Page 24 of The Stone Witch of Florence

TWENTY-THREE

SANT’ELISABETTA DELLE CONVERTITE

Morning, July 8th of 1348, City of Florence, the Start of a Very Long Day

T hough Ginevra had years to prepare something to say, then a day since she’d returned to Florence, and then a good half hour as she walked over, still no words came to her as she approached the Convent of Sant’Elisabetta delle Convertite after her early morning cleaning of Lucia’s palazzo. Thoughts passed through Ginevra’s head in rapid succession. She would come humbly, with an apology. Or, better to be proud and show no shame. They should apologize to her! They would embrace her. They would weep. They would shut the door in her face. It will bring me joy to hear you are well, but far away. She forced her hand to lift the knocker. Its heavy thud rang out against the walls that lined the narrow street. A nun opened the door and peeked out with a scowl that turned quickly to surprise.

“Taddea?” said Ginevra, stomach aflutter.

Taddea reached out her hand and touched Ginevra’s scar. “Is it you ?”

“It is me,” said Ginevra shyly. “Um. How are you?”

“How am I? The world is swallowing itself whole. Come inside. I need your help right away.” She pulled at her arm.

Ginevra gripped the door frame. “Wait—Agnesa, Fra Simone—will they accept my presence?” Now Taddea pulled with all her might, and Ginevra tumbled through the door.

“Fra Simone is dead since yesterday, and if you will not come help me, Agnesa will follow him.”

Ginevra’s mouth went dry, her ears rushed, and her limbs felt floating. How stupid, how blind she had been. When every person had dropped dead, how had she not considered this possibility? Is this what the smaragdus had been trying to tell her? That her healing abilities were needed desperately at Sant’Elisabetta?

“Come,” said Taddea. And then, head still swimming, she was in Agnesa’s plain little cell. The white walls and tiles and pallet on the floor, and her dear old friend, so frail as to be almost transparent, delirious and covered in black spots like insect bites.

“Agnesa! Sweet Agnesa, here is somebody who will help you. One of our own.”

Agnesa looked at Ginevra with wild eyes. Ginevra was ashamed at the relief she felt that there was no recognition in them.

“What are you waiting for?” whispered Taddea to Ginevra. “Do you have— do you carry magic stones, still? ”

“How did you know—”

“Agnesa told me everything, after you went away. Do you have them? ”

Ginevra nodded, all thoughts of inquisitorial contracts gone from her mind, and knelt down beside the pallet, wondering what on earth to do. Lucia’s disease had been contained in tidy swellings. Here it was spread throughout Agnesa’s whole body. Tentatively, she placed her bloodstones on two of the spots on her chest, over the heart. She waited for the vibrations to start but the stones stayed cold and still in her hands. Still, when she lifted them, to her immense relief the spots had disappeared.

“Is it working?” said Taddea, who hovered, wringing her hands.

“It is. I think it is!”

“Thank God you have come. Thank God.”

As Taddea flitted back and forth behind her, Ginevra touched the bloodstones to every spot she could find, methodically starting at the fingertips on Agnesa’s left side, working her way back to her shoulder until her entire arm was clear of them.

“That feels nice, what is it?” said the faintest, tiniest voice.

“It is working!” said Taddea. “She has not spoken since yesterday!”

Ginevra could have cried with relief. “It is bloodstones, Sister. They will make you better.”

“Oh, is that all?” Agnesa closed her eyes. “They will not. I’ve tried it all; nothing will make me better.”

“These stones are rare, they came from far away. Don’t be worried.”

“I’m not worried. But I could not save my sisters, and you cannot save me.”

Ginevra looked at Taddea.

“We are the only ones left, we two,” Taddea said.

“It’s alright, Sister, it’s not your fault. This plague keeps its secrets well.”

“I tried everything, but this disease—it is old, it is evil. It has not come for many thousands of years. The knowledge was lost. I am old, too, my golden strings grow thin and snap. The magic does not flow through me as it used to.”

“Do not speak of yourself so,” said Ginevra, doing her best not to cry, to focus on the task at hand.

“I put strings of corals around their necks, but the corals were unripe and they held no power.”

“Hush, Sister,” said Ginevra. She guiltily tapped her own coral amulet, warm and red in the presence of Agnesa’s disease.

