When he began vomiting blood, staining the linen coverlet rusty red, Ysabella went out into the streets to find a priest. Even the parish priests remained behind locked doors, unwilling to pave their own roads to death by smoothing their parishioners’ paths to the afterlife. Within the day Martellino was dead, and Rinaldo had begun to weaken, unable to rise from his bed to help. Ysabella wandered the streets, where bodies were piled alongside buildings, trying to find a gravedigger to bury her father. None would help, at least not for a reasonable fee. The Becchini requested an exorbitant price, far more than she could ever amass. When Ysabella blanched, the leering pallbearer suggested her body might serve as currency. Ysabella shrank back from the hands extending from the long, black Becchini cloak, and ran back home, where the closed shutters hid the once-fragrant bakery. She washed her father as best she could, though the stench of his body resisted all her efforts. She dragged his heavy corpse down the stairs legs first, head bumping on each step, but she could get no farther than the doorstep of the bakery. She left him there, covered with a linen shroud.
Rinaldo died a day later. His final hours were much the same, but the last weeks of his life had been vastly different from his father’s. When the Mortalità had first begun to wreak its madness upon Siena, Martellino had turned to penitence, prayer, and simplicity of living—eating little, and that which he ate barely seasoned, kneeling to pray at each peal of the bells. Rinaldo had turned instead to debauchery, carousing with bands of men in the streets, drinking in taverns, gambling, and brawling. He returned home long after dark, often with a new cut on his cheek or a blackened eye. Ysabella, when she had a moment to think at all, reflected upon the two men’s souls and the opposite ways they chose to meet the looming threat of death.
Ysabella burned the bedding and clothing Rinaldo had worn, and Bianca sequestered herself with little Gabriella in what had once been her marital chamber, covering the baby’s face with cloths soaked in aromatic oils. Ysabella did not ask for her assistance in managing Rinaldo’s corpse. She dragged his body just far enough outside so she could shut the door. This time, she found a beggar willing to carry the bodies in a cart for a few soldi, and she followed her brother and father to a huge ditch in the parish churchyard where their bodies fell with a soft thump and a scattering of flies upon the heaps of corpses layered there. The house was thus stripped of its men.
Ysabella fully expected that she would succumb, but after a month of watching those around her fall ill and be carted away, she feared her own death less. Bianca and Gabriella were also spared, perhaps because of their isolation—they never left Bianca’s bedchamber. The baby slept in a cradle suspended by ropes from a beam in the ceiling, and each time she cried out Bianca leaped up from her bed, with heart pounding. But miraculously, the babe stayed well and cried out only for ordinary reasons: hunger, thirst, or a soiled cloth. Gabriella was taking a bit of poratta now from a wooden spoon, and Ysabella brought that and all Bianca’s meals to their camera, and made sure the oiled cloth and wooden shutters barred the miasma entry.
Every few days Ysabella left the confines of their house in search of food. The mercato had shut down and nearly all the businesses were shuttered against traffic that might bring the Pestilence with it. Those that were left sold their goods at exorbitant prices because so few dared to stay and sell at all. Ser Tornabuoni put forth eggs and capons for three times what they had brought before the Pestilence came, and sugar was beyond reach, as it was used for bolstering the diet of the sick. Many shops were left unmanned. Ser Buonacorsi, from whom Ysabella’s father had always purchased the wheat and barley for his loaves, had fled to lodgings in the contado, along with many of the more prosperous merchants. Some houses lay empty because all within had died, and looters had stripped the buildings bare and left the front doors ajar, creaking on their hinges.
Ysabella could not imagine reopening the bakery after her father’s death, but the remaining family must have some livelihood. Monna Tecchini had died in the first few months of the contagion, but she had taught Ysabella well, passing on her knowledge of herbal lore and training Ysabella’s hands to coax babies from their watery homes into the perilous world. Ysabella drew upon her knowledge of midwifery and healing, and made a livelihood of it, supporting the three of them. Few doctors would attend to the sick in these times, and those that did often died in the attempt. The beak doctors—armed with birdlike masks against contagion—walked the streets, ominous in their disguises, trusted less and less as the scourge ground on. Ysabella’s aim to comfort even when she could not cure made her a welcome visitor. It seemed to Ysabella that each birth was evidence of God’s desire that the race of men should continue to inhabit the earth. These thoughts gave her some comfort that the Divine still smiled upon Siena, even as the Pestilence ravaged the city.
* * *
One incongruously bright day, a visitor came to the door. Ysabella nearly leaped out of her skin at the knocking, so unfamiliar was the sound. In these times of terror and contagion no soul would enter a house marked with death as theirs had been. She raced down the stairs from her studium where she had been drying herbs for a poultice. The smell of lemon balm and rue followed her to the front door.
She did not recognize the visitor. His neck lay in thick folds above his dark wool tunic, and the pallor of his skin reminded her of maggots that multiplied in meat left too long in the sun of the market. Ysabella held the door partially ajar, barring the entrance with her body.
“I am seeking Gabriele Accorsi, the painter. Does he reside here?”
Ysabella started at the name of her cousin; it had been many months since she had heard it anywhere other than within her own head. “He is not here.”
“But this is his residence?”
“He is away on a commission.” Ysabella’s response was just within the boundaries of propriety. It would not do to anger this unknown gentleman, with no man in the house to protect her. But she took an immediate dislike to the caller and could not bring herself to be civil.
“And is he expected back soon?”
“Who are you, to come with probing questions, but no introduction?” Ysabella had never been timid, and her months of survival in the face of overwhelming death had strengthened her already substantial will.
“I am a friend to Accorsi. Giovanni Battista is my name. Your kinsman and I became acquainted during his time at the Ospedale where I am a scribe, assistant to Fra Bosi.”
Ysabella narrowed her eyes. He had not counted on her knowledge, and it betrayed his lies now. But she let him continue, gathering information by listening.
“I and the other staff of the Ospedale are concerned for his whereabouts, and hoped there was no news of his demise at the hands of the Pestilence.”
Ysabella could see the man’s small eyes shift to the left, then right, as if he were reading the next untruth from an invisible page in front of him.
“It is a boon to know that my cousin still has friends, despite the friendless times in which the Mortalità has left us. But I know as little as you, Messer Battista.” The man was dangerous. She would have known it even had he not invented a story she knew to be untrue, having met Fra Bosi’s scribe herself. And what had become of Monna Trovato, after she left Siena under the Genoese merchant’s employ? Gabriele had told the story the night before he left for Sicily himself, his pleasure at the new commission tempered by worry for the scribe’s welfare. Ysabella hoped Messina had provided a haven for both travelers.