A Golden Web Read online

Reading was her only solace. She read whatever she could bribe or beg someone else to bring to her—and sometimes she wrote her thoughts in a book of spoiled sheets of vellum that Giorgio gathered and bound for her. Pierina stole ink and tiny brushes for her, too, so that Alessandra could practice sketching. For want of another model, she drew her own hands, her naked feet, and the ancient twisting vines of the wisteria that grew outside her window. She thought about the surface of living things, and how their shape came from everything hidden inside.

  The summer spread its glorious wings while Alessandra was locked indoors. The first few months passed quickly enough in the pleasures she found in reading and drawing—but then the autumn came.

  Her father was away, searching out new books to publish, making his yearly rounds to the greatest libraries of the region, in monasteries and noble palaces. Ursula took advantage of his absence to say things she never would have dared say when he was at home.

  Quite capable of being pleasant and even charming when she wanted to, Ursula made it clear—day after day, in a relentless stream of cruel comments—that Alessandra’s ongoing presence in the household was the only thing that stood between Ursula and perfect domestic bliss. Alessandra was selfish and horrid for refusing to marry or take the veil and leave Ursula in peace to enjoy her husband’s other children.

  While her stepmother kept watch on her, Alessandra sat and sewed seed pearls on yards and yards of blue silk that Ursula said would one day serve as the cloth of her wedding gown. No field was ever sowed so thickly—nor were there ever seeds with less chance of sprouting. As Alessandra plied the needle, poking it up through the silk and through the pearl and down again, she thought about the smell of dry leaves and ripe pears, and the sounds of the harvest songs wafting across the parched fields. She looked down at her white hands and remembered how they were stained purple the year before, when she and Nicco stole into the vineyard and feasted on the blackest, ripest grapes they could find. She learned to answer Ursula without really hearing what she said, making the small, polite sounds considered fitting conversation for girls.

  The more she stayed indoors alone, while her siblings climbed trees and swam in the river and watched the sunsets, the more Alessandra grew to loathe her jailor. Fall slipped away from her, barely glimpsed—and then the fog and rain of winter came. By then—even though her father was home again—each day seemed to last a year. Her eyes ached from the needlework, and her head hurt so much that even Ursula sometimes took pity on her.

  When she was allowed to lie in bed in her room, Alessandra looked at the square of sky that showed outside her window and dreamed of doorways.

  The following spring, Alessandra’s father came to visit her in her room, where she lay in bed reading after the midday meal. The covers were pulled up around her shoulders. There was a fire burning in the brazier. Outside, the rain was falling, although Alessandra could only tell from the silver droplets that sat like pearls in the silver of her father’s hair.

  “Look what I’ve brought you, Curly-top!” He opened his fur-lined cloak and brought out a baby rabbit, which peeked out from between his fingers and wriggled its nose at Alessandra.

  She smiled at it from over the top edge of her book. “Dear Papa, you’re always trying to tempt me away from my reading, aren’t you?” She marked her place with the striped tail feather from a hawk—a souvenir of Nicco’s latest outing to the forest—then lay the book down beside her. “What a lovely little bit of life and fluff! Was it its mother we ate today?”

  “Cook saved this one for you. His brothers and sisters, I’m afraid, have been made into a stew.”

  Alessandra took the bunny from her dad and stroked it gently with her cheek. “How its little heart is pounding!”

  “I want to speak to you about a matter of importance,” said Carlo, settling himself onto the cushions that covered the long chest beside his daughter’s bed.

  Alessandra kissed the baby rabbit and put it in her sleeve, from where it peeked out, wriggling its silken ears as if still unable to believe its good fortune, landing here in this luxurious bedroom instead of in the stew pot.

  “You know how much I treasure you, daughter.”

  “Thank you, Papa. But you make me tremble with fear now, as this can only be the preamble to a piece of bad news.”

