Plague in the Mirror (23 page)

May almost wishes she were a ghost again, safe from hard edges, from the confusion Cristofana has left them in. Pippa’s savage cries tempt her forward — May wants to help, make it stop — but she’s frozen to the spot.

When the cries cease, Marco nestles Pippa in the big bed again, gating her in with a rolled blanket like a pro. He turns with a weary sigh, an air of familiarity as if to say,
You deal with it,
as if May were in fact a young mother and he the stay-at-home dad who’s reached his limit. This is not a sensation she’s ready to have, and it seems to May, somewhat irrationally, that Cristofana has kept her promise. She has ruined everything.

I will take his smile forever, in your honor, and he will think all along it was you.

What else would Marco think? She and Cristofana are one and the same to him, and there’s no telling what horrors or humiliations he’s suffered on her watch.

May can’t look at him. She doesn’t dare. For all she knows, he hates her now or thinks she’s a monster. Would he even look at her again the way he did the day he mended her knee? What if the man she saw looking out at her through laughing amber eyes that day no longer exists — destroyed by the plague, or Cristofana, or both?

Even Pippa doesn’t laugh or babble when May approaches her now. She rolls away with her thumb in her mouth, her forehead sweaty, her feet and knees filthy from that morning’s outing. The thumb doesn’t soothe her, and in no time she’s wailing again, belly down, kicking her feet with a dull thump on the mattress, pitiful and inconsolable. She’s obviously hungry, but May has no idea what they’ve been feeding her. She feels useless, horrible, but Marco has already mashed up a dish of what looks like fruit with porridge.
Good,
May thinks,
no wet nurse need apply,
relieved that Pippa can manage hard food.

The little girl eats with a pout on her face, squinting at her surrogate father until he scowls back playfully. After she’s had her fill, Pippa collapses over her pile of covers and capes, sucking her thumb until the hand falls away in sleep.

Then things get really awkward.

Marco just sits there, watching May from his chair. He can’t seem to decide whether he loves her or hates her. Sometimes his amber eyes pierce in a way that makes her aware of every inch of her body. Sometimes he clamps them closed as if he can’t stand the sight of her.
Thanks, Cristofana,
thinks May, not knowing what to address first.

She has memorized the words for
I’m sorry
but doesn’t speak them. He doesn’t speak, either, but when finally May looks at him as directly as she can, she feels his eyes warm to her, feels him watching her even after she looks away.

He gets up, walks to the front display window, and folds the inside shutters closed. He crosses back to her with that alarming look on his face, then eases her back against the wall. It might be anything, that look, and it’s a little of everything: lust, pleading, accusation, anger . . . definitely exhaustion. He smells rank and rich, and it dizzies her. May read somewhere in Gwen’s heaps of museum and gallery materials that medieval people rarely bathed. They carried around carved apples full of herbs and spices, or dried posies, to trick their noses and distract from the stench everywhere. She can’t be smelling too good herself at this point. He has her pinned, and when he kisses her, deep and hard, with a familiarity that frightens and excites her, May knows for sure that he has this all wrong. He thinks she’s Cristofana. In May’s absence, some kind of twisted intimacy has obviously developed between them, because he seems as likely to strangle as to keep kissing this lunatic girl who went away and left him with a child.

At the moment, May doesn’t care if she isn’t that girl. She can’t help it. She kisses him back, and back and back.

Later, she’ll make Marco understand what he’s been dealing with, who he’s been dealing with, and who he hasn’t.

But for now he’s longed for her, and he’s angry, and it’s all her fault.
All my fault,
thinks May irrationally, confused by her own willingness to go along, to let him believe whatever he wants, believe anything if she can own his sigh of resignation and his mouth moving over hers, and the pressure of his hands, the way he breathes her in and takes her breath. If it lets her keep this lonely, beautiful stranger for herself — keep him close, needing her — then she’ll be anyone, for a while, even Cristofana.

He’s so intense she doesn’t know what to do . . . until she does. The sleeping child has the bed, so they kneel together in a crouch, settling on the floor among coils of rope and oily stains and splinters and sawdust and chicken feathers.

It’s hard to look at him as he eases her down, his eyes urgent and sorrowful while he undresses and lowers himself over, pulling her middle close in rough, paint-smeared hands, smoothing the sides of her crimson gown up. So she meets the blank stare of an unfinished sculpture beyond them, until at last he starts kissing her again, and she kisses back, a little fiercely, rolling on top of him in a bliss of rising away and falling and sliding and biting her lip as he moves inside her, moves and moves, and it’s like reeling or flying apart.

May wakes later on splintery hardwood, tucked into the same wool blanket she had outside, like a mummy in her bandages. It’s sticky hot because he’s sealed her in on every side, sweetly, thoughtfully, and now he sits in a chair in a corner, eating an apple. With Pippa wide awake and prancing first in her big bird’s nest, blowing feathers off pudgy palms, and then on the bed, he’s been watching May sleep. There is nothing quite like being looked at that way by an artist.

May feels sore and ripe and real and wonders did she really lose her virginity with . . . what? A man who no longer exists? An afterimage? How could something that physical not be real? She isn’t sorry or disappointed, not at all, but there’s something bittersweet because of Liam. She wouldn’t change anything, May thinks, meeting Marco’s dark eyes, wouldn’t give this back or undo it, but part of her feels like a thief.

