The Book of Madness and Cures

CHAPTER 15





The Vanishing Bend in the Path

After a rough three-day sea journey from Leiden—we survived solely by chewing dried ginger (promoting heat in the body and alleviating the sea nausea) and by clutching the deck railings while the German Sea heaved itself upon the bow—we neared the port of Leyth, below the hills of Edenburg. Lorenzo fairly leapt to the coign of the crescent-shaped seawall to help the crew tie the lines. I felt dazed and scoured by the journey. Our poor animals, suffering from the voyage, set up a raucous braying in their excitement to regain the land.

Dr. Hamish Urquhart—I guessed it was him, for no one else resembled a professor there on the waterfront—approached the ship, leaning into the offshore wind like a dark snag to meet us. The professor almost immediately lost his flat cap as a gust picked it up and tossed it into the water, exposing a crop of red hair that flared like a torch. His narrow beard, a darker red, outlined his strongly contoured chin. Dr. Urquhart was a disconcertingly handsome man, and surely, I thought, there would be attendant arrogance, in spite of what my father wrote of his amiability.

I stood and attempted to straighten my coat and skirts, while the wind defiantly whipped everything into disarray again. I must have appeared ragged and unsightly, dark circles under my eyes from the sleepless nights at sea, and I couldn’t have smelled very pretty either. So much the better, then; let it work for me in my need of solitude.

Lorenzo meanwhile disembarked and walked up to the man without any qualms. He introduced himself and gestured toward Olmina and me on the ship. Once the mules had safely come ashore with our supplies, Lorenzo held my hand firmly and led me with unadorned courtesy down the gangplank, which dipped and rose with the frequency of breath.

The Scotsman moved with barely concealed enthusiasm to take my arm when I wavered on the stone pier, though I swiftly warned him away with my eyes. “I’ll be all right,” I said simply.

“Dr. Mondini, please be…after a long sea journey, one must…”

He spoke in incomplete sentences, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “Oh, pardon me…Dr. Urquhart, at your…service.”

A handsome gentleman without guile. I’d have to be doubly wary.

“I’ve obtained a carriage,” he offered.

“I’d like to walk a little and see the city as we approach. Is it far?”

“Not at all. We’ll pass along the Water of Leyth and be there within an hour.”

Olmina came up beside us and spoke frankly. “I’ll take advantage of the ride, sir, for I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to acquaint myself with your fine city.” Then she added pointedly, “And so will you, signorina.”

“I can’t get in a carriage right now. I need the still ground beneath me.”

“I’ll accompany her,” Lorenzo offered as he reluctantly turned over the reins of the rowdy bunch of roped mules to the professor’s manservant. Lorenzo gave the youth a few clipped instructions. “Hold ’em firmly, but let the rope play out a bit—they’ve been cooped up aboard ship. Let ’em have at some grass too.”

The professor appraised our animals with admiration. “If you ever decide…to sell one of your fine beasts…”

“Why would we sell ’em?” interrupted Lorenzo, narrowing his eyes.

“Oh, I only meant…I have a good man, kind to animals. Didn’t mean…” The professor grew flustered.

“Don’t worry,” I said, smiling a little. “We are perhaps more attached to our beasts than some. They’ve come far with us.”

“Ah, yes…of course.” He nodded and helped Olmina into the modest black carriage drawn by two small, stout roan horses. “Cowgate Wynd, then,” he directed the driver. We watched the carriage set off in spurts up the hill, jockeyed between the steady pull of the horses and the push of five spirited mules.

“I hope they get there,” muttered Lorenzo, pulling his rough green woolen cap down over his ears.



As we passed from the small port and walked along the damp footpath near the Water of Leyth, the landscape began to settle me after the days of rocking at sea. Lorenzo became like a young boy, cheerfully whipping the hedges with a willow shoot he’d picked up. Small clumps of leafless willows, alders, and aspen trees lined the banks and were studded with great numbers of tawny, rose-breasted birds that swung out over the soggy gold stubble of winter fields as we approached.

“Oh, what are those wonderful little birds?”

We paused, watching the flocks lift and fall in sinuous, then spherical clouds, their songs vibrating the air.

“Mostly linnets, a few buntings,” the professor said. “They love to sweep through…”

“Yes?”

“…the barley fields. Hmm, for seeds.”