  Carlo sighed. “You have ever been two steps ahead of everyone else in this household, Alessandra. Your first nanny was convinced you were a changeling—”

  “And would have killed me with her knife, if Mother hadn’t snatched it from her hands and sent her packing!”

  As Carlo looked at his daughter—so like his late wife in her face as well as her spirit—he was filled with love for both of them. “I’m leaving for France, soon—not an unusually long trip, but a dangerous one.”

  He glanced away from her, sighed, and spoke more quietly than before. “It is time to get you a husband.”

  When Alessandra said nothing—seeming to hold her breath as she stared at him, as if trying to read in his face the greater truth of his words—he added, his voice weighed down by his own unhappiness over the matter, “I promised I’d tell you today.”

  She spoke in a whisper. “Have I already been promised to someone?”

  Carlo, in his turn, was silent.

  “It’s true, then!” Alessandra’s voice broke when she spoke again. “Could it not be deferred, Papa?”

  Carlo shook his head. “The papers have already been drafted.”

  “Burn them—I beg you!”

  Feeling sorry with all his heart for letting himself be so influenced by his wife, Carlo took his daughter’s hands in his. “Although you are blessed with a mighty intelligence, Alessandra, you are yet an innocent child.” He reached out and gently touched her cheek, then used his thumb to wipe away a tear. “Have you thought about what your life would be like if something were to happen to me?”

  Alessandra threw her arms around him. “Nothing will happen to you, my dearest Papa! You are strong and well.”

  “And old and gray,” he said, gently pushing her away. “Now, I want you to think hard, Alessandra, about things that may not please you.”

  She nodded, although her bottom lip quivered.

  “When I die—”

  “Stop, Papa! I won’t hear of it!”

  “You will, child! Now be brave and hear me out. When I die, your stepmother will depend on Nicco—at least until she marries again.”

  “Oh, stop—I can’t stand it!”

  “Hush, Alessandra! Listen to me. Nicco will have his place here, as will Pierina, who is a girl more in your stepmother’s mold. And Dodo has never known any other mother. But you, Alessandra—”

  “I know. She’s told me often enough: I am a thorn in her side. A ghost here to haunt her. Uninterested in the things that interest her, and excited by things that no girl has the right or need to know.”

  Carlo patted his daughter’s hand. “She fears you out-shine her.”

  “I have no desire to do so! I wish she’d simply leave me alone!”

  “She cannot do that, Alessandra, and neither can I. We must think of the welfare of all four of our children.”

  “Oh, Papa, you know she wishes I were dead!”

  “Hush, child! She only wishes to see you well situated in life.”

  “Away from her!” Alessandra looked into her father’s kind blue eyes, the color of cornflowers and so like Pierina’s. “Away from all of you.”

  Carlo looked suddenly older and more tired than he had just a moment before. “You’ve read every book in our library now.”

  “Not yet!” said Alessandra. “And there are many I wish to read again. I was too green in my understanding when I read them the first time.”

  “You are, in truth, my daughter.”

  “I am, Papa.” She made to put her arms around him again, and in the process sent the baby rabbit flying. Carlo—whom Alessandra had once seen catch a thrush midair—deftly caught the terrified little
thing and restored it to the safe haven of his daughter’s sleeve.

  “Please,” she begged him. “Buy me some time!”

  “I must keep peace in this household, Alessandra. And as unpleasant a thing as it is to admit, I think you would receive fairer treatment by the hearth of a man who would love and cherish you as your stepmother never will.”

  She grabbed his hands again and made him look at her. “I have a plan, Papa—a great and half-mad hope! But it cannot be fulfilled for another year. And it can never be fulfilled if I am married.”

  “Will you take the veil, my girl?”

  “If only it were such an easy path!” Alessandra shook her head. “You know how I hate being locked up—and how limited the curriculum is at the cloister.” She looked at the pair of finches her father had given her to ease the tedium of living indoors. She didn’t tell him, for fear of giving offense, that she took small comfort in the caged creatures, only seeing in their plight a reminder of her own.

