A Golden Web (13 page)

Pierina was beside herself with excitement at the prospect of
Alessandra’s visit home. So much had changed since she’d been sent away to that wretched convent—and so much more was about to change as well.

Pierina had always felt the sting of being the younger girl and not nearly as smart as Alessandra. Well, no one in the parish was as smart as Alessandra, save their father. It was quite a trial being her sister—although (Pierina told herself) who would want to be as weirdly smart as Alessandra? Certainly not Pierina, who was generally
acknowledged to be the prettier of the two, with her lovely blond hair and blue eyes.

She felt a twinge of guilt as she thought about the pleasant hours she’d passed in the company of her stepmother, joking and talking about Alessandra’s freakishness.

Well, all would be well now, with this match their father had made for Alessandra with the first son of the great landowner of Lustrola. He sounded just perfect for her sister—equally enamored of books and study, and bent on getting a medical degree. How perfect it would be for Alessandra, to be a doctor’s wife! Their father said that he was a fine and well-made young man, too.

He couldn’t possibly be, Pierina was quite sure, as fine and well made a man as her Giorgio. But, still, she was glad that Alessandra wasn’t going to be stuck with some wretched old man three times her age.

She truly wanted her sister to be happy. No matter what their stepmother said, Alessandra—however odd she was—was every bit as much entitled as anyone to the pleasures of this life, which, God knew, was larded enough in sorrow to make a saint of each of us.

Pierina couldn’t wait to see her sister and show off her lovely new breasts, and to tell her she’d begun her flowering, too. Maybe she’d even beat Alessandra to the punch. Their stepmother said Pierina was young to have started, and she had to be especially careful, as she could be got with child because of it.

She told this to Giorgio sometimes when they kissed and kissed, early mornings in the workshop, when no one else was there. Pierina repeated her stepmother’s warning—but both she and Giorgio knew it was a good thing they’d be marrying soon.

Alessandra found Mina in the garden, gathering vegetables for their dinner. “Oh, please!” she said breathlessly. “I need your help, dear Mina.”

Mina put down her basket, and brushed the dirt off her hands. They bent their heads close together while Alessandra whispered her instructions.

When Otto asked about Sandro at dinner, and whether anyone knew where he was, Mina said that he was in his room and had asked not to be disturbed. Mina nonetheless brought a tray of food to Sandro’s door, knocked
softly, and was admitted inside.

After the midday rest, shortly after Sandro left the house, Mina waylaid Otto before he returned to town. “I was asked to give this to you.” It was a piece of parchment, folded and sealed with wax. Otto waited until he was well away from the house before he broke the seal—and noted, with annoyance at himself, that his hands were trembling as he read it.

Alessandra had let her hair grow out again in Bologna, having discovered during her first days there that many of the scholars—at least those who were not in holy orders and had enough hair to be vain about it—wore their tresses long.

The dress that she’d brought with her from Persiceto no longer fit—so she’d borrowed a gown from Mina, who had a comely shape and lovely clothes. Alessandra covered as much as she could of her hair and the gown with
Sandro’s winter cloak before leaving her room and heading for her secret little garden in the center of town.

The sun was low in the sky when she reached the gate that was missing its latch. The light was too low for reading, but perfect for the revelation she had in mind. She settled herself on the bench there, caught her breath, and waited for Otto.

“Surely your cloak is out of season,” said Otto as he pushed the gate closed behind him. He looked at the eyes peeking out from beneath the hood of Sandro’s cloak. They were golden with the light of the late-afternoon sun.

The hooded figure touched the bench. “Sit here!”

It took all of Otto’s self-control to resist the urge to take her in his arms. He did as she commanded, and reveled in his knowledge of the lovely girl who was hidden there beneath the heavy clothes.

“Close your eyes, if you please!”

“Hmm—famous last words of the robber about to smash his victim over the head….” Otto shut his eyes, wincing slightly.

Alessandra found just the right spot to place herself. She flung the cloak away from her and whispered a prayer. “You can look now,” she said, shaking out her curls.

