A Golden Web Read online

  “Please be quiet, both of you! Do what I say, Nic, or he’s bound to die!”

  “God in Heaven,” said Nicco, “this may well be worth a trip to Hell!”

  Nicco had expert aim, whether with bow and arrow, his balled fist, or his boot, which no sooner made contact with the place indicated by Alessandra than the priest’s jaw dropped open. While Nicco and Emilia both recoiled in horror, Alessandra reached deep inside the friar’s foam-flecked mouth and pulled out a half-chewed piece of mutton.

  Fra Giuseppe gasped, sputtered, and then cried out in fear when his hands made contact with the pool of his own blood. “Are we attacked?” he said, his voice wobbling.

  “You were, dear sir,” said Alessandra, tossing the chunk of meat over her shoulder, “but my brother saved you!”

  “Alessandra Giliani!” said Emilia, crossing herself again—but Alessandra silenced her by grabbing her hand and giving it an urgent squeeze. A crow flew down from the sky, snatched up the meat, and exultantly flew away with it.

  The priest looked up and about him wildly. “Brigands, was it? And in broad daylight! Ouch!” he groaned as he tried to right himself and clutched his ribs. “They’ve injured me something awful, the villains!” He paused and sniffed the air. “They were mad with drink—they must have been. Who else would be fool enough to try and kill a man of God?”

  “Who else indeed?” said Nicco solemnly.

  Emilia was about to mutter something else when Alessandra found a handful of flesh through the folds of her nanny’s skirts and pinched hard enough to make her cry out instead.

  “Do you see them?” asked the friar, looking up at her cry. “Bastardi!” he shouted into the distance, shaking his fist.

  Alessandra had to cover her mouth to contain her laughter. “Are you wounded, Nic?” she said with tears in her eyes.

  Nicco rubbed the backs of his knees where, earlier, the friar had struck him. “Not too badly to run in pursuit of them—if you’re sure you’re well enough now, Fra Giuseppe.”

  “Run, dear boy—run like the wind! God will reward you!” His gaze focused then on the upended wine bowl. “I had the oddest dream,” he said.

  “Run, Nicco!” cried Alessandra, the laughter spilling out of her despite all her best efforts to keep it hidden.

  “Like the wind!” said Emilia, daubing at her eyes and shaking.

  “Wind!” echoed Dodo as Nicco took off in the direction of the stables to saddle his horse and go for a lovely ride. He would have to work hard, he told himself, to think of a way to repay Alessandra, his excellent Alessandra—who, though only a girl, was smarter and braver than anyone, save their father, in all of Persiceto.

  Three

  Alessandra caught up with Nicco just as he was tightening Nero’s halter. The stallion whinnied at the sight of her, then pushed his huge head against Alessandra’s clothes, looking for the windfall apple or pear she usually kept tucked into one of her pockets.

  Nicco looked down at his sister with admiration. “What I can’t fathom is how you figured out how to bring the old sinner back to life.”

  “That’s an easy one. He was not dead!”

  Alessandra held her hand out flat to give Nero his apple, wary of having her fingers nibbled. “Do you remember that pike you caught, last Whitsuntide—how you stepped on it, just so, and it coughed up the smaller fish it lately swallowed—how the little fish went flying through the air?”

  “But a man is not a fish!”

  “You made me think of doing the same thing, nonetheless, when you said Fra Giuseppe was ‘dead as a pike’—those were your precise words. I already suspected, from what Emilia told us, that some meat might have been caught in his gullet. You know how he gobbles his food!”

  Nicco shook his head in wonder. “St. Francis himself might learn a trick or two from you, Sis!”

  “You know…” Alessandra lowered her voice, even though the two of them were quite alone. “I wouldn’t dare say this to anyone else, but I think a good many things that common folks call miracles are merely matters of an observant person’s plain good sense.”

  Nicco climbed up onto his horse. “The miracle will be if you are not burned for a witch before you’re grown!”

