Plague in the Mirror (13 page)

“Oh, you are so good, aren’t you? You despise cruelty. You are like a good little nun. You are no use to him at all.”

Him.
That pronoun again.

They have reached the workshop, and Cristofana peers around the loose shutter, spying.

May sidles up next to her, eager and afraid at once. She wants to see him again, badly, as always, and there’s a kind of shame in that. It clouds her judgment, and Cristofana knows it. She’s the
only
one who knows. May feels complicit in something, and this helpless craving for something to happen, for relief, is agonizing. “How can you stand to be you?” May hisses near the other girl’s ear.

But together they admire his lean back in a soiled linen shirt, the thoughtful tilt of the black back of his head, the geometry of his raised arm. There is color everywhere, streaking his clothes, the stiff chair and those beautiful hands, speckling the plank floor. The workshop is a sweaty, close space, full of wooden bowls of ground pigment and sticky paint, hunks of half-chiseled stone, piles of charcoal-marked pages, sheets of hammered bronze, dust falling through beams of light, the ubiquitous chickens picking through curls of wood for a dropped almond. Squat candles burn on an iron stand. “The same way I can do this. Watch, now. His light is burning for me.”

She has her hand on the door latch before May can blink, and suddenly Cristofana’s inside. It’s as if a real person has walked onto a television set, into the screen. He doesn’t flinch when she comes slinking up from behind. She lifts a leg and swivels, sliding between the artist and his easel, settling on his lap, facing him, and for a moment he looks around the empty workshop, stunned and bewildered, but he soon relents hungrily, hands moving over her neck and breasts. She kisses him hard, grinding on his lap, and May turns away in an agony of disgust. Is he kissing Cristofana because she’s there, because he can, the way May imagines she kissed Liam?
Does he think it’s me? Doesn’t he know it isn’t? Why should he care? He thought I was dead. . . .

Her rage doesn’t make it any easier to look away from the spectacle in front of her, her artist’s strong, scarred hands roving over Cristofana’s face, in her hair.
Mine,
May thinks — and this childish greed is new and terrible —
mine.

Cristofana breaks the seal of their kiss, arching her back, glancing up at the window for effect, wiping her smug mouth. The two exchange a few words May can’t hear, their foreheads touching, his mouth brushing her neck. Almost as quickly as she slipped away, Cristofana returns, adjusting her clothes. May stands speechless by her mirror image until it presumes to speak in that low, dire voice May hates, the one that purrs like a secret. “He will die, you know. More important, I will die, unless you save me.
Save me,
and take him for your trouble.”

Their eyes lock.

“Oh, his hands feel good,
bella.
I must tell you. He is an apprentice only, but a master with his hands, and he tastes like honey from the hills. His mouth is warm, and twice already he has painted me nude.”

“Shut up, you”— it slips out before May can stop it, a word she doesn’t use, just wouldn’t ordinarily use, but this anger is so rich, so comforting —“
bitch.”

“Now then, my friend, what harm in it? In being a little dog, a little she-dog, licking his —?”

“Shut
up!

“He saw you then, but now he sees only me. He thinks I am you, and I will treat him unkindly in your name. I will seduce him and break his heart. I will ruin his good, damaged soul and take his smile forever in your honor, and he will think all along it was you, the girl who came from another world and loved him with her eyes.

“You should not go away so long,
bella.
You never know what will happen, and you care too little for him. You care too little for me when you might help me. You have but one choice and that is to
make
a choice.

“Stay here. Take your chances with Marco. The pestilence will pass, and he will be a great artist like his master, one of your Renaissance men — with all the best patrons one day, all the best commissions — and you will wear silk like my lady did, before she died in a puddle of filth, before the buboes came.

“Stay, and I will go, and we will cheat time, which will not otherwise let us each have what we want.”

