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  “Know, Madame, that I will defend my sister if anyone misuses her.”

  He and Ursula stared at each other, neither hazarding to utter another word. Alessandra, roused from her own thoughts, looked up at them, from face to face, locked in combat as surely as if they’d been trading blows.

  “Have an apple, anyone?” Pierina piped up from the fire. When Nicco and Ursula continued to glare at each other, unmoving, she added in a smaller voice, “They’re awfully nice this year.”

  The dog started barking, there was the sound of horses, and the servant ran out from the stable. Carlo, accompanied by a stranger, was back from Bologna.

  Two riders came abreast of the house, the master on his high horse and someone unknown riding a brindled donkey. When the stranger removed his cloak and hood, it was clear that he was not much more than a boy, though he looked tall—about the same age and height, in fact, as Nicco.

  “Husband,” Ursula said, lowering her eyes, perhaps to conceal the anger in them.

  “By God!” Carlo bellowed. “It’s good to be home.” He reached down to chuck Alessandra under the chin. “Are those tears, my pet?”

  Alessandra took his cloak, freeing him to fold her in his arms. “All is well, Papa.”

  “Nicco? It’s going well, my boy?” They clasped each other by the shoulder.

  “Have you brought a new playmate for us, Father?” Nicco said with a friendly smile for the boy on the donkey.

  Carlo laughed—it was a sound that filled his children with the conviction that all was right with the world. He slapped the parcel that seemed about to burst the seams of the saddlebag. “I’ve brought the text and drawings for a fine, new medical book we’re going to publish, plus a scribe and artist who will please Old Fabio mightily. This is Giorgio da Padova, a newly minted journeyman, and as fine an illuminator as I’ve seen in many years.”

  Pierina had by then come out from the kitchen and was wiping her hands on her apple-stained apron. “Giorgio da Padova,” she said dreamily.

  “Are you a parrot?” snapped Ursula. “Excuse our rudeness, young sir. We are simple country folk here.” Ursula held herself beautifully tall, with a bearing to dispel anyone’s notion that she was anything other than the wife of a rich and powerful man. “Welcome to our home.”

  He began to answer her—he opened his mouth to answer her. But the words wouldn’t come, so that Alessandra wondered if the lad was mute. He reddened as they waited for his reply, as he opened his mouth and closed it again. He reminded Alessandra of a hungry bird. And then he managed to speak, although it was little more than a stammer and the words took ages to come out of him, and only with the greatest difficulty, as if he were cold and shivering. “I t-t-t-thank y-y-y-you, m-m-m-y l-l-l-l—!”

  “Well,” interrupted Ursula, looking quizzically at her husband. “We will not worry about you chattering idly instead of working.”

  Giorgio looked as if he wanted to answer, but only smiled instead.

  “Welcome, Giorgio!” said Nicco, helping him off his donkey and patting him on the back. “I expect you’d like a wash and a rest after that long ride.”

  Six

  Carlo was right: Giorgio da Padova’s skill as a miniaturist was astonishing. And he not only made charming decorations, rich in color and detail, but added an element that no other illuminator had ever attempted in the workshop before: He gathered things from the natural world and painted them in such a lifelike way, in the borders and twining around the fancy first letters, that one had to look twice and even touch the page to assure oneself that these were only drawings of ivy and wild strawberries, fern fronds and mussel shells, and not the real things.

  Carlo hoped to institute another innovation with the addition of Giorgio to his workshop. Some copies of books were being made now in which each separate folio was numbered sequentially. The thing took a lot of planning, putting the numbers on the pages before they were cut up and assembled. But students—especially those in the law school—were extolling the superior merits of these books, in which a given part of the text could be referred to and found again and again, even by someone who had never read the book before. This “pagination,” as it was called, also improved the system whereby authorized editions of books were divided into pieces and rented out to students for copying. To know where one had left off and was to begin again saved any amount of confusion and wasted time.

