The Miracles of Prato

by Laurie Albanese

  “Give it to me, please,” he said, with a wave.

  “There’s no note, only a message from the convent.”

  Fra Filippo paled. “Hurry up, out with it.”

  “Sister Pureza said you must come. It’s urgent,” Paolo stammered. He thrust a ragged black robe into the painter’s hands. “Put on this robe, and toss a stone over the wall into the garden. Then wait for her by the old pear tree.”

  When the rock fell into the garden, Sister Pureza put aside the basket of tall basil stems she carried, and slipped out the convent gate. She smelled the bruised fruit that rotted on the ground, and found Fra Filippo near the twisted pear tree that grew where the orchard had been. If not for the painter’s distinctive features, she would have thought it was another man who waited for her. The painter she knew was strong, vibrant, and sure-footed, but this man was thin, the skin around his eyes the sallow color of an old bruise.

  “What’s happened to Lucrezia?” he asked.

  The old nun was filled with shame and regret.

  “Her recovery is slow, but she’s young, and she’ll mend,” Sister Pureza said. She looked directly into the monk’s bloodshot eyes. “Don’t worry, Fra Filippo, I’ve sent for you as a friend.”

  Sister Pureza didn’t have the luxury of choosing her words carefully. “Spinetta told me everything, Fratello,” she said. “We don’t have time now to discuss the wisdom of why or how you took Sister Lucrezia into your heart and your bed. Only that you did.”

  “Because I love her,” Fra Filippo blurted. “I love her. I told you that day in my bottega, I’d give up the cloth and the Church, I’d give up everything to be with her.”

  Sister Pureza had ceased believing in earthly love long ago. She’d believed, instead, that all love was spiritual, and belonged to God. Yet here was a man of great passion, who was willing to surrender everything for the sake of love. When she looked at him again, and saw the naked anguish in his face, she knew that what he said was true. He was in love with the girl.

  “I have no idea what goes on in the world of men,” she said. “But I want to help you.”

  Sister Pureza recounted the prior general’s cruel orders, her visit to the balia, and the provost Inghirami’s treachery.

  “I don’t know where the babe’s been sent,” she said. “But I’ll try to find him.”

  She looked into the painter’s lined face. He was twice the novitiate’s age. Yet such a difference in years was common between husbands and wives.

  “If the Medici will help you, perhaps you have a chance, Fra Filippo.”

  The monk felt himself soften toward the old woman, whose eyes were kind and wise, and who surely must have been beautiful when she was young.

  “Thank you,” he said, bowing his head. “Thank you, Sister Pureza.”

  Sister Pureza and Fra Filippo sneaked into the convent just after Sext, when the nuns and the prioress were gathered in the refectory for their midday meal. Everyone ate heartily, and no one glanced out the doorway to see the white hem of the monk’s cassock beneath the plain black robe as he hurried across the grounds, and into the infirmary.

  “Filippo.” Lucrezia raised a hand toward him, then let it fall. She was ashen and nearly lifeless under the white sheet. “They took the baby away.”

  He gathered her in his arms, and pressed his face to hers.

  “Lucrezia.” He took a deep breath. She smelled of sour milk and unwashed sheets. Her sobs were small quakes against his chest. “Lucrezia, mia cara, I’m so sorry for everything. But you have to eat. You have to keep up your strength.”

  “What for?” she said, weeping. “The baby’s gone—what do I have to live for?”

  “Sister Pureza knows everything now,” he said. He brushed her limp hair from her face, ran his palm across her wet, hot cheek. “She knows what happened to you,” he whispered. “And she’s going to help us.”

  “How?” Lucrezia dimly recalled Sister Pureza rubbing a balm on her belly and legs during the night. “Has she told you where she sent the baby?”

  Fra Filippo’s throat closed and he choked at the pain in her face. “He was sent to a balia.”

  “Have you seen him? Have you brought him back to me?”

  He shook his head, but the painter couldn’t bring himself to tell her the child had been switched by Inghirami.

  “We’re doing everything as quickly as we can. You mustn’t give up, mia cara.”

