Page 22 of The Stone Witch of Florence

TWENTY-ONE

TRAFFICKING OF NECROMANTIC BOOKS

1340, City of Florence

A fter being turned out of the Aldobrandini sick room, Ginevra walked back to Sant’Elisabetta, her head floating with a poor night’s sleep and a deep sense of dread. She’d used a magic gem to cure the son of a noble. Or, as others might put it, she had stolen and destroyed an expensive jewel that belonged to an important physician. It was all well and good, giving enchanted river water to peasants. But this was further than she’d intended to go.

Still, she had saved the son of one of the most powerful men in the city. And she had Ludovico on her side. Ostensibly. By now, it was a week, at least, since their last visit and he had sent no word. Perhaps nothing would come of it. Perhaps the physician would be ashamed. The Aldobrandini would be grateful and discreet. Soon the city would be well again, thanks to her. She tentatively decided she’d done nothing wrong.

However, the next day Fra Simone, founder of the convent of Sant’Elisabetta, called Ginevra to his studio for the first time ever to ask why Lord Aldobrandini had sent him sixteen cured hams and a gilded reliquary containing the toe of San Silvestro.

“Oh, did he?” she said with rehearsed nonchalance. “That was kind of him. Their son was sick, and...I have been helping sick people a little bit on my errands.”

“The Aldobrandini are clients of the physician Maestro Ficini di Salerno. Was he not available?”

“Oh, yes. He was there, too. Only he had this—theriac pill—it wasn’t able to help the child, so I did,” she said, omitting the bit about the destroyed ring.

“You should not have made a fool of that man. He is friendly with the inquisitor.”

“He made a fool of himself with no help from me,” she said before she could stop herself.

Fra Simone shook his head. “For these hams and this toe of Silvestro, you have put our convent in danger. You must always remember who holds the bridle, girl, or they will rattle the bit against your teeth! Agnesa has given you too much freedom. You will cease your work in the city and stay cloistered with the nuns.”

“But—”

He put up his hand. “That is all we will speak on the matter. Your stupidity pains me too greatly.”

Ginevra walked out, furious that he wouldn’t acknowledge the good in what she had done.

“Ginevra!” called Agnesa, hurrying to catch up with her. “What did Fra Simone want? Why are there so many hams here? Does he know about... it ?”

“What? No. It’s nothing, a donation. We needed food, didn’t we? I have to go lie down, my head aches.”

Ginevra just wanted to be alone. She was very upset. So upset, in fact, that she did not notice how her coral figa grew pale and cold, a warning sign of danger it could not deflect.

The danger was the Maestro Ficini, who was not just a bad doctor, but also a bad man. Instead of rejoicing that his patient lived, he was consumed with jealousy, humiliated that he’d owned a magic ring for so long and never even noticed. So, as soon as he left the home of the Aldobrandini, he wrote a letter to his friend the Inquisitor Perugia detailing how Ginevra di Genoa had let holy relics fall onto the floor and consulted a strange book.

When the sickness withdrew at the end of summer and all the frightened clergy unlocked their doors, the inquisitor walked straight over the fresh graves of fifteen thousand Florentines to have a talk with Fra Simone. What was the Fra thinking? Harboring the likes of Ginevra, letting her run unsupervised throughout the city—he was supposed to be saving souls, not corrupting them! The inquisitor still had to think what he would do with the girl, but as a first step, a massive fine was levied against the convent. The amount was staggering, disastrous. More than a year’s worth of eggs and gold thread for tapestries. More than the entirety of the secret donations of the noblewomen.

Agnesa found Ginevra sitting on the floor in the corner of the empty women’s ward. Sighing, she crouched down next to her pupil and took the girl’s hand in her own.

“Do not blame yourself, Ginevra. I was a fool to let you take that stone. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Ginevra crawled with guilt. “It is my fault, not yours. I convinced you. How can we pay that fine?”

“Shhh.” Agnesa studied their clasped hands before she spoke again. “You are young and in my charge, which means I bear the responsibility. But—there is a way to fix it.”

“There is?”

Agnesa smiled. “One more act of magic. Give me your Nemesis stone—I am sorry—I know it was left for you but it’s the only way to save this place. Give it to me, quickly. The man is here!”

Ginevra blanched. “I... I don’t think it will work.”

“Of course it will work.” Agnesa took the ring from Ginevra’s finger. “Vermilia understood these sorts of things.”

Ginevra buried her face in her knees.

“What is it, girl? Oh. Oh, no. You—Ginevra you haven’t used it already have you? You know it only works the once!”

