Page 3 of The Stone Witch of Florence
TWO
SO YOU WILL KNOW
About 1330, City of Genoa
I n the center of Vermilia’s chaotic room was a small wooden table where a sliver of light came in through the doorway. It was here that clients were received. Ginevra’s first duty was to sit in the corner, fetching things as requested and quietly observing.
She observed how Vermilia would nod her head as people whispered their troubles in her ear. They would complain about a quarrel with their neighbor or show their sore foot or brazenly lift their robes, modesty erased by desperation for a solution. Then Vermilia would flit about the mess of her room, pulling leaves from bundles on the ceiling rafters, telling Ginevra to get a scoop of powder from the orange pot painted with black warriors, a stone from a specific bridge, or a hair from the tail of a dog. Sometimes these things would be ground into a paste or rolled up in a pill. Other times Vermilia would tuck them inside a pouch or embed them in clay, and tell a person to wear it around their neck or bury it under a tree and then say a special prayer over it. As soon as the patient went away, questions exploded from Ginevra:
“What were those leaves?”
“Why a stone from that bridge?”
“How will burying it under a tree help?”
And Vermilia answered all of them:
“The leaves are from an oak and will fix his digestion.”
“Because she was walking over that very bridge when the argument began.”
“Because the tree will appreciate the gift and so make their child well.”
Although nearly everyone in the city visited a healer like Vermilia at some point, nobody liked to admit it, and they all kept their hoods up until they were indoors. This was because Vermilia’s practice walked the fine line between acceptable and heretical, allowed and illegal. And nobody wanted to be associated with a witch on the day someone important decided her work was more on the heretical, illegal side of things.
“This is why you must always be discreet in your abilities. Only help those who seek you out. Never offer your services unsolicited,” Vermilia warned her young pupil.
Ginevra, buzzing with joy at the discovery of her natural talents, chafed at this restriction and did not respond.
“Are you listening, Ginevra?” asked Vermilia as she crunched snails beneath a pestle. “Women like us must be careful not to interfere with the profit of the physicians’ guilds, of the licensed doctors. Do NOT flaunt your gift for treating hopeless patients—the ones that doctors pass off to a priest. That is how you get the wrong kind of attention.”
“Ah!” Ginevra perked up. “So if you’re a proper doctor, then you don’t have to keep your magic a secret?”
Vermilia shook her head. “You listened to the wrong part of what I said! The point here is to make yourself invisible. If you don’t, then sooner or later, the priests will hear rumors of a maid in the harbor who claims to cure people with witchcraft, and you will be sorry. Besides, it’s practically impossible to receive a physicians’ license as a woman. So don’t go thinking you can get one.”
Ginevra had already gone and thought it. “What do you mean practically impossible?”
Vermilia sighed. “I mean, if you were the richest woman in Genoa and your father and his father were physicians, then maybe they’d let you attend university, take exams, make an exception. But for you, illiterate girl from the harbor, none of this.”
Ginevra nodded, but inside her head the plan was formed— I must be rich, and I must be in a physician’s family. All I have to do is marry a man who is both of those things . That is not impossible.
“Anyway,” said Vermilia, “you would not like what you learned at university, after everything I’ll teach you. We have our own methods. The things we do can’t be done by just anyone, especially by a man of today. They are too wrapped up in themselves to see what’s right in front of them. They become angry when we expose their blindness, jealous when we have success.”
Ginevra was quiet at this. Even at her young age she understood that men, even her own father who loved her, had a limited view of what women could comprehend and accomplish. But she also knew from observing her kind mother, her wise Vermilia, and the industrious coral-carving orphan girls, that men were wrong.
“But your remedies actually work ,” she said eventually. “Many men have seen that! Instead of bothering witches, priests should punish the doctors who take money for useless cures.”
Vermilia shook her head. “The miracles of saints are the only sort of God’s magic the church appreciates. We threaten its power by providing alternative remedies, by reminding people of the magic that God has placed in all things of the earth.”
Here, the old woman paused to scrape the mashed snails into a jar. She picked up the container, then walked around the table and with her free hand tapped Ginevra on the forehead. “So you will keep both eyes open, yes? You will learn to see all the places in which magic resides. You may find it living in the church—but let me tell you something—true magic can hardly ever be pulled from the dead finger bone of a saint.”
Ginevra sighed and took the snail-jar from Vermilia to put away. This part of the speech was familiar to her: relics—finger bones or otherwise—were something of a pet grievance for her mentor. These mortal crumbs of saints were scattered by the thousands all over Europe, in grand cathedrals, humble parishes, and personal collections. Relics were believed to have the power both to grant the prayers of the faithful, and to cause trouble for those who failed to show them proper reverence.
“It’s NOT that I take issue with praying to relics,” Vermilia explained.
“It’s just that saints are exhausted and overworked,” finished Ginevra dutifully.
“ Exactly. And who could blame them? Their earthly bodies broken into a jumble of tiny pieces, shipped off to dozens of places, hundreds of miles apart. They are too scattered, too put-upon, to answer the volume of prayers sent their way. Nobody, no matter how holy, can be everywhere at once. And THIS is why even devout persons come here for help. They come after faith and physician has failed them.”
