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Agnesa nodded. “Now I will tell you—this is the toadstone, it comes from the heads of old toads. It sweats when brought near poison so, if you’ll take the lid off that barrel...”

Ginevra lifted the lid and sure enough fluffy white mold had spotted the surface of the dark flour.

“Very good,” said the nun. “About the toadstone, I mean. You clearly need a different lesson on how to properly store food.”

Back in Agnesa’s cell, she picked up the Pliny, looking for more information about toadstones; as she leafed through, a small thin volume fell out from the pages.

“What is this?” she asked Agnesa. The binding crackled and flaked under her fingers as they traced golden letters. “Liber Iuratus Polydorus—who is Polydorus, Sister?”

“Ginevra, do not—”

But already she was flipping through the pages. Upon papyrus sheets, she saw strange symbols, circles inside stars, lists of names with Latin letters spelling guttural syllables, strings of words arranged into triangles. Agnesa slapped it from her hands.

“What was that??” asked Ginevra.

“Shhh. An evil thing—for men who believe they can summon demons to do their bidding. Books like this give our work a bad name, Ginevra. They lure the ignorant into chasing base and selfish desires by placing pins into dolls, baking hair into bread, writing chaotic arrangements of letters and numbers.”

“You mean—the spells in this book are fraudulent?”

“Probably. But who can know? For only a saint could perform them, and no saint would ever try. Books like this are all the same, look here—” she said, pointing to a page “—it dictates months of fasting, of chastity, of punishing the body with scourges and hair shirts as prerequisite for a spell to obtain a thousand armed soldiers! Here I am in agreement with the priests: to attempt these rituals is surely a crime against God.”

Agnesa tried to stuff the book into the little clay brazier she kept burning in her room for warmth, but no matter her angle of approach, it would not fit, and not even a corner of it became charred. The nun sighed and tucked the book carefully back into the hidden space under the floor.

“Now,” she said to Ginevra, “let us return our attention to Theophrastus: he says here the antipathy stone may be worn at the wrist to absorb unpleasant memories—I think we have one of those somewhere—and here he discusses the lyngurium stone, which is the crystallized urine of a lynx. Lyngurium has many virtues—but, unfortunately we do not have this stone. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who’s seen a lyngurium, for the lynx buries her treasures...”

When Ginevra was good enough at writing, Agnesa had the parchment of the convent’s earliest records scraped clean and bound together into a blank book so her pupil could keep her own notes. Here is the green crystal called smaragdus, carved with sacred words of the Arabians. Look upon it when your eyes are weary and you will see with fresh perspective. Or: Here is shimmering black obsidian, made by the heat of volcanoes. It is good against fevers.

Ginevra was grateful for the lessons, but still, beneath it all, there was that tiny current of skepticism that most young people have, that her elders were too cautious. That if she was just given the chance to try things openly, then Fra Simone and the physicians’ guild and everyone else would understand that there was nothing sinister in women’s use of healing stones.

This sense of lost opportunity was even more acute on days when the stones called to Ginevra and her fingers tingled to use them. But unless it was a matter of life or death, Agnesa insisted on standard herbal remedies, on prayer and patience. What might be resolved in an instant with a hematite rinsed in rainwater instead took weeks of drinking tea made from agrimony and oak leaves. Ginevra found the whole thing maddening. It went this way for some time. In the middle of the night, Ginevra and Agnesa explored the mysteries of striped agates and red carbuncles. In the daytime, they pretended these treasures did not exist. Only when Agnesa decided a patient was beyond the help of prayers or of plants, did she reach under the loose tiles in her cell.

SIXTEEN

A LOVING SPIRIT

1340, City of Florence,

the Kitchen of a Great House

When Ginevra was twenty, she fell in love. It happened when she was making a delivery of eggs from Sant’Elisabetta to the kitchens of the Acciaiuoli family, who were such important bankers that they lent money to the king of England, or so they bragged. Ginevra disliked this particular errand. Every week the bankers’ cook condescended to her how the Acciaiuoli only bought from the convent out of charity, how the eggs were not any good and that was why his custards never turned out properly. This was very frustrating to Ginevra. She knew their chickens were the finest in Florence, because Agnesa had found a piece of Sardinian pink granite that was just the exact shape of a hen egg and buried it in the floor of the coop. Ever since, each of their hens laid two perfect eggs, speckled and pink like the granite, exactly as the sun rose. Of course, she could not explain this to the cook.

On one of these occasions, Ginevra looked with exasperation past the grumbling chef and was startled to meet eyes with a young man, his smooth face brimming with suppressed laughter. Ginevra looked to the floor, embarrassed. For this young man was not a servant of her own station. He wore a flocked doublet woven in blue checks. His hat matched it perfectly.

“Gentiluccio, if you go on harassing vendors like this, we’re all going to starve.”

The cook turned around to face the young man. “Signore Ludovico! What are you doing here? You’ll get your nice hat all smoky.”

“I just wanted a—” He looked at Ginevra again and stopped speaking.

“A what?” asked the cook.

“I—I’ve forgotten somehow. Introduce me to your friend.”

“Who, her? She works for the egg nuns. Don’t worry about it, she’s gone.”

And Ginevra was, as fast as she could go.

But Ludovico Acciaiuoli could not forget her. Because it is true that the eyes are a window to the soul; it is therefore not just the malocchio that may use them as a portal, but also Love. So when Ludovico and Ginevra had locked eyes, her invisible golden strings became tangled with his plain strings of cat-gut or whatever type of string the universe attaches to ordinary men. And when she hurried out of the room, their strings stretched and twisted further round each other, and bound them in sweet longing.