“People were dying,” she whispered, her head still buried. “You wouldn’t give me the obsidian—”

Fra Simone burst through the door backward. “You CANNOT just come through here. The sisters are not used to strange men—”

“My brother in Christ, I can do whatever I want,” said Inquisitor Perugia smoothly. “But do not fret—that’s the girl right there, isn’t it? Come, child, I have questions for you.” He snapped his fingers and hired soldiers peeled her from the floor as Fra Simone held a weeping Agnesa. The parting came almost as a relief for Ginevra—never had she seen Agnesa shed a single tear. The inquisitor put her in the stinche where the one-handed academic still languished, and in short order convicted her of “heretical depravity,” the full charges consisting of “the trafficking of necromantic books; possession of notebooks containing witchcraft; destruction of property; practicing medicine without a license; and, finally, disrespecting a member of the Guild of Doctors, Apothecaries, and Grocers.”

In her hot cell inside the prison, she awaited sentencing and pondered the awful possibilities alone in the dark. This could not be happening to her . She bribed the jailer with shameful favors to send word to Ludovico ( Dear Heart, It is your Ginevra (Beatrice). Surely, you have heard how it is for me...). But days of silence turned into a week, her coral figa was white and cold, and she eventually understood he would not come; that no help of any sort would come. Her mind stopped looking for ways to escape, and instead fixated on what terrible things they might do to her. She looked at her fingers and imagined them smashed. Imagined her ankles as stumps. But try as she might, she could not imagine what it was like to be killed. With these thoughts, she was left alone, and they sunk into her until she wished for nothing more than the moment to come, whatever it was, so she would be afraid of it no more.

Though nobody was talking to Ginevra, many were talking about her. The matter of her sentencing was fiercely debated in the ecclesiastical court. On the one side was the inquisitor’s cohort, who wanted nothing less than to burn her. On the other, a number of sympathetic individuals, members of the Signoria and other powerful men, who not only supported the convent’s work, but had also benefited from Ginevra’s cures. There was Lord Aldobrandini, of course, and also the leaders of the powerful wool merchants’ guild, whose workforce had been preserved in large part thanks to her river-water cure. Her death would weigh heavily on their souls. So, while no one could defend her directly (one must always respect a guild doctor), they made it known to the court in subtle ways that they did not wish to see her burned up for it.

During this time, Ludovico paid a visit to his powerful uncle, the priest Fra Angiolo Acciaiuoli, who sat on the ecclesiastical court. Eyes brimming with tears and cheeks hot with shame, Ludovico launched immediately into a confession of his great love for the nuns’ servant convicted of witchcraft, and wasn’t there anything his dear uncle could do to save her from an awful punishment? Ludovico pushed Ginevra’s last letter, written from the stinche , toward his stunned relative.

Fra Angiolo read the letter carefully, keeping one eye on his distraught nephew. Really, the two men were not so far apart in age, both with the same dark hair and elegant profiles. A few silver strands at the temples, and faint lines around the eyes, were all that distinguished the older from the younger. But while Ludovico carried himself with an arrogance that was easily dismissed, the priest’s dignified manner left no doubt he was one of those rare men whose intellectual abilities matched his lofty position.

“Why does she call herself Beatrice?” he asked at last.

“It was a pet name!” wailed Ludovico.

“A pet name—Ludo, have you shown this to anyone else? Does your father know?”

“No, of course not, do you think I’m a fool?”

“Yes. That is exactly what I think you are. If word of this spread—you know what’s at stake for our family, the long plans we’ve made for you that are soon to bear fruit.”

“I know! I know! It is front of my mind, every day.”

“And yet, you allowed this affair to go so far that this girl—this convicted criminal—thinks she may write to you with such familiarity?”

“Uncle, you would not understand. I could not help myself!”

“You think a priest doesn’t know what it’s like to be with a woman?”

Ludovico said nothing for a moment, then, “I come here only to ask that she is shown mercy. I could not bear it otherwise.” Ludovico sat upon a velvet stool and wept.

Acciaiuoli looked down at his nephew and sighed, placing a hand on his head. Personally, he was not terribly bothered by Ginevra’s brand of heresy. If it were up to only him, a punishment of one thousand paternosters and a barefoot pilgrimage sounded more than sufficient. Those in favor of burning her were nothing but a chorus of simpleminded zealots, he thought. But now, the priest wondered if it might actually be to his advantage to allow this contingent to have its way. Ludovico’s affair could not continue, and there was a certain finality to an execution. And yet—if he went along with burning a woman who cured sick people, he risked being labeled an extremist. Fra Angiolo had his sights set on the Florentine bishopric, and it wouldn’t do to align himself with the vicious fringes.

