Cane stepped forward menacingly. “Speak up, before my master loses his patience.” He and Lugani had a smooth bad cop/good cop routine, probably perfected with years of practice.
“The captain is raging with fever. He gives off an odor so foul, from every fluid that emanates from his body, that none but the ship’s doctor will attend him. The merchant is with the angels, Ser. As of dawn today.” The young man shrank from Cane’s glare.
“How could he have been well at sunset and dead by the morning? We received his message yesterday before Compline.”
“Ser, begging your pardon, but I don’t know.”
Lugani looked at me, his lips narrowed into a thin line, then back at the cringing sailors. I wondered whether he remembered my warning. “Return to your ship, boys, lest you are carrying some contagion upon your person. Cane, notify the port officials that there may be a pestilence aboard the Genoese galleys. Monna Trovato, return to the fondaco with me. We shall discuss this further.”
The galleys were anchored a short distance from the shore, and the sailors struggled to untie the rowboat they’d used to make their way to the port. A taut line stretched from the ship’s stern into the water, disappearing under the smooth surface of the harbor. Along that line traveled a small, sleek shape with a curved, upraised tail. The shape was joined by another just like it. I watched the rats as they dove into the water and made their way to the shore.
“Monna Trovato.” I heard Lugani’s voice from a great distance, through the roar in my head. Everything spun around me, and I felt a searing pain under my arms and in my groin, with the fierce heat of fever. My knees buckled and I fell, dimly aware of landing on the pavement.
* * *
I awoke to the sight of a group of horsemen stabbing a wild boar until his flanks ran red. I closed my eyes again, hoping when I reopened them the scene would make sense. I wasn’t hallucinating—it was the painted canopy above my bed in the fondaco.
“Signora, are you awake?” I thought about lifting my hand; it was a thousand miles away from my body and impossibly heavy. “My lady, can you answer?”
I forced my mouth to move. “How did I get here?”
“Messer Lugani brought you in his arms. At first, I thought you were dead! I am so very glad you are not.” Clara burst into tears and buried her face in my chest. I put my hand on the back of her head as she sobbed. The warm wetness seeped through my chemise—someone must have undressed me. I hoped it had been Clara.
I sat up. The pain and fever, or whatever I’d felt at the port, were gone. I must have had an empathic version of the Plague. I definitely didn’t want the real thing. “We have to get out of here. I’m going to talk to Messer Lugani. Where is he?”
As if on cue, there was a knock on the door. Clara wiped the tears off her face with her sleeve, and got up to open it. Lugani stood in the doorway, his height filling the entrance. He was hatless, and his dark short hair stood up from his head in spikes, as if he’d been running his hands through it repeatedly. His cloak was pinned off center. I had not seen him look so like an ordinary man before, vulnerable to the vagaries of life. And, I was happy to see, Cane was not with him.
“Monna Trovato, it seems you were right. The pestilence has come.” His admission of the accuracy of my warnings and his failure to believe them made even more of an impact on me than his appearance. “Messer Cane and I plan to leave the city immediately. You should prepare to leave with us.”
There was nothing I wanted to do more than accept. Nothing, that is, except find Gabriele and leave with him. “Ser Lugani, I wish to leave the city as much as you do. However, I must find my Sienese acquaintance first, Ser Accorsi, the artist who now resides in Messina’s Ospedale, where he has a commission. I wish to leave with him.”
Lugani’s face darkened. “There is no time. We leave before the next bells.”
“Surely you can wait a few hours for the possibility of saving one more life?” We stared at each other openly, and I saw the battle inside him—his own life balanced against the life of someone else.
“There is a ship—La Serena—leaving Messina in two hours. If you are not on it, you will have to find your own arrangements.”
I made a quick decision I hoped I wouldn’t regret. “Well, then, you may leave without me.” Lugani nodded.
“You may find your gold in Messer Provenzano’s hands. May God protect you.” Lugani turned and left. I thought I could feel a cool wind stirred up by his cloak, but it might have been fear. Clara made a small noise at my side.
“Clara, you can go with him.” She looked up at me, and I saw the longing in her eyes. It wouldn’t be as his betrothed, but it might buy her ten months of life. I watched her conquer that longing, and replace it with something else: a fierce, young resolve.
“No, Monna Trovato. I am staying with you.” I hugged her quickly, feeling her limbs tremble. I hoped we both wouldn’t regret our decisions.We were now likely to be stranded five hundred miles from Siena in a city about to be overrun by Plague. I stood up, pulled on my dress, and tied my hair into a loose knot while Clara fumbled with my buttons. Then I went to find Provenzano. He greeted me in the fondaco office with his usual combination of good humor and friendly grumbling. I suspected Lugani had not told him what was coming, since without him, there was no one to run the fondaco. Lugani was a businessman after all.
“Signora, it is always such a pleasure to see your radiant face in this dim little shop. I rue the sad day when you depart, leaving me bereft in this godforsaken post.” His fat face creased with a smile. He either didn’t notice the wild look in my eyes and the unusual state of my hair, or was too polite to mention anything.
“Provenzano, I’m told you have something for me.”
“Is it just your wages that you seek? How disappointing.”
If I had to choose someone among Lugani’s administrative staff to be stranded in Messina with, this was definitely the guy. “I hear that Messers Lugani and Cane are leaving Messina,” I said, trying to gauge how much he knew.
“Oh, they often leave on short notice. Busy men, busy, busy men.” He wiggled his hands to connote business.
“They didn’t say anything about a pestilence at the port?”
“Messer Lugani said that his Genoese contact had fallen ill, but nothing more than that.”
“Provenzano, there’s a deadly contagion brewing at the port that endangers all Messina. You should leave town as soon as possible. After, of course, you give me my money. I’m resigning, effective immediately.” I held out my hand.
He looked at me uneasily. “What sort of contagion exactly?” He coughed once. “I’m quite susceptible to illness. I am always the first to fall ill, and the last to recover.”
“Swellings in the groin and under the arms, raging fever, coughing up blood, delirium, and rapid death.”