“I don’t know what I want,” May admits, hating herself for it, and somewhere in the back of her head, she hears her mom’s voice intruding, calm and measured — on the day she and Dad broke the news — her own mother’s voice, saying, “There is no logic in love, no knowing when it will come . . . or go.” Even her father seemed to hold with this ridiculous statement, murmuring agreement, nodding meekly.

Is this love?

How tame May has been all her life, how trusting and well behaved and unimaginative. Always doing the right, expected thing.
I am not myself.
Even her parents are braver, and May feels the injustice of this like a red blaze, a fury she turns on her double. “Not that your plan is in any way, shape, or form
sane.
Has it ever occurred to you that I like my life?”

“Has it ever occurred to
you
? I have watched you — when you didn’t know I was there — sitting glumly with your loved ones, picking at your food (so much food!). You have everything. You deserve none of it.”

They stare at each other until Cristofana resumes in her headlong way. “But I digress. Only think: you and Marco will have babies, and you will keep kittens, fat kittens — you’ll be a hero to kittens — and I will have —”

What?
May thinks, smelling or imagining the hint of sickness and decay in the air, the chill damp in the stones, easily eclipsed in her mind by the warmth of his hands, his hot eyes on her.
I am not myself.
She shakes her head, shakes herself sensible. “I’m going home to think. But first tell me — you’re obviously dying to — what
you’ll
have. What’s in it for you . . . after you’ve saved your sorry ass?”

“What do you suppose?” May’s twin blinks back at her, the soul of patience. “I will have everything that is yours,
bella.
” She glances over May’s shoulder. “Now, go from me. I have an unpleasant errand.”

May glares at her. Cristofana is a schemer, a survivor, and it makes sense that assuming May’s identity would offer safe haven in an alien world. It would buy her time to orient herself.
The more she knows about my life, the more prepared she’ll be to take it over.
“Tell me how the portal works,” May demands, remembering that she has questions of her own. “How are you doing this?”

“The spells are here. And here.” Cristofana touches her palm to her forehead, her chest. “They can’t be told or sold or borrowed.” She walks away, calling over her shoulder. “Make the choice with your heart,
bella,
not fear, and make it soon. I grow weary, waiting.”

M
ay watches her double walk away, the long tangle of dirty-blond hair laced through with tiny dreadlock braids, ribbons, and straw, her scavenged gown-of-the-day, a busty plum number, dragging in the muck. Watching her grow smaller on the horizon, a purplish speck, May panics. Letting Cristofana out of her sight here is like losing sight of herself somehow, and when the other girl veers down a crooked alleyway, May starts after her, a ghost streaking the air.

May follows through a stony labyrinth of streets, keeping well out of view, and then across a busy covered bridge. She guesses it’s an earlier incarnation (this version looks almost newly constructed) of Ponte Vecchio, but instead of the rows of flags and
trattoria
s and stalls offering souvenirs and fancy jewelry, there are tables manned by burly butchers and tradesmen advertising their wares. Luckily there’s enough streaming light inside to conceal her as she dodges in and out of the shifting crowd.

Through the archways, May sees the river below, wide and flat and shining, dotted with tiny men rowing tiny boats (though May knows that up close they’re probably the long
barchetta
s still used, in the future, to give river tours).

When Cristofana steps onto the Arno’s other bank, though, May hesitates. There isn’t a cloud in the perfect blue sky today, but it’s hard to believe you’re invisible — when you aren’t used to being — so as she comes into the open, May has to make it unaccosted past one or two bridge-bound travelers before she can relax. When no one notices her on the winding cart road through green and gold hills dotted with cypress and silvery olive trees, she breathes easier, keeping her plum-colored target in view.

At last Cristofana turns down a scrubby dirt pathway with grass and blue chicory growing around the wheel tracks, startling a wild rabbit or hare out of hiding. She stops at what appears to be a church, if the crude wooden cross out front is any clue, or perhaps a convent. It’s a shabby building with a garden and a small stable off to one side, though there’s something familiar about the layout of the buildings or the angle of the view, and it hits May that the trek she just made follows the same route — through a much-changed, or at least more populated, landscape — that she and Gwen and Liam took down from that bed-and-breakfast in the hills the day they first arrived in Florence City Center. The only difference was that their cab had crossed one of the handful of other city bridges. Future Ponte Vecchio was open only to foot traffic.

