“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said.
“I am woefully prone to distraction, Signora, and my prayers falter in their constancy. That is why I am here today, rather than in the pulpit.” He rubbed the top of his head as he spoke, and his face shifted rapidly. “The sun is so lovely this morning, is it not? I was imagining that I might ride out of this very window upon a ray of light and follow it to its celestial origin.” He laughed, a high-pitched, childlike sound, and pointed to a gleaming stained glass panel. Had he been like this before the head injury?
I couldn’t help falling into old medical habits, assessing the extent of his amnesia. “Do you remember how you hurt your head?”
“I cannot recall the details. Were you present, Signora?” He was staring off into space now. “Your apparition burns in my memory. I took you for a demon unleashed by the night as I faltered in my prayers to protect our city from evil. But now I understand your beneficent purpose.” The hairs on my arms rose as I remembered the sound of a voice chanting the night office, that first night I’d awakened in Siena’s Duomo.
“What do you remember about that night?”
“I heard the sound of footsteps in the nave and saw a figure disappearing through the great doors of the cathedral—I know now it was you. Then I prayed harder, in the hopes that my inexpert fumbling had not opened the door to unwelcome spirits.”
“I’m not a spirit,” I said firmly. But that was an interesting thought. Had his prayers—or a failure of his prayers—allowed a chink to open in the wall separating one time from another? I made up a more reasonable story for him. “I fell asleep in the pews after Compline, and awoke to the sound of the divine office.” I still wanted to wring more information out of him, this link to my old time. “Have you ever witnessed such apparitions before, Father?”
“Never, Signora. But my hours spent in contemplation of the Holy Spirit have sharpened my eyes to the world beyond our own, and it was simply a matter of time before otherworldly beings showed themselves to me.”
“I’m not an otherworldly being.” That wasn’t entirely true; perhaps it was better to meet him on his own ground. “Father, do you think the Duomo is a portal of sorts, through which spirits—like myself, for example, might travel?”
“The person is the portal, not the place.”
His comment had an edgy clarity that jarred me. “What person?”
The priest spoke in a low melodic voice that was almost a chant. “The cathedral, for all its grandeur, cannot house the love of God without a human element as a vessel, and God must work through the actions of saints and men. Where the heart and soul travel, the divine presence works its miracles. The mystics serve as an entry through which God communicates with our humble world. They harbor the Divine in their hearts and souls at all times and in all places. You, for example, do not appear to be bound to any place. Or any time, for that matter,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
With that unnerving statement, he closed his eyes. “I am so very tired, Signora, I must lay my head down for a moment.” He bowed and left the chapel. After a few minutes I left too. As I crossed the courtyard I wondered whether he might be onto something. But if it was the person and not the place that mattered, shouldn’t I be able to go home whenever I wanted?
* * *
The oddest part of my encounter with the priest was that it had occurred at all. In my medieval experience to date, intimate conversations between members of the opposite sex were rare. There was little privacy, and the private places were mostly off-limits. Gabriele and I had spent time together on his scaffolding, but that was in front of half the population of Siena, and he’d been working, not chatting.
I continued to wonder whether Gabriele might be interested in me as something other than a needy widow or angel’s prototype, but my ignorance of medieval behavior made it hard to tell. The biggest challenge was Gabriele himself; I had never met anyone so difficult to read. My attempts to divine what he was thinking—either the normal way or my paranormal way—repeatedly failed. Seeing my own image bloom from his paintbrush on the facade of one of the most prominent structures in Siena could have been evidence of his interest, but Gabriele seemed to pay more attention to his painting than to its model.
* * *
By the second week of September, Gabriele’s fresco was far along, and I was working on a business proposal, drawing on notes from the rector’s preferred notary. The document was addressed to a wool merchant named Girolamo Lugani, whose company in Genoa would provide new robes for the Ospedale staff and embroidered altar cloths for the Church of Santa Annunziata. Lugani was en route to Siena, and the contract had to be ready before his arrival. I was halfway through the document when I heard the sound of hammering outside—muffled, now that the window had been repaired. I went outside to see what was going on. Gabriele was back outside the scriptorium, this time with a team of carpenters.
“I have not the leisure to rebuild this myself, as the Virgin and the rector command my haste,” he said when I raised an eyebrow at the three laborers he’d brought to rebuild the scaffolding.
“You don’t trust your own work?”
“I suspect, as do you, that my work was not at fault.”
I stared at him. “How do you know what I think?”
Just then, a builder tapped his shoulder for attention. Gabriele gave me an apologetic shrug and returned to the reconstruction of his scaffold. I reluctantly returned to my correspondence with the wool merchant.
Over the next few days Bosi glowered constantly and corrected everything I did at least three times. Even the unflappable Umiltà was jittery, talking quickly and forgetting to finish the ends of her long sentences. I started getting nervous myself, wondering whether I’d have the opportunity to meet this Lugani, and not sure whether I wanted to.
I’d closed the door of the scriptorium to concentrate. Every error meant rewriting the whole page by hand, which certainly made me try to get it right the first time. The knock on the scriptorium door made me jump.
“Who’s there?”
The answering voice was muffled by the wood. “Gabriele Accorsi.” I leaped up, tripping over my skirt, and opened the door to find Gabriele standing in the doorway with a package. “Good day, Signora. Ysabella regrets the time it took her to return your garment.”
Gabriele extended the package toward me. My hand brushed his as I took the dress and I pulled back instinctively. I hadn’t touched him since the scaffolding incident, and that time he’d not been awake.
“Thank you—I’ll give you back the blue one. Would you rather I washed it first?”
“Ysabella and my uncle asked that you keep it, if it suits you.”