“I placed red carbuncles upon swellings but it caused fits of apoplexy and they died.”

“I will say a prayer for them, Sister.”

“I ground pearls into dust and fed them the sparkling powder. But all of them died.”

“But you did not have bloodstones, Sister,” said Ginevra, touching the speckled jewels to the spots on Agnesa’s shins.

“Bloodstones. Hmmph.” She spoke animatedly now. “You do not listen to me. For those who are young and strong, perhaps those rocks will work. But even your bloodstones cannot draw out what is already deep, what is already spread. If you had a lynx, you might use its urine to extract the essence of your jewels. Then the patient could drink it down—and the stone’s powers could reach into all the various folds where plague has taken hold.”

“A lynx, Sister?” Ginevra was onto the right arm now.

“Yes, a lynx. Like you, she possesses wonderful powers. But the animal is cleverer than you. She buries her urine, guards it jealously because she knows it is magic and that men will steal it from her. But you walk around an open book so all may know your secrets and use them against you.”

“Lynx urine? She is going mad,” said Taddea.

“No,” said Ginevra. “She is remembering from a book.”

“You will never find the lynx’s treasure, so your stones will not work and I am dead,” said Agnesa.

“Sister, please. I have seen them work. I am watching them work.”

Agnesa smiled a wicked smile. “Look again.” She held out her shaking left arm: the splotches Ginevra had erased before had bloomed again, large and angry.

Ginevra moved the stones frantically from spot to spot, but now where one disappeared another came back to take its place.

“What is happening?” said Taddea.

“I’m not sure—this worked before, I swear it!”

“Try something else!” said Taddea.

Ginevra, not knowing what else to do, began to fumble with the loose tile on the floor. If the books were still there, maybe they held an answer. The passage about the lynx.

“It is empty, empty!” cried Taddea. “We sold everything, sold those secret books years ago to pay our debts. Try something else.”

But Ginevra did not know what else to try.

Taddea ran away.

Ginevra knelt back next to Agnesa and panicked. The bloodstones worked so easily before. She should have come yesterday, before the disease was so advanced. Right when the smaragdus had first conjured the image of Sant’Elisabetta in its green depths.

“Please, Agnesa. Oh, please, oh, please. You will be well, and I will tell you how sorry I am and we will talk and be friends as we used to be.”

“Don’t fret, girl,” whispered Agnesa. “You arrived exactly when you were meant to.”

Taddea returned with the Relic of the Blessed Bread from the chapel, and laid it atop Agnesa and prayed:

Bread, bread, bread

Keep her from death

As Christ conquered death

Bread, bread, bread

Agnesa began breathing very quickly.

Ginevra grabbed her hand. “Please, Sister, I am here. I have come back.”

Then she breathed not at all.

Both young women, who thought they had no tears left, sat down on the floor and clung to each other and wept until their eyes puffed and they could not breathe through their noses. And then they tripped over each other to apologize, through their tears, for how they had been apart and for how it took the most awful thing God ever wrought upon the earth to bring them back together again.

When they were spent of crying, because eventually you must be spent, they carried Agnesa’s frail body through the convent, and Ginevra experienced the strange and immediate recall of details—floor tiles, icons painted on the walls, even little chips in plaster, all as it was when she left. The place had not been flourishing.

When they reached the courtyard, they bathed the body of their friend and teacher, and laid her in the shallow pit Taddea had scratched out of the dirt, next to the shrouded thing that was once Fra Simone da Cascia. The rest of the yard was studded with mounds of freshly turned earth and crosses made of sticks. They sat down on the ground then, for a while, in shocked silence. Too stunned to feel the full weight of grief. That would come later, Ginevra knew.

“Taddea, come stay with me—this place is filled with pestilence. I am at the house of the Tornaparte, in Santa Trinita. The master has fled, there is room for you.”

“I can’t go.”

“You can’t be the only one here by yourself.”

“But I am not by myself.” She gestured to the relic of the bloody host, which had overseen the funeral services.

“Bring the bread with you, then.”

“No. Fra Simone built our chapel for it, and here it shall stay—I pray to it daily for the plague to leave. It’s important. It won’t be as powerful outside of its reliquary.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

Taddea looked over. “You look like you could use a meal. I’ll be right back. Today is porridge day.”