  Old Fabio had sworn that he’d never consent to number pages, calling it the work of the Devil. But this Giorgio—young and open as the young are to new ideas—had simply narrowed his eyes, thinking it over for a moment, then smiled brightly at his new master. The trick, he knew, would be to paginate the books he worked on without offending Old Fabio.

  Alessandra and Nicco took double delight in their outings together now, when they were able to slip away, looking for ever more admirable objects to bring back for Giorgio to copy. And unlike Old Fabio, Giorgio could really be a friend to them, always ready with a smile and happy to listen to their talk when he was working on artwork rather than text. Fabio always went home to eat dinner at his own house, with his old wife, who was as wrinkled as one of last winter’s apples. Whatever apprentices were in the workshop boarded with him and his wife, where Fabio could keep a strict eye on them.

  But Giorgio slept in an alcove near the workshop fire and was invited every day to dine at his master’s table, sitting as often as not wedged comfortably on the bench between Nicco and Pierina.

  Walking undetected into the workshop one day while Giorgio was there alone, Pierina was astonished to overhear him singing—in a rich, warm, and winsome voice—without stammering at all.

  The sense of betrayal she felt was awful. How the entire family had coddled him and petted him. How they had trusted and confided in him! “I can’t believe it! You—of such goodness and honesty. You’ve been deceiving us all this time!”

  “I—I—I—,” began Giorgio.

  “Oh, stop it, stop it!” Pierina held her hands over her ears. “How can you think me so stupid?”

  Blushing and stammering both, Giorgio finally managed to say that his ability to sing without stammering was a mystery he couldn’t account for.

  The process of telling his story took time—and a great deal of patience on Pierina’s part. But the telling and the hearing of that story was the start of a powerful bond between them.

  Giorgio had always stammered, ever since he could remember. And he had always been able to sing without stammering at all. Because he had first sung in church, the thing was counted as proof of his vocation for the priesthood. But he knew—and his friends knew—that he could sing without stammering even if he was singing a bawdy drinking song.

  Once the secret was out, Pierina and her siblings went to great lengths to coerce or trick Giorgio into singing, as all of them reveled in the marvel of the fluency of his voice when raised in song.

  He could be counted on to sing when he wanted to say something quickly—as when Dodo was about to touch an illumination that was not yet dry, or when one of the apprentices nearly trod on a cache of hen’s eggs, destined for tempera, wrapped in a piece of linen. Both picture and eggs would have been spoilt if Giorgio had taken the time he would have needed to speak his warning.

  Pierina, who also loved to sing, suddenly found excuses to spend time in the workshop—a place that had held little enough attraction for her previously, when Old Fabio was the only artist there. She would come down from the second floor of the house with a basket of beans to shell or a bit of embroidery she was working on.

  When Ursula demanded to know why she had to go downstairs to do her needlework, Pierina would use the excuse that she was copying one of Giorgio’s designs. She was usually able to get Giorgio to sing a caccia with her, alternating, depending on who knew the song best, who was the leader and who the follower. Sometimes the other scribes chimed in, and then the workshop was a merrier place than it had ever been before. If students were there copying, they either j
oined the song or roundly told the singers to shut up, depending on the text they were working on and the mood it had put them in.

  Carlo understood that he’d found a gem in this young illuminator, whose work had already been much in demand when he was a freelance illustrator and scribe in Bologna. With two accomplished artists in his employ, Carlo could seize the opportunities that abounded now, between the rapidly growing call for textbooks and the rising number of nobles and other wealthy families who counted books—lavishly illustrated and gorgeously bound—as a mark of wealth and status. As treasures to be passed on from one generation to the next, right there alongside the family jewels.

  One morning in August, Carlo sent the children out to gather oak apples, the small, hard, fruitlike tumors that grow on the trunks and branches of oak trees. Slowly cooked in water and mixed with ferrous earth from Spain, the ground-up oak galls made for an excellent and free supply of black ink. A long-sought-after commission for a Book of Hours for Romeo Pepoli (destined as a wedding present for his nephew’s bride-to-be) had tripled the demand for ink in the Giliani workshop, and a great new batch was needed right away. The apprentices and all the servants were busy mixing pigment, making gesso, and scraping parchment—and so the four children were pressed into service.