“Are they tasty, then?” asked Lorenzo, probably thinking of spitted wrens for Santo Stefano’s day, after Christmas. It was a custom I’d never been able to bear.

“No, no. I can’t say.” Dr. Urquhart extended his hand as if to ward off the thought. “I don’t savor the little birds.”

I was grateful to hear him say it.

“What’s the difference between songbirds and, say, a nice, plump roasted goose?” Lorenzo shook his head. “You’re killing them all the same.”

“Yes, but the birds, they’re part of…some larger”—he paused—“spirit that must not be touched, something we don’t…”

“Understand, perhaps?” I completed his sentence. “If I killed the bird, I’d miss its song, its dazzling flight. A bright thing in the dark world would be lost.”

“Well spoken, Dr. Mondini.”

“Well, I like bird chatter too,” grumbled Lorenzo. “But I don’t think you’ve ever been hungry, signorina. It gives you a different outlook on the world.”

“Yes, you’re right, Lorenzo. Beauty comes to us more readily on a full belly.”

We continued walking silently for a while. Then I said quietly to Dr. Urquhart, “As you may have gained from my letter, I’m tracing my father’s journey to find out what I can that would lead me to his present whereabouts.”

“Ah yes, your father…” He frowned and looked away from me.

“Any news?”

“No, nothing since he left…though…we could ask Dr. Baldino, who often discussed the past with him.”

“Ah.” I sank into weariness. But then I thought, I must get to know this man a bit, before he takes me into his confidence. There may be something in his discomfort worth the telling.

Bushes and trees I couldn’t name gave off rich, pungent scents, sometimes reminding me of a steamy kitchen strung with herbs, other times of a garden mulched and abandoned to its season. I noticed the professor’s smell too, a pleasant, earthy smell of animal heat suffusing wool. The sun came and went, lowering like a snuffed coal, as we reached the edge of Edenburg and proceeded to Cowgate below the Castle.

As Dr. Urquhart took leave of us at the lodgings he’d secured, he said, “You may recall, Dr. Mondini, that we’re on the Julian, not the Gregorian, calendar here, so you’ve just traveled back…in time. It’s ten days earlier than when you were on the Continent, so reckon accordingly. You have a chance to relive those days.” He smiled broadly with some mischief in his blue-green eyes.



Our rooms were adequate, though small, the beds niched in the wall like cupboards with wooden doors that we could shut at night. The dun stone buildings all around were close and tall, but from our rooms on the uppermost floor I would be able to see a sliver of the Firth.

On that first night, questions I’d hidden within me since Leiden raked my mind like an anchor scoring the bottom of the sea as I tried to sleep in my cupboard, like a mouse in a narrow larder. Had Wilhelm Lochner really followed me to Hollant? His pale body on the dissection slab haunted me. Over and over his cut form repeated itself in the blue light of the anatomy theater.

Sometimes in the dream, Maurizio or my father lay cold, with eyes upturned to a dim ceiling. What did Dr. Urquhart mean by “Ah yes, your father…”? The anatomy theater loomed thick with night. I wanted to flee its dark, blood-muddied chambers, but I could not. Sometimes in sleeplessness I’d read one of my father’s letters written in an ordinary rather than extravagant voice, to settle myself.



Dear Gabriella,

You have kindly asked about my book, and I can say quite frankly that the work progresses, though it becomes overwhelming at times. There are so many diseases that I don’t know how I will fit them all in one volume. Perhaps I shall only include the ones with cures, for how desperate should we all feel as physicians to know so many that are incurable? Yet it is humbling, it is right, that we acknowledge them. It may be that some new medicine will come to light, from an old midwife or mother, or from some clever experimentalist locked in his alchemical cellar amid flasks, retorts, and furnaces. There is a clever man, Dr. Urquhart, a natural philosopher here who has made my days more companionable with his curiosity and pursuits of astronomy and metallurgy, from the melting of copper (that green dragon of the moon) to the larger schemes of matter, space, and time. I cannot pretend I understand everything he describes, but I find the conversation invigorating and amusing, though he sometimes becomes lost in the branching forks of his own thoughts and his Aristotelian studies. I recall a phrase I’ve read somewhere: “Where the natural philosopher finishes, there begins the physician.” For we must come to earth, to our patient with the swollen ankles or the sorry wound, though we may rely sometimes upon the natural philosopher’s theories and experiments. But now, my daughter, forgive me, for I must leave you. The practical gods have reminded me of their dominion. My lamp is out of oil.