  “Half the trick of being a smart girl is learning how to hide it.” Alessandra stroked Nero’s silky muzzle. “Don’t look glum, Nic! Fra Giuseppe is bound to give a good report of your progress, now that he fully believes you saved his life. You may even be quit of him as a tutor, as his knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond what he’s already taught you.”

  “What he’s already taught you, it would be fairer to say. It was excessively good of you to give me the credit for saving his life!”

  “Goodness had nothing to do with it.” Alessandra shivered. “I have no desire to ever serve as fuel for a bonfire in the square.”

  They were both silent for a moment, remembering the monk who was burned at the stake there the year before—how he’d shouted through the flames that the wrath of God would come down on the sinful puppet who sat on the Pope’s throne in Avignon. The smell of burning flesh lingered for days afterwards. “Did you make Emilia promise not to tell?”

  “She loves us both too much to ever tell. But, now, Nic, I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Ask away! I would be a brute to deny you anything, after all you’ve done for me.” Nero pawed and snorted, so that Alessandra, straining her neck to look up at them, moved back a couple of paces.

  “Teach me to ride, Nic!”

  “You have your little pony, and you ride quite prettily already.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I want you to teach me to ride as well as you, and to learn the ways of the woods and all the creatures that live there.”

  “I will teach you to ride, with pleasure, although you’re a bit of a shrimp to handle a horse as big as Nero. But the woods are full of dangers—”

  “Which is why I want to learn their ways!” Alessandra looked out to the dark line of trees that marked the beginning of the forest. “I’ve made a study of all I can, in and around our father’s house. I long to go farther afield. You have no idea how galling it is to be penned up here as surely as our cattle.”

  “Our cattle are penned up to keep them safe from wolves and bears and just the sorts of brigands you convinced Fra Giuseppe had tried to rob him.”

  “But if you teach me to ride, and read the woods—”

  “It is not one of your books!”

  “It’s one of yours! You’ve spent your life learning the language of it, just as I’ve learned Latin. And you will teach me—you must!—just as I’ve taught you.”

  “And if something should happen to you?”

  Alessandra stood close against Nero’s flank and looked up into her brother’s blue eyes. “Your knowledge will keep me safe, dear onion—or as safe as a girl with dreams can ever be in this small-minded world.”

  Alessandra had, for many years now, been in the habit of stealing away with a candle to the storage room. Because there was no window there, and no fire, it was the only room (apart from the privy) where she could usually count on spending time alone.

  On each of these visits, she would open the chest that held her mother’s wedding dress and everyday clothes. (Her two embroidered gowns and the silk and velvet clothing were all appropriated by her stepmother.) Alessandra would caress the linen and homespun garments that still held a faint scent of the person she’d loved so much and lost. And lately, from the silken folds of the wedding gown, she’d take out the heavy icon of the Virgin, painted by Old Fabio with her mother’s likeness. Alessandra held it against her as she prayed, and kissed her mother’s face after every whispered Ave Maria.

  But this day she opened the chest that held the children’s own outgrown clothes that could not, as yet, be handed down. Sorting through them until she found some of Nicco’s garments that she thought would fit her, she stripped off her gown and kirtle and pulled on breeches and a doublet. With some twisti
ng and tucking, she managed to hide her hair under a cap. She knew the disguise was a good one when her sister walked in on her and let out a mighty shriek.

  “Hush, for God’s sake, Pierina—it’s me!”

  “You scared me half to death! I thought we were being robbed. What are you up to, then? I’m sure it can’t be any good.”

  “Mind your own business, pipsqueak! I’m off to study.”

  “I’m going to tell!”

  Alessandra grabbed Pierina by the shoulders and looked into her clear blue eyes, so rare in their part of the world. “Tell what? That I’ve donned a set of Nicco’s castoff clothes?”

  “It’s some sort of scheme of yours.” Pierina wriggled out of her sister’s grasp. “Or some game. And I want to play, too! You and Nic always leave me out of everything!”

  “We wouldn’t if you weren’t such a tattletale.”