  Nicco was happy, as the day of gathering oak apples meant that he was excused from his morning lessons.

  Even Emilia had been pressed into service in the workshop that day, and fretted because the children would have no one to look after them but Nicco. She sent him off with strict instructions to watch out for any riders wearing the colors of the Guelfs, who had lately arrested two men of the Ghibelline party in a nearby town. Nicco rolled his eyes but nonetheless promised Emilia to sound the hunting horn if they were in distress, watch over the girls, and make sure Dodo wasn’t stung by any late-emerging wasps that hadn’t yet flown from the galls that served as their nurseries.

  “Why is we Ghibellines?” Dodo wanted to know as they made their way down the dusty pathway, the autumn air filled with the smell of dry leaves and woodsmoke.

  “We’re with the Emperor,” explained Pierina, “while the Guelfs are the Pope’s party.”

  “You know,” said Alessandra, “it does seem odd, doesn’t it? I asked Papa, and he said it’s ever been the same, even before our great-great-grandparents were born. The Pope’s men and the Emperor’s men, battling it out, killing each other for hundreds of years. And still there’s always a new Emperor, when the old one dies, and always a new Pope, and nothing changes.”

  “Keeps everyone busy,” said Nicco.

  They walked down to the stand of oak trees that grew near the post road, past the margins of their land, and looked all around them for riders or even the dust of riders.

  But there was no one on the road, neither Guelfs nor Ghibellines. There was only the sound of cicadas and, occasionally—to their great relief—the wind in the trees.

  Nicco hiked Dodo up onto his shoulders, from where he could reach higher than any of them, while Pierina and Alessandra guided him from down below. The oak apples that were not yet ready for gathering were still inhabited by wasps.

  “Not that one, Dodo!” said Alessandra when she saw him reaching for one that still looked full. “Get the one that has a hole in it, right next to it!”

  “Eek—not that one!” said Pierina. “The wasp is just coming out!”

  Domenico, a sensible boy even at the tender age of four, pulled his hand away.

  Nicco put his brother back on the ground and climbed up into the lower branches of the tree. “Hold the basket over your head, Zan!” He stripped the hard, silvery gray fruits, the size of small, misshapen plums, off the leaves and twigs by the handful. They fell into the basket with the sound of hail. “Ouch!”

  “Did you get stung?” said Pierina.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Come down,” said Alessandra. “Let’s put some mud on it.”

  “I’ll get some of these lower ones,” Pierina urged. “Do come down!”

  Nicco gave in to his sisters’ tender ministrations and jumped to the ground. “Can you see the stinger?”

  Pierina, who liked to think her brother loved her best, grabbed Nicco’s injured hand. “Move over, Zan—you’re blocking the light!”

  “Wasps don’t drop their stinger—just their poison.” Pushing Pierina aside, Alessandra brought Nicco’s hand up to her mouth, sucked on the swelling there, and then spat. “Let’s put some mud on it now.”

  Pierina was torn between jealousy and admiration for her sister. “We should get you a pair of red gloves, Alessandra—and then you could go about the parish, selling cures.”

  Nicco added, “And sniffing the urine of everyone who complains of feeling ill.”

  “And casting their horoscope!” Pierina was terribly glad that Nic seemed to be taking her part.

  Alessandra, ignoring both of them, was digging around the roots of the tree, looking for some damp earth.

  “Are you going to do it or not, Zan? It hurts like hell.”

  Done teasing, Pierina knelt down beside her sister. “What are you looking at?”

  “This.” Alessandra’s digging had revealed another oak apple, much like the others. But this one was growing out of the roots of the tree. She dropped it when she felt something moving about inside it.

