Gwen explained that in medieval Europe, people swore by the magical properties of saints, holding even their skin and bones in awe. Their bodies were considered superhuman. A dead saint might be ripped to shreds by faithful Christians seeking miraculous healing. Every boot, bone, and strand of hair was whisked away for the sick and needy, with not a tooth or a scrap of robe remaining. Blood was drained from the bodies or blotted up in garments to soak up luck and protection.
Corpses of famous saints were taken apart and divvied up among rival churches, which put these relics on display or paraded them around to improve morale in bad times. Churches even stole from competing parishes to boost their reputations. “The tongues of a handful of saints were said to remain preserved,” Gwen explained, “long after their bodies had decayed. Saint Anthony of Padua’s was billed as ‘red, soft, and entire’ more than four hundred years after he died.”
May looked at Liam when Gwen made the tongue comment, smiling in solidarity, but he refused to meet her eyes.
Oh, right. We’re not speaking.
Every so often, she catches him looking back with those stark blue eyes. He’s a good-looking guy, with that jaw and that dark stubble with a sheen of red mixed in, that wide-shouldered frame and crooked smile, with that way he has, when the phone’s in his pocket, at least, of thoughtfully trailing his fingers over the things they pass, every stone, as if to register its temperature. All this makes her wonder why she didn’t just let him kiss her in Fiesole. Would life be easier if she had? Would she feel less alone?
Right now she isn’t allowing herself to feel much of anything except alone. May feels off, wrong, not quite healthy or here somehow. Maybe all this weirdness is only May hallucinating herself into some other moment in history and back again, but isn’t that worth a worry? Shouldn’t she be doing something about it? To fix herself if she’s broken?
Why did those people do it? she thinks, peering in at reliquaries under their spotlights. Tear their heroes limb from limb? Is it because she’s so ordinary that none of this seems real enough to startle or penetrate? Good old normal May . . . unexceptional except in the right and approved ways — straight A’s, or nearly straight — uncomplicated in her demands. What did she have to lose? What would she tear a body limb from limb for? She has no trouble at all imagining her witchy twin tearing a corpse to bits, but the phenomenon of Cristofana doesn’t feel like something to unveil to Gwen and Liam over antipasto.
If only she could trust her own thoughts, so jangled and unreal, to know the difference between real and not real anymore, but even Liam isn’t the Liam she knew. How can she trust a world so changed . . . or so quickly changing?
This time when she looks for Li, he looks back, only for a second — with regret and defensiveness in his eyes — and May concludes that no matter how needy you are, there’s always someone else . . . always others . . . needing, too. That’s just how it is. She’ll keep her problems to herself.
“Why did they do it?” she finally asks aloud, sidling close to Gwen, who regards her with concern.
“Do what?”
“Tear their saints apart like that? It’s such a savage way to . . . get help. It isn’t very Christian, to say the least.” Did the artist in Old Florence believe in superstitions like that? The thought made her sad, more than anything, though it wasn’t sadness she associated with him. Every time the young man from the workshop entered her thoughts, May felt an excitement she had no name for, a dark thrill and a promise. A promise that life would break, probably, because it — the promise, but life, too — made no sense.
“Blood magic seemed very real and present in those times. But even more recently, people dug up and stole the skulls of great composers, hoping for a clue to their genius. Einstein donated his own brain for postmortem study — even though some of it ended up filed away in a dusty cider carton in some doctor’s office. Then there are cryonics and other efforts to ‘miraculously’ preserve the body with hopes of reanimating it later. And think of all we’ve learned from genetics.”
May peers in at poor Saint Juliana in her ghastly mask, half expecting her to comment.
They walk to another section of the chapel, which Gwen calls the friary. In one of its frescoes, people and cows lie swollen and obviously dead. The leaflet says that the fresco was in tribute to the 63,000 lives lost in Florence during the Great Mortality.
“I’m going to write one of my papers about the plague, I’ve decided. What year was it here?”