Edenburg

Your father





A few days after we’d arrived, Professor Urquhart came round to collect Olmina and me for a midday meal at the home of his friend Dr. Baldino, who, he informed us, was in his ninth decade, a professor whose passion continued to be the study of memory and recollecting. He had also known my father.

This gentleman, Professor Baldino from Salerno, greeted us at the door of his four-story stone house. He appeared short and bowed like a hunchback, though he didn’t truly possess that infirmity. His insubstantial white hair and beard wafted about him like smoke, though he fastened his dark brown eyes upon us with an iron focus. I like this impropriety in the elderly, who sometimes stare more fiercely at this world even as they glimpse the next.

“Welcome to my northern home, Dr. Mondini. Come in, come to the kitchen and tell me about your journey.” He pressed my hand with crimped fingers that seemed white parchment stretched across the joints, hardened into a single brittle claw. He smiled at Olmina and Dr. Urquhart, displaying no more than four or five teeth, three on top, one or two (I couldn’t quite tell) on the bottom.

He led us through the entry, past a cold, unlit room that appeared to be stacked with books and furniture, and up a crooked staircase alongside plain walls of dark oiled wood to the second floor, mastering each step one ponderous breath at a time as he clasped the railing. I felt my own inhalation slow to a stretch of years, as if I might be old myself when we finally reached the top.

“We’ll dine here where it’s warm. Isabella will prepare our repast and bring it to the table,” Dr. Baldino announced, lisping through his gums.

A large woman with a gray braid that ran down her back in an ever tighter weave, until there was only a wisp of three or four hairs at her waist, stood busily trimming pale green and brown vegetables at the stone counter. The hearth roared loudly with the strength of a six- or seven-hour fire that had been constantly stoked and now heated a large black pot of soup. The kitchen radiated the heat of a long summer day. We seated ourselves gratefully, women on one side and men on the other, at the oaken table set with plain brown linens and pewter bowls and spoons, and began to sweat, gradually casting off the clothes we could respectably shed.

As we waited for our soup, I addressed Dr. Baldino. “As you may know, I’m seeking my father, who spent some time here several years ago, according to his letters, but he’s unaccountably vanished. He hasn’t written. I’d like to know if you can tell me anything about his stay or if you know where he is at present.”

Professor Baldino folded his frail hands upon the table and regarded me with impenetrable sadness. “I haven’t heard from him since he left Edenburg some years ago. He became a man of fulminant humors.”

I grew restless at this lack of news and stood up, startling myself and the others no doubt with my sudden distress. I paced over to the window, where I could see only a blur of rooftops, since it was steamed up from the pottage. Olmina came and stood beside me, laying her hand on my arm.

Dr. Urquhart must have pitied me, for he jumped in with his jerky speech. “Your father’s whereabouts…hmm—I can reveal nothing really, but…the distressing occasion of his lapse, six years ago. He suffered a commotion…of the mind, couldn’t understand the orderly passage of time. He kept very late hours in his quarters at my house, then…slept all day, sometimes the next night, barely emerging when I knocked loudly…his door. Only one of his servants remained, for the other…had fled with his purse.”

“That scoundrel!” I exclaimed, returning to the table. Olmina sat beside me.

Dr. Baldino watched me with heavy, kindly eyes.

“Fortunately he kept most of his money hidden…in his chest, or so…he told me—in confidence.”

“Money and medicine in the same chest? That seems unlike him.”

“I once observed your father through the half-open door, fully dressed in his doctor’s red robe, black skullcap…at his desk, staring…out the window, tapping his quill but writing nothing upon the page. In the end he…needed to raise money and was forced to sell…most of his books.”

His treasures! My heart sank. “Did the collection include a copy of the materia medica from Wirtenberg?” I despaired of the answer.

“Yes, it did. Your father,” answered the philosopher, glancing to the side as if seeing the book there, “yes, mentioned it was a gift…from a Dr. Fuchs?”

My face must have fallen, for he looked concerned. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing.” I wavered.

