Fabbri suggested I start with tax records, a good way to find medieval people, assuming they’d paid their taxes. Since it was unlikely that any Medici would have paid his taxes in Siena, I didn’t expect that approach to be useful. However, through an odd twist of fate, it was. A former graduate student at the University of Siena had done her thesis on contrasts between Sienese and Florentine financial record-keeping in the fourteenth century, a topic that would have once bored me. As a result of her work, though, a good chunk of Florentine tax records was available in the library’s archives. It took me hours to read through the pages of faded writing despite my unusual firsthand experience as a medieval scribe.
It was almost closing time when I finally found his name: Giovanni de’ Medici, and the rest of his household too—Immacolata (wife) and Iacopo (son). Fortunately for me, the family had been good about paying taxes, and the records were from 1345. If this was the executed Giovanni, he’d lived past 1342. Just as things were heating up, Fabbri appeared and regretfully asked me to gather my belongings, as he needed to close the archives to visitors. I looked at my watch—ten minutes to five. I could do a lot in those ten minutes. I headed for the steel cabinet that housed execution records from Siena’s medieval prison. With Fabbri’s increasingly anxious assistance, I found the year I was looking for. And then, just like that, there it was. The parchment had yellowed with age, but of course I knew the handwriting and the signature—an owl and knife like a branch beneath the owl’s feet.
On this day, Messer Giovanni de’ Medici was thus condemned to death by hanging at the hands of the Podestà and jurists acting on the Podestà’s behalf.
Signed by my hand and no other,
Beatrice Alessandra Trovato
This of all things survives me? I had been there, then, after all. If anything should send me back in time this should, I thought, waiting for the thunderclap. But I felt nothing out of the ordinary, other than the combination of thrill and shock I might be expected to have, seeing a document I’d written centuries before.
The repetitive throat clearing of Fabbri at my shoulder brought me back to my own time: 5:00 p.m. exactly. I put the documents I’d found together in a file box allocated to me for that purpose, and left my discoveries to sit overnight (in a locked carrel) while I went home for dinner, a shower, and an early bedtime.
* * *
That night, I dreamed about Gabriele. We were in the elevator of the building I’d grown up in; it smelled like Mr. Clean. I knew in my sleep that an elevator was a place where people from two different worlds could meet, because it hung suspended between places, with no real location of its own. Gabriele looked pale, as if he hadn’t fully materialized. He didn’t speak, and when I reached out toward his face, my hand touched the paneling behind him. He didn’t notice my intrusion on his physical integrity.
“Are you alive?” I asked, but it seemed he couldn’t hear me, or maybe I hadn’t phrased it right. “I mean, are you alive in your own time?” He smiled, as he often had when I’d said something amusing. “Did you take all your pills?” Medication compliance—what a ridiculous thing to waste my otherworldly encounter on. But Gabriele had already turned away. Slowly he took on the colors and patterns of the objects around him—the brass railing that ran around the elevator’s perimeter, the false wood grain. Gabriele would love that, I thought, remembering how much he delighted in the portrayal of inanimate objects in his work, but before I could finish the thought he was gone, and the elevator opened onto the bright fluorescent light of the tenth-floor hallway.
* * *
The next morning I woke up with a headache. I made a cup of coffee and sat at my kitchen table sipping until the pain receded, but my larger problem could not be solved by coffee. I had told only one person the truth about what had happened to me, and he was centuries old. I briefly imagined explaining time travel to Donata. The thought made my head ache again. Instead I did what I had done in 1347. I wrote a letter that I had no intention of sending.
Dear Nathaniel,
You were so close to the truth, I almost told you. I didn’t simply go to Siena last summer; I went to Siena’s past. And there I found myself in the middle of the mystery that Ben had started to unravel. But I found more than that. I found colors brighter than I had ever seen, and flavors more intense, and a way of life that centers around the pealing of the bells. I glimpsed the edge of that existence a long time ago, before surgery wrote its name in capital letters on my future. Now I’ve read Dante in the medieval Italian vernacular, and copied it myself. I’ve played a part in the law and business of a place where contracts are still written by hand, and faith is a profound part of daily existence. I’ve dedicated myself to the practice of history rather than medicine, and in the process I’ve learned a new way into people that doesn’t require slicing them open with a scalpel. It has all been surprisingly satisfying, and sweetly, terribly beautiful.
You know me well enough to see I’m leaving something out. As you predicted I’ve met my match. It makes me cringe but there it is. The inaccessible Dr. Trovato, you must be thinking, hooked at last. True to form, I’ve picked a person who is so staggeringly inaccessible (or he has picked me, or some other force has picked us both, but now I’m sounding medieval!) that there’s no chance—well, almost no chance—it will succeed. Because, you see, not only is he dead, he’s from another century. He was dying the last time I saw him, dying of the Plague, the way I almost did. But he didn’t have modern American medicine to pull him through. I gave him a taste of it, but was it enough? The obvious thing to do would be to try to find out whether he survived, and if he did, to go back for him. And if I went back to find him and he was dead, then what? Would I wish I had stayed in my own time? I’m not sure, believe it or not. I felt more at home there and then than I’ve ever felt, but I can’t tell how much of that was him. Maybe I’m crazy, but this particular insanity revolves around the truth, as improbable as it may be.
When I finished writing, the page was wet from tears.
The next morning I went back to Fabbri again. He seemed inordinately happy to see me; it was possible I was the only person he’d seen in months.
“I’m looking for a Giovanni de’ Medici,” I said, “who paid his taxes in Florence in 1345 and died in 1347. What other sources might be useful? I’d like to know more about his family.”
Fabbri’s pale forehead furrowed with thought. “You might search for birth and death records from Firenze’s archives.”
“Can I get the information without leaving Siena?”
Fabbri looked pained that his resources were insufficient for my purposes. “We can arrange an interlibrary loan if you’d like.”
I liked, but unfortunately it would take three or four days to get a copy of the pages of interest. Now that the question of Giovanni de’ Medici’s family was on hold, I was free to pursue the answer to the question I’d been afraid to ask.
* * *
Donata’s office was on the sixth floor, and there was no elevator. By the time I reached the top of the last set of steep marble steps, I was panting, and when Donata opened her door to my knock she looked alarmed.
“Beatrice, you look gray.”