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“That is Zenobio, I swear it on the graves of my children!” It was Lady Girolami, who made her way to the front. “He is my ancestor, I would know him anywhere.”

“No!” said the bishop. “You are wrong, a widow mad with grief.”

“But there is the bread,” said another woman’s voice. “The bread that I have guarded these weeks. I would know it anywhere.” Taddea collapsed at the front of the platform, weeping.

“No!” said the bishop, yelling down at the top of her head. “You are wrong, a silly nun who knows nothing of the world.”

“She is not silly!” cried Lucia. “That is the finger of San Tommaso, who I pray to in Santa Maria Novella! I know it down to the fingernail.”

“No! No, no, no!” said the bishop. “Foolish women, who believe anything they see! These are false! Bits of ordinary men, pulled from our own graveyards!”

“But smell the air,” cried somebody. “The odor of sanctity! The relics cannot be false.”

Ginevra sniffed and realized that the inquisitor’s smoking clothes gave off the sweet and musky odor of his pomander.

“It is a miracle! A true miracle,” cried Fra Michele in all earnestness, who was so used to his own perfume, he could not recognize it. He had not seen the jettatore, and truly believed the Virgin had interceded on their behalf.

The crowd believed this also, and fell down on their knees as one and crossed themselves and then began to clamor to touch Ginevra and Fra Michele.

Bless Me

Save Us

Forgive Us

The Swiss soldiers also knelt down, wept, and begged to see the North again, told the relics how they had been tricked and didn’t know for whom they worked. They crawled to Ginevra and the inquisitor and kissed the bottoms of their garments.

Bishop Acciaiuoli stood alone now, on the other side of the platform. In shock over the short ruin of his long ambitions. “Bishop,” called Ginevra. “I have found your relics, as you requested of me. Will you not kneel before them?”

So the bishop knelt in front of the relics he had hoarded for months, for what else could he do? But as he knelt, he found his robes had grown tight and itchy. When he put his hand on the planks, somebody stepped on his fingers by accident, crushing them, and splinters dug into his palm. Then another person stepped on him, then another, in their eagerness to touch the relics of their saints, and it was all he could do to slink away through their feet and fall off the edge of the platform.

He limped toward his palazzo, but on the way, a pack of dogs that normally kept to themselves chased him. He only just managed to keep them at bay by throwing his expensive bishop hat at them, the one with his family crest embroidered in gold and pearls, which they tore to shreds. When he reached his palazzo, he slipped on a letter that had been dropped on his doorstep. It was signed by ten of his creditors, powerful dukes of the countryside. If he did not return their investments immediately, they would be sending forces to recoup what they could from his personal property, plague be damned.

As he was reading, the Swiss mercenaries caught up to him and demanded again their own payment. He started to yell how he owed them nothing, how they had voided their contract by abandoning their posts, but he stopped when they held him down and ran a long knife from the top of his forehead to the bottom of his chin. The bleeding bishop crawled into a corner and the mercenaries ransacked his palazzo, taking what they wished and fighting among themselves as to who would claim the plates with the shimmering purple eel women.

Back atop the ringhiera, Ginevra di Genoa picked up her coral from the feet of the Virgin and tied it back to its rightful place around her neck.

FORTY-SEVEN

A CHANCE TO BE KIND

Late in August, 1348,

City of Florence

A close sun baked dusty streets, and thin lines of shadow outlined open doors and empty fountain heads. On their beds, upon their floors, and in the dirt of their gardens, the bodies of dead Florentines had begun to dry out into hollow husks. The city was silent, as if respecting the dead on their arduous journey from soft flesh to hard bone. Except for one place; behind stone walls and locked doors, the convent of Sant’Elisabetta hummed with activity. Here the still living gathered together. Visitors shuffled slowly through the halls, quiet and purposeful. They stopped first in the chapel, where they whispered prayers to sacred bread enclosed in a new crystal orb. They were there because it was said that here, at last, the plague’s secrets were discovered and could be unraveled. The methods were unorthodox, but effective. So, that August of 1348, Sant’Elisabetta became again a bit of an open secret in Florence and the surrounds: the sort of place everybody knew about but nobody talked about.

In what had been the women’s ward, there was Taddea, spooning porridge into the mouths of peasant, priest, and lord. In the kitchen was the noblewoman Monna Lucia Tornaparte, sweating over eel pies that were only slightly burnt. And in the courtyard where gossiping nuns once spun golden threads, Ginevra di Genoa made a soup from secret stones and ladled a noxious broth, tasting of honey and smelling of ammonia, into any bowl that was proffered.

Running about, tripping over cats and people with his hands full of clean sheets or dirty bandages, was the still-blindfolded Giancarlo di Sporco, merchant of luxury ceramics, would-be necromancer, doomed lover of his people. Though Ginevra had made him poke many needles into many bowls of olive oil, made every traveler who came to the convent tell him every joke they knew, the Eye still clung stubbornly to him. If he so much as peeked out of his blindfold, all the cats in the place yowled like demons until he put it back on. But still, his blindness did not trouble him. He was elated, at last, to be bringing true help instead of harm. Lucia sewed him a new mask that had no danger of slipping. She made it so it fit the contours of his face and laced securely up the back of his head. It was embroidered with special prayers to San Tommaso, to make doubly sure the malocchio would find no way to escape. San Tommaso, pleased with the many candles Lucia eventually delivered to his shrine, was only too happy to guard the jettatore’s blindfold. A helper to all was the boy Piero, who had taken his leave of the bishop’s household immediately following the Miracle of the Virgin of Requisiti, as the incident came to be known.

Those recovering in the beds and waiting in line told stories about the bishop—how he had found himself relieved of all personal properties by his creditors, that he had been chastised by the Pope himself for shouting in front of a crowd that genuine relics were only replicas. Some said you could see him now, wandering behind the windows of his palazzo (church property), with a bandaged face, eagerly awaiting his next salary installment (which, of course, was delayed). It was advised that if you attended a mass or a procession led by him, you’d better keep a hand pointed into horns behind your back. Mothers whispered to each other that if the bishop baptized your child, you had better take the baby straightaway to a healer who knew about needles and olive oil because it was understood that the bishop of Florence was badly cursed by the malocchio.

Ginevra stepped away from this gossip, outside of the efficient little cloister, for the first time in many weeks to walk over an empty bridge and through empty streets and meet with the Inquisitor Michele di Lapo Arnolfi at the steps of the half-built cathedral. He had asked her to come, to say goodbye. He was on his way to Avignon, summoned by the Pope. It was rumored he was to be made cardinal, as the Virgin of Requisiti clearly favored him.

He took both her hands in his. “Monna Ginevra, our sacred bones are back in their homes. A miracle, witnessed by many, occurred. You will be known as a most holy woman.”

Ginevra looked down at the ground. She hadn’t the heart to tell the inquisitor it was no miracle, but the battle between the figa and the malocchio that had started the fires. “It will be a refreshing change to be thought of as holy,” she said at last. “Though after all I have seen of your bishop, I do not think I need the church to tell me what is holy and what is not.”