“I would say he forgot himself,” opined Dr. Baldino at last in slow, measured tones. “Even though that rhetorician of Bologna, Boncompagno da Signa, tells us that men of melancholy temperament have the best memory, for they retain the impressions of things, owing to their hard, dry constitutions.” He went on with labored breath, “For I met your father many years ago in Padua, and I must say”—he paused to compose his words—“that in comparison to that period, the man appeared greatly altered. He could barely hold a conversation. His mind continually drifted and his eyes would fix upon a window, any window. If I had to say, it was almost”—he halted briefly, holding my eyes—“as though he’d lost track of time and only wanted to go into the fields and lose himself. Roam the land. I observed him more than once on the road to the Pentland Hills there.” He waved his arm to the south. “I saw him on nights flooded by moon after midnight. I too suffer insomnia. It brings me solace to sit and watch the country there, as if I were an old sentry of history. But he sometimes appeared to be walking on all fours, barefoot.”

After this astounding statement, I was dumbstruck. Dr. Urquhart interceded. “I don’t know if you really saw him…now, or one of our highland foxes, lengthened by his shadow…”

“It was a man, and I knew no one else out at that hour.”

“I can’t believe such a thing,” I said, even as my doubts grew.

“I once mistook a goat for a woman from afar, when it stood up against an olive trunk to pull at the olives,” declared Olmina.

Dr. Baldino frowned at her.

“The oddest thing, to return to your father,” said Dr. Urquhart, “was that after a brief stay, only six weeks in Edenburg, he’d…gone without even a leave-taking. May have suffered from severe nostalgia, a desire to go back to Venetia and…”

My head began to ache. “But I received letters from my father after that time,” I said, trying to remember all the letters, “from France and the Kingdom of Spain, and he never expressed such an intention.”

Dr. Baldino placed his hand on mine across the table. “It may be that I’m mistaken. Nothing is certain. But it’s true that your father wandered the land at night, wrestling with something unknown in himself.”

Isabella served our pottage. There was much silence over mushy colewort, parsnips, cabbage, beans, and dreadful oatcakes. We also had stringy pullets, which were oversalted and overcooked. I realized with embarrassment that the meal was prepared for the nearly toothless Dr. Baldino, and I had no cause for complaint, having all but four of my teeth still in my mouth.

As I chewed, a sentence I didn’t speak aloud came to my mind. Not My father has disappeared, or My father is lost, but I’ve lost my father. As if he were a fallen coin I could find by dropping to all fours and patting the floor with my hands. I’ve lost my father.



Owing to harsh weather, we decided to remain the winter in Edenburg. Finally, Olmina proclaimed, I’d come to my senses.

One afternoon before Christmas I observed Hamish in the square in front of the church when he didn’t know that anyone was watching, for there was a considerable crowd milling about. A few merrymakers flouted the recent Presbyterian rules that banned the old celebrations, electing a lord of misrule and parading him through the square on their shoulders with a pot upside down on his head (and ample ale in his belly, no doubt). Some lively carol singers (also at their peril from the church, whose special officers were luckily nowhere to be seen at this moment) imitated the joyous sounds of the animals at the birth of the Holy Child—the ox lowing, the ass braying, the calf bellowing, the cock crowing, and the goat bleating (the latter so pitiful that everyone began to laugh).

Hamish stood alone to one side of the western doors of High Kirk, just below the line of sunlight as Olmina and I strolled by. He was absorbed in a book, and his reddish hair stood about his head as if he’d run his fingers through it many times. He chewed on his nails thoughtfully, seeming to taste words that were impossible to place upon the tongue, as he leaned back against the wall, with one knee bent, oblivious to the revelry around him. I managed to discern the title—Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum—and recalled one intriguing passage:

The most skilful interpreter of dreams is he who has the faculty of observing resemblances. Any one may interpret dreams which are vivid and plain. But, speaking of “resemblances,” I mean that dream presentations are analogous to the forms reflected in water…In the latter case, if the motion in the water be great, the reflexion has no resemblance to its original, nor do the forms resemble the real objects. Skilful, indeed, would he be in interpreting such reflexions who could rapidly discern, and at a glance comprehend, the scattered and distorted fragments of such forms, so as to perceive that one of them represents a man, or a horse, or anything whatever.