She returned with a bowl of cold groats. Ginevra spooned it into her mouth mechanically.

Taddea watched her as she ate. “Why are you here, Ginevra?”

Ginevra ate several more spoonfuls before she answered. “It is so strange, I fear you will not believe me.”

“Just now, I would believe anything.”

She started at the beginning, the message supposedly from Ludovico on behalf of the bishop, the contract with the inquisitor, the relic thief that eluded them.

“So you have been in town since yesterday, and only now you come?” Taddea said quietly, trailing her fingers through the dust of the courtyard.

“I was afraid Agnesa and Fra Simone would not forgive me for the trouble I caused. And my fears have come true, for they are dead and I cannot ask them.”

“I will not deny you brought us trouble—the loss of funding. We had to close the women’s ward.”

Porridge stuck in Ginevra’s throat as she was told what she already knew—she was the reason why the plaster was chipped in all the same places.

“But I don’t believe Agnesa held any of it against you. Bringing your healing magic to so many—you did what she would have liked to, but she was too afraid.”

“She said all that?” asked Ginevra, hopeful, desperate.

“No,” Taddea admitted. “I just assume that’s how she felt.” The two sat in silence for a moment before Taddea sighed and continued, “So. The disappeared relics. It’s bad, isn’t it? Without their protection, the whole city will die.”

“You keep your holy bread locked up, don’t you?”

“Yes—in its crystal case, in its cupboard in the chapel, which I also keep the key for. And I visit it many times a day because there are so many people dead so quickly, I must pray constantly for their souls. Their ghosts come to me every night, complaining of purgatory.”

“You have done better at protecting your relic than the priests in the grand parishes.” Ginevra scraped to the bottom of her porridge bowl, and saw it was made of fine earthenware, decorated with grapevines in purple and green, surrounding a gold chicken.

“I see this style everywhere, with these colors,” she said absently.

“Hmm? Oh, that. It’s really too fancy for everyday use, but what’s the point, now, of saving nice things? It was a gift from the man who bought Agnesa’s books. A rich potter in San Romolo. His workshop is the only place that paints this way...”

Ginevra looked up from the fancy bowl, saw how out of place it was in the dusty graveyard garden. “If only I had never left, Taddea. I could have still been here, and when the plague first arrived, Agnesa and I, together we could have found a way to save the sisters.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Ginevra. No matter what happened, you would not still be here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean , you said it yourself: the only reason you came back is because of a letter from stupid Ludovico Acciaiuoli.”

“That wasn’t the only reason. I wanted to come back for...for myself. To clear my name and make amends and make a life here, again. Anyhow, he is dead now, and I was dead to him long ago.”

“You were not so dead to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, there is something he left for you. Years ago. He said you never wrote him back, and he thought we might be in touch with you.”

“What is it? Let me see,” Ginevra said, too quickly.

Taddea rolled her eyes, but left the garden and returned shortly with a small leather case. Ginevra opened it. Inside was a gold brooch set with a honey-colored stone at the center—amber, frozen sap from the forests of the north. The amber was encircled in a pair of arms, with hands clasped. She turned it over, and saw an engraved dedication:

“‘Not my wife/But my life?’” said Taddea, reading over her shoulder. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Poor, dense Ludovico. So cruel in his kindness—he meant the jewel as a token of affection, this Ginevra understood. But to think this would be enough for her, to be a lonely secret while he lived his own lonely life at the side of another poor woman who undoubtedly would be lonely as well. She held the jewel out to Taddea.

“You take it. Sell it for the convent.”

“I will not. Sell it for yourself. You really think the inquisitor will pay you? He is a frail man. Even if you find the relics, he won’t live to fulfill his obligations.”

Ginevra put the jewel away in her purse, distraught. She must have misunderstood the smaragdus. What did it send her here for? To see someone she loved die? So she could be humiliated anew by an old love affair? She couldn’t stand to be at the house of her failures any longer.

“Taddea, I must go. Now. I have business to attend. Please, are you sure you won’t come with me?”

Taddea just shook her head. “Go, Ginevra. And help in your way. I will stay here, and help in mine. And if God allows us to survive this, we will both know we have done what is right.”