Dear Nathaniel,
I feel like writing to you even though I have nowhere to send this letter. Did you suspect before I did that my preoccupation with the past had gone too far? “You’re getting in over your head, Dr. Trovato,” I can hear you saying, as if you’re standing here next to me, but of course you’re not. You don’t even exist yet but I like to think that somewhere you and Charles are rolling out of bed, emerging from your hem-stitched linen sheets, and padding into the kitchen to make espresso. God, I miss coffee. And toilet paper, and . . . Ben. I’m sure he’d be amused to be in the same category as toilet paper. But even if I came home I couldn’t have Ben. Not anymore.
What I miss most is not the conveniences of modern life; I miss being known. Everything I say about myself is fabrication, but there’s no alternative, because the truth is impossible. There are moments when I forget my old life, when I’m happily writing and the dust motes are swirling in the air above me, catching the light through the rippled glass windows. But underneath the day-to-day rhythm here, I’m homesick, or maybe timesick is a better word. With no way of getting home.
This is better than a postcard, right? I don’t think they had postcards, I mean HAVE postcards, in the 14th century.
Love,
B
I’d made no progress on how to get home again, but at least I had a job, which at this moment entailed drafting an agreement with the Grance di Grossetto accounting for the proceeds of twenty bushels of barley. Egidio had been sent on an errand and I was alone in the scriptorium. I could hear street sounds as I worked—laughter from a group of children playing, a peddler calling his wares. That morning, an intermittent loud banging had started, as if someone were building something just outside, but I couldn’t see anything through the leaded glass windows. As I finished the agreement, I began to feel sleepy. I’d slept badly the night before, awakened by nightmares of the Plague, reenacted by flat medieval figures from the chronicles I’d read in my old century. I slipped the letter to Nathaniel under the ledger and put my head on the desk. The agreement could wait a few minutes, unlike neurosurgery. Soon I was dreaming: I was lying on my belly in the sun on a sandy beach, letting the warmth soak into my back. Then I was feverish in my childhood bed, getting an alcohol rub from Benjamin to bring my temperature down. The images fragmented, a bonfire at the camp I’d gone to when I was nine, faces distorted through the wavering heat above it. When I woke up, I was lying in the street.
* * *
Gabriele had not asked for help from any of the laborers at the workshop, preferring to limit expense by doing the preparatory work himself. The single fresco over the doorway would not require a team of carpenters to build the scaffolding or painters’ assistants to prepare plaster, bag spolvero, and mix the pigments daily. Tommaso, his closest friend from Simone’s workshop, questioned his sanity, but Gabriele enjoyed the physical effort.
He extended the boards to allow access to the wall over the Ospedale entrance. Soon he was too warm for his tunic and worked in his linen long-sleeved undershirt, humming under his breath in harmony with the sparrows that gathered in the piazza. As he hammered, he began to smell the cooking from the Ospedale kitchens, smoky and pungent. But after a few more minutes, the smell became unpleasant, and his eyes stung. Gabriele rapidly made his way down the scaffolding to the front entrance. The two guards at the entrance moved to block his entry until they recognized his face.
“Fire,” Gabriele barked, then raced past them into the Ospedale’s entrance and up a flight of marble steps, following the smell of smoke. When he reached the landing he dropped to the ground and crawled until he reached a closed door. The door was warm to the touch but he rose and threw it open.
Gabriele’s heart sank at the sight of billowing smoke and tongues of orange flame curling around stacks of books in the Ospedale’s great scriptorium. He could see a large cistern in the corner of the room with a bucket and dipper hanging next to it, and scrambled on his hands and feet toward the water source. As he passed the scribes’ desks he stumbled over something soft and yielding. Looking down he saw, with shock, a woman’s foot, wearing a sandal with fine leather straps. The billowing smoke isolated the foot strangely, as if it were disembodied. As the smoke drifted, Gabriele made out a calf above the ankle, and the edge of a skirt—all attached to a woman, slumped over the copyist’s desk.
Gabriele pulled himself to stand. His mind allowed him a peculiar slow clarity, enough to capture detail despite the situation’s urgency. The scribe’s cheek rested on the ink-stained wood and her slender fingers still curled around a pen. A few fine strands of black hair escaped from her plaits to touch the curve of her neck. In that fraction of a second Gabriele caught the subtle lift as a shallow breath moved her shoulders. Alive.
He grabbed the scribe under her arms and dragged her toward the doorway. As he did, he heard a terrible splintering sound—a full bookcase detached from the wall near the door, swayed and pivoted, showering sparks as it fell. It crashed to the floor in front of him in flames, effectively blocking his exit. He pulled himself and his limp burden back down to the floor, scanning the room for possibilities. High windows paned with thick glass lined the left wall, and he could see a path through the flame and smoke to reach them. He grabbed a heavy inkwell from the desk and crawled, dragging the scribe behind him. At the windows he rose, hefting the inkwell with one hand, and swung hard to smash the diamond-shaped leaded panes. The windows broke around him, the thin seams of lead bending and fragments of glass showering him and the motionless scribe.
Gabriele had chosen his escape route well; outside the broken window were the poles of his scaffolding. He knelt down to lift the woman and threw her over his shoulder. As he struggled to climb through the jagged opening he found himself thinking, with the same odd crystalline detachment, how bizarre it was to be carrying another person, the second in a few weeks, to either death or recovery. He hoped for the latter as he flung the woman out the window onto the small platform he had built just that morning, and burst gasping into the fresh air after her.