  “You are silent, Alessandra. Will you not confide in me?”

  “Not yet. Just promise me you’ll throw those papers in the fire! Promise me, Papa!”

  “I cannot promise you that—”

  “Please!”

  “Hush! But perhaps I could convince her to wait a bit, on grounds of finding an even more powerful match for you—a gentleman with a name that would give your stepmother cause to hold her head even higher.”

  “If it would buy me time, you could betroth me to the King of China, for all I care! Just so long as I can make my way to Bologna before he comes to claim me.”

  “Bologna?” Carlo looked at his daughter as if she indeed might be the changeling she’d been accused of being so long ago. “There is only one sort of unmarried woman who makes it her business to stay in Bologna.”

  “Fie, Papa! How can you think so ill of me?” Alessandra buried her face in her hands.

  Carlo reached out and stroked his daughter’s hair. “Will you not confide in me, Alessandra?” he said again.

  She sniffed and wiped her face, smoothing the covers around her to stall for time. To seem as tall as possible, she sat up straighter, hoping that the nobility of her purpose would shine through her words. Silently, she prayed to the soul of her mother to intercede for her and aid her cause—her mother, whose needless death had inspired Alessandra’s ambition, and whose love had given her the belief that it might, against all odds, be possible to fulfill.

  And then she said what she’d practiced saying a hundred times, never finding quite the right way. She let the words tumble out of her, unplanned, all in a jumble. “I want to go to the University of Bologna, Papa. I want to study medicine.”

  Seven

  Carlo looked at his daughter a long time before responding to the astonishing thing she’d just said. He knew that she was not like any other child, male or female, he’d ever known. But this newest conceit of hers left him quite speechless.

  She spoke when he said nothing. “There are female scholars in the town.”

  “Are there?” Carlo looked thoughtful. “Are you sure?”

  Alessandra was longing to say yes, of course she was sure—but, in truth, she didn’t know. Now that she thought about it, the few female scholars she’d ever read about had all been high-ranking nuns from noble families, or noblewomen who were tutored at home. “Females, I believe, can attend lectures if they so desire. At least, I have never heard any injunction against it.” Her voice trailed off into uncertainty.

  “And medicine, child! What man would surrender his pulse and his urine to a female physician?”

  “I want to study the workings of the body, Father—not to wear the red gloves and attend the ill.”

  “Will you learn only from books, then? Because I can and will procure whatever books you want, and you can study them here at your leisure….” He gestured around the warm and cozy room with its bed as commodious as a throne, well padded with embroidered pillows and hung about with curtains, now pulled back to let in the light. “In the safety and tranquillity of your own home.”

  Alessandra looked around her room, taking in all her father had done to make it a whole world for her since her stepmother had clipped her wings, keeping her imprisoned here as surely as the finches in their wicker cage. “I want to study as Aristotle says men should study.”

  “Men, Alessandra, not girls.”

  “It’s true the old Stagirite has nothing kind to say about the intellectual capacity of females. But I am living proof that he was biased in his view!”

  Carlo thought how proud his daughter was—how proud and pretty and, he had to admit, correct in her opinion. She had all the capacity required to pursue any of the seven liberal arts: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, or even astronomy. Nicco, for all his lovable manly bluster, was as a lowly apprentice, not even worthy of holding a candle to his sister’s intellectual pursuits. She was a natural scholar and an original thinker. Was it not but an unhappy accident that she was born a girl?

  And yet she was a girl, and what she asked for was against every law of man and Nature. “Wouldn’t music be better suited to you, Alessandra? Both the study of music and the study of medicine are concerned, after all, with achieving harmony.”

  “And yet they are as different as an angel is from a living creature, Papa! I want to study the body itself and learn the secrets of how it works—of everything that’s hidden beneath the flesh. To learn, as Aristotle teaches us to do, by observation.”

  “Alessandra, you have been shut up in this room too long—you need fresh air!”