The late-afternoon sun was behind her. What Otto saw was Alessandra outlined in gold. Alessandra as he’d never seen her before—as no one had ever seen her before—in all the ripeness of her young womanhood, as sweet and perfect as a golden pear that falls into your hand when you hold it underneath. The stem breaks as if by itself, because the golden fruit has reached the apogee of its perfection.

There are moments, now and again, when time itself seems to stop. This was one such moment. Otto and Alessandra saw each other as Adam and Eve must have seen each other in the Garden of Eden.

He walked closer to her, but it felt to both of them as if the space between them was shrinking. He looked at her face and when he was close enough, held her by the upper arms. He thought what a fool he’d been to ever believe that this luscious girl was a boy. “
You
are truly Alessandra Giliani? I have not dreamt this moment? I will not wake?”

They both stole a glance at the discarded cloak, which looked a bit like a person who’d expired there and then among the weeds.

“We’d better check to see if you’re dreaming,” she said. “Aristotle would definitely want us to.” She disengaged herself and pinched his hand, hard enough to make him cry out, although he was laughing as he did so. “Have you woken up?” she asked him.

“Not yet,” he answered, shaking his head. “There’s another test, though, highly recommended by Aristotle.” Leaning close, he softly kissed her neck and then her lips.

“I never ran across that work before in my father’s library,” she murmured, cognizant of the sudden change in her voice, which somehow seemed liquid now, as if the very words melted as they touched the air. She leaned in with her face tilted upward and found the kiss again.

Unlike the kisses that had come before, this one lasted a very long time. Alessandra and Otto both were dizzy and short of breath when they pushed a little away from each other—but only enough to be able to gaze at each other again.

“Marry me!” Otto’s voice had a huskiness she’d never
heard in it before. He said the words again: “Marry me, Alessandra!”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, his ear just next to her mouth. “I will not give up my studies. I will not let you—or anyone else—make me do so.”

“I would not want you to!” he said, holding both her hands against his chest. “It would be like clipping the wings of a falcon.”

“Ah, but falcons are dangerous birds!” She pressed her hands against him. “Your heart is beating fast, Otto.”

“And yours?” He slipped his hand under her chemise.

“Oh!” she gasped. And then, with a medical student’s interest, she noticed the bulge in his breeches. “Oh!” she said again.

“Darling girl,” he laughed, “my blood is rioting. And we must marry—we must! Without delay.”

They kissed again—a long, lingering, deliriously happy kiss.

Alessandra pushed him away and gulped the air. He took her hands in both of his, and brought them to his lips.

There was the oddest sensation in her hands then—
and she looked at them, as if expecting to see them glowing with heavenly light. She remembered that day—so long ago now—that she had looked at her hands, just so, in her father’s workshop. They were the hands of a woman now—and she knew their skill.

“As soon as we can, then, sweet Otto, we must look for a way to live together as man and wife.”

Nicco ran across his father in the stables, just as Carlo was about to climb onto his horse.

“Good timing, Nic! Give your old man a leg up, will you?”

Nicco laced his fingers together and let Carlo step into the sling they made. “May I ride out with you, sir?” he said, wiping his hands on his breeches.

Carlo took a moment to consider this. And then he shook his head. “Stay here and look out for our women.”

“Are you going away again?” Nicco eyed the well-packed saddlebags. “We might want to consult the planets first.”

“I have already—and found no injunction against travel.”

Nicco eyed his father warily. “You’ll see Alessandra?”

“Not likely!” Carlo laughed. “I’m off to Bologna to meet her bridegroom.”

“Wasn’t that the sound of thunder?”

“Nonsense! You’re as nervous as an old lady.”

“Well, then,” said Nicco, calculating how far he’d have to let his father get before he could overtake him undetected on the road. “
Buon viaggio
, Father! Make sure this Lustrolano has all the parts he needs to give me a nephew!”

“I will—and I’m going to do my best to see he hurries up about it.” He lowered his voice. “Pierina is giving me cause to think we’d better have this wedding soon.”

“Good Lord—Godspeed, then!”

“Godspeed, my son! With luck, I’ll clinch a wedding date before we meet again.”

“If only it were possible!” Nicco said under his breath as his father disappeared in a wake of dust. Then he ran toward the house to pack himself a few supplies, scattering the chickens in his path.