Gwen lifts her eyebrows. “Which one? It’s cyclical, unfortunately.”
“The big one.” May points to the frescoes.
“The Black Death. Fourteenth century — 1348, I think.”
Conscious of Liam’s irritation — she can almost hear him thinking, Don’t get her going again — of Gwen looking from Liam to her and back again, curiously, noticing for the first time, perhaps, that they haven’t spoken all day, haven’t joked or shoved or whispered in rebellion against her edu-tyranny, May kneels to study the bottom half of the frescoes, which mostly depict religious scenes, but a few show farmers in the field, people gathered in a courtyard, ordinary people.
Gwen kneels, too, and together they stare silently ahead. “Things never do stay the same, May. Look at these frescoes. Every one of these people is gone now. . . .”
“They’re beautiful, though,” she murmurs, one hand hovering over the fading paint (she knows better than to touch), thinking of the artist, half smiling in secret, because for the first time she has someone to obsess over, to pine after, to feel ridiculous for.
“You’re more like your mother than you think.” Gwen stands up, brightening. “Would you two like to see how it’s done? I know a painter who gives demonstrations in his studio. . . .”
Suspending animosity for the moment, May and Liam groan in tandem and head for the exit.
There is only one painter May wants to see.
After a week of sightseeing and glutting out on Italian food, May almost forgets Cristofana, forgets to believe or disbelieve. Except for the persistent — if impossible — memory of the artist, she becomes a mindless tourist again, following Gwen from one cultural treasure to another or running errands for the book she and Liam are supposed to be helping with. Even a modest ambition, like luring Li into a bout of thumb wrestling over antipasto (when he’s more or less mastered the art of not looking at her), seems beyond her.
So, before their afternoons out and dinner, she takes to the terrace to get some work done, or try to; as Gwen reminds her daily, her essays aren’t going to write themselves.
So far she’s only taken notes, but this morning she has the apartment to herself, and May’s determined to write at least an outline. It isn’t much, but it’s a beginning, and she has to begin.
She heads to Gwen’s office corner in the front room and starts piling up books, meaning to bring them out to the terrace, where her tea and biscotti are already waiting, but as she passes her own room, something makes her pause. May listens without moving, without breathing, her arms sagging with books, and nudges the door with her big toe.
Why isn’t she surprised, she wonders, to find a ghosted-out Cristofana reclining comfortably on her bed, admiring her faint self in the mirror?
May’s almost amused at first, relieved that it wasn’t an intruder in there, but then again, it is an intruder, and she feels her relief darken. “Don’t you believe in knocking?”
Cristofana seems hurt, turning her haughty gaze back to her own reflection, and May almost feels for her. It’s uncanny and deeply disturbing — how physically alike they are, despite their different forms, one flesh and one phantom — but the resemblance is skin-deep only, and May knows better than to trust a thing just because it’s familiar.
Besides which, with Cristofana right in front of her, real enough to almost (if pointlessly) touch, it’s all rushing back now, the reality of what she’s been through since she got here, along with that dark thrill, that impossible promise that m
aybe isn’t impossible after all. What if she can see the man in the artists’ workshop again? For a second May has to close her eyes, overcome by the memory of his hands and how he smelled.
First things first, she thinks. “You need to explain something to me,” she says aloud.
Cristofana nods. She must understand that she has May on the hook, and she’s not rushing.
“You said you were looking for me. But why? I mean, why me? There had to have been others you —?”
“Yes, but none so similar in aspect. None so like me. Time does not allow for trade unless the trade is even, a nose for a nose, a hand for a hand.” She finally looks up, right into May’s eyes with her negative-but-identical ones. “We correspond.”
“You mean genetics . . . DNA? Are you saying we’re related?” May’s mother had tried to get her interested in genealogy before the trip. “We have people from Italy, you know, generations ago. I have a picture of your great-grandmother somewhere. She was from a seaside village on a cliff — Corniglia, I think.” May, in no mood to think about family new or old, had politely changed the subject.