  “I won’t be this time—I promise! Cross my heart and hope to die!”

  “All right, then.” Alessandra took Pierina’s hand and sat her down on the chest that held their mother’s clothes.

  Pierina was looking at her expectantly.

  “It’s a game called Disappearing,” said Alessandra.

  Pierina nodded sagely.

  “I’m to go first, because I’m the elder girl.”

  “You always get to go first!”

  “Hush! The other’s job is to cover up while the person who’s ‘it’ is gone, without telling an outright lie. So if Emilia wants to know where I am, you’ve got to say you think I might be with Mother in the garden. And if Mother wants to speak to me, say that you’ve a feeling I’m in the nursery with Dodo—and so forth, until everyone believes I’m here, even though I’m not.”

  Pierina clapped her hands together. “It’s a lovely game!”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “But are you sure there’s not sin in the intention of leading others astray, just as surely as if I’d out-and-out lied?”

  Alessandra smiled. “You’ll make a fine scholar yet, Pierina.”

  “I will never be a bookworm like you—nor would I want to be! What gentleman would want to marry a girl who is always thinking?”

  “A good man would! Don’t forget that our own mother could read, and was said by Dante himself to recite as beautifully as anyone in all of Romagna or Lombardia.”

  Pierina looked suddenly sad. “I wish I could remember! My memory of her grows dimmer every day—especially since our lady took the portrait down. Sometimes I can’t picture her face at all.”

  It was not the first time that Alessandra was sorely tempted to show Pierina the icon, which her father had made her promise to keep secret. She put her arm around Pierina instead. “You’ll remember as soon as I remind you—close your eyes!”

  With Pierina’s head resting on her shoulder, Alessandra described the painting their mother had sat for when she was pregnant with Dodo: a glorious half-page illumination showing the Annunciation—the very same image Fabio had copied for the icon. Alessandra looked at it so often that she could describe it perfectly, from the almond-shaped eyes to the startled brow and the slightly parted lips that seemed about to speak.

  The original illumination was part of an exemplar that Carlo Giliani had been putting together to show off Old Fabio’s skill and the fine quality of the books produced by their workshop.

  When his wife died in childbirth, Carlo had the folio with her portrait mounted on a piece of gilt-framed wood, which he hung in a place of honor above the hearth. Later, when he married again, his new wife insisted the painting be taken down. Just that past year, Carlo had Old Fabio paint the image over again in miniature for the weighty icon he gave to Alessandra, telling her that this treasure was for her and her alone.

  “You look like her, Zan-Zan,” said Pierina, gazing up into her sister’s wide-set, unmistakably almond-shaped brown eyes.

  “Hmm. I suppose I do.”

  “I look more like Papa’s family, don’t I?”

  Alessandra studied her sister’s blond hair and wide blue eyes with a familiar twinge of envy. “I’m sure our stepmother feels nothing but love when she looks at you.” They were both silent then, thinking about how little love their stepmother bore Alessandra. “Are you in, then? Are you going to play Disappearing with me and Nic today?”

  Pierina nodded.

  “Yours will be the hardest part.”

  “But where will you go, dressed like a boy?”

  “Into my newest study hall stocked with books I’ve never read nor touched!”

  “What are you talking about? We have the best library outside of Bologna.”

  Alessandra felt cheered up again, thinking about her adventure. “Ah, but this is a study hall filled not with books but the wonders of Nature—with birth and growth and death and decay, plants and creatures, earth, water, and sky.”

  “Are you running away?”

  “Just for the day—I’ll be back before supper. And if you’ve played your part well, no one shall ever know I was gone.”

  Alessandra kissed her, then scrambled up onto the windowsill. “Godspeed, Pierina!” she called out over her shoulder before steeling her nerves and jumping outside.

  Four

  Nicco had decided it would be best to have Alessandra ride behind him on Nero, at least at the start, until she grew enough to handle a full-size horse on her own.