Alessandra, still wearing Mina’s dress but with the cloak thrown
over her arm, walked through the twilight into the crooked alleys of the district where the midwives and witches of Bologna were said to practice their arts.

She found herself on a street filled exclusively with women, apart from the urchins rushing about in their last games before heeding their mothers’ calls to come indoors. The stars began to bloom in an inky sky of periwinkle blue.

She stopped at an apothecary’s stall, noting that the
building looked a bit larger and better maintained than those on either side of it. Ducking inside, she saw jars and pots of herbs and tinctures lined up in neat rows on shelves behind the counter. A young girl sat on the floor, pounding some kind of root to a powder in a large mortar made of bronze. There was a fire burning in the grate, and the herbs hanging in dried bunches from the ceiling gave the place the scent of the wild hills Alessandra used to wander with Nicco.

The sign outside had the symbol of women healers along with the name of the proprietor.

Alessandra bowed to the woman who stood behind the counter sorting through a large pile of mushrooms. “Dame Edita, I presume?”

“I don’t do abortions,” the woman said without looking up from her sorting. “Go to Mistress Fulvia’s, right at the first crossing and second under the portico.”

“I’m in need of a room,” said Alessandra, putting one of Otto’s silver coins on the counter.

Dame Edita sighed, wiped her hands, and picked up the coin. Then she looked with narrowed eyes at Alessandra. “I have a room upstairs I’ve rented out from time to
time.” She looked at the unblemished young woman who stood before her. “It is few, the number of people who choose to live in this quarter if they don’t have to. And you’d better know, miss, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, that I will not allow prostitution in my house.”

“I am a student in the medical school—and there you have it,
Signora
, my reason for wanting to stay here, where the men of Bologna know they are not welcome.”

“Well, then—perhaps the room will suit you. It’s simple but clean.”

Alessandra smiled at her gratefully. “I’m sure it will suit me well—for both the refuge and the proximity to your craft. There is much that I would learn from the women healers of Bologna.”

“That’s the first time such a thing has been said to the likes of me by any scholar of the University.”

“And none too soon,” said Alessandra, accepting a glass of mead and sitting down. “I am no whore,
Signora
, but I am about to be married in secret—and my bridegroom will come to stay with me here sometimes. We agreed it would be the only place we could safely meet as man and wife, since in public I must go about in men’s clothes—for
my own safety, as I’m sure you understand.”

The apothecary took all this in, nodding. “I will appreciate having someone here who can read. And I will be glad to teach you whatever I know. For far too long there has been no passageway between the two worlds of healing.”

Nicco reached Mondino’s long before his father. A very surprised Mina received him in the family’s grand salon. “You’re Sandro’s brother?” she asked this tall and broad-faced youth with blue eyes.

“I am,
Signora
—and it’s most urgent that I speak with her. Him!”

Mina laid a hand on his arm. “She’s safe—you needn’t fear.”

“You know?”

Mina nodded.

“Our father is on his way, for other purposes—and he doesn’t know that Alessandra is here.” He wiped the sweat from his eyes. “I must warn her!”

Mina said, “They’ll be hard to find at this hour.”

“They?”

“Your sister has become—most attached to another
boarder here, her fellow in the medical school.”

“Oh, that’s just terrific,” said Nicco. “When Father has it in his mind to get her married straightaway.” He looked at Mina. “You say ‘attached.’ As fellow to fellow?”

“I’m afraid their attachment is of a more…passionate nature.”

Nicco held his head in his hands. “If Signore Agenio doesn’t kill him, then our father will—or he’ll kill Father and we’ll all be orphaned.”

“Signore Agenio?” Mina started laughing.

“I do not speak in jest, Madame!”

“I’m sure you don’t, dear young sir. But I doubt Signore Agenio would kill himself—and he’d certainly not want to harm his future father-in-law!” She smiled kindly at Nicco. “And, anyway, Otto is a most gentle and genial young man.”

“Holy Mother of God—excuse me,
Signora
! Is it possible…?”

“It seems to be,” said Mina, grabbing her cloak. “And I think we had better go find Sandro and tell him that his days are numbered.”