So Hamish mulled upon the nature of dreams. I wanted to steer us away quickly, before he noticed me, but he peered up from his book—“Gabriella!”—and I was caught. I flushed like an aching girl.

Olmina tugged at my arm and said, “We must return to the house. The signorina is not well.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted, and I disengaged my arm from hers. Without any preface I asked, “So do you believe in divination by dreams as foretelling, simply tokens, or coincidences?”

He stared at me with curiosity. “It depends on what manner of dream we’re interpreting. A night dream, a daydream. A consequence of tough pullets,” he said smiling, “or some nocturnal form of Nature’s sacred design. Or even the grace of a lovely woman.”

It was the first time I’d heard him speak in complete, uninterrupted sentences. The narrow white gathers of the tight linen collar at his neck flickered ever so slightly with his pulse and breath.

“I believe,” I said, “there may be resemblances to events in the future, or even anticipations of malady or healing. For once I dreamt that all the remedies and instruments from my medicine chest were scattered in the Venetian Lagoon, and I did lose that chest in Lake Costentz. Yet even after the chest was recovered, I found the medicines mislaid. Maybe the dream points to the cures written in my father’s Book of Diseases, lost when he disappeared.”

“Ah”—his eyebrows rose in keen interest—“I’d like to know more about it.” He closed his book and slipped a slender finger from the page he’d been holding.

“Perhaps we can speak further the next time we meet,” I murmured, not really sure how much I wanted to tell him. A damp breeze kicked up the air. I put my hand near my face to protect myself from the cold.

He clasped my upraised hand and pressed it between both of his warm palms, brushing my face with the back of his hand, and then he bowed. “Farewell, then. I look forward to our renewed conversation.”

“Yes, soon.”

I pulled my hand away, then turned, hooking my arm through Olmina’s soft, heavy arm once more, and strode away at a rapid pace, pulling her along with me, until she tugged back to slow me down.

“He’s a handsome one, that man,” she commented, “a bit rash, but the face of a seraph.”

Ah, I thought, smiling, so even Olmina has been moved by him.



After that meeting, I found his tall, lank frame a singular source of disruption whenever he appeared. He differed greatly from my father, who entered a room and immediately established a presence with others. I knew where I stood in a room with my father, even with his sporadic ill tempers, for he was, at least at one time, an almost predictable class of planet.

But whenever Hamish advanced, I was unsure of my ground. I found myself leaning too close to him at times. I remembered the pavana venetiana, the pavana ferrarese, the exquisite dances of my youth, accompanied by the lute, an instrument considered too sensual for women to play. The evenings at the Villa Barberini, lit by long rectangles of late sun falling from the windows as we passed in and out of the circles of honey-scented candles. Back then, my mother looked expectantly upon my unflagging joy in the music. She thought of suitors; I thought of gestures. She’d never savored that kind of freedom, for she’d married my father at fifteen and hadn’t known another before him. Sometimes when I danced, I imagined a homunculus, a little man dancing within at the center of me. (Is this what it felt like to be full with child?) I never tired of the saltarellos, the pivas, the spingardi. Until the death of Maurizio.

My notes for The Book of Diseases occupied me well as Edenburg’s dark days of winter progressed, but I began to cherish the occasions when I would meet Hamish, and fret when I did not.



Christmas in Edenburg was a solemn affair. The inhabitants were forbidden by the Presbyterian elders to bake yuletide bread in their homes, and even the poor bakers themselves were interrogated about those who might order any such cake or bun. To cheer me, Hamish had agreed to escort me on another walk along the Water of Leyth the following day. Lorenzo joined us.

After we passed through the town gates, we followed the footpath that ran along the banks of the water, southward this time, toward its source in the Pentland Hills. Dark red coppices of willow stood dripping in the fog. Gorse and withered grasses lay sodden beyond the trees. “I warned you that you won’t see much of the countryside today,” said Hamish, amused that I’d insisted on going out anyway.

“Yes, but we can sense the fields and hills, the scent of winter earth. Maybe we’ll even hear a few birds,” I answered, pulling my red Hollant cloak about me. Naturally I couldn’t admit to Hamish that I had just wanted to see him.

Lorenzo piped up from behind us. “This cold could split a stone! Still, it’s better than coal smoke and gloomy houses.”

“You’re right, this is just the thing for a dry temperament, though I suppose we could do without the bilious cold,” I agreed.