  She wondered if they would find a hare or a partridge, and whether Nicco would kill it—and whether she would be able to bring herself to look, rather than turn away as she often did when faced with the sight and smell of blood.

  She thought of and then brushed away the memory of her mother’s body split open from chest to just below the naval. She smelled the hot blood and felt her father shaking with sobs and watched between her fingers as the midwife pulled Dodo out, still in his caul.

  Alessandra held on tighter to Nicco and pressed her cheek against his back, willing the image away. She felt some comfort in knowing that he, too, had been there and seen what she had seen. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to their mother, asking her to watch over them.

  They spent that first day in the border of sunlight and gloom at the edge of the forest. Alessandra practiced climbing up and down off Nero’s back, using the low branches of a tree as her ladder. She learned the proper way to tie Nero to the tree—which turned out to be the same as the bookbinder’s knot she’d seen so many times before but never bothered to learn how to make. She and Nicco climbed the tree and found some feathers that Nicco said were the remains of a red falcon’s meal. And Nicco told her how this was a falcon he hoped to trap one day and train to hunt with him.

  They sat in the canopy of the tree, and Nicco, in a whisper, told her everything he knew about the sounds they heard there: the names of birds, and which were good to eat and which made songs so beautiful that it would be a sin to kill them, especially now that the years of rain were over, and not nearly so many peasants were dying of hunger as before.

  To both of them, the tree seemed filled with the breath of God. When they climbed down, they saw that this tree was part of a ring of trees growing around a clearing. Nicco stuck his fingers inside a mound of leaves at the base of the roots and pulled out a mushroom that was shining white and the size of Alessandra’s thumb, with a slantwise cap as delicate looking as a piece of skin.

  Alessandra’s eyes grew even wider than they were already in the half-light of the clearing. “Isn’t that—?”

  “The very kind our own dear Cook once paid for with a fine, plump hen—and Father had her flavor a broth with it that he served to the Bishop.”

  “I saw nothing before you dug it out! How did you know it was there?”

  Nicco screwed up his face, trying but failing to find the clue that had let him know. “Perhaps the way the leaves there looked a little more disturbed—but I think it’s something else about things that are hidden underground. I just feel them sometimes—like heat, only it’s not heat,
but something else.”

  It was Alessandra’s turn to be rapt with admiration. Her heart beat a little faster, thinking about how there might well be as many wonders beneath the surface of things as there are above, if one could but figure out how to see them.

  They untied Nero and walked deeper into the woods. Nicco found the delicate skull of a vole and the scat of the bear that had eaten the animal. The horse clearly didn’t like being there. “But how can he know,” asked Alessandra, “that a bear was here, perhaps weeks before?”

  “Because bears, like all creatures, have their pathways—and Nero no doubt smells or else somehow senses the presence of the bear, from whenever it passed by and ate this vole.”

  Alessandra took the clean, white, beautiful skull—as delicate as the carved ivory elephant she once saw in a stall in the marketplace in Bologna, when her mother had taken her along to buy spices. Alessandra had been allowed to hold the tiny elephant in the palm of her hand.

  She wrapped the vole’s beautiful little skull carefully in a broad leaf and put it in the pocket where it was most likely to stay safe and whole.

  By the end of the day, she had a new respect for her brother, filthy hands, and an ache inside her to find out more. “No wonder you find Aristotle dull, Nicky! Why read about learning, when the entire world spreads its wonders at our feet?”

  They ate the hunk of dried fish and two hard rolls Nicco had taken from the kitchen when Cook’s back was turned. (In fact, she had seen him—but she doted particularly on the Master’s elder son, and allowed him the pleasure of thinking he was outsmarting her.) Then they went to a special little place Nicco knew about, beside a stream, and gorged themselves on blackberries until their teeth were blue.

  Alessandra nearly fell asleep as she rode behind her brother on the way home. She was roused by the sound of the church bells tolling Vespers, telling her that they’d stayed away too long, and that even if Pierina had played her part brilliantly, there was no way Alessandra’s absence from home could have gone unmarked.