Plague in the Mirror

by Deborah Noyes

  The effort of trying to block out mental images of Cristofana lurking in the dream, dark at the foot of her bed, of Pippa, filthy and feathered and drooping over her guardian’s shoulder, sucking her thumb, of Marco off somewhere, gaunt with worry, his eyes bruised and sunken, his sketch board blank, keeps her awake for a time. But in minutes, May is sound asleep.

  May wakes an hour or two later — the light is bright and stark — with Marco and Pippa still nowhere to be seen. Daylight has her on her feet in an instant. Jesus! She shouldn’t be here, not after the doctor. Did you come here to save them, or kill them? She shouldn’t be sleeping in their beds and touching their things.

  So May grabs a crust of bread from the table and spends what must be the next twenty-four hours hugging her knees in the alley beside the workshop.

  Even as it starts to get dark again, and the harsh cries and drunken singing of men entering and exiting the tavern a few doorways down ring through the streets, she resists going in to Marco. If she’s caught plague, she’ll infect him and the baby. May stares into space, willing herself away from the present. Even if she fled to the remote alley with its faintly scrawled symbol, the portal would be gone, she knows, dismantled, and if it isn’t, she couldn’t enter now anyway. Her life no longer belongs to her. Not for the next few days, at least. By then she’ll know if she’s marked or not, if that life is over.

  May can’t muster an opinion — about this or anything. An emotion. Hope. Regret. Not even hunger. She might as well be in ghost form again, except that she isn’t, and at regular intervals May pushes her long, loose sleeve off her shoulder to check for sores in the soft crescent of her armpit, waiting for fever and sweat and black blotches. But nothing comes.

  Nothing but the night again. By daylight, the alley isn’t worth remarking on. It’s not dirty, not clean, just damp and blank, a storage place for the stonemason next door. At night, though, it fills with sound, men carousing in the distance, yes, but also nonhuman snuffling and scratching, and May knows she isn’t alone here, that other travelers with teeth and tails pass this way to and from the garden. She huddles in her harlot’s gown, and waiting becomes her occupation. May settles in a hollow inside herself, like a hibernating animal, suspended in space and time. She isn’t sure how many hours pass before her dry mouth and the dull ache in her head inform her that she needs to get up and find food, find water.

  Before sunrise, she sneaks into the kitchen garden behind the workshop and picks cherry tomatoes from a vine, stuffing them into her mouth, juice and seeds spilling everywhere. They’re delicious. She licks dewy leaves until Pippa’s voice, the contented noise of a small child waking before the adults and talking back to her imaginary world, rivets her. May darts out of the garden and back to her grim hideout until Pippa’s happy shouts sound out front, and the pull of life proves too strong.

  May watches from around the corner as they head out for the morning, deciding it won’t hurt to tag along. As long as she keeps hidden, keeps her distance. If she’s going to die, she’ll do it in the fresh air, with a view.

  Marco carries a long, curved basket, probably some kind of fish or eel net, and heads straight for the southern edge of the city, walking a mile or two along a cart road running parallel to the river, past the bridges, till the sloping wall of buildings that crowd the Arno’s shoreline thin and taper out. With nowhere to hide in the wide open, May finally has to let them go on without her. She conceals herself beside a stashed rowboat flipped on its side. Stretched in the trodden grass, listening to the pull of the river, she feels exhaustion in every limb. Though it’s the last thing she means to do, she falls asleep again, and when she wakes, Pippa is beside her, weaving wildflowers into her hair.

  Am I dreaming?

  May sits up, inching away on her backside, her eyes wide on Marco behind the child. He has hollow circles under his eyes, a pallor below his caramel skin, and he looks terrible . . . and beautiful . . . and terrible. May fights the urge to stand and touch his face. I can do it now, she thinks — remembering her overwhelming urge to reach out to him the day she stood behind his easel at the workshop — I can touch you.

  And then she thinks of her own response, when the dying doctor reached for her. Don’t don’t don’t touch. . . .

