Plague in the Mirror (17 page)

A stooped, small woman, not a nun — or at least not in a nun’s garb — admits Cristofana, and the huge wooden door clunks closed behind them.

Left on her own, May takes in the terrible hush about the place. The convent wasn’t exactly hopping the last time she was here, but there’s something different about this silence, dire. She wavers a minute, thinking like flesh and bone, before it occurs to her that she’s in ghost form and can pass through the wall, which she does, wishing immediately that she hadn’t.

The long room she ends up in, exposed in shadows (though if a ghost is going to look at home anywhere, it’s here), is a house of horrors. Here and there a candle or spitting torch cuts the gloom. The shadows are deep but can’t conceal the crazy quilt of women and children, nuns and orphans, turning and tossing on piled straw, row after jagged row of makeshift cots. May floats quickly into a partially open wardrobe, careful not to jut through the wood as she watches through the crack. A sick antiseptic smell fills the room, boiled herbs and vomit, and the thick stone walls look as if they’re sweating, though it’s chill inside, deathly chill for the middle of an Italian summer. The sound of too many people groaning and trying not to be heard makes for a muffled roar.

May cringes a little as Sister Arcangela, making rounds, crosses very close, kneeling by a child with a sleeping baby in its arms. Cristofana follows behind, looking wary and tired, and May ducks back farther into the damp gloom of the wardrobe.

The orphans in the nuns’ care have been dying, Marietta reports under her breath, one by one, infecting the sisters in the meantime. “Come sit by me,” she urges, her eyes hollow in the candlelight. Cristofana steps nearer but stiffens when her sister adds, “Better yet, kneel, sister, bend to His will. There is peace in it.”

Kneeling seems almost as hard for Cristofana as being in this room in the first place, which shouldn’t surprise May but still does.

“He is one of the youngest,” her sister explains. “Just a month old. Left on our doorstep as most of them are. See here?” She gestures with her chin, lifting the edge of the infant’s blanket, letting it fall. “The sickness shows first in the groin or armpits. The tumors,
gavoccioli,
are the size of eggs, oranges sometimes. Here, take the cloth. Cool them.”

At that Cristofana draws the line, moving away from the damp scrap of linen as if it might bite her. “I came only to say good-bye —”

“You already said good-bye,” Marietta reminds her curtly. She strokes the older child’s forehead with the wadded cloth. “Do you know that Benedetta carried her infant brother all the way here from a village near Scandicci? He died before they arrived, and the only way we could console her was to give her this one instead. She doesn’t seem to know the difference. This child —” she begins, her voice filling with warmth.

“Is not my child. I did not come here to forsake my life but to ask your forgiveness for saving it.”

“It is not my forgiveness you require, sister.”

“Whose, then? Let me guess.”

The nun continues stroking her patient’s damp forehead with the cloth, her voice grave. “They are lost or failing, the other sisters, and apart from loyal Maria, Mother Abbess’s niece, I care for these alone.” The girl, Benedetta — May wouldn’t have been able to tell its gender on her own; the child’s hair is cropped and her face wasted and pale — seems to spasm then, rolling on her side, coughing blood with a wet
splat
over the baby onto the nun’s veil. As Sister Arcangela eases the bundle from her arms, Cristofana winces and backs away on her knees, out of reach, out of the candle’s glow, partly obscuring herself in shadow. She stands up, and she might be trembling — May can’t tell at this angle — but she’s definitely agitated, rocking slightly, wild-eyed, a caged animal compared to her stoical sister.

The nun sets the sleeping infant aside on a blanket, ignoring the mark on her veil. She wipes a red string of saliva from Benedetta’s mouth, stroking the narrow, veined wrist with her fingers until the girl is soothed to sleep. Then she rises and moves to another patient nearby, with Cristofana standing back, her reluctant shadow. “As the buboes spread,” she resumes like a lecturer, pointing out sections of a dying child’s body with her voice low and mechanical, “the malady changes. Black or livid spots blaze on the arms and thighs, now few and large, now small and numerous. It was hard at first, to feel anything but revulsion, for this disease degrades as well as kills. It turns the breath foul and the urine to blood-black sludge. There is another chain of sickness, too, which you saw, marked by the coughing of blood. With the tumors, you die in five days or six — though some few survive and recover. Those who spit blood never do.” She glances back at Benedetta. “These die in a day or two, three at most. The majority here will not be alive by the Sabbath. Even those who yet show no signs.”

