The Book of Madness and Cures (26 page)

The path curved with the water, which grew narrower in its channel. Hamish turned intently toward me. “Why don’t you complete
The Book of Diseases
here in Edenburg? I’ll gain permission for you to use the library. We have an abundance of medical volumes here!”

I was astonished by his offer. I stood mulling it over, rather guiltily. For shouldn’t I want to continue the search for my father? “Are you sure that your peers will allow a woman in their sanctum?”

“They will if I insist.”

All at once a flock of screeching jackdaws approached invisibly and then miraculously appeared one after another out of the white vapor with their wet black bodies, gray necks, and pale blue eyes, moving in uneven synchrony. Their haunting caws increased, and though we couldn’t see them all, there must have been hundreds circling and creating the din. Hamish touched my woolen-gloved fingers. I didn’t withdraw my hand but lowered my head and observed the sodden pointed toes of my shoes. As he moved nearer, I noticed a smell of binding glue, the sort that emanates from books. I looked behind to where Lorenzo should have been, but couldn’t see him beyond the vanishing bend in the path. Hamish pulled me close while the raucous birds spun around us.

Then Lorenzo’s loud voice cut through the fog. “Have you ever heard such an uproar?” We quickly separated, as yearning and shame flared through me.

We continued to walk, holding our separate silences like live coals. I involuntarily brought my hands to rest below my chest, as if to contain it, the way a pregnant woman will place her hands upon her swollen belly. Incongruously I thought of a strange tale my father had related to me about a seed bone. I mentioned this to break the silence.

“Tell me,” said Hamish immediately, “what is a seed bone?”

“It re-creates the whole body. When my father first told me the story when I was a child, I wanted to plant every bone I could find in the sandy earth of our courtyard to see if it would make the magic. If the chicken knuckle would generate the chicken, the prickly ribs reconstitute the fish. Or if the tiny sacral bone I secretly obtained would grow into a skeleton or even a man. I’d stolen it from the charnel house on the island of San Michele, when we buried my great-aunt Tiziana. I wandered in the green cemetery, tapping gravestones with a long stick I found, while the rest of the families gathered beneath a black cypress, the tree of sudden death, Olmina once told me. That is why they are planted in cemeteries. Since then, I refuse to stand anywhere near one.”

Close behind me, Lorenzo scoffed. “The only reason cypress mark the fields of the dead is that their roots are long and deep. They won’t upend the coffins.”

“And just how did you steal that bone?” asked Hamish incredulously.

“When I came to the charnel house, I reached through the grate on impulse, grabbed the little vertebra, and pocketed it. Two Capuchins, their gray hoods covering their faces, strode nearby but didn’t observe me. Later, on the gondola returning to Venetia, I felt the bone jump in my skirt and I clutched it in my fist to keep it quiet. That night I secretly planted it beneath the pine in our small courtyard, but nothing ever sprouted. Even the vertebra disappeared, for when I tried to dig it up I couldn’t find it.”

“What a daring thing to do!”

I smiled. “I don’t know. It seems I’ve always wanted to make fragments whole, whether it involves a bone, a book, or a patient.”

He regarded me seriously with sharp blue eyes.

I stopped to catch my breath. The fog had turned to a wan rain. “I guess we should turn around.”

“I’ll agree to that, signorina. You don’t want to come down with the ague,” Lorenzo said, slapping his arms to warm up. I noticed both pockets of his woolen breeches bulging with small, thick branches, so that he resembled a sort of walking pollard.

“Well, I see you’ve found something to carve, then.”

“Ah yes, signorina. I like alderwood for the sweet, smoky smell. Easy to work and doesn’t feather.”

“What will you carve?” asked Hamish.

“Hmm, maybe a little crèche for Epiphany.”

“Careful, then,” Hamish said. “Don’t forget you’re in Protestant country now, and Nativities are forbidden. Best to keep it in the house.”

