As my eyes adjusted, I saw brushes in clay jars on a table along with the raw materials to mix tempera-based paints—pigments, a basket of eggs, a mortar and pestle, sheets of gold leaf. Then I looked down. Gabriele lay on the floor on a makeshift pallet with his eyes closed. He was curled on one side, mirroring the arc of Mary’s body in the moment of the Annunciation, warding off suffering to come. I could see every detail of his face as if it were illuminated—his long curved lashes, the slant of his closed eyes, the faint shadow of new beard growth on his cheek. He had to be alive—wouldn’t I have known otherwise? He opened his eyes and his hoarse voice made me jump.
“I am not dead yet, Beatrice, if that is what you are wondering.” He coughed once, a harsh sound.
I would have laughed had I not been so afraid. I moved toward him, but Gabriele raised his hand in a gesture of warning.
“Stay away.” I dropped my hands. “You were quite right about Messina, it seems.” His words trailed off in a spasm of coughing. I wanted to lie next to him and cradle his body in mine. I could almost imagine how his long slender back might feel under my hands, and the rasp of his unshaven cheek against my own—but that was irrational and deadly.
“Please leave me, Beatrice. Your presence endangers your life.”
“I can’t.” I stood frozen, drinking in the sight of his face and the sound of his voice. “Can you walk?”
“I cannot.”
I imagined picking him up and carrying him out of the tiny room, the chapel, the Ospedale, through Messina’s streets and out into the surrounding contado, as he had carried me, once, from the burning scriptorium. But even if I could, then what?
“Beatrice, you must leave the city. It will do neither of us any good if you too should fall ill with this malady.” He stopped to cough once more, holding his hands over his face. “I will find you, if I recover. Some do, do they not?”
Some do, some must. Gabriele looked up abruptly, an odd expression on his face, as if he had heard my unspoken words.
“Do you know, given your possession of my journal and your place in time, what befalls me? Is it written somewhere in the century you once inhabited?”
“Oh no, I have no idea what happens to you. I wouldn’t be considering your marriage proposal so seriously if I’d knew you were about to die.” Gabriele smiled weakly. “I accept,” I said, my voice breaking.
“Not now,” he said. “I cannot bear to think of your precious vows given to a dying man, if that is what I am. I know what it means to have my promise follow someone to the grave.” He looked toward the doorway that led to the chapel and his unfinished painting.
I reached into my bag and found the five antibiotic tablets I’d brought from my old home. They felt curiously heavy, as if their power had lent them weight. I placed them into Gabriele’s palm without touching his hand.
“Take one of these now,” I said to him. “Can you swallow?”
He brought one tablet to his mouth and chewed it, grimacing. “Is your century this bitter, Beatrice?”
“I usually swallow them whole.” I didn’t know how to answer his bigger question. “Take one every time the bells ring the hours, until they are all done.”
“I shall, sweet Beatrice, until either the tablets are gone, or I am.”
“Gabriele?” He raised his eyes to look at me. “Please don’t die.”
“I will do my best,” he said, “and I hope you will do the same.” I nodded. “Leave me now, Beatrice.”
“Can I touch you first?”
“You are the physician. You know how the disease passes from one body to another.”
This was probably the pneumonic form, with all that coughing. Both of us were probably doomed. Fifteen years of training die hard—I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. But my head filled with unexpected images—burning gold and red and blue, a shimmering sweep of fabric, the glitter of outstretched wings. He’d let me see the visions in his head.
“If we survive, I will call upon you to keep your promise,” he said, so quietly I could hardly hear him. “Now, for the love of God, please leave me.”
I left the tiny room and began to run. I ran around the unfinished painting, ran through the bright gleaming chapel, ran out of the Ospedale. I kept running, running while crying, until my lungs burned and my legs ached, running without knowing where I was going.
* * *
Clara finished packing, but her mistress had not returned. She went to look for Messer Provenzano, who was loading trunks into a cart behind an irritable-looking horse. He was going to the country, he said, and she’d be wise to do the same. Feeling desperate, Clara watched Messer Provenzano hoist the last of his belongings into the carriage.
“Can you help me find my mistress, Ser?”
“I can’t imagine how I could help, Signorina,” he said, not unkindly. Clara put her face in her hands. “Now, now, don’t despair. I do hate to see a young girl cry.” He patted her shoulder awkwardly, apparently unaccustomed either to young girls, or crying, or both.
Clara attempted to calm herself; she hadn’t survived as an orphan this long without learning to make her rescuers feel at ease. Her throat ached, but she managed to produce a smile. “Will your travels take you past the Ospedale?”
“I’m bound for my lodgings in the contado. But I can take you on my way.”
Clara was not even certain of her mistress’s whereabouts—perhaps she was wandering through the streets, lost or ailing. Clara looked up at Messer Provenzano’s round face and felt the panic in her throat.
“Monna Trovato is so wise, and so kind. What if I cannot find her? What will become of my poor mistress, alone in this terrible place?” Clara’s voice broke in a wail, the sound of the child she had so recently been.
Provenzano reached out and brushed the tears off her cheek with his plump fingers. “I am sure she will be found. How hard could that be? She stands out in any crowd like a Moor among maidens. Or no, that is not quite right, more like a maiden among Moors. Never mind the comparisons. And I shall leave a note here with directions to where we’ve headed, should she return and find us gone.”
When Provenzano was done writing, Clara took the piece of parchment and, as they left the fondaco, affixed it to the front gate. It looked forlorn there, pale against the dark iron. Clara climbed up with Provenzano into the cart, and leaned up against his ample side, finding comfort in his bulk and constant conversation. But as they headed into the city streets she heard the cathedral tolling funeral bells, and the sound made her shudder.
When they reached the Ospedale piazza the sun was nearing the horizon. At the Ospedale entry, the guard did remember a woman with blue eyes and black hair who had come and eventually gone, toward the city gates. There was nowhere else to look.
“I must be on my way,” Provenzano said at last, “before the roads become too dangerous to travel.” Clara imagined being left here, alone in Messina with a pestilence raging. Desperate, she reconsidered her approach. An idea came to her with sudden clarity: food, of course. His width proclaimed his propensity to give in to that temptation, one Clara was well-equipped to deliver.