  Pippa’s after a frog hopping along the shore, so May reaches and dips her finger in the river mud. She scrawls an X over the exposed hollow of her throat, speaking with her eyes, and when Marco tries to reach for her, pulls away fiercely. He sets his basket aside, his amber eyes hard to read, and before he can use them to convince her to stay, she gets up and strides off. She walks until she finds the strength to run, the sides of her gown bunched in her fists, and runs until, looking back, she can’t see them anymore.

  But they’re all she has, so a bewildered May lurks in wait, learning to look and not be seen, watching from some hiding place or another till they pass. They’ve made a game out of finding frogs. Obviously distracted, Marco still takes the time to lay down his basket and fit a frog into Pippa’s pudgy hands, where it slides out again, a leaping complaint — and then he finds her another, his dark eyes as fixed and patient as a heron’s.

  Pippa seems to have shot up overnight, become a toddler. The little girl manages a few steps and then topples over, whimpering showily until he plucks her up and dusts her off. That or she struggles upright again, soldiering on, oblivious and determined. Marco is neither gentle nor impatient with her . . . only present . . . attentive when he has to be. Mainly he lets her go about her business until the water or other trouble attracts her. They have a quiet, easy rapport, but there’s something too measured about his movements, as if his very life depends on the ability to concentrate. May can only imagine how confused he is, and she’s confused, too, not knowing what sort of presence Cristofana has become in their lives, what impact she’s had. Her domestic sprawl in the workshop certainly suggests that she’s wormed her way into their world completely.

  They thought I was her.

  Pippa falls again, twisting in the effort to get vertical, and looks right up the hill at May, her smile confirming everything. May ducks out of view until they set off again, then follows from a reasonable distance.

  Marco never notices her, or at least he acts like he doesn’t, though Pippa often does and laughs and babbles. It’s a game to her. Hide-and-seek.

  May follows through the winding streets and alleys as the pair meanders — Marco sometimes taking up Pippa’s hand, sometimes riding her on his shoulders, and when at last they reach the workshop, Marco hustles Pippa inside and bolts the door behind them. May stands paralyzed — the last thing she wants is to return to the stony gloom of the alley, but it hasn’t been long enough yet, not quite.

  The front shutters open, startling her, and when he spots her there, his expression is intense, if no more readable than before. The door swings open, though he doesn’t emerge, and the unlit interior of the workshop looks forbidding from the walkway, where the sun now shines hard on stone and stucco.

  When he doesn’t emerge or wave her in, May steps to the doorway and, with halting Italian and pantomime, explains that she’ll isolate herself in the garden for a couple more days and that he and Pippa must keep away. He nods gravely, and after she settles in, he opens the garden door and sets down a blanket, a steaming bowl of lentils, a crust of bread, and a cup of wine.

  May isn’t sure how long she stays out there, with this feeding ritual repeated at intervals.

  She sleeps and dreams and sweats, and is afraid of sweating, afraid of the tiniest headache, of the bug bites she mistakes as buboes. Luckily the weather holds out, and in the end it’s only the insects that plague her. May spends her nights swaddled in the blanket to ward them off, heat or no heat, and the wool smells like what has to be Marco, and it’s a good, strong smell that keeps her mind on life.

  When she’s certain that enough time has elapsed, that she isn’t contagious, May stands up, uncertain about everything else. She waits for him to
notice her out there, for his awareness to shift to her, for permission, and he opens the door almost immediately, waving her in.

  His silence is ominous. May’s eyes are still adjusting to the dim when she spots Pippa hanging over the edge of the big barge of a bed, pulling the silk coverlet and a sea of clothes and cloaks off in a landslide that takes her with it. Hitting the floor with the rest of the pile, the toddler starts to wail.

  Marco hauls baby and bedclothes off the floor, holding her and rocking her almost maniacally; he’s been left with this, a child, and must be confused, resentful, but he seems less overwhelmed than tired.

  May almost wishes she were a ghost again, safe from hard edges, from the confusion Cristofana has left them in. Pippa’s savage cries tempt her forward — May wants to help, make it stop — but she’s frozen to the spot.