  All four knelt down to watch a wasp crawl out of the little hole in the dry gall, and walk on its insect legs up the roots toward the trunk of the tree.

  Nicco scooped up a little mud and put it over the place where he’d been stung. “Hell of a doctor you’d make, Alessandra!” He made to tromp on the wasp, but Alessandra pushed his foot aside.

  “Look at it, Nic! It doesn’t have any wings.”

  “Well, neither do we, in case you haven’t noticed. We have to get a move on, if we’re to make it back on time for dinner.”

  While they were trudging home, with the baskets full and their hands stained brown, Alessandra suggested they stop in the orchard to pick up a fig branch that could be used to stir the oak apples while they soaked in the sun—and to eat a few figs, if there were any ripe ones.

  “Hush!” said Pierina. They heard the sound of hooves along the road. “Can you make out their colors?”

  Nicco, who had the best eyes among them, squinted into the distance. “They’re neither one nor the other faction. They’re—” He picked up his basket. “Hurry up, you three! They’re traders! Let’s go see what they’ve got for us!”

  The traders had come all the way from La Magna. What they had turned out to be lapis lazuli, brought over a year of traveling by camel and horse, passed from the hand of one herdsman to another and paid for in blood and gold, all the way from the mountain caliphates of Greater Khorasan. Carlo was beside himself with happiness. This was just in time for the prodigious need they were going to have for aquamarine. He’d been prepared to scrape the pigment off any old manuscripts he could get his hands on, so rare was the gemstone these days, with so many brigands along the roads and so many people willing to pay such a high price for the only color befitting the Virgin’s robes and the skies of Heaven. He made the traders promise to pass his way again the following year.

  Yes, he was sure that his fortune was made now and his children would be safe. This was a sign from God.

  It seemed to Alessandra that Ursula had loosened her hold on her or, much to her delight, had somehow forgotten about her. She grew enough that year to ride the little gelding kept by Carlo’s groom. She never learned to ride as well as Nicco—but, still, she learned to ride well enough and to wear her brother’s clothes with such confidence that the neighbors—always alert to anything new—took her for an apprentice or cousin or some other young male hanger-on at the Gilianis’.

  Alessandra was learning about the world of Nature from her brother, and how to draw from Giorgio, and she continued to read whenever light and time allowed. Her heart was full and her cheeks were rosy, and a happier girl could not
have been found in the province when the family gathered around the table on her saint’s name day, to celebrate the end of her thirteenth year.

  Ursula, smiling with uncharacteristic serenity, raised her goblet to Alessandra.

  “Fourteen,” she said, taking a sip of her wine. “The age when girls must be kept inside.”

  Alessandra felt herself go pale.

  “The age,” continued Ursula, still smiling, “when girls must be kept even from looking out windows or doors. When they must be kept safely apart from all young men.” Here she looked at Nicco. “Even their brothers.”

  “Amore,” said Carlo. “Where do you get these ideas?”

  “From the Holy Father,” said Ursula. “It is my duty to protect your daughter’s virtue, and I will see that it is done. No matter what—” Here she looked at all of them, one by one. “No matter what anyone says, as God is my witness!”

  Alessandra never appreciated her freedom until it was taken away. Her father’s house—so long a haven of learning and a source of comfort—was transformed by her stepmother’s zealous oversight into a barrier between Alessandra and all the wonders and pleasures of the outside world.

  Nicco and Pierina could come and go as they pleased, so long as they got their work done. Even Dodo, free to romp unsupervised in the garden, was allowed more license than Alessandra. Ursula barred her from the scriptorium, citing the frequent presence of students there—and made sure she kept Alessandra occupied with housework, far from the schoolroom, when Nicco had his lessons.

  Once a week, Alessandra was allowed to go to Confession—but always with Ursula, proud and showy in a velvet gown, walking close enough to hear what anyone else might try to say to her. So large was Ursula’s shadow that Alessandra felt her own physical presence in the world diminishing, like sandstone being worn away by wind and rain.