  Lucrezia saw the strain in Filippo’s eyes, how lined and tired his face had become. She put her hand to his cheek, and let herself rest against his arms.

  “I don’t care about anything else, only the child. Bring him quickly, Filippo.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Wednesday, the Thirteenth Week After Pentecost, the Year of Our Lord 1457

  Prioress Bartolommea reached for her new spectacles, which had been sent from Rome at the cost of a single gold florin. She held Fra Filippo’s note between her two fingers, and read it with a grimace.

  Mother Bartolommea,

  I intend to keep my promise and paint the altarpiece for Santa Margherita. It will depict the Virgin at the moment she gives the Sacra Cintola to Saint Thomas. With your permission I will come to the convent, to be sure the sketch of your face captures your likeness. I am at your mercy, and await your word. In faithful humility to Christ and the Virgin—Fra Filippo Lippi.

  It had been nearly a year since the prioress had prayed with the Holy Belt of the Virgin wrapped around her hips, and still no good fortune had blessed the convent. If she’d been a different kind of woman, Prioress Bartolommea might have taken it as sign of her own shortcomings. Instead she accepted the fact, as she did nearly everything, with a large dose of annoyance and not a little petulance.

  As she stared out her study window over the top of her spectacles, her eye caught the full quince tree with its gilded fruit and she remembered how eagerly she’d seized on the idea of getting the relic, of holding its luminous green and gold threads in her own hands. She’d believed good luck would visit them, and had been modest in her prayers, asking only for a new desk for the convent study, large iron pots for the kitchen, and some padding in the coffers from which she might treat herself to a small jeweled ring. But their fortunes hadn’t changed. Relations were strained within Santa Margherita, the divide growing between those who felt a deep sympathy for Lucrezia and those, like herself, who understood that Lucrezia had brought about her own suffering.

  She’d had to use her own florin for the spectacles that balanced now on her nose and pinched her face at the slightest movement. And worst of all, more than three times this month she’d seen a strange reddish tint in her urine, which surely meant the humors in her body were imbalanced. Although the prior general had forbidden him to enter the convent gates, it was time the painter got to work on the altarpiece; her time on this earth was surely running out.

  “Sister Camilla, I need some ink,” the prioress said with a determined flourish. “We’ll write to Fra Filippo and tell him to start my altarpiece immediately.”

  Sister Pureza saw Fra Filippo arrive just after Lauds carrying a piece of rolled parchment and wearing his familiar leather pouch across his shoulder. She watched his white-robed figure move slowly to the study of the prioress, then she sent Rosina to the kitchen for some broth. After it cooled, Sister Pureza sat at Lucrezia’s side and spooned it into her mouth.

  “The Festa della Sacra Cintola is approaching,” Lucrezia said softly. “I’d like to be strong enough to go and pray to the Virgin, as I should have done last year.”

  Lucrezia looked into the old nun’s eyes and saw that they were guarded.

  “What is it, Sister Pureza?” she asked. “You’re going to bring back my baby, aren’t you?”

  “I’m doing all I can,” Sister Pureza said. She took measure of Lucrezia’s face. “I’ve already gone to the balia where the child was sent.”

  “Yes?” Lucrezia’s breath caught in her throat. “And he’s there
?”

  “No, mia cara, I’m sorry. He was taken away, but I don’t know where.”

  Lucrezia pushed away the spoon that Sister Pureza held to her lips.

  “Then you don’t know where he is, and you don’t know if you can find him,” she said, anger blotting out her fear. “Mio bambino.”

  “There are many women in Prato who’ll help us. But it takes time,” Sister Pureza said, trying to soothe Lucrezia.

  “But he needs me, Sister Pureza.” Lucrezia’s eyes shone with a steely glint. “He needs me now.”

  It seemed to Sister Pureza that a pall hung over Santa Margherita, slowing the very bodies that slept in the cells, worked in the barnyard, and prayed in the chapel. Yet in a cruel reversal of the lifelessness that haunted the convent, the giardino was in the full bloom of late summer. For the first time in many years the honeysuckle and the pole beans were growing in wild abundance, their vines tangled together along the low garden wall.