He takes another bite of the apple, green and bruised, his gaze intent on her. He is too beautiful for words.

Good thing, because she doesn’t have any.

May rises slowly, adjusting her mangled gown. She folds the blanket, sets it aside, and tidies up a little. Like a visitor. Because in the end she’s just a visitor, isn’t she? A traveler. No matter what Cristofana thinks.

Time will be tricked but never cheated.

All this suspect activity visibly alarms Marco, who relaxes only when she leads him to the bed. They lie beside Pippa, and May sleeps like Pippa in the heat of Marco’s arms, which tighten around them in the night whenever one or the other tosses and turns. Later, he wakes again to find her by the window. May lets him blot away her tears with his thumbs, and his own eyes are so worried, so haunted, she strains for words. “I won’t leave you,” she says.

It’s the best lie she can think of —
can’t
and
won’t
not being the same thing — and she lets him lead her back to bed. They lie a long time in silence, face-to-face in the moonlight with Pippa behind them, before he says anything.

Marco doesn’t talk much, as a rule, and doesn’t seem concerned that she doesn’t, either. But now he asks, “
Perché
?” hoarsely, almost mournfully, running his fingers along the edge of her face.

Why?

Why what?

Why would she come back? Or why would she leave him?

Such a big little word,
why.

O
nce she’s positive she hasn’t infected them, when they, too, exhibit no signs of plague, May relaxes into the uneasy rhythms of the household.

Marco wakes first, rousing Pippa before dawn to fish and hunt frogs by the river. He always seems surprised when May elects to go along, which suggests that Cristofana didn’t. He seems surprised by many things, with good reason, and over the course of a day, May often looks up and finds him watching her, puzzling. Her Italian is so halting that she’s more or less stopped talking voluntarily. If he speaks, she does her best to answer, but sometimes she just stares back blankly, mute and sorry.

When the river fog burns off, the trio heads back to pick over scant goods in various black-market haunts in the neighborhood, weed around the salad greens, herbs, and tomatoes in the kitchen garden, or, while Pippa naps, manage the dormant workshop.

Through a mostly wordless shorthand system they’ve developed, talking with their eyes and their hands, Marco teaches her to grind pigment for paint and help sort his sprawl of correspondence, cracked parchments, old marble orders, and shipping documents, all more or less by appearance. What she can’t explain is that she took Italian her sophomore year of high school and reads the language way better than she speaks it, so some documents are of real interest.

Not long before the Great Mortality ravaged Florence — she learns in letters from his father and brother addressed from a village near Orvieto — Marco was admitted into the guild, the Company of Saint Luke, meaning that one day he’ll open an independent workshop and become his own master, with his own powerful patron.

Thanks to Gwen, May knows that even when he sets up shop for himself, Marco won’t be free to paint the images that seem to crowd his mind and scream for color. Like his late master, an early plague victim, Marco will have a wealthy patron who chooses his subjects and influences his style and the way he works. Most commissions will have religious themes, and the patron will flatter and insert himself into every allegory and heroic pose, whether the artist wants him there or not.

Marco’s shop, like this one — which will pass to his master’s heirs once the plague is sorted out — will probably be on the ground floor of a city-center building, a simple shop that could as easily be a shoemaker’s or a butcher’s. It will throng with boarders, apprentices, and assistants, and churn out suits of armor, theatrical costumes, and tombstones as well as sculpture and altarpieces, keeping enough chickens underfoot to feed everyone and provide eggs for tempera to bind the pigments for paint.

In an unsent letter to his brother, Marco complains (though May’s translation is painful):

In another, earlier letter, also unsent, Marco wrote of there being no one left alive in a certain church to check his fresco work:

In the afternoon, until the light dies, Marco paints — sometimes on a canvas, but more often right on the rear plaster wall of the workshop, fresco-style — and May knows enough to stay invisible, though he never asks her to. Even Pippa seems to get it, content to play in the garden with Cristofana’s stash of stolen cards and dice games, tops and balls. There’s even a wooden sword out there, a paint-chipped hobbyhorse.

Marco works tirelessly, obsessively, stretching his aching arm. He’ll start with a formal outline on paper — today another Madonna and Child, drawn and pricked through with hundreds of tiny painstaking holes. He fixes the paper to the wall, shakes charcoal dust over, and paints the form beneath the page. Only he doesn’t, really.

Today the outline of loving arms extended, the mother’s secret smile, the infant, plump and assured, morph into a grinning, implacable skeleton, Death on a gaunt horse, reaching down for a child, robbing a mother of hope.

“I will paint it over,” he tells her later in Italian, with a sigh of what can only be regret, because in his apologetic view, the work is good — like the sprawling nude and the demon in chains the days before — very good. His best yet. “Tomorrow. I will try again.” He says it as if this is what she needs to hear, what she deserves.

At night they sleep in a sweaty tangle, all three, and this dark man kisses their foreheads while they dream.

There is something so deceptively simple in all this, so natural and domestic, that May almost forgets that she’s been robbed.

She almost lets herself fall head over heels in love with Marco, with Pippa, with the early-morning fishing excursions, and the smell of rosemary in the little crowded city garden, and the act of kneading bread dough made from scratch, from grain, baking it in an oven that’s no more than a hole in the wall. With all of it.