Ginevra pondered this conversation the next day as she bored little holes in coral branches so they could be worn as amulets. She realized there were also those who came to Vermilia first, because their troubles were not the sort they wished to share with a physician or a saint. Many were women, needing help either to have a child or to not have one. But really it seemed to Ginevra that the whole population of the city was represented in miniature in Vermilia’s clientele. Fancy lords and lowly peasants all crept in with problems of love, health, and wealth. The realization that all men were governed by common worries made Ginevra feel equal to those who were in fact far above her station, and gave her confidence in her lofty marriage plans.
As Ginevra was lost in her thoughts, a young woman slipped through Vermilia’s door and looked around nervously. Ginevra glanced at her, and without even pausing her coral drilling, she blurted out, “If you anoint your tongue with honey and butter every day for a week, your mother-in-law will become amenable to your request.”
Vermilia stared at her, white eyebrows raised. The young woman thanked them both profusely and slipped back out the door.
“That was good, Ginevra,” said Monna Vermilia, “but next time remember to ask for payment.”
After this, Ginevra was graduated from observer to assistant. She felt pride in herself as never before, and wished she could share all that was happening with her parents, but Vermilia forbade it. “It’s for their own good,” she said. Whenever they inquired about her day, Ginevra simply told them she did the chores Vermilia required. But it was so much more exciting than that! She boiled cucumber seeds in ash for gout, cut the heads off slippery eels to harvest their blood, and gave rose-flavored comfits painted with gold to rich clients who had nothing really the matter with them, but still liked to have something prescribed, just the same.
In Monna Vermilia’s family, the traditions of magic had not died out as in Ginevra’s, but remained secret and whole for generations. But the best secrets, these she got from an old monk at San Columbano where there was a precious library. She fed him an intoxicating liquid that rendered him madly in love with her. In order to prove his devotion, Vermilia made him take books from the monastery and translate them aloud from Latin into the vernacular. She remembered almost everything he told her, a skill common among those who cannot read. She said nothing of this to Ginevra, because in general she did not approve of love potions. But, when no clients were present, Vermilia would repeat to Ginevra the myths recorded by Ovid about the pagan gods, and how they had lived in the sky or in hell or under the ocean and caused trouble for humans.
As practice, the two would walk through crowded streets and Vermilia would ask Ginevra to notice what was wrong with people and whisper how she could fix it. On one such outing, they passed a man whose magnificent robes of vermilion silk still failed to distract from an aggressive facial rash. Ginevra saw an opportunity. This is the sort of man I can use—a rich man we can place in our debt, who could sponsor me and support my entry to the guild. He had not escaped Vermilia’s notice, either.
“What do you think?” she asked Ginevra quietly. “What is his cure?”
She answered immediately: “I would make him a paste of clay and ash from a wormwood, and tell him to put it all over his head and stand outside until the sun had baked it hard. Then he should say he was sorry to whomever he had wronged, then he should wash it off with seawater and he would be better.”
“Very good,” said Vermilia. “That is what we would tell him if he came to us and asked.”
“ Or we could tell him anyway—he would be very grateful, don’t you think?”
“I do not, foolish child. Come.” And she turned away.
But Ginevra did not come. Her boldness had grown with her skills. She knew just enough to think she knew everything, and was tired of holding herself back. So when Vermilia turned back around, to her horror she saw Ginevra had approached the gentleman and was making him a proposition. Vermilia hobbled over and smacked her on the side of the head, mid-sentence.
“Forgive her, sir, she is simple.”
The man muttered something about crazy puttane , and hurried off, a flurry of dandruff in his wake.
“I am not simple!”
“Oh? You will have to prove it after that . We have a new lesson today. See if you can take its meaning.” Vermilia grabbed Ginevra’s arm tight and led her to the stone piers that jutted out into the harbor. They walked to the farthest one, and Ginevra saw that there were no boats tied to it this day. Instead, a large bonfire burned at the end, tended by soot-blackened men stripped down to only their breechcloths. Vermilia pulled her into the crowd that gathered around it. The people spoke quietly and jostled each other for a view of the flames. Soon a group of men arrived, led by a friar in a black pointed hood. Upon their shoulders, they carried a wooden ladder with a woman tied along it. They propped her so she was upright in front of the fire, on view to the crowd. The onlookers’ murmurs grew louder until the priest lifted his hands for silence:
“We are here to pray for the soul of Monna Caterina D’Augustino, who calls herself a witch and is an unrepentant heretic.”
A few of the people mumbled prayers but most said nothing. The priest continued: “In 1332 she was summoned to court when she claimed to remove vile spirits from a young girl. She paid her fine and promised to cease performing such rituals, but she was a liar. Later, after being shown every mercy by the court, she gave a woman a stone amulet carved with symbols and told her this would make her pregnant, and she did this without the knowledge of the woman’s husband. And so she was brought before us a second time and became angry, and was heard to say in the presence of several witnesses that she could remove diseases with methods unknown to physicians, and claimed she possessed other skills over which only God has domain.”
The crowd hissed. Ginevra looked at Monna Vermilia, who just inclined her head toward the spectacle, indicating that Ginevra should keep watching.
The priest was now recounting how the woman had repented in the end, admitted her sins. But Ginevra and anyone close enough could see that all her fingers were bent at the wrong angles and that the spirit of God perhaps was not the only thing that inspired her confession. The priest made the sign of the cross over her and nodded to the men who held the ladder. They let it tip forward so she dropped face-first into the glowing coals and was consumed by flames.
A flake of ash landed on Ginevra’s cheek and she slapped it away, suppressing a gag. “Why did you bring me here?” she choked out.
“So you know,” said Vermilia. “So you know what happens if you do not keep your secrets.”