  When the cries cease, Marco nestles Pippa in the big bed again, gating her in with a rolled blanket like a pro. He turns with a weary sigh, an air of familiarity as if to say, You deal with it, as if May were in fact a young mother and he the stay-at-home dad who’s reached his limit. This is not a sensation she’s ready to have, and it seems to May, somewhat irrationally, that Cristofana has kept her promise. She has ruined everything.

  I will take his smile forever, in your honor, and he will think all along it was you.

  What else would Marco think? She and Cristofana are one and the same to him, and there’s no telling what horrors or humiliations he’s suffered on her watch.

  May can’t look at him. She doesn’t dare. For all she knows, he hates her now or thinks she’s a monster. Would he even look at her again the way he did the day he mended her knee? What if the man she saw looking out at her through laughing amber eyes that day no longer exists — destroyed by the plague, or Cristofana, or both?

  Even Pippa doesn’t laugh or babble when May approaches her now. She rolls away with her thumb in her mouth, her forehead sweaty, her feet and knees filthy from that morning’s outing. The thumb doesn’t soothe her, and in no time she’s wailing again, belly down, kicking her feet with a dull thump on the mattress, pitiful and inconsolable. She’s obviously hungry, but May has no idea what they’ve been feeding her. She feels useless, horrible, but Marco has already mashed up a dish of what looks like fruit with porridge. Good, May thinks, no wet nurse need apply, relieved that Pippa can manage hard food.

  The little girl eats with a pout on her face, squinting at her surrogate father until he scowls back playfully. After she’s had her fill, Pippa collapses over her pile of covers and capes, sucking her thumb until the hand falls away in sleep.

  Then things get really awkward.

  Marco just sits there, watching May from his chair. He can’t seem to decide whether he loves her or hates her. Sometimes his amber eyes pierce in a way that makes her aware of every inch of her body. Sometimes he clamps them closed as if he can’t stand the sight of her. Thanks, Cristofana, thinks May, not knowing what to address first.

  She has memorized the words for I’m sorry but doesn’t speak them. He doesn’t speak, either, but when finally May looks at him as directly as she can, she feels his eyes warm to her, feels him watching her even after she looks away.

  He gets up, walks to the front display window, and folds the inside shutters closed. He crosses back to her with that alarming look on his face, then eases her back against the wall. It might be anything, that look, and it’s a little of everything: lust, pleading, accusation, anger . . . definitely exhaustion. He smells rank and rich, and it dizzies her. May read somewhere in Gwen’s heaps of museum and gallery materials that medieval people rarely bathed. They carried around carved apples full of herbs and spices, or dried posies, to trick their noses and distract from the stench everywhere. She can’t be smelling too good herself at this point. He has her pinned, and when he kisses her, deep and hard, with a familiarity that frightens and excites her, May knows for sure that he has this all wrong. He thinks she’s Cristofana. In May’s absence, some kind of twisted intimacy has obviously developed between them, because he seems as likely to strangle as to keep kissing this lunatic girl who went away and left him with a child.

  At the moment, May doesn’t care if she isn’t that girl. She can’t help it. She kisses him back, and back and back.

  Later, she’ll make Marco understand what he’s been dealing with, who he’s been dealing with, and who he hasn’t.

  But for now he’s longed for her, and he’s angry, and it’s all her fault. All my fault, thinks May irrationally, confused by her own willingness to go along, to let him believe whatever he wants, believe anything if she can own his sigh of resignation and his mouth moving over hers, and the pressure of his hands, the way he breathes her in and takes her breath. If it lets her keep this lonely, beautiful stranger for herself — keep him close, needing her — then she’ll be anyone, for a while, even Cristofana.

  He’s so intense she doesn’t know what to do . . . until she does. The sleeping child has the bed, so they kneel together in a crouch, settling on the floor among coils of rope and oily stains and splinters and sawdust and chicken feathers.

  It’s hard to look at him as he eases her down, his eyes urgent and sorrowful while he undresses and lowers himself over, pulling her middle close in rough, paint-smeared hands, smoothing the sides of her crimson gown up. So she meets the blank stare of an unfinished sculpture beyond them, until at last he starts kissing her again, and she kisses back, a little fiercely, rolling on top of him in a bliss of rising away and falling and sliding and biting her lip as he moves inside her, moves and moves, and it’s like reeling or flying apart.