“How sad!” I exclaimed. I certainly wasn’t a devout Catholic, but as a child I’d always enjoyed playing with the little figures Lorenzo had whittled.

Lorenzo shook his head and trundled ahead of us.

Then Hamish opened his great green coat and put his arm out toward me. “Cold?”

I moved closer so he could put it around my shoulder.

Lorenzo looked back and caught my eye as if to ask,
Are you all right with this man?

And cautiously, I smiled.

We walked back down the path, gathering warmth from each other. Before he left us at our rooms, I said quietly, “Hamish, I’d like to come to the library, then.”

The beauty of the countryside, and of Hamish, loosened my thoughts and my orderly plans. I began to consider that maybe I could settle in Edenburg, a city crowded upon three hills above an estuary. Wouldn’t I find comfort in the penetrating damp, the salt fog out of the east like an old childhood friend? A sea like beaten tin. Tall ships ticking across the horizon like the ornate hands of a wondrous clock. For like Venetia, Edenburg conversed with a sea to the east and withstood mountain winds from the Highlands in the north. This correspondence of geography pleased me—the familiar and the foreign in lively accord.

I began to consider more deeply my desire to find my father. How well did I really know him? Perhaps that was why I carried the letters and read them with all the devoted habit a woman might apply to reading the hours. More often than not, he was my Compline, the last of the hours, when one contemplates the small death of sleep. My night prayer.
There, my father, you do exist. I have your words, even though you’re not here.
I’d read them in different orders through the years, following chronology or place and now, on this journey, his nature. For it seemed another organizing principle cycled through his correspondence, like lunar phases, wheels of mysterious mood and reflection that weren’t entirely clear to me, though I could feel their inner workings. There was that unusual letter from Montpellier in 1586—unusual because he employed a rare tone of contentment.

My dear Gabriella,

I spend my days walking this strange half-abandoned city because I can no longer sit indoors. The season is spring, though the weather is still cool. A very fine fellow here, an old papermaker from Alby, has proved to be my best companion. He doesn’t ask me questions about my profession. He doesn’t spar with my theories. And he couldn’t care less about the Book of Diseases, except that he’s delighted that I’ve promised to request his paper through the Aldine Press in Venetia. He’s shown himself to be a marvelous artisan even as he works here at the mill of a friend who’s lent him a pulping hammer, vat, and screen. You would enjoy watching him, as you were always so engaged by how things are made, the beautiful mechanics. The other afternoon I sat for a while observing him working the hempen rags into paper. After previously soaking and boiling the fibers, he gently sieved them evenly onto a copper screen and pulled a sheet of paper out of the vat on that very screen. Then he couched it onto felt, where he pressed out the excess water. The old papermaker patted it all over (testing for uneven dampness) with unimaginable tenderness, as if he loved the paper. Then he left it to dry on a rack. I actually envied him his craft, the feel of it. The consequence of good work that he could hold in his hands. While our vocation may yield a healthy man, woman, or child, surely a happy outcome, it may just as well yield suffering or death. I wonder sometimes if that fires my passion to finish this book. To create something that I may hold in my hand, the very thing of it making me content. I know how it pleases you too, my daughter. May we one day find ourselves together at the Aldine Press, holding the book that offers help and knowledge to others, after it sustained us well in the making.

Would a book satisfy my passion? Or was there something—or someone—else I should hold?

True to his promise, Hamish obtained permission for me to study in the library. He appeared there almost every day at the hour I arrived, no matter when I rose or went out. He must have set someone on watch—or perhaps he’d agreed to be my escort there, unbeknownst to me.

It was the only place I went. Lorenzo, who also accompanied me each day, waited outside the hall on a bench, for they didn’t permit him to enter. Sometimes he whittled, always diligent about pocketing his shavings, much to Olmina’s vexation when she washed his clothes. He guarded his pieces from inquisitive eyes as much as he could, though once a gentleman asked him, “What are you carving there, my good man?”