“And so, do you organize your book by the humors, then?” asked Hamish.

“I’m not sure thus far of the classes of malady and cure. My father hadn’t yet suggested categories, so I lack his guidance.” We walked briskly as we spoke, to warm ourselves, and Lorenzo dropped behind.

“Wouldn’t it be more useful to gather them under the elements of place rather than humors? For those of us who live in wet regions would be able to turn to ‘Diseases Engendered by Rivers and Lakes,’ ‘Diseases Wrought by Swamps,’ and so on.”

I was delighted by this suggestion. “There is a great appeal to the Hippocratic Corpus,” I admitted, “the three environs of Airs, Waters, and Places. But the places aren’t entirely fitting for this work, though I’m drawn to the category of waters. When a person is porous, he is healthy. We may judge disease by the motions of water, how the urine flows, its color and quality, likewise the sweat, saliva, and tears. But the humors are more compelling for me. A melancholic can turn to her inclination and immediately find ways to restore balance.” As I spoke, I warmed to his presence beside me. No man had talked so freely with me about medicine since my father.

The path curved with the water, which grew narrower in its channel. Hamish turned intently toward me. “Why don’t you complete The Book of Diseases here in Edenburg? I’ll gain permission for you to use the library. We have an abundance of medical volumes here!”

I was astonished by his offer. I stood mulling it over, rather guiltily. For shouldn’t I want to continue the search for my father? “Are you sure that your peers will allow a woman in their sanctum?”

“They will if I insist.”

All at once a flock of screeching jackdaws approached invisibly and then miraculously appeared one after another out of the white vapor with their wet black bodies, gray necks, and pale blue eyes, moving in uneven synchrony. Their haunting caws increased, and though we couldn’t see them all, there must have been hundreds circling and creating the din. Hamish touched my woolen-gloved fingers. I didn’t withdraw my hand but lowered my head and observed the sodden pointed toes of my shoes. As he moved nearer, I noticed a smell of binding glue, the sort that emanates from books. I looked behind to where Lorenzo should have been, but couldn’t see him beyond the vanishing bend in the path. Hamish pulled me close while the raucous birds spun around us.

Then Lorenzo’s loud voice cut through the fog. “Have you ever heard such an uproar?” We quickly separated, as yearning and shame flared through me.

We continued to walk, holding our separate silences like live coals. I involuntarily brought my hands to rest below my chest, as if to contain it, the way a pregnant woman will place her hands upon her swollen belly. Incongruously I thought of a strange tale my father had related to me about a seed bone. I mentioned this to break the silence.

“Tell me,” said Hamish immediately, “what is a seed bone?”

“It re-creates the whole body. When my father first told me the story when I was a child, I wanted to plant every bone I could find in the sandy earth of our courtyard to see if it would make the magic. If the chicken knuckle would generate the chicken, the prickly ribs reconstitute the fish. Or if the tiny sacral bone I secretly obtained would grow into a skeleton or even a man. I’d stolen it from the charnel house on the island of San Michele, when we buried my great-aunt Tiziana. I wandered in the green cemetery, tapping gravestones with a long stick I found, while the rest of the families gathered beneath a black cypress, the tree of sudden death, Olmina once told me. That is why they are planted in cemeteries. Since then, I refuse to stand anywhere near one.”

Close behind me, Lorenzo scoffed. “The only reason cypress mark the fields of the dead is that their roots are long and deep. They won’t upend the coffins.”

“And just how did you steal that bone?” asked Hamish incredulously.

“When I came to the charnel house, I reached through the grate on impulse, grabbed the little vertebra, and pocketed it. Two Capuchins, their gray hoods covering their faces, strode nearby but didn’t observe me. Later, on the gondola returning to Venetia, I felt the bone jump in my skirt and I clutched it in my fist to keep it quiet. That night I secretly planted it beneath the pine in our small courtyard, but nothing ever sprouted. Even the vertebra disappeared, for when I tried to dig it up I couldn’t find it.”

“What a daring thing to do!”

I smiled. “I don’t know. It seems I’ve always wanted to make fragments whole, whether it involves a bone, a book, or a patient.”

He regarded me seriously with sharp blue eyes.

I stopped to catch my breath. The fog had turned to a wan rain. “I guess we should turn around.”

