“Whom do I have the pleasure of having snatched from Messer Stozzi’s grasp?” The diminutive sister spoke to me in her surprisingly large voice. “Your plight became evident to me, aligned as it was with my request for a supplement to our communal funds. I usually achieve my aims, with God’s help of course. Please allow me to introduce myself. You may call me Suor Umiltà.”
The tiny woman’s fingers were firmly around my wrist. She could have been anywhere from forty to eighty years old, and the pointed stare from her dark eyes made me feel like I was being X-rayed.
“I am Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, from Lucca, recently widowed and on a pilgrimage. I am very grateful for the Ospedale’s welcome.” I was getting good at that story. The word ospedale encompassed the institution’s multiple roles as hospital, pilgrims’ hospice, and protector of widows and orphans. I congratulated myself on having created a fictional identity that put me in more than one category that the Ospedale ministered to.
“Trovato: found, as in a foundling, or orphan. An auspicious name for a recipient of the beneficence of the Ospedale.” Umiltà beamed, deeply satisfied with the linguistic tidiness of it all. “Do tell me of your travails, Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, and be assured that we will provide you the assistance for which the Ospedale is renowned.” Faced with the first directly sympathetic ear since my arrival in 1347, I was overwhelmed with the desire to tell her everything. Instead I said:
“Thank you for rescuing me. I can’t imagine what would have happened if you hadn’t.”
Umiltà smiled in a self-satisfied way. “Did you encounter difficulties in your trip through the Maremma? I have heard tales of vicious bandits along the route. I hope your traveling companions were not lost to violence?” I was stumped for a moment by the questions—Maremma, bandits, companions? What was the Maremma? It must refer to the land between Siena and Lucca. To buy time, I put my face in my hands. Umiltà put her arm on my shoulder and leaned in solicitously.
“The tribulations of pilgrimage weigh heavily upon those who take up the path, but rest assured it brings us closer to God in the process.” I kept my hands over my face, still thinking furiously. “Can you speak of your losses?”
I opened my eyes inside the darkness created by my hands. The invitation to consider my grief brought back a memory of the day I’d said good-bye to Ben for the last time. “My brother,” I said, my voice breaking.
“My child, you have lost so much in such a short time,” Umiltà responded, her hand still firm on my shoulder. “Rest assured the mantellate will care for your spiritual wounds. Many come to us with losses such as yours, and we are well equipped to find balm for suffering souls.”
“Mantellate?” I blinked back tears.
“We are religious women, doing the work of God by charitable acts in the world of men, rather than the cloister. Have you no equivalent in Lucca?”
“Yes, yes, of course, we just call them something else.” It sounded lame to me, but she let it go. When Umiltà spoke again it was with a new undercurrent of interest.
“What can you do?” Umiltà looked at me appraisingly. “Sew, embroider, spin, recognize and prepare medicinal herbs?”
The question was clearly intended to discover whether I’d be of any use, or just a burdensome charity case. I considered my options. Most of my sewing had been related to wound closure. Billing myself as a physician might get me into trouble, and I knew nothing about herbal medicine. My first and only experience with a spinning wheel had been during an elementary school trip to a model early American village.
As we walked across the courtyard to the entrance of the Ospedale, Umiltà put her hand firmly on the small of my back to guide me through the doorway. I was still trying to think of something that would support my stay when I remembered my hours copying Ben’s manuscripts.
“I can read and write. Is that helpful?”
She looked at me with new interest. “Assuredly. Of course, the charity of the Ospedale would extend to you in any case, but the additional assistance you might provide to our great institution as a scribe, supporting its noble mission through your skill, would be most welcome.”
“It would be an honor to contribute to the Ospedale and its inhabitants, and by extension the commune of Siena, whose beneficence and protection serve as a beacon to travelers and citizens alike.” I wondered whether Umiltà’s verbiage might be contagious. But the more I sounded like the people around me, the less alien I’d seem, and that might keep me out of trouble. All those medieval documents I’d read back in modern Siena gave me language I could draw upon to sound more like a fourteenth-century native. That thought made me wish that I still had Gabriele Accorsi’s journal to keep me company.
*
The fresco season had the brevity and intensity of an adolescent love affair. On this hot July day, well into the season of paint and plaster, Gabriele was deep in the passion of a work in progress. He awoke before dawn to the mattino bells sounding from the Torre del Mangia—marking the end of curfew and the opening of the city gates—and made his way to Mass in the little contrada church. Instead of focusing on the sermon, Gabriele imagined the face of Santa Anna, the Virgin’s blessed mother, gazing with wonder at her newborn daughter being bathed in a basin. Gabriele felt the weight of an imagined brush in his right hand, and his left hand’s fingers moved as if he were checking the plaster to be certain of its dampness. Gabriele could feel Anna’s ache to hold her daughter, a child who would someday bear, to her joy and despair, the son of God.
“Dreaming about your painting again?” Gabriele’s cousin Ysabella peered up at him as the congregation filed out.