  As she showed Rosina how to snap the long beans from the vines and let them drop into the basket at her feet, Sister Pureza tried to imagine where the child could have been sent. The prior general was cruel and shrewd enough to have sent the bambino anywhere in the hills, perhaps anywhere within the states of Italy. But news of a bastard child spread even more quickly than the sores on a leper, and news of a child born to the novitiate was surely on the lips of every merchant and scullery maid in Prato. She needed a friend who could be her eyes and her ears in the city, keeping watch over what happened and listening for what was rumored. For this, Sister Pureza could think of none better than the women at the de’ Valenti palazzo, where many messengers and merchants visited each day.

  Leaving Rosina to her work, Sister Pureza walked back to her cell, smoothed a parchment out on her desk, and composed a note to Signora Teresa.

  When she’d finished and sealed her note with candle wax, Sister Pureza quietly found the man who came to fetch the convent’s milk and cream to market, and asked him to deliver it to the palazzo that very afternoon.

  “Take an extra bucket of cream for your children,” she said to the ruddy man as she pressed the note into his fat palm.

  The man returned the next morning with a fine linen envelope sealed with the Valenti family crest. The signora wrote that Nicola, whose ears never missed a word of gossip, had heard that two children had been brought to the hospital of the Casa del Ceppo earlier that week, a bell ringing for each of the poor squalling souls.

  The signora had written:

  I pray you may find the child. Lucrezia is deserving of a child. I have sensed her goodness, and this small transgression may be God’s way of bringing humility and forgiveness to those of us who have been blessed with much more than she. If it may be of help, I offer the gift of a single fat pig to whoever leads us to the child.

  Folding the note into her robe, Sister Pureza found Rosina and instructed her to gather another basket of pole beans from the garden and then to trim the buckthorn. She stopped to see the prioress in her study, nodding to Prioress Bartolommea from the doorway.

  “What is it?” the prioress asked, looking up over her spectacles.

  “A laboring mother in the Falconi family has been taken with fever,” Sister Pureza said. “They’ve sent for me, and promised a new pig for our barnyard if I come right away.”

  “A new pig?” the prioress said weakly.

  “God willing, I’ll be back before Nones,” Sister Pureza said, before quickly ducking out the convent gate.

  The ospedale of Prato was not as grand as the foundling hospital in Florence, nor as famous, but had been built by the same good merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, in the final spate of generosity that had poured forth as his death approached. The building stood in the southern quarter of the city, its façade marked by a simple loggia, the colorful crest of the Datini family, and several roundels with carved putti. As Sister Pureza approached the building she saw a group of older children gathered around two nuns who wore the brown robes of the Franciscan Order. Each child clutched at a crust of bread, and no one paid any heed as the old nun in black mounted the stairs and entered the building.

  Sister Pureza had birthed many children, but had only been inside the ospedale twice before. As she stepped into the small rotunda, she was greeted by the sound of babies crying and the sharp smell of urine. Sister Pureza stopped a nun who hurried through the halls, and asked where the newest babies were kept. Without breaking her stride, the nun nodded in the direction of a small room behind the main staircase.

  Alone in their makeshift cradles, three tiny babies squawked, each bright red with hunger, all waiting for the sole balia who served the foundlings. Looking at the mewling infants, Sister Pureza couldn’t help but think of Teresa de’ Valenti’s ornate birthing chamber and the many attendants who bathed, swaddled, and fed her child.

  Gingerly, the old nun picked up the first baby, whose minute head was covered in a fuzz of red hair. A quick peek under her swaddling revealed that the child was a girl. Kissing her forehead, Sister Pureza laid the child back down and reached into the cradle for the second child. She waited for his spray of urine to finish before she turned him over, praying for the telltale red mark on his buttocks. It wasn’t there.

  “Please, Blessed Mother, let this be the one,” Sister Pureza said as she gently lifted the third baby. He was large and healthy, and for a moment the nun’s heart quickened as she thought of the painter’s sizable frame. Already this babe’s tiny buttocks were dimpled with fat, but aside from that, his skin was clear. He was not the child she sought.

