Page 2 of The Stone Witch of Florence

ONE

HER OWN SELF

About 1330, City of Genoa

I n the very old days, before even Rome was great, there were many doctors and witches in Italy who used stones and plants and odd bits of animals to make things happen that wouldn’t otherwise. They might, for instance, pound pastes to banish madness, or arrange amulets on women’s beds to ease their labor. They could build a charm to warn a prosperous lord when his food was poisoned, and read the future in birds’ guts, folding them inside parchment packets to seal the prophecies. Powerful magi hoarded precious gems with secret words engraved upon them, and old women mended broken hearts with bundles of parsley tied up just so.

As Christianity spread, overtaking the ancient religions, the princes and priests of this new church became greedy in their power. Jealous and afraid of the old ways, they condemned any miraculous event with roots outside of Christian ritual. Those who remained artful in the ancient secrets, who remembered how to coax magic from stones and potions from plants, found it prudent to become quiet in their practices. The ones who were brash lost their livelihoods, and found themselves prodded with all sorts of unpleasant and spiky things.

It was into this fraught time that Ginevra di Gasparo was born, to parents of no great importance, about the year 1320.

Her city of Genoa was built right up against the sea inside a large and beautiful harbor. It was filled with sand-colored buildings topped with red tile roofs, all jumbled up with one another and pressed out against concentric rings of stone defense walls. Every day, vessels arrived, sitting low in the water with holds full of treasure from Africa or Britain or some such place. And each year, the Genoese trade routes stretched out farther, like the fingers of an eager hand, poking their way through to Crimea, Antioch, and Tripoli. Merchants returned with gold-threaded tapestries from Flanders, blue lapis lazuli from Kabul, cotton gauze from Egypt, and perfumed woods from the forests of Ethiopia.

From an early age, Ginevra knew about the luxurious cargoes and important transactions taking place in her city, but as a daughter of poor fishing folk, her life was generally devoid of fine things. The pungent scents of fermenting fish and pitch boiled by shipbuilders permeated the district where she lived, so Ginevra’s light hair and undyed wool dress always smelled of dockside industry. Her father, Gasparo, made his living fishing for the red corals that grew in sharp crags on the sea bottom. From the time she was very small, Ginevra’s father would take her out onto the water to help him with his work. Instead of a net, they would drop a sort of wooden cross from their little boat and drag it across the reefs to crack the corals from their rocky bases. The slick lava-red branches were hauled into the boat and laid out to dry, and Ginevra would watch the tiny white polyps who lived in the coral pulse and writhe about as they suffocated in the air. This filled her with sorrow, because she did not like to see living things suffer. After the harvest, Ginevra’s mother, Camiola, would break the dead corals apart. Eventually the pieces would be sent to nimble-fingered orphan girls who polished them into beads to be strung as rosaries, mounted in monstrances, or made into pairs of bracelets that were put on babies to keep them safe.

The corals processed by Gasparo and Camiola were pledged, at deep discount, to a merchant who built his own fortune at the port long ago and now used violence to ensure no others could follow the path he took for success. But, in defiance of the cartel, Gasparo made an arrangement with an old woman called Monna Vermilia, reserving a small portion of his coral for her each week.

To avoid attention from the merchant’s agents, Gasparo sent his daughter to the old woman’s dingy abode to deliver the parcels of tiny red twigs hidden inside a round of stale bread. Vermilia needed the corals because she still knew the old ways of healing and made her living from them. She said special blessings over the branches and put them on cords, then sold them cheaply to couples who could not afford polished bracelets but were still afraid for their babies. She sold them also to sailors to protect them from drowning, and shopkeepers afraid of losing their inventory.

Ginevra did not know it, nor did her parents, but she had, through her mother’s side, the blood of a priestess who could talk to oak trees. And through her father, she was descended from a long line of gentlemen soothsayers, who were shunned after auguring that a young viscountess would betray her husband with a servant (she did). Neither Gasparo nor Camiola had inherited enough magic to amount to anything unusual. But because Ginevra possessed a bit from both of them, she was born with an aptitude . And when she walked, the invisible golden strings of the universe were plucked and caused the faintest vibrations in the air, and it was through these strings that the old magic could flow.

