Page 33 of The Stone Witch of Florence

THIRTY-TWO

O, ZENOBIO

July 10th of 1348, Torre Girolami

G inevra never found the stones. In the earliest morning, she left without rousing her friend. She was still angry, and did not want delays or distractions. The girl Zenobia could be very sick or even dead by now, and she wasn’t sure the little bit of medicine she’d salvaged from the inside of the jar would be enough, or if it even was properly made. After, she would visit the inquisitor. Explain about the Divine Nine and San Francesco’s shoe and the man so smelly he stood out even among the patrons of Alle Panche. Surely, all this was not nothing? Surely, she and Lucia had reached a greater understanding in three days than the inquisitor had in as many months!

Now, back in the dead parish of Santo Stefano al Ponte, the streets were silent as midnight, though the sun was full and round and heated the air like a bakery. The door to the Girolami tower remained unlocked from her last visit. Easing her way in, Ginevra realized how tightly her jaw was held and willed it to soften, moving it back and forth with a painful click. Again, she walked up the twisting stairs; again, she went brazenly into the chamber of Lady Girolami, bracing herself for whatever household object would be chucked at her head. Instead, the lady barely looked up to acknowledge her arrival. She knelt on the floor, with gray face and black gown, slowly folding children’s clothing into a chest.

“I never paid you for your services,” she said by way of greeting. “You must be coming about that.”

Ginevra exhaled with relief. “Where is your daughter?” she asked. “I was worried, with the sickness—I have something that might help.”

The lady stared at her hard. “You were right. I should have moved the body sooner but I could not bear it... She is dead now, like him. I have buried them next to their father.”

Ginevra sunk onto her knees, shattered. To save this child, with the stones and the secret of the cats, it would have brought some meaning to witnessing Agnesa’s death. But again, she had arrived too late to help. The golden strings that attached her to people, to places, one by one they were being snipped and snapped. She felt that soon there would be nothing left to tie her to the earth.

“I’m so sorry, I tried to come back sooner with medicine—”

“If you are sorry for anything, let it be for saving me to witness the death of my children.”

“Your elder son—he lives yet, does he not? Let him be your salvation.”

The lady softened. “He lives, it’s true. Thanks to your interventions. I’m sorry I hit your head. You don’t want money?”

“No, Dama. It’s as I told you: I only came here to look for Zenobio, to help the city.”

“What city? Look around you. Soon there will be nobody. Why attach yourself to such a place? In a year, it will be abandoned to ghosts and grazing sheep.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“And why do you care what happens? You seek our stolen property out of the goodness of your own heart?”

“Only saints can claim such motivation, and I am not one. I was hired by your bishop, and I work for a fee: the funds to establish myself as a businesswoman here. To gain sponsorship to the doctors’ guild.”

“After everything they did to you? You would wish to entangle yourself further with Florence?”

Ginevra stiffened. The lady continued. “Don’t be surprised. I know who you are, Ginevra di Genoa. We are the same age, you and I. Your trial was the talk of the town, and I remember how it went for you. Wheeled out of Florence as an exile—covered in manure and blood. I can see the spot where they cut your nose. They did not accept your miracles then, and they will not accept them now... Monna Ginevra—I will not tell that you came here and used your magic on us. But I cannot be associated with a heretic, now without a husband to protect my interests.”

“I am no heretic, Dama. I just want to help people the only way I know...”

The lady packed furiously now. Crushing beautiful tiny embroidered gowns into an overfull valise. “Then we both want impossible things. I want to tear all the hair out of my head. I want to crawl through the streets until my hands are worn to stubs and my knees are bone, and rub the filth of the gutters on my face and shriek until the voice in my throat has shattered and my mouth fills with blood and I choke to death upon it. But not all my children have died. Just the two of them. So I curb my grief and take the one living away from here to survive in a different way. And for his sake, I cannot follow the desires of which I have just spoken. I say thank you for what you’ve done, but now you must go and leave us to swallow our sorrow and make what we may of our blackened lives.”

“Mama—”

The two women turned. Lady Girolami’s son had entered her chamber.

“Oh, my God—Zenobio—forgive me, that was not for your ears.” At ten, he was the same height as his mother. She embraced him fully and began to weep, but he wriggled away toward Ginevra.

“Hello, so nice to see you!” he said.

“He is strange, cheerful,” whispered Lady Girolami, “since the deaths of his father and siblings.”

“It is the shock of grief,” said Ginevra. “He will return to himself.”

“Mama—Papa would not want us to leave—this is going to be MY tower.”

“Go back to bed, child. I am master of this house now.” But the boy did not move.

“Mama, this lady said she can find Zenobio, I just heard her! I am named for him,” he said to Ginevra. “Can you help about Santo Stefano, too? He is my dead brother’s saint.”

“Yes, I will try,” she answered. “I know he is missing, too, since...” she pulled out the inquisitor’s list of thefts “...since the Rogazione procession in the spring.”

Lady Girolami sat down on a painted chest and put her head in her hands. “We donated a whole foot of Santo Stefano. It went right up to the knee joint! Acquired at great expense. The whole city knew it was gone except for us.”

