Page 52

Evening, July 8th of 1348,

Palazzo Tornaparte

Ginevra walked slowly along the river toward Lucia’s home, rubbing the bump on her forehead where Lady Girolami’s prayer book had struck her. She didn’t blame her. The poor woman had lost so much—and had more to lose, still. The girl, Zenobia, was in grave danger. Ginevra’s coral had glowed bright red in the tower, and it seemed only a matter of time before the little one fell ill. Please don’t leave us, she’d said. Ginevra could not bear it. Perhaps there was a way to protect the child without provoking the mother. Something in the stones. She must find it, and quickly.

In the approaching dusk, a pile of discarded rags rustled ahead of her. Ginevra heard a little cry; it was a kitten, the color of dust and clay, decorated all over in stripes and dots. Ginevra looked around, but saw no mama cat watching from the shadows. She crouched down and reached out her hand. The kitten suckled her offered fingers. The rags smelled strongly of ammonia. Ginevra’s mind leaped to Agnesa’s deathbed rantings. If you had a lynx, you might use its urine to extract the essence of your jewels. That was what she needed: a catalyst to draw out the healing magic of stones, turn it into something that could be swallowed to protect the blood, the lungs. More than a cure; a prophylactic. And what was a lynx but a gigantic cat who lived in the mountains? Ginevra had seen the pelt of a lynx once, at the port in Genoa. This kitten had the same sort of coloring, the same markings. This is how she would protect Zenobia. She gathered up the kitten and rags in her arms. “Come on, cat, I will let no more creatures die today.” The kitten mewed her thanks.

As night fell, the pair arrived back at the Palazzo Tornaparte, and found Lucia in the kitchen, where she had put together a supper of stale cheese ends paired with a rare ruby claret foraged from her husband’s private cellar. Ginevra looked around the kitchen: the eel bones were still upon the table, and her embers had gone out even though she had buried them carefully in ashes. They’d been scraped out onto the hearth to heat a pot containing the remnants of Ginevra’s bread dough—now scorched and fused rocklike to the bottom of the tin vessel.

“Sorry about dinner,” said Lucia. “I wanted to make you an eel pie like you made me but I couldn’t catch an eel and then I realized I didn’t know how to make a pie and also the fire went out. So, here is cheese.”

“Thank you, Monna Lucia, I’m grateful all the same.” And she meant it.

“Tell me, what is that bundle you carry? It smells like cat piss.”

“It IS cat piss. And I’ve got the cat to go with it. Look—here is one even more in need of a meal than we.” She pulled the top of the rags away and a little cat head popped up to observe her new surroundings.

“Ohhh, she was left all by herself, the same as me. Ginevra, you have collected us all together. Give her here.” She took the kitten from the filthy rags, and fluffed up an old apron inside a basket for her new home. She set down a dish of water and then picked the remnants of dried eel from the rubbish bones and fed her in little bits. The kitten nipped hungrily at her fingers and started to purr.

“Lucia, you are an excellent mother cat.”

“It’s nice to be needed... I came upon my friends today at church. They all thought me dead, and were not so glad to be wrong.”

Ginevra could only shake her head. It had been too much for one day. The numbness was fading, the day’s horrors reasserting their dominance over her psyche. She took a gigantic gulp of the wine.

Lucia grinned.

“What?” said Ginevra.

“The wine—my husband reserved it for his most important business partners. They would only take tiny sips and then praise it like it was their lover after each little drop. Pour me some and we’ll drain the bottle.”

Ginevra obliged, and the women fell into their supper, such as it was, discussing how it had been in their separate days. Lucia told how she had dirtied her knees at the altar of Zenobio, how the Baptistry was locked up. She shared the sad news that the finger of San Tommaso was stolen, and how everybody already knew her Santa Trinita was a dead parish missing its relic. How wicked people met at the tavern Alle Panche to drink and plot. (She tactfully left out her encounter with Ludovico’s widow.) Ginevra carefully added the theft of the Tommaso finger to the inquisitor’s list:

Santa Maria Novella—finger of San Tommaso D’Aquino.

Theft noticed: July 8. Relic last seen: winter 1348.

She then told Lucia of the dead Fra Simone, dead Agnesa, and the dead child in the Torre Girolami, and of how the bloodstones failed her twice. She spoke of the tampered-with relic at San Paolino, and its awful graveyard.

“I couldn’t leave your Antonella there, it was not right. There was not an inch of dirt not already filled. And those on top covered with the most meager sprinkling of earth, like cheese on a lasagna.”

Lucia pushed away her cheese. “So...where is she, then?”

“We sunk her in the river, that way nobody would come and take her finger or her nose.”

“I hope it’s alright if you have been buried under water instead of earth. She did not have a confession, either.” Both of them thought of poor Antonella, stuck in purgatory.

“I will light a candle for her,” said Lucia, adding it to the mental list of candles she’d already promised San Tommaso. “Ginevra, what did you mean, that people would take her finger or her nose?”

“Ugh. Give me some more of that expensive wine.” Ginevra explained what she had heard—people making a business taking bits from the newly dead and disguising them as genuine relics.

“No!”

“It’s true, I swear it. And there is a man who makes his living buying up these pieces of flesh and keeps a shop where he sells them as true relics.”

Lucia turned ashen, and went to her room. She came back with a necklace containing a small bit of dried-up something. “A gift, from Pampinea, who is much taken with that sort of thing. I suppose this is not really a piece of San Sebastiano, then?”

Ginevra remembered Becchino’s mention of the current popularity of San Sebastiano and grimaced. Lucia threw it out the window. “Alright. Enough. There is work to be done.” Ginevra stood up and busied herself in starting a new fire. She had to keep her mind occupied or the sorrow would take over and she would never be able to accomplish the task the inquisitor set for her.