“Go with God, nephew,” he said. “Speak of this to no one. Burn her letters. And if you do this, I will see that she does not come to any great harm.”

In a very clever move, that gained him the reputation as a reasonable and civic-minded official, Fra Angiolo proposed a compromise in the form of cave a signatis —a mutilation that would mark Ginevra for life as a dangerous heretic and warn others to stay away. To be certain Ludovico was dissuaded from further bouts of ardor, his uncle suggested they ruin the girl’s face, rather than cut off an ear or something that might be overlooked by a zealous lover. This they would do with a large notch taken out of her nose. They would also banish her from Florence. The Signoria agreed, their tender hearts appeased by the reduced sentence.

So, at last, Ginevra was taken from the stinche and held down upon her back by four men, one at each of her limbs. Her head was placed between two wood blocks so she could not move it while a fifth man sliced her up with a stubby iron knife. She let out such a shriek that they let go of her almost immediately. She clamped her hand over the wound. Blood spurted through her white fingers, and she stared up at her assailants in horror but none of them would look her in the eye, especially the one who held a triangle piece of her nose in his hand. With gazes cast down, they tied Ginevra up in a cart and rolled her through town for all to see, a winding route back across the river to Sant’Elisabetta to collect her belongings and be gone from the city. As was tradition, people came out to see and yell things at her. Many supported her and shouted kind things like “Bless you, Sister” and “Pray to God for us!” But most had no idea what was going on, so they threw wilting vegetables and other trash at her because that is what you do to people in criminal carts.

Ginevra had intended to stand proud and tall, in case Ludovico was there to see her, but when her mutilated nose was smacked by a cabbage, the pain sank her to her knees and she did not get up again. They dropped her at the gate of the convent, her face wrapped in a dirty rag the jailers gave her. The nuns were all in the chapel, forbidden by the inquisitor from saying goodbye. Ginevra was glad that none would see her shame. She found her small possessions already bundled for her on her bed. A tiny parcel with a note pinned to the top—her heart leaped—but it was in Sister Agnesa’s hand, not Ludovico’s.

Go with God, but go far away from here.

It will bring me joy to hear you are well, but far away.

Taddea wishes to provide the parting message

that she will pray to the bread for your salvation.

Inside the parcel—the collection of gems left to her by Vermilia, including the Nemesis ring, which she placed back upon her finger even though its powers were spent. The jewels, which she had so long desired, at last in her possession, but O, at what cost! The guards then escorted her to the Porta San Niccolo, the towering gate on the city’s southern wall, and registered her with the keepers as a persona non grata before shoving her out into the world. Like this, she walked back to Genoa, where she had not been for five years.

The nose notch was not so severe a punishment as Ludovico’s uncle had intended, for the healing magic of the coral did its best and eventually only a thick white line, an asymmetry that gave her a quizzical look, would be left of what was meant to be a gross disfigurement. The banishment was much worse. She was distraught over her Ludo, who hadn’t even come to see her being wheeled around in the criminal cart, and now she had no way of meeting him to learn why he’d abandoned her when she was in such dire need of a friend.

When she arrived at Genoa, she learned the water sickness had also infected that city’s drinking fountains, and her parents were among the dead. This loss struck her as a blow strikes one already beaten to the ground. She curled further inward upon herself, unmoored from everything but the misery of her current situation. This is how it is , she thought. This is how everything is and how everything will be forever, now. Loss upon loss upon loss . But—even with all this—still she could not lay down and die herself. The golden strings wove a net to catch her in her free fall; some hidden part of her could not shake the instinct of self-preservation. In a dreamlike state, she put her small savings from the convent toward a little room in the ugly part of town where she was born. It had a hard dirt floor and a soggy garden plot, good for growing nothing but mosquitoes.

Then the strings tugged at her and made her take up the old reed mats on the floor and burn them and weave new ones. They told her to dig trenches in the garden to drain off the water, and coax what medicinal plants she could from the brackish soil. When she was finished, she painted a little symbol of a snake in coral outside the door, a tribute to Vermilia. Vermilia, who knew how it was, how to appear quiet and poor, and how to be left alone.

Gone were Ginevra’s lofty plans; the hopes of marrying rich, of moving outside the realm of her sex, of helping the world on any grand scale. She just wanted to lick her wounds in the dark. But you still need to eat , the strings reminded her. So, she opened her door and it was not long before the curious housewives of the port began to visit her with their problems, their little coins and barters of bread sustaining her. In this way, Ginevra resigned herself to a future as a local healer and permanent spinster.