  “There is a doctor who teaches at the University of Bologna. He chooses assistants from among the best students in the medical school. I know you’ve heard of him—his little book has been much in demand for copying since its publication last year.”

  “Anatomia?”

  “The very one! Mondino de’ Liuzzi. Our Giorgio did some of the pictures for him. Each illuminator was sworn to secrecy, as they used corpses as models—” Alessandra clapped her hand over her mouth, realizing what she’d just done. “You won’t tell, Papa, will you? They only use corpses from the gallows or the hospitals, and never the bodies of people from hereabouts.”

  Carlo was by now weeping. Alessandra stopped herself from saying more, enfolding herself in his arms, as soon as she saw the effect of her words.

  “Have I not ever shown you love and kindness, Alessandra, and given you everything you desire?”

  “Of course you have, dear Papa!”

  “Did I nurture you and coddle and encourage you, only to see you banished from the company of every decent, God-fearing person? To see you become a smut in the eye of God Himself?”

  Alessandra stiffened, hearing an unpleasant echo of her stepmother’s diction in her father’s words, even as she let herself be held by him. She pushed him gently away and dried her eyes. “New things are being learned all the time—especially now that so many of the ancient texts from the Greeks and the Arabs are more widely accessible—and largely because of you and your brother stationers, Papa!”

  “Woe betide me, then!”

  Alessandra caught and held his eyes. “Do you never think that if someone, somewhere had bothered to learn and study more, Mother might still be alive today?”

  “Oh, my dear child—God calls us to Him when and how He will.”

  “And yet you physic me when I have the ague, and Emilia makes Dodo take cod-liver oil, and you have always done your best to keep your children safe and healthy. Is that going against God’s will?”

  “Basta, Alessandra—enough!” Carlo held out his palm to keep her from saying more. “You cannot go to Bologna to study medicine. You must not even think about it anymore.” Carlo shook his head when she was silent, simply looking at him with those brown eyes of hers that were so like her mother’s—eyes filled now with reproach. “Your stepmother will never allow it—and although I am ruler of this family, still it is in my interest to keep my wife in g
ood humor.”

  “At my expense?”

  “How you vex me, Alessandra! What you’re asking is unreasonable! No girl of Persiceto has ever gone off to study in Bologna. And females are not permitted to compete for advanced degrees. You would heap shame upon our heads—and even Pierina’s chances of marrying well would be compromised.”

  “It is not fair!”

  “It is the way of this world, daughter.”

  That night, after everyone else in the house was sleeping, Alessandra took her candle and stole into the storeroom, where she took her treasure out of its hiding place, prayed, and kissed the image of her mother’s face again and again.

  The cold stone of the floor seemed to grow warmer and softer beneath her knees. And in the candlelight, after many Ave Marias, she saw a golden web cast itself like a veil over the face of the Virgin.

  Alessandra barely managed to keep the heavy icon in her trembling hands. Was it a sign to her? Her mother’s blessing?

  She hugged the icon to her breast, crossed herself, and tucked her treasure away again, well hidden beneath her mother’s clothes.

  Through all that spring, Alessandra uncomplainingly did the household tasks her stepmother assigned to her, and spent the rest of the time propped up in her bed, reading and thinking.

  It was a breathtakingly beautiful spring, filled with birdsong and blossoms. Alessandra experienced what she could from Pierina’s tales of the world beyond her little room, and basked in the sunlight and fresh air on the way to and from church. She walked slowly, soaking up as much as she could of the sights, sounds, and sweet scents of the outdoors.

  Pierina proved to be more than willing to smuggle books or parts of books in progress out of the scriptorium. But as luscious spring turned again to tantalizing summer, she was increasingly annoyed with the obedient lump that seemed to be standing in for her once rebellious, unquenchably adventurous sister.

  Pierina shared a room with Dodo now—it was part of Ursula’s plan to keep Alessandra untainted by worldly things and thus as grandly marriageable as possible.