“I’ll agree to that, signorina. You don’t want to come down with the ague,” Lorenzo said, slapping his arms to warm up. I noticed both pockets of his woolen breeches bulging with small, thick branches, so that he resembled a sort of walking pollard.

“Well, I see you’ve found something to carve, then.”

“Ah yes, signorina. I like alderwood for the sweet, smoky smell. Easy to work and doesn’t feather.”

“What will you carve?” asked Hamish.

“Hmm, maybe a little crèche for Epiphany.”

“Careful, then,” Hamish said. “Don’t forget you’re in Protestant country now, and Nativities are forbidden. Best to keep it in the house.”

“How sad!” I exclaimed. I certainly wasn’t a devout Catholic, but as a child I’d always enjoyed playing with the little figures Lorenzo had whittled.

Lorenzo shook his head and trundled ahead of us.

Then Hamish opened his great green coat and put his arm out toward me. “Cold?”

I moved closer so he could put it around my shoulder.

Lorenzo looked back and caught my eye as if to ask, Are you all right with this man?

And cautiously, I smiled.

We walked back down the path, gathering warmth from each other. Before he left us at our rooms, I said quietly, “Hamish, I’d like to come to the library, then.”



The beauty of the countryside, and of Hamish, loosened my thoughts and my orderly plans. I began to consider that maybe I could settle in Edenburg, a city crowded upon three hills above an estuary. Wouldn’t I find comfort in the penetrating damp, the salt fog out of the east like an old childhood friend? A sea like beaten tin. Tall ships ticking across the horizon like the ornate hands of a wondrous clock. For like Venetia, Edenburg conversed with a sea to the east and withstood mountain winds from the Highlands in the north. This correspondence of geography pleased me—the familiar and the foreign in lively accord.

I began to consider more deeply my desire to find my father. How well did I really know him? Perhaps that was why I carried the letters and read them with all the devoted habit a woman might apply to reading the hours. More often than not, he was my Compline, the last of the hours, when one contemplates the small death of sleep. My night prayer. There, my father, you do exist. I have your words, even though you’re not here. I’d read them in different orders through the years, following chronology or place and now, on this journey, his nature. For it seemed another organizing principle cycled through his correspondence, like lunar phases, wheels of mysterious mood and reflection that weren’t entirely clear to me, though I could feel their inner workings. There was that unusual letter from Montpellier in 1586—unusual because he employed a rare tone of contentment.



My dear Gabriella,

I spend my days walking this strange half-abandoned city because I can no longer sit indoors. The season is spring, though the weather is still cool. A very fine fellow here, an old papermaker from Alby, has proved to be my best companion. He doesn’t ask me questions about my profession. He doesn’t spar with my theories. And he couldn’t care less about the Book of Diseases, except that he’s delighted that I’ve promised to request his paper through the Aldine Press in Venetia. He’s shown himself to be a marvelous artisan even as he works here at the mill of a friend who’s lent him a pulping hammer, vat, and screen. You would enjoy watching him, as you were always so engaged by how things are made, the beautiful mechanics. The other afternoon I sat for a while observing him working the hempen rags into paper. After previously soaking and boiling the fibers, he gently sieved them evenly onto a copper screen and pulled a sheet of paper out of the vat on that very screen. Then he couched it onto felt, where he pressed out the excess water. The old papermaker patted it all over (testing for uneven dampness) with unimaginable tenderness, as if he loved the paper. Then he left it to dry on a rack. I actually envied him his craft, the feel of it. The consequence of good work that he could hold in his hands. While our vocation may yield a healthy man, woman, or child, surely a happy outcome, it may just as well yield suffering or death. I wonder sometimes if that fires my passion to finish this book. To create something that I may hold in my hand, the very thing of it making me content. I know how it pleases you too, my daughter. May we one day find ourselves together at the Aldine Press, holding the book that offers help and knowledge to others, after it sustained us well in the making.



Would a book satisfy my passion? Or was there something—or someone—else I should hold?



True to his promise, Hamish obtained permission for me to study in the library. He appeared there almost every day at the hour I arrived, no matter when I rose or went out. He must have set someone on watch—or perhaps he’d agreed to be my escort there, unbeknownst to me.