“Oh, barnyard animals for my granddaughter at home. This here’s one of your furry Highland cattle.” The man smiled then and left him in peace.

“I wish you did have a granddaughter,” I said spontaneously, and immediately I regretted it.

“Mmh,” he grunted, and he frowned down at the wooden animals, his whole body clenched against the past. He placed them in a worn handkerchief that he folded up and tucked into his jacket pocket.

I struggled to apologize. We’d never spoken of their baby that died, nor of the others that never came. But then he turned to me and said, “Maybe you’ll have a girl of your own one day, and I can count her as granddaughter.”

I didn’t say a word. I’d thoughtlessly opened old sorrow for him, and in turn he stung me with hope. Somewhere within me, a vision sprang forth of that little girl from Tübingen, her curious expression, curls, and wayward hoop. I did want a child, and this unexpected longing flung me open, like a room of windows unlatched by wind.

I stood at the tall table fronting the literature shelves, with one foot up on the footrest, beginning to read from Petrarch’s
Epistolae familiares,
a selection I’d come to by randomly opening the book. It was a letter describing his ascent of Mount Ventosum.
So many men have written on this subject,
I thought.
And so few women have penned a perspective.
Hadn’t Olmina and I traversed Passo Rolle and the Dolomiti? What about the shepherdesses there tending flocks high in the shimmering air of those mountains? But no woman, perhaps, had climbed deliberately to a peak. Someday I wanted to ascend and descend with purpose, just for the sake of the mountain. And so I returned to Petrarch. I liked the ending of his Mount Ventosum letter, not so much for the edification as for the arrival by moonlight.

How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountain-tops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.

With no consciousness of the difficulties of the way, amidst these preoccupations which I have so frankly revealed, we came, long after dark, but with the full moon lending us its friendly light, to the little inn which we had left that morning before dawn.

The friendly light, the little inn. The moon lending. They shone somewhere in my mind. So I wasn’t particularly present when Hamish came up behind me and asked, “How are you, dear lady?” He pointed to the manuscript as if he were discussing Petrarch, so as to avoid rumors from his fellows, of whom there were several in the library at that moment, reading, discussing topics among themselves. A couple of them were watching us.

He looked over my shoulder and recited:

To-day I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate which determines the affairs of men. Consequently the mountain, which is visible from a great distance, was ever before my eyes, and I conceived the plan of some time doing what I have at last accomplished to-day.

“Thank you,” I said simply. The sound of Hamish’s rich voice anchored me, a welcome weight even as he read about a light, windy mountain.

A tall, austere young gentleman came up beside us. He pulled Petrarch’s
Sonnets
from the shelf, tugging the book on its rope as far away from us as he could go, presumably to give us some privacy. Or was it repugnance at being close to a woman? I received my answer when he glanced at me derisively.

The young man, who clearly resented my presence, occupied far more than his space with the pressure of unspoken warning. He tapped slowly, loudly, on the slanted table as he read aloud. I could see no good of confronting him, though I felt the urge building in Hamish. So I linked my arm through his and said, “I’m ready to leave.”

He smiled down at me, fierce and yet willingly calmed.

Strolling away from the library between the two men, Lorenzo and Hamish, on a rare sunny noon, I felt content. If indeed my father had disappeared, and
The Book of Diseases
had vanished with him, then I would dedicate myself to the book’s completion. Though I lacked his full experience, I knew I could make up for it in time—with the added vision of a woman.

Aromatic Water of Rue:

For Augury

Though rue may be employed internally as a remedy for many ailments, among them headache, colic, and women’s lunar pains, and externally for gout, chilblains, and bruises, the water of rue is marvelous for sight and second sight. Writers, engravers, and artists relish the fresh herb with watercress and brown bread. Dabble the water around the eyes to settle murky vision and to summon foreknowledge in all things. The herb of sorrow is thus also the herb of grace, for the future already repents its errors. Some also claim that rue repels plague, biting chiggers, and curses. The evil eye squints from the scent of rue.