“I have no knowledge of this,” Cristofana replies. “Related?”
“Are we family?” The last thing May wants is more family right now. More choices. More regrets.
“I have no family,” her twin replies coldly, and May can see that it’s a sore subject for her; maybe they do have a thing or two in common, besides their appearance.
Cristofana rises lazily, stretches like a cat, and crosses to the desk. She peers down at yesterday’s debris: pens and highlighters . . . crumbs, snack plates, and empty teacups . . . the already-scoured research texts. “You have a great many books.”
“For what it’s worth. None of them are helping me get my essay written. I have enough notes to write a book of my own —”
“Essays?”
“For school.”
“You attend school? Like highborn men? Your family is very wealthy?”
“Listen. Maybe we should cut to the chase here. Before someone comes home and hears me talking to myself.” It’s a moot point, May thinks, since you can’t really see her out in the sunlight. “Why are you here today? Again.”
“I have more to show you.” She looks hungrily, almost furtively, around the room and then out the tall arched window offering a sliver view of rooftops, with the dome and campanile jutting out above it all. “You will come back with me?”
If she could trust this girl, it might be worth the risk, to find him again, to know him better than she imagines she already does. On the other hand, that’s a big “if,” and the Middle Ages are a truly scary place. “I might,” she relents. “Later. If I decide I can trust you.”
“You will return — I know it — and you won’t be sorry. I have much to show you. There are dancing bears here in your world, at market, and jugglers?”
“I’m more of an art person myself,” May quips, but the joke falls on deaf ears. “No. We have malls,” she says, “and television. I suppose that counts.”
“What is television?”
“Never mind that now.” May gets up, and Cristofana follows her out to the terrace. The girl leans over the shaded stone railing and stares left and then right, making dizzy noises in her throat like a child going too high too fast on a swing.
“From where does it all come?” she muses, and May can’t answer, can’t begin to comprehend how changed everything must look to Cristofana. On the other hand, remembering the pared-down version of Florence Past, she can imagine. Either way — more, less — the shift is a shock, a miracle of sorts.
“Shouldn’t you get inside? Someone might see you from the street or a window and wonder what’s up.” Suddenly May wants very much to be away from Cristofana; she wants to think without her influence — to delay this and all decisions — think, think, but her double’s voice jars her. May continues, “At least move out of the shade.” What May can make out of Cristofana in this bright light is staring down at the patio table, at May’s notes on the progress of the plague.
She’s been reading all this time, and her tone is eerie and remote, as if she’s in a trance. “Can you not imagine it, bella? Standing at the base of a sturdy stone wall, savage cries all surrounded, when a corpse comes hurtling from the heavens with your name on its lips?”
May gapes. “What are you talking about?”
The girl looks up as if startled. “Filthy Tartars. But enough now of such fearsome stuff. Are you ready to go? I will not return or extend this invitation again.”
May absently fans the pages of one of the research books, trying not to fathom the paralyzing boredom she’ll feel if she does the right thing, the safe thing . . . if she says no.
Without a word, she closes the book and circles back inside. Rifling through her wardrobe, she assembles the plainest outfit she can find — a long sack-like T-shirt dress, faded brown, with three-quarter sleeves . . . leather sandals . . . just call me Friar Tuck — and changes quickly. “Let’s go,” she calls to the barely there girl on the terrace, and holds the front door open.
Nothing in the past seems different, at first.
May follows Cristofana and the clamor of voices and cart wheels to the market square. There is the same long, columned, rectangular piazza skirted by stone towers, the same wooden stalls and merchant stands, the same men in capes and women with their wares spread on blankets or piled in baskets. But there are fewer stalls, fewer wares, and fewer people picking through them. The minute May sees the crowd, she hangs back. “They can’t see you,” her twin reassures her. It seems to take shade and shadows, dark backdrops, to provide contrast. May saw for herself how Cristofana effectively vanished on the bright terrace but was as obvious as day indoors. “Stay out in the white light, and you will be fine. If one should glimpse you, as I have said, you will seem a phantom, and he will doubt his own mind.”
