I pieced together what happened from what I was told. A group of Russian tourists on a bus tour of Sicily found me lying on the ground, delirious and sweating a half-mile outside the Messina city perimeter. They’d called an ambulance that took me to the local hospital. It seems it wasn’t much of a hospital, because it took them nearly twenty-four hours to figure out I didn’t just have heatstroke. It had been a record hot day for Sicily in October. Fortunately, Dottoressa Elena Ricci, an infectious disease specialist from Venice, was visiting Messina’s main hospital to give a lecture on in-hospital staphylococcal infections. On rounds with the ICU team she heard about the mysteriously ill woman who’d been found passed out in an orchard outside the city gates, wearing medieval dress-up clothes. A few tests later I was in isolation on high-dose intravenous antibiotics.
When the nursing staff went through my bag, they found my name written on a piece of parchment and were able to figure out where I worked. It didn’t take long for the massive clunking Machine of American Medicine, with some help from the U.S. Embassy, to have me flown back home on a medical plane, once I was stable and not contagious, and deposited safely in my former workplace—in New York City. With Yersinia pestis safely put in its place, I managed to recuperate fairly quickly, although I’d lost a lot of weight and my legs trembled when I stood up for too long. Still, for a few weeks after, the sight of one of those big buzzy indoor flies that show up in the late fall made me shudder. It would have been more accurate to fear fleas than flies, but my visceral reaction didn’t differentiate. I had a lot of unsettling dreams. Sometimes I wondered whether my time in the fourteenth century might actually have been a dream too. The only evidence that I’d traveled hundreds of years into the past was the Plague I’d brought home with me. But, since it had not been eradicated completely even in the twenty-first century, that was not proof enough.
* * *
Before I was discharged from the hospital, I’d asked Nathaniel to go through my mail. He brought the most pressing items, including a letter from Ben’s lawyers, but after just a few seconds of reading a stabbing headache started between my eyes.
“Just tell whoever wants to know that I’m alive, I’ll deal with the rest later,” I croaked, “and Ben’s neighbor, I mean my neighbor . . . Donata . . . ah, what is her name . . . Donata Guerrini—write her too. Just tell her I’m OK.” I drifted off to sleep again, for the hundredth time. More often than not I dreamed about Gabriele, and awoke reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
Once I was well enough to leave the hospital, I was well enough to think about Ben’s mystery again. At first my thoughts were vague, without any impetus to action, until the second letter from the lawyers came.
Dottoressa Trovato:
We hear from your colleague Signor Nathaniel Poole that you became ill while traveling in Sicily, and hope you are on the road back to health. Signor Signoretti, whom we are sure you will recall as the well-regarded Plague scholar, has approached us in your absence—most reasonably requesting your brother’s notes so he might complete the work you left behind. We imagine you will need time to recuperate, and that a return trip to Siena may not be forthcoming in the near future. We look forward to your approval, which will allow the most expedient publication of what appear to be important matters of great historical interest.
My first response, which I did not commit to paper, was full of profanity. Instead I wrote:
Dear Sirs:
Thank you for your concern for my welfare. I do not authorize the transfer of any materials to Signor Signoretti. I intend to resume the project, and I appreciate your protection of my late brother’s documents. I trust you will continue to exercise the same caution should any future requests arise. Please inform me of any matters regarding the maintenance of my brother’s house in my absence.
Best Regards,
Beatrice Alessandra Trovato, MD
I wasn’t going to hand over any of Ben’s papers to his unscrupulous competitor, even if he was descended from a fourteenth-century nobleman I’d met in person. But feeling proprietary about Ben’s book didn’t necessarily translate into actually resuming work on it—at least not immediately. My concentration wavered and I tired easily, napping at every opportunity on the faded pink couch in my apartment. Plus, I was still in New York City. Everything I’d done in Siena, even before my life was split between two times, seemed impossibly far away, and medieval Siena, even farther.
Once I was strong enough, I went back to operating: part-time at first. It might have been easier to work all day than to rest. Resting meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering.
Five weeks after I’d been discharged from the hospital, I decided to go to the Met for the visiting exhibit of medieval Italian art from the Uffizi in Florence. I found a room full of panel paintings from the 1300s and settled myself on a low bench in the middle of the gallery to bask in the images. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon and I was nearly alone in the exhibit; all the senior citizens were probably at half-price Broadway matinees. A blue-uniformed museum guard stood unobtrusively at the doorway, adept at watching for trouble while letting museumgoers commune with the art around them.
I stared at the elongated face of a Madonna with almond-shaped eyes, at the curving plump hand of the Christ child reaching toward his mother’s cheek. I had a sharper eye for these images now—I could see emotion in faces I would once have found impassive. I looked at the date: 1320. Gabriele was nine years old when that was painted. I suppressed the thought and the sharp sudden pain it created in my chest.
The clothing now looked familiar to me too, and when I closed my eyes I could feel the brush of a long skirt on the tops of my feet, and the smell of wool rose strong and almost sweet around me. But when I opened my eyes again I was still sitting on the upholstered bench in the middle of the gallery. I stayed for two hours, getting up periodically to stare at the paintings at close range. It was the small background details that felt most real to me—a nightingale in a cage hanging under a covered second-floor loggia, a glimpse of sheep dotting the rolling green hills through an open window, pages of a book, illumination in progress, on a scribe’s desk. The last one moved me most of all.
* * *