Though eccentric in appearance, Vermilia was no fraud. She was attached to a few of these golden strings herself, and when Ginevra delivered the first loaf of clandestine coral Vermilia felt the vibrations. In the blackest morning of the month, she killed a little sparrow and spilled its blood and saw in the drops that the child could be capable of great things if she was correctly guided. Monna Vermilia went to the girl’s parents and asked if she might have her as help. Gasparo balked at first, but his wife told him he’d be a fool to refuse a woman like Vermilia.

So, it was agreed that for two weeks out of every month the girl would spend her days with the elderly healer. Ginevra was nervous about this new arrangement. Her parents had never given her to another person before and she wasn’t sure what bad thing she had done to deserve it. On her first day as helper, she squeezed through Monna Vermilia’s narrow door, marked by a tiny carving of a snake crawling through a coral branch. Inside, she observed a woman with a face so ancient it practically disappeared beneath its wrinkles. Vermilia wore a black dress and tight hood as if she were a widow, though she had never married, and frizzled gray strands stuck out of it, framing her face like the tentacles of a sea anemone. On her left hand, she wore a ring set with a large orange stone carved with a winged figure. Ginevra felt oddly drawn to the jewel and stared hard at it, forgetting her manners.

“Do you know why you’re here, child?”

Ginevra’s gaze snapped back to the weathered face and she shook her head “no.” She looked around and then shifted and hunched her shoulders inward to avoid the sticky pots of goo, lichen balls, and stacks of dead crabs that leaned up on walls and lay in piles upon the floor.

“Close your eyes,” commanded Vermilia, “and listen. And tell me what you know.”

“I know that Mary is the Mother of God, and all the saints are to His glory—”

“Don’t tell me what you’ve been taught, tell me what you know.”

Ginevra was frightened and stepped backward toward the narrow door. With the agility of a much younger woman, Vermilia darted behind her and pulled it closed.

“Now, make your mind dark and quiet like this room. And tell me what you know.”

Ginevra decided that to start talking was her only chance of escape. She closed her eyes. “I know... I know that there are seeds in the dirt waiting to grow if we would stop packing it down with our feet. I know that the oysters in the harbor can never love each other because they love only their pearls. I know that there are many people who feel very itchy, and twice as many over who are worried about...about going bald?” She clasped her hand over her mouth, shocked at her strange babbling.

But Vermilia smiled. “Do you understand how you can know these things?”

“I don’t know why I said any of it. Please, don’t tell my parents—please, can I go home—”

“You know this because you are tied to the strings that are tied to everything else. To the past and the future, to other people, to creatures and to plants and to stones.”

Ginevra fanned out her fingers and wiggled them but she saw nothing, felt no pull. She looked back, bewildered at Monna Vermilia.

“They are invisible to us, but they have always been there,” offered the old woman. “There used to be more of us that could feel their pull. Now, not so many. But you are special, like me. It is in your blood.”

Ginevra looked again at the blue veins in her hands, which seemed so normal, so like everyone else’s. Vermilia clasped her own gnarled hand over Ginevra’s. “And because we are special, it is our duty to help those who are not.”

Ginevra tried to pull away but Vermilia’s grip was firm. “Close your eyes.”

She struggled and a pot of goo fell off a shelf and shattered on the floor. “Close your eyes, I said!”

The girl obeyed. She knew that the city walls had secrets they would never tell. That the favorite food of fishes was beautiful stones. That the shade of a strawberry plant was the thing held most precious by worms. And she knew—she knew—that Vermilia was a friend. Her fear gave way to a most exquisite joy. She opened her eyes. The room appeared bright now. The balls of lichen seemed to shimmer, the stacks of dead crabs emitted rays of light. She was more than a helper on her father’s fishing boat. She was her own self; a conduit through which the secret powers of the earth would be concentrated into visible good.