  There was still an hour of daylight left when Sister Pureza returned to the convent and made her way back to the herb garden. Rosina had left the buckthorn she’d trimmed in a neat pile, and the smell of steamed green beans filled the air around the refectory. Tired and discouraged, the old woman reached for her garden shears to finish the day’s work.

  She’d tried what she could, followed whatever small leads she could find, but it was not enough. Lucrezia was right: the child needed her now. The longer he was away from her, the farther he could be sent, and the less likely it became that he would be found and returned.

  “Mother of God,” Sister Pureza prayed. “Help me to make it right.”

  She put down her shears and paced the garden, running her hands along the tops of the flowering basil, the spikes of lavender that had grown to a thick swatch of tall plantings since her first years in the garden. When the answer came, the nun nodded her old head and left it bowed in thanks. She let the warm August breeze blow over her, and she breathed in the thick perfume of the abundant lavender.

  In the morning, when Fra Piero came to say Mass, Sister Pureza pulled him into her garden. They hadn’t spoken since that day in the infirmary, when she’d been too angry to be forgiving. But since she’d resolved to help find the child, she’d sensed the procurator waiting for her to approach him. When she did, his face was alert, his eyes receptive.

  “I’ve done everything I can think of,” she said. “But it’s come to nothing. The prior general and the provost are powerful men. Only God Himself, or the Blessed Virgin, could move them to return the child.”

  The procurator nodded. Perhaps he’d overestimated the old woman. His eyes wandered around the garden. He could smell the sharp aroma of thyme drying in the sun along the rocks.

  “The Festa della Sacra Cintola is coming, and all of Prato will be focused on the relic,” she said. “I’ve prayed on this a great deal, and I believe the intercession of the Virgin and the power of her Holy Belt may help bring about the miracle we need.”

  She glanced around to be sure they were alone, and lowered her voice to nearly a whisper.

  Fra Piero bent closer. As he listened to the old nun, his mind raced. He willed himself to carefully trace the lines of the apse, the nave, and the chapel in the Church of Santo Stefano. He thought back over the mounting preparations that were being made for the festa. In the past month, he’d spent a littl
e more time than usual in the pieve; he’d seen the shadow of Provost Inghirami and the smaller form of Young Marco moving through the church together, and spied them slipping down the stairs that led from the bell tower to the crypt.

  “I think I can help,” the procurator said slowly. His eyes darkened, then danced. “Yes, if I may have a day or two, I believe I can get what you need.”

  Lucrezia was half asleep when she heard the steady step of Sister Pureza in the infirmary. She opened her eyes and saw the old nun standing next to her pallet, carrying with her the scents of the garden, as always.

  “Lucrezia, I know you’re suffering.” The old woman held a small cup toward her and shook it slightly. “This is Saint-John’s-Wort. It will soothe your pain and help lift your spirits.” She paused. “I know this, child, because it helped me once.”

  The nun sighed and slid the wooden stool closer to Lucrezia. The young woman looked at her warily.

  “I know this, because it helped me once,” the old nun repeated. “Long ago, when I was young and beautiful, I made a terrible mistake. I sinned and I paid for it dearly.”

  Lucrezia rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and listened.

  “I’ve known the hands of a man on my body, and the quickening of a child in my womb,” Sister Pureza said slowly. “All my life I’ve carried this shame.”

  A look of sympathy crossed Lucrezia’s face, and the nun put a callused hand under Lucrezia’s chin. With the girl’s face tipped up to hers, Sister Pureza poured out the long truth.

  “I confused passion for love,” she said, steeling herself against the memories. “I’ve seen many others suffer in this same way, Lucrezia. Mistaking passion for love, and then paying for their sins in blood.”

  She shook her head, remembering how she’d lain in this very room, so long ago, and vowed never again to succumb to lust, or weakness, or lies. Her tongue tripped over the memories and she spoke to Lucrezia in a long, rambling confession.