I closed my eyes and then I whispered a visceral impromptu prayer. Don’t take him from me; I can’t bear it. I can’t. I thought I might sink down and never resurface, hundreds of years from any familiarity and comfort, without mooring in time and space. I opened my eyes again.
The corners of Gabriele’s mouth curled upward. Had I spoken out loud? His eyes stayed closed.
“Messer Accorsi? You can’t be smiling.”
The gray eyes opened. Equal pupils, round and rapidly shrinking in the light. I couldn’t help the quick assessment.
“I am smiling, strangely enough,” he said, fixing his gaze on my face. “Why are you crying?” I started to sob then, in earnest. “I do not know how you thought to save me but I believe I owe you my life, Beatrice Alessandra Trovato.”
I did not explain. “Then we’re even,” I said, gasping between sobs that turned into laughter.
* * *
Gabriele was whisked to the Ospedale infirmary and I went back to the scriptorium to work, but it was understandably impossible. Clara came in periodically to give me updates on the painter’s well-being, and by the end of the day she announced that Gabriele had been proclaimed sufficiently recovered to go home. I was glad to hear that, but that didn’t eliminate the fact that someone might have tried to kill him, someone whose malicious intent I had experienced firsthand as the scaffolding began to fall. I left the scriptorium and went to bed early.
That night I dreamed about my old life. I was in the OR, working alongside Linney on a falcine meningioma resection. The tumor had gotten so large, growing from the tissue that separates the two hemispheres of the brain, that it had squeezed the surrounding brain into a flat ribbon on either side of it. Linney was by my side, competent and quiet. It was a perfectly normal episode from my prior life, but I had a feeling of overwhelming uneasiness in the dream, a sensation of having missed something important. I tried to tell Linney what was wrong, but she couldn’t hear me. Then I was awake, panting and drenched with sweat on my narrow bed in the Ospedale women’s quarters. For the first time since I’d arrived in the fourteenth century, I was flooded with relief to be exactly where I was, and when.
*
The following day Clara came into the scriptorium breathless with another announcement: Umiltà wanted to see me immediately in the pellegrinaio, the hall where I’d seen the man with smallpox on my first day in the medieval Ospedale. I washed the ink off my hands and followed Clara out.
Umiltà explained. “A young priest—one Fra Bartolomeo—is receiving care for his injuries. He speaks in a jumble of confused words, but I believe he is asking for you.”
“Why on earth would he ask for me?”
“I am as baffled as you, Beatrice, but in rare moments when he becomes lucid, he calls for the tall woman with raven hair and eyes like the sea.” She pulled me along to a cot where a man lay with his eyes closed and a bloody bandage wrapped around his head. I hoped there weren’t any brains hanging out under there; even an accomplished neurosurgeon would be hard pressed to handle that in such medieval circumstances. I recognized his face—the tongue-tied man whose mind I’d entered, the priest who had accompanied Giovanni de’ Medici to the gallows.
He looked as if he might merely be sleeping, except for the dressing on his head. His flushed cheeks and his faint fuzz of light brown hair made him look like a peach.
“He was trampled by the crowd at the hanging,” Umiltà said, “and the guards brought him here.” The priest started moaning but didn’t open his eyes.
“I shall give him more extract of Papaver, Suor Umiltà.” An elderly man in a red robe trimmed with white fur appeared at her side with a long-necked glass flask in his hand. The doctor held the container up to the light to peer at the yellowish liquid within it.
“This is Dottore Agnolo di Boccanegra,” Umiltà said, “a most esteemed physician, trained in Paris. We are fortunate to have him here. And this”—Umiltà turned to me—“is our new assistant scribe, Beatrice Trovato.” I wondered what fourteenth-century Paris might be like. Dottore Boccanegra bowed briefly before looking up at the flask again.
“The color of his urine proclaims his derangement. Papaver will calm his fevered state and balance his humors.”
“Not yet,” I said. Everyone stared at me. “It could make him worse, with a head injury. And you won’t know how he’s doing either, if you keep drugging him.”
“Have you experience of physic, Signora?” Boccanegra wrinkled his nose at me as if I hadn’t taken a bath in too long, which from my perspective was certainly true. I figured I’d better come up with something plausible quickly.
“My late husband was similarly afflicted,” I lied, “and the poppy blunted his ability to speak in his last hours. He was unable to give his final confession.” They all looked at me with new understanding.
The physician changed the bandage while I stood there, and I saw a bruise on the young priest’s head, with a hint of swelling under the skin. I didn’t like the location—right at his temple, over the middle meningeal artery. A fracture there, and he’d be set up for a rapidly expanding epidural hematoma—a lens-shaped collection of blood between the skull and the brain—followed, if not checked, by coma, then death. His color was pale, his breathing irregular. Not good. I stole a hand out to feel his pulse—slow. Also not good. After the dressing was replaced, he looked tidier, but to me, worse. He had stopped moaning, and when I pinched his arm surreptitiously, he didn’t withdraw or flinch. I watched the physician examine him, restraining my desire to take over. The priest had the telltale signs of increased intracranial pressure—something was either swelling or collecting inside his rigid, unyielding skull. And if that pressure were not relieved he might never wake up again. How could I intervene? I had no instruments, no anesthesiologist, and perhaps most dauntingly, no authority.
“He asked for me?”
“He described you in a moment of clarity before the third dose of Papaver,” Umiltà said. Before I could consider why he might have done so, the buzz of the crowded pellegrinaio dampened suddenly and I felt the throb of a vicious headache, unbearable pressure like a vise at both temples. And I knew, with the certainty I now recognized from my hours in the OR, that blood was pooling under the curved table of the priest’s skull. A few more minutes, and it would be over. I dragged myself out of the priest’s head, still reeling from the remembered agony.
Lack of authority be damned—I had to do something. “Dottore Boccanegra,” I said, “have you a . . .” I wanted to do a craniotomy, but that terminology would not fly here. I stretched back to my med school history of medicine course until I had it. “Have you a trephine?”