  May wakes later on splintery hardwood, tucked into the same wool blanket she had outside, like a mummy in her bandages. It’s sticky hot because he’s sealed her in on every side, sweetly, thoughtfully, and now he sits in a chair in a corner, eating an apple. With Pippa wide awake and prancing first in her big bird’s nest, blowing feathers off pudgy palms, and then on the bed, he’s been watching May sleep. There is nothing quite like being looked at that way by an artist.

  May feels sore and ripe and real and wonders did she really lose her virginity with . . . what? A man who no longer exists? An afterimage? How could something that physical not be real? She isn’t sorry or disappointed, not at all, but there’s something bittersweet because of Liam. She wouldn’t change anything, May thinks, meeting Marco’s dark eyes, wouldn’t give this back or undo it, but part of her feels like a thief.

  He takes another bite of the apple, green and bruised, his gaze intent on her. He is too beautiful for words.

  Good thing, because she doesn’t have any.

  May rises slowly, adjusting her mangled gown. She folds the blanket, sets it aside, and tidies up a little. Like a visitor. Because in the end she’s just a visitor, isn’t she? A traveler. No matter what Cristofana thinks.

  Time will be tricked but never cheated.

  All this suspect activity visibly alarms Marco, who relaxes only when she leads him to the bed. They lie beside Pippa, and May sleeps like Pippa in the heat of Marco’s arms, which tighten around them in the night whenever one or the other tosses and turns. Later, he wakes again to find her by the window. May lets him blot away her tears with his thumbs, and his own eyes are so worried, so haunted, she strains for words. “I won’t leave you,” she says.

  It’s the best lie she can think of — can’t and won’t not being the same thing — and she lets him lead her back to bed. They lie a long time in silence, face-to-face in the moonlight with Pippa behind them, before he says anything.

  Marco doesn’t talk much, as a rule, and doesn’t seem concerned that she doesn’t, either. But now he asks, “Perché?” hoarsely, almost mournfully, running his fingers along the edge of her face.

  Why?

  Why what?

  Why would she come back? Or why would she leave him?

  Such a big little word, why.

  Once she’s positive she hasn’t infected them, when they, too, exh
ibit no signs of plague, May relaxes into the uneasy rhythms of the household.

  Marco wakes first, rousing Pippa before dawn to fish and hunt frogs by the river. He always seems surprised when May elects to go along, which suggests that Cristofana didn’t. He seems surprised by many things, with good reason, and over the course of a day, May often looks up and finds him watching her, puzzling. Her Italian is so halting that she’s more or less stopped talking voluntarily. If he speaks, she does her best to answer, but sometimes she just stares back blankly, mute and sorry.

  When the river fog burns off, the trio heads back to pick over scant goods in various black-market haunts in the neighborhood, weed around the salad greens, herbs, and tomatoes in the kitchen garden, or, while Pippa naps, manage the dormant workshop.

  Through a mostly wordless shorthand system they’ve developed, talking with their eyes and their hands, Marco teaches her to grind pigment for paint and help sort his sprawl of correspondence, cracked parchments, old marble orders, and shipping documents, all more or less by appearance. What she can’t explain is that she took Italian her sophomore year of high school and reads the language way better than she speaks it, so some documents are of real interest.

  Not long before the Great Mortality ravaged Florence — she learns in letters from his father and brother addressed from a village near Orvieto — Marco was admitted into the guild, the Company of Saint Luke, meaning that one day he’ll open an independent workshop and become his own master, with his own powerful patron.

  Thanks to Gwen, May knows that even when he sets up shop for himself, Marco won’t be free to paint the images that seem to crowd his mind and scream for color. Like his late master, an early plague victim, Marco will have a wealthy patron who chooses his subjects and influences his style and the way he works. Most commissions will have religious themes, and the patron will flatter and insert himself into every allegory and heroic pose, whether the artist wants him there or not.