“I’m sorry, Dama,” said Ginevra.

“After the fiasco at the Feast of San Zenobio, my husband fell into a very deep depression. He had been so sure that if we held the procession correctly, our ancestor saint would intervene, would make the city lively again. But after—he forbade us all from leaving the tower. So we heard no news, we did not know for weeks that the sacred foot was missing, that we had sealed ourselves up in a dead parish...”

“Santo Stefano is my brother’s church!” said Zenobio.

“It’s not his church, my darling. My only darling. We have a chapel there is what he means. Several days ago, my husband went there. Left our tower for the first time in weeks. He knew, suddenly—it struck him in his bones—that the relic of that church would be taken as well. He went to check, though I begged him not to. He brought death home with him.”

“Did he see anything in the chapel? From where the foot was taken. Did he tell you anything?”

Here, the lady looked up at Ginevra with red-rimmed eyes. “He said—it could only be dark magic. We kept the foot in a gilded cupboard, studded with lapis and colored enamels, and it was fit with an ingenious iron lock, commissioned at great expense. He said the lock was all taken over by rust. It crumbled at his touch. Who could make such a thing happen?”

Ginevra nodded, but she did not think it took magic to rust a lock. She thought of the doors at Santa Trinita, falling off their hinges, the inside covered with mold. Even the Girolami could not stop mists of the Arno dampening their church, corroding metals and warping wood.

“Monna Ginevra, I repeat my request, for you to go. I am tired, so, so tired.”

“Not me,” said Zenobio.

Ginevra bowed her head. “I take my leave, and pray for the souls of your family.”

The lady said nothing, but went back to her packing. Zenobio waved goodbye as she made her way down the stairs.

Outside she walked out of sight of the tower and then sat down in the street against a building and tried to cry for Zenobia. But she could not cry anymore. She took out the small flask of elixir she had salvaged from the exploded jar. It was probably useless anyhow, even if she had arrived in time. If she was ever to break out of these cycles of death and fear, she must complete her task. She made her way, determined, to the inquisitor’s palazzo.

But at the inquisitor’s residence, the shutters were closed, the door was locked, and no amount of her shouting and banging brought anyone to let her in.

“Have you seen the inquisitor?” she asked the dead mason on the scaffold. He did not answer. She sat down on the doorstep to wait for his return. She sat there until the shadows grew long, and realized with a jolt that she had never picked up the heliodor from Lucia’s kitchen, after her friend’s night at Alle Panche. Without the gem, she would have no way of finding her way home after dark—she could wait no longer. She tore a corner from the inquisitor’s list of thefts, and scrawled a note saying she would try him again tomorrow and stuck it into the door frame.

Ginevra arrived, disheartened, at Lucia’s palazzo, thinking that at least now she would have the chance to make amends with her friend. But when she got back, there was nobody home but the kitten mewing for her supper. In the kitchen, she saw the heliodor and amethyst were both gone from the place she left them. Her anger redoubled, and brought with it worry for Lucia’s safety. She had an hour of daylight left, at most. Ginevra ran back out, as fast as she could, to the tavern Alle Panche. But as with the inquisitor’s home, as with Lucia’s palazzo, the place was dark and empty. Was she the only living person left on the earth? Fretting, she hurried on to Santa Maria Novella, thinking that Lucia might have gone to her favorite church if she was not at the tavern.

Into the vast and empty sanctuary, she ran, watched by the stone eyes of those whose graves paved the floor and lined the walls. From chapel to chapel, she went, peeking in at the effigies and reliquaries that sparkled and winked out from the darkness pooled in their niches. Not one saint had a candle lit before them, when it should have been many hundreds.

At last, she found the shrine of San Tommaso D’Aquino, but Lucia was not there. She examined the wrought iron gate that separated the shrine from the sanctuary. It was shut up again, but there was no lock hooked through. She stepped up close to the gate, and jumped at a quiet crunch beneath her shoes. A smattering of brick-colored flakes dusted the floor. Rust. She knelt down and crushed them beneath her fingers. Ginevra looked around for a leak, but the space was as dry as a bone. She shivered. It was as the Lady Girolami had described at Santo Stefano, a lock ruined prematurely with rust. She thought again, of how the hinges gave way at Santa Trinita, remembered how Lucia had complained of dirtying her dress at Santa Reparata, and how the altar at San Paolino was rusted through.

A low whistling hummed in the striped stone arches of the church—the wind of a coming storm, making its way through the open doors. A man who could turn iron to dust. Who stank and made a room cold. Who announced his crimes as they were committed. Oh, where was Lucia?? She yelled out her friend’s name, and got only the echoes of her own voice for an answer. There was nothing to do but to return to the palazzo and hope Lucia had returned already. It was a new moon, the darkest night of the month was fast approaching. Without the heliodor, it would soon be impossible for Ginevra to find her way. She walked back out into the dusk, the growing wind whipping up her skirt and blowing unpleasant trash at her ankles.