Alessandra count on now to help her, if someone else imagined they saw the Devil’s traces on her—or simply said so, out of jealousy or spite? Her father, who would do anything to protect her, was away so much of the time.

She nested her two feet—warm now—against Pierina’s. “Sometimes I think the only thing for me is to go away.”

“And then
you’d
be friendless! And with that heart of yours so stuffed with learning, you’d be accused straightaway. You mustn’t! Unless—”

“Unless?”

“Unless it’s to marry.”

“And let myself be poked by a hairy devil of a husband who would keep me pregnant, year after year, until—”

“Don’t say it!” They were both thinking about their mother—Alessandra of the grisly night of their mother’s death, when her corpse was split open to release the as-yet-unbaptized Dodo so that her soul could fly to Heaven and watch over them. Pierina remembered it only as a tale, partially told to her—judiciously censored—by Nicco and
Alessandra. “Our stepmother says that I mustn’t be afraid. That as many women as die in childbirth live to take joy in the baby they’ve brought into the world.”

“And yet she has never done it.”

“It is her sorrow that she herself is barren.”

“I wonder,” said Alessandra. “She doesn’t seem particularly sorrowful to me.”

“Will you go tomorrow?”

“To the burning? Certainly not. People were glad enough to heed the old woman’s counsel during the years of rain and, afterwards, during the years of rot, when she could tell them which wild plants are safely eaten. How many peasant families did she save from starvation?”

“God’s mercy saved them, Alessandra, as you know perfectly well!” There was a silence. “It might seem odd,” Pierina ventured, “if you don’t go.”

“I’ll spend the hours in church instead.”

Pierina kissed her sister’s back, just between her shoulder blades. “Good girl,” she said. “That will be the safest place for you to be. Make sure someone sees you there!”

“God will see me.”

“Make sure someone else sees you there.”

“Go to sleep, Pierina—may the angels watch over both of us!”

“And Nicco and Dodo…”

“And Father…”

But they were both fast asleep before any other words could be spoken.

After she came back from church, Alessandra hid herself in the workshop to start reading a book her father had just borrowed from the Dominican priory. It was a newly discovered text from Avicenna, the princely Persian scholar—lately translated into Latin by a visiting monk from Toledo.

Carlo had paid a handsome price (in the form of a donation to the friars) to borrow a copy of Avicenna’s treatise from the monastery, knowing that it would be much in demand at the medical school in Bologna. Old Fabio had been working such long hours on copying it—and complaining so piteously about his aching back and failing eyes—that Carlo resolved to hire another, younger artist and scribe as soon as one possessing the requisite skill could be found.

The book contained many illustrations, all of which needed to be rendered as accurately as the text. A wealthy man but still a thrifty one, Carlo regarded with horror the heavy fines levied by the University of Bologna on stationers who didn’t make sure the books they published were faithfully copied from the original. Several mistakes in one year’s time, and his university commission would be revoked. And where would Carlo’s family be then, if this—the greater part of his livelihood, and the basis of his reputation—were taken away?

Alessandra read undisturbed until she knew she’d be missed—and then joined her family in the kitchen. All through breakfast, she pondered the words she’d read, many of which had made no sense to her at all. Was it the translation, she wondered—most likely from Persian to Hebrew and then into Latin—that rendered the words so difficult to parse? Or was it the nature of the thoughts themselves?

After the meal, she waited until everyone else had left the kitchen—and then walked across the passageway, back into her father’s scriptorium.

It was a threefold treat for her senses, going from the fragrance of cloves and roasted meat and woodsmoke to
the blast of cold, sage-scented air in the stone passageway to the sweet smell of ink and the acrid, sulfurous tang of the
gesso
being mixed by the latest set of apprentices, two eight-year-old twin boys from Lombardy.

She walked up quietly behind Old Fabio to watch him as he hunkered over the vellum folio, applying gold leaf to an illumination of the Adoration of the Magi. The set of pages were part of a commission for a Little Book of Hours her father had won after an evening of drinking with the Bishop. Dank early mornings were the best, she’d heard, for the application of gold leaf—and this was just such a morning.

Old Fabio used the gilder’s tip to pick up a piece of gold that had been pounded so thin that it was practically not of the material world anymore. Alessandra didn’t dare even breathe as he let it float down to the red silk gilder’s cushion, where it settled like a shimmering slick of precious oil.

“May I blow it flat?” she whispered.

“Madonna mia!”
said the illuminator, nearly jumping out of his chair. “I thought you were the Angel of Death, come to take me!”

“I’m sorry!”

“And look what you’ve made me do! The gold has floated away.”

“It’s here,” said Alessandra, from her hands and knees on the floor. “May I have the gilder’s brush,
Maestro
?”

Old Fabio clucked his tongue but gave her the tool, as he knew his knees were too stiff to allow him to go searching underneath his desk. “Don’t break it!”

Alessandra touched the tiny brush to the escaped piece of pounded gold, as delicate as an insect’s wing. She cupped her other hand around it and held her breath as she dropped it onto the bloodred silk of the tiny cushion. “There it is.”

The illuminator raised his chin to look at her. “Well done,
Signorina
.”

Alessandra smiled. She liked being good at things—especially things she wasn’t expected to be good at.

“Blow on it, if you want to—but gently!”

The little wrinkles in the golden wing were smoothed out in the current of Alessandra’s warm breath. Old Fabio took his knife and cut a crescent out from it for the Christ child’s halo. “Breathe harder now on the place on
the page where it goes—just there. Breathe on the infant Jesus.”