Arriving at the Porta San Felice, Carlo was surprised at how worn out he felt. Once through the gate, he stopped at a tavern in the parish where Otto Agenio was said to lodge, thinking to refresh himself while finding out how to get there.

The tavern was dark and shadowy, lit only by a single candle and the firelight. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, Carlo made out a sight that both shocked and upset him: two young men, hidden in a corner together and locked lip to lip in a passionate embrace.

He winced and looked away. And to think his own daughter had begged him to let her come and live in this corrupt and sinful place! How right he’d been to refuse her.

“I’m looking,” he said to the barman who poured his drink, “for a medical student named Otto Agenio, said to board at the home of Magister Mondino.” He put a coin down on the counter. “Do you have a boy who could show me the way?”

“There is no need, governor,” the barman said.

“Is Mondino’s house so close by?”

“Not exceedingly close, but…” The barman began
to speak in an exaggeratedly loud voice. “But if someone wanted to find—
Otto Agenio
—he wouldn’t have far to go.”

There was no one else in the tavern but Carlo, the barman, the two men besotted with each other, and a marmalade cat curled up and purring by the fire. The two men sat apart now, one trying madly to hide his face in the folds of his cloak.

Carlo looked back at the barman, who nodded. “Oh, Lord,” he said, holding his head in his hand. And then, “I will not countenance it!” He drank down his drink in one toss and straightened his clothes. “Signore Agenio,” he boomed, “you might well hang your head in shame before the man who was prepared to give you his precious daughter!”

But it was the other man, the taller one, who came toward him. He faced Carlo, then extended his hand to his lover, a slender man who seemed hardly older than a boy, as Carlo now saw when he raised his pretty face and spoke the word, “Papa!”

Carlo staggered backward, tripped on the cat, and nearly fell into the fire.

Alessandra ran straight into his arms. “Can you ever forgive me?”

Carlo pushed back her hood and held her face in both his hands, shaking his head in disbelief. Letting go, he looked at Otto, but no words would come—or none would emerge from the battle of emotions raging inside him.

And then he said, “I will deal with you later, Alessandra!” He turned to Otto. “Do you understand who this person is?”

Otto dropped to his knees before him. “I do indeed, sir—although I will admit that it took me rather a long time to see through your daughter’s disguise. But I can assure you that I loved her in both guises, first as a friend and now”—he held out his hand to Alessandra, who knelt beside him—“as my wife.”

Nicco and Mina burst into the tavern just in time to see the newlyweds kneeling at Carlo’s feet. Alessandra’s face broke into a great smile at the sight of her brother. She jumped up and ran toward him, and he spun her around as he used to do so long ago, when they were both children. Once Alessandra’s feet were on the ground again, Nicco took
Otto’s hands, and enveloped him in a warm embrace.

“We must have a feast,” said Mina, looking on.

“We must have a wedding!” added Nicco.

Alessandra and Otto looked at each other. “We’ve already said our vows before a priest. But it would please me greatly, Papa, if we could have a wedding—a proper wedding, at home.”

They waited until just after Easter, when Otto’s family journeyed to Persiceto. Mondino’s clan came, too, as well as several of Otto’s friends from the University. Every one of the students asked where Sandro was—and none of them saw anything other than the brilliant and beautiful girl Otto’s family had snagged for him. Alessandra thought, once again, how people see what they expect to see, even when something quite contrary to their expectations is right before their eyes.

At her own insistence, Alessandra wore her mother’s wedding gown, which Emilia took great pains to refresh and shake out. Pierina was happy enough to wear the magnificent blue silk dress, which Alessandra arranged to have brought over from the convent; it arrived in Persiceto at
more or less the same time as she did. Ursula was so taken up with all the preparations needed for the feast—and so focused on Pierina—that she didn’t bother Alessandra with questions or complaints. The girl was marrying at last—and to Ursula, this was all that mattered.

There was food enough to feed family and friends, and a bevy of servants, students, and beggars besides, over the course of two full days. Lodovico played the lute, Giorgio and Pierina sang, and Carlo and Mondino both got so drunk that they danced the
tarantella
. Mina almost wet herself from laughing.