It was the only place I went. Lorenzo, who also accompanied me each day, waited outside the hall on a bench, for they didn’t permit him to enter. Sometimes he whittled, always diligent about pocketing his shavings, much to Olmina’s vexation when she washed his clothes. He guarded his pieces from inquisitive eyes as much as he could, though once a gentleman asked him, “What are you carving there, my good man?”

“Oh, barnyard animals for my granddaughter at home. This here’s one of your furry Highland cattle.” The man smiled then and left him in peace.

“I wish you did have a granddaughter,” I said spontaneously, and immediately I regretted it.

“Mmh,” he grunted, and he frowned down at the wooden animals, his whole body clenched against the past. He placed them in a worn handkerchief that he folded up and tucked into his jacket pocket.

I struggled to apologize. We’d never spoken of their baby that died, nor of the others that never came. But then he turned to me and said, “Maybe you’ll have a girl of your own one day, and I can count her as granddaughter.”

I didn’t say a word. I’d thoughtlessly opened old sorrow for him, and in turn he stung me with hope. Somewhere within me, a vision sprang forth of that little girl from Tübingen, her curious expression, curls, and wayward hoop. I did want a child, and this unexpected longing flung me open, like a room of windows unlatched by wind.



I stood at the tall table fronting the literature shelves, with one foot up on the footrest, beginning to read from Petrarch’s Epistolae familiares, a selection I’d come to by randomly opening the book. It was a letter describing his ascent of Mount Ventosum. So many men have written on this subject, I thought. And so few women have penned a perspective. Hadn’t Olmina and I traversed Passo Rolle and the Dolomiti? What about the shepherdesses there tending flocks high in the shimmering air of those mountains? But no woman, perhaps, had climbed deliberately to a peak. Someday I wanted to ascend and descend with purpose, just for the sake of the mountain. And so I returned to Petrarch. I liked the ending of his Mount Ventosum letter, not so much for the edification as for the arrival by moonlight.

How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountain-tops, but to trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthly impulses.

With no consciousness of the difficulties of the way, amidst these preoccupations which I have so frankly revealed, we came, long after dark, but with the full moon lending us its friendly light, to the little inn which we had left that morning before dawn.

The friendly light, the little inn. The moon lending. They shone somewhere in my mind. So I wasn’t particularly present when Hamish came up behind me and asked, “How are you, dear lady?” He pointed to the manuscript as if he were discussing Petrarch, so as to avoid rumors from his fellows, of whom there were several in the library at that moment, reading, discussing topics among themselves. A couple of them were watching us.

He looked over my shoulder and recited:

To-day I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate which determines the affairs of men. Consequently the mountain, which is visible from a great distance, was ever before my eyes, and I conceived the plan of some time doing what I have at last accomplished to-day.

“Thank you,” I said simply. The sound of Hamish’s rich voice anchored me, a welcome weight even as he read about a light, windy mountain.

A tall, austere young gentleman came up beside us. He pulled Petrarch’s Sonnets from the shelf, tugging the book on its rope as far away from us as he could go, presumably to give us some privacy. Or was it repugnance at being close to a woman? I received my answer when he glanced at me derisively.

The young man, who clearly resented my presence, occupied far more than his space with the pressure of unspoken warning. He tapped slowly, loudly, on the slanted table as he read aloud. I could see no good of confronting him, though I felt the urge building in Hamish. So I linked my arm through his and said, “I’m ready to leave.”

He smiled down at me, fierce and yet willingly calmed.

Strolling away from the library between the two men, Lorenzo and Hamish, on a rare sunny noon, I felt content. If indeed my father had disappeared, and The Book of Diseases had vanished with him, then I would dedicate myself to the book’s completion. Though I lacked his full experience, I knew I could make up for it in time—with the added vision of a woman.



Aromatic Water of Rue:

For Augury

Though rue may be employed internally as a remedy for many ailments, among them headache, colic, and women’s lunar pains, and externally for gout, chilblains, and bruises, the water of rue is marvelous for sight and second sight. Writers, engravers, and artists relish the fresh herb with watercress and brown bread. Dabble the water around the eyes to settle murky vision and to summon foreknowledge in all things. The herb of sorrow is thus also the herb of grace, for the future already repents its errors. Some also claim that rue repels plague, biting chiggers, and curses. The evil eye squints from the scent of rue.