Was this the original “medieval nunnery” mentioned in the B&B’s brochure?

Her double lurks out front for a long time, pacing back and forth as if trying to make up her mind. The sound of bells nearby seems to trigger a decision, and rather than lift the iron knocker, she slips around the long, low stone building and cautiously approaches a small fenced kitchen garden in back. Here, three women wearing black veils and dresses of rough brown cloth kneel in the soil, weeding.

Cristofana stands stock-still by the figure nearest the gate, her shadow falling over a woman with hollow eyes and hair pulled back severely under her veil. She looks to be about ten years older than Cristofana but is possibly younger, May thinks, and worn down by what must be a difficult life of labor and sacrifice.

May floats closer to get within earshot, holding her breath, feeling exposed, though she isn’t.

It takes the woman a long while to look up, as if she’s delaying on purpose, but the minute she lifts her face, May sees the resemblance. The woman stands, wiping earth-black hands on her sack dress, and under her steady gaze, Cristofana averts her eyes. The two kneeling nuns now stand, too, nodding or bowing as they pass Cristofana, filing out of the fenced-in garden in silence. They disappear inside the convent.

“Marietta,” Cristofana says crisply. Her gaze is still turned to the ground, from what May can tell, and her knotted hands fidget behind her back. What she’s really doing, May sees, is slipping that honking red ruby off her finger. The ring vanishes into her basket. “I mean, Suor Arcangela, of course.”

“Of course you do.” The woman regards the girl, who must look garish to her, in her plum-colored dress and ratty ribbons. With a curt nod, Marietta, or Sister Arcangela, walks the length of the fence, her own hands stiff behind her back. “Cristofana.” Her face is hard to read. “You have traveled long?”

“You are well,” the other asks with a contemptuous wave, “here?”

“I am always well.” The nun never turns her grave eyes from the other’s dress. “I need for little . . . here.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Cristofana complains, her voice rising. “I read your letters. With your vow of poverty, you sleep in the straw on the hard ground. You wake in the night for Matins. You pad barefoot to meet your bridegroom Christ by candlelight. You are a slave, and it shows in every line on your face.”

The nun’s face flushes red. “And you are an aberration.” She breathes deeply, composing herself. “God, who is Master of all, forgives you, sister, as do my thirty true sisters. As do I,” she adds, almost kindly, though the edge in her voice is obvious. “It’s been some time since I wrote to our mother, who for too long didn’t answer. You look ridiculous,” she blurts out, a distracted smile ghosting on her lips, “of course, as always — a preening doll. Like her.”

Cristofana drops into a curtsy. “There is reason enough Mamma stopped writing, but where to begin. You do not refuse to speak her language, I see.”

“It is not her language I object to . . . or her nation of origin. Our mother may be vain and foolish, but she turns a pretty phrase, and I welcome the chance to practice the English tongue. My studies occupy me much. Even now. Even . . . here,” the woman adds, parroting her younger sister’s tone. Her face changes — softens. “You have the news, then, you and Mamma?”

Cristofana turns away, shading her eyes against the glare, bracing herself, probably.

“Babbo is dead.”

There’s nothing in her expression to suggest that this news upsets her. No surprise. No change in her posture. But by now, May knows Cristofana well. Something has collapsed in her. Broken.

“Taken by the Scourge at sea,” continues Suor Arcangela, who was once plain old Marietta, somebody’s big sister. Cristofana isn’t quite an orphan, after all. “So many long years at sea, and this as his homecoming. Ludovico, his loyal servant, survived — one of the few aboard who did — and delivered Sire’s diary. He could not find Mother to notify her, and later I will ask you why not.”