Alessandra blew her warm breath on Christ to make the pink, crescent-shaped spot of
gesso
around his head soft enough to receive the gold. Then she pulled back and watched, holding her breath, while the gold came floating down from the gilder’s brush, seeming to jump into place, as if it knew exactly where it belonged. Old Fabio covered it quickly with a piece of silk and pushed on the halo with his cracked and blackened thumb.

“Finish it up, if you want to try.” He handed her the burnishing tool, a dog’s tooth mounted on a wooden handle. “Delicate but strong—there’s the way.”

Alessandra stood over the folio in which the Christ child had suddenly come to life.

“You’ve a good hand, my girl. You could do any job in this workshop and do it well. Not like that brother of yours!”

Alessandra looked at her hands, a child’s hands still, smooth and dimpled and as yet unmarked by life. She was glad they were good hands. She breathed on them in the cold morning air of the workshop, as if they too would
suddenly shine gold with the certainty of her own future and whatever brightness it held.

Alessandra was careful, after the grim bonfire in the square and the flesh-scented days following, to please her stepmother—at least, to the extent that Ursula would allow herself to be pleased by her least favorite among her husband’s children.

Carlo left for several days on a business trip to Bologna, and Ursula took advantage of his absence to give Alessandra tasks she would never dare give her otherwise. So while Pierina sat by the kitchen fire, helping Cook put up apples to dry, Alessandra was sent to the well with the two buckets balanced, one at each end of the rod that hurt her back and neck even while the buckets were empty.

It was one thing for the servant, who was broad and well padded and could have fit two of Alessandra inside her, to fetch the water. But Alessandra embraced the task without complaint, taking it as an intellectual as well as a physical challenge.

Nicco caught her as she crouched beneath the weight
of the two full buckets, her back to the well, hanging on tight with both hands to the rod that was braced across her shoulders. He stopped her just as she was about to use her fanny to shove the well bucket, tied to the rod as a counterbalance, over the edge and into the well.

“Are you trying to drown yourself? Surely there’s an easier way.”

Alessandra picked herself up from the ground, where she’d fallen after Nicco untied the rope and the counter-weight was gone. “I’m trying to haul water, as I’ve been ordered.”

“Who would dare order a shrimp like you to carry the water?”

“Who do you think?”

Nicco, broad shouldered and well built for a lad of fourteen, grunted as he lifted the full buckets in the air and let the rod come to rest behind his head, holding on to the ends with his meaty hands. “You should have called me.”

“I thought I could devise a way to do it myself.”

Nicco grinned. “The world will be a better place because of you, Alessandra, if you’re able to stay alive
long enough to do even half of what you cook up inside that brilliant heart of yours.”

As they walked along, Alessandra brushed absently at the water sloshing over her from the closest bucket. “Don’t you wonder, Nic, how the rest of our body hears our thoughts as the heart thinks them, and knows what to do?”

“Why should I bother myself about such a bloody stupid thing?” Nic grunted again as he lowered the brace of buckets onto the kitchen threshold.

Ursula was standing in the doorway when they opened it, as if she’d been waiting for them. “I told Alessandra to fetch the water.”

“Yes, you did, Madame!” Nicco put his arm around his sister’s shoulder. “It made as much sense as it would for me to put my saddle on my dog and try to ride him.”

“Do you dare defy me, Niccolò?” Ursula was a tall woman, but not quite as tall as Nicco. She raised herself up to her full height and held her head high as she spoke to him.

“Know, Madame, that I will defend my sister if anyone misuses her.”

He and Ursula stared at each other, neither hazarding to utter another word. Alessandra, roused from her own thoughts, looked up at them, from face to face, locked in combat as surely as if they’d been trading blows.

“Have an apple, anyone?” Pierina piped up from the fire. When Nicco and Ursula continued to glare at each other, unmoving, she added in a smaller voice, “They’re awfully nice this year.”

The dog started barking, there was the sound of horses, and the servant ran out from the stable. Carlo, accompanied by a stranger, was back from Bologna.

Two riders came abreast of the house, the master on his high horse and someone unknown riding a brindled donkey. When the stranger removed his cloak and hood, it was clear that he was not much more than a boy, though he looked tall—about the same age and height, in fact, as Nicco.

“Husband,” Ursula said, lowering her eyes, perhaps to conceal the anger in them.

“By God!” Carlo bellowed. “It’s good to be home.” He reached down to chuck Alessandra under the chin. “Are those tears, my pet?”

Alessandra took his cloak, freeing him to fold her in his arms. “All is well, Papa.”

“Nicco? It’s going well, my boy?” They clasped each other by the shoulder.

“Have you brought a new playmate for us, Father?” Nicco said with a friendly smile for the boy on the donkey.

Carlo laughed—it was a sound that filled his children with the conviction that all was right with the world. He slapped the parcel that seemed about to burst the seams of the saddlebag. “I’ve brought the text and drawings for a fine, new medical book we’re going to publish, plus a scribe and artist who will please Old Fabio mightily. This is Giorgio da Padova, a newly minted journeyman, and as fine an illuminator as I’ve seen in many years.”

Pierina had by then come out from the kitchen and was wiping her hands on her apple-stained apron. “Giorgio da Padova,” she said dreamily.

“Are you a parrot?” snapped Ursula. “Excuse our rudeness, young sir. We are simple country folk here.” Ursula held herself beautifully tall, with a bearing to dispel anyone’s notion that she was anything other than the wife of a rich and powerful man. “Welcome to our home.”