May moves reluctantly forward, and it’s true that no one seems to register her presence as she passes, but there’s also a strange watchfulness in everyone’s eyes — expectancy, even terror. May feels both invisible and exposed. If they could see her, she thinks, their eyes would pick her apart like starving animals at a carcass. They all seem to be waiting for something.
May has the hollow, headachy feeling again, and the nausea, and intermittently her ears feel full of cotton. She might be the only one moving in the whole square, until a figure in an overhanging window dumps down a bucket of foul-looking water, missing her by a foot, making her jump. Not that it matters, May thinks. I wouldn’t feel it.
She crosses into a partitioned stall arranged with bolts of fabric and hanging leather goods, catching her own warped, barely there reflection in a tall glass bottle. It strikes her, looking around, how few reflective surfaces there are in Old Florence, where everything is wood and stone and straw. She’s startled by a horse and wagon clop-clopping behind her, the driver whipping the poor animal into a frenzy. She winces, covering her ears against the sounds of the whip connecting with flesh, of the animal whinnying in complaint. May looks over at Cristofana. It’s especially weird to be here with her double in the flesh, even more like looking in a mirror. While they wait for the cart to pass, May says, “Have I mentioned that I still don’t believe in you?”
“Very funny, bella. Ha. But I believe in you, and that is all that matters, since here you are. You have florin, yes?” The cart finally passes, and Cristofana moves forward abruptly, smoothing her tangle of dark-blond hair and her dress, which is gray, like her — their — eyes, and which trails on the ground. She waves her hand dismissively, remembering. She speaks under her breath, since as far as those around her are concerned, she’s alone. “Even if you do, your ghost coins will not profit me, but see here what lovely wares they have left to sell?”
Cristofana stops to let May take it all in, and then she extends her palm, where one gold coin shines dully. “I have stolen this, you see, from the home of the wealthy merchant who took me into service. Thi
s is why I must now keep to the shadows, though you must not. His other servants will not spy me because he has none. They have all fled, though his wife clings to her fine ways with all her might, and I am forever dressing and undressing her and plaiting her hair just so. She is probably croaking for me now, calling from her big bed for me to fetch the leech. She is not sick, my mistress, but her wealthy friends bring terrible rumors, and I think she wills herself sick to end the suspense. For her, suspense is worse than death.” Again, that waving hand. “Look here: mallow, nettles, mercury plant. Herbs for drawing abscesses. They’ll serve when the pestilence comes. Soon they will be hard to find. . . .”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” May wants to get the upper hand, wants a word in edgewise.
“Bella, I talk, watch, listen — do all this — magnificently. I also sing and steal. My father was a pirata.” She taps her forehead. “I have his sea songs here. My English mother was a whore with a virgin’s eyes, and I have her gifts, too.”
Be proud, May thinks, very proud, but the question begs asking. “So you have no family left?”
“My parents are dead, and good riddance. I was raised by wolves with Saint Francis as my saint. My given name is Frances, though I adopted Cristofana from a girl I once robbed. I stole her name and her ring finger, too, when she wouldn’t do as I asked and remove her ruby.” Cristofana displays a monstrous ring, flashing it so briefly that May can hardly make it out.
“You’re lying, aren’t you?” Somehow, already, May knows those rhythms of speech, that lilting intonation, the glint in those eyes, as if she’s known them always.
“Do you deserve the truth?”
A clamor nearby distracts May before she can answer — doesn’t everyone? — a ragged man shouting on a step, and when Frances or Cristofana or whoever she is sees him, she moves fast, stepping close. “He brings a crowd,” she whispers, “and maybe my master.”
Plague in the Mirror Page 5