The festivities went on for three days. Nicco flirted with Maxie so ardently that Horabilli began to think she would be the only one of the daughters left unmarried. The innkeeper of Persiceto made plans to add a new room with his windfall, and the stone mason was happy in his turn to receive more work, as his wife was pregnant with a new baby. And Alessandra and Otto were as delighted as any newlyweds have ever been, in love with each other and, by extension, with the whole world.

Bene had been invited, but didn’t come—which everyone agreed was a shame.

With Mina’s help, the newlyweds rented a small house not far from Mondino’s. They let it be known that Alessandra’s cousin—none other than the famous Sandro—would be boarding with them. No one who wasn’t in on Alessandra’s secret thought it strange to see Otto and Sandro together. But a couple of people remarked, in passing, that they had yet to see Sandro with his pretty cousin from Persiceto.

Alessandra went one day to the quarter where the Jews lived. And there she watched a butcher kill a calf, slitting its throat and then hanging it upside down on a hook overhanging a bucket. She actually looked into the calf’s still-living eye while the blood and the life drained out of it, and she thought about the difference between the moment when it was alive and the moment when it was dead. She remembered then her dream about the two rivers, but had no sense yet of its meaning.

She passed a stall that had books in it, some of them quite beautifully illuminated, although made of paper rather than parchment and all of them written in what she took to be Hebrew or Arabic. In one of these there
was a simple drawing of a person showing the heart and the lungs and—painted in bloodred ink and blue—the veins and the arteries.

She asked the bookseller how much he wanted for it but he only laughed at her. She went home and discussed the matter with Otto. And then she came back with two gold coins and bought the book that so intrigued her. She wanted to pay the Jewish merchant to translate the words accompanying the drawing of the heart and lungs. But he protested that he could read very little Arabic, and only poetry. Nonetheless, she made him write down for her, in the Latin alphabet, the name of the man who authored the book. It was Ibn al-Nafis, who was born in Damascus, the bookseller told her—everyone knew of him in the Oriental world. He was a great scholar of law, as well as medicine and philosophy, and had been the personal physician to the Sultan.

Alessandra kept the book close by her bed, where she looked at it every night, trying to parse out what the pictures meant even though she couldn’t make any sense of the words.

On the days when there weren’t any lectures she
wanted to attend, she took to revisiting the witches’ quarter. Dame Edita was happy enough to have Alessandra come along with her to gather the ingredients for her medicines. There were hundreds and hundreds of these, from acacia to zedoary, from Armenian bole to sea holly, roebuck rennet, pennywort, and honeysuckle. Slaked lime, lizard, and knotgrass. St. John’s wort and serviceberry. Wood sage and the juice of wild cabbage.

Mondino himself was familiar with such matters, as his own grandfather had been an apothecary. But Dame Edita’s knowledge dwarfed the compendium of
materia medica
that Mondino knew by heart.

Aware that Alessandra could read Latin—and more trusting of her now—Dame Edita pulled from her trunk an ancient, recipe-stained copy of
The Trotula
, a centuries-old manual for the medical treatment of women, including beauty remedies. The book had been treated as a sacred object by her mother and her mother’s mother, even though none of them could read it. As Alessandra, by candlelight after business hours, translated the book into the vernacular, paragraph by paragraph, Dame Edita only nodded—and sometimes smiled. The knowledge had been
passed down to her, almost word for word.

But Alessandra learned a great deal in this reading—and it struck her how odd it was that there seemed to be a parallel world of women’s medicine, where women were in charge. And another world of Oriental medicine, if her book by Ibn al-Nafis was any indication of the depth of learning there in the faraway lands of the Levant. It made her grateful that she’d come to this place that was shunned by so many.

One day when she was visiting, hooded agents of the
Podestà
came down the alleyway, pounding at every door, looking for a midwife who was known to everyone there—and yet everyone there denied ever having heard of her. They left with their pikes and their hangman’s noose.

“Any woman with healing powers,” Dame Edita explained to Alessandra, who’d been frightened for her friend, “whether a witch or a future saint, causes their manhood to shrink, and calls out the killers among them.”