May follows the line of the sister’s raised arm. Across the room, on a large straw pallet, the ones who must still be healthy curl together, twitching in their sleep, their bare ankles bony and pale.

“As I wash their small bodies for burial, shocked every time by the black blotches, the fierce swellings, I wonder who washed Babbo’s body aboard ship. Was it Ludovico who folded him into whatever passed for a clean sheet? Did he do as I do here, tracing black crosses on tiny shrouds with a cooled stick from the embers?

“Even the littlest sins can stain the soul, and through no fault of their own, Babbo and all these multitudes are denied the ministrations of a priest. There are no holy men left to bless them, just as in the end there were none aboard ship to bless our father.

“I see it in my sleep, Sire dragged away in chains, his soul snatched by grinning demons. I hear him . . . the wailing as he’s hurled into the inextinguishable fires of Hell —”

Cristofana lets out her own wail of aggravation. “I beg you, sister. What God is this?”

“If our father knew how your faith has waned —”

“Bless him, but you speak continually of Babbo and never once ask after Mamma or what became of us in his absence and yours. You live so near Firenze and heard nothing of our misery?”

Marietta seems taken aback. Startled. “My vows preclude the world without.”

Cristofana waves. “The world without has found its way in.”

“My eyes have been rinsed in the blood of the lamb and see only His love.”

Shaking with frustration or rage, Cristofana blurts out, “Mamma is dead. She lay in a pool of
her
blood for hours before anyone came.”

Sister Arcangela looks up with the eyes of someone who can no longer be surprised. Crossing herself, she murmurs, “And you?”

“Left for dead . . . rescued by our neighbor, the midwife — you remember; ‘the witch Callista’ we called her when we were small. She raised me as her own, and I am like her now. Your God disgusts me.”

With blank eyes, Sister Arcangela begins chanting what May thinks is the Hail Mary. Her blank voice, rising in strength and pitch, only seems to infuriate Cristofana, who sinks to her knees and starts rocking forward and back. “The Virgin is deaf and dumb! The Holy Mother is deaf and dumb and the Holy Father, too. They are nowhere.” She tips forward, knocking her forehead hard against stone, making May wince. “Nowhere,” she repeats weakly, her tangle of hair fanned around her. “And we are nothing.”

May is momentarily tempted to go to her in her sister’s stead and calm her — some of the figures on the floor have turned their hollow eyes toward Cristofana’s voice — but like Sister Arcangela, May can only watch Cristofana cry herself quiet.

In a moment, she rises unsteadily, adjusting her peacock gown (more modest than the plum one, though still outlandish in this place). The nun won’t look at her but stops chanting, poised in the moment, waiting for her sister’s next move.

Cristofana backs away slowly. “You have always saved the best of yourself for strangers,” she says. Though her head is bowed, the words ring distinctly, and she sidesteps the zigzag of straw cots, disappearing into the dark of the corridor.

Sister Arcangela smooths her veil, steps over the recent corpse of a child to kneel by one who’s living, and begins a silent prayer.

H
ome again and safe, May spends the next morning, Sunday, skulking by the Arno as the bells of Florence peal.

She follows the river farther than she has before, leaving the city limits, it seems, leaving everything. If Li’s timeslip theory from the bar makes any sense (and it doesn’t, really), she’s supposed to find the
past
eerie and depressing, not the present, but May can’t escape what she witnessed at the convent. Not even here.

A hazy sun is cresting the rise, and May lets the morning fog have her, a damp embrace. Calm one minute and panicked the next, she steps farther in, snared in the strangeness of her own mood. The entire riverbank is obscured, and she with it. Who will find her ever again? She’ll vanish off the face of the earth, like those numberless plague dead Cristofana is always talking about. The dead and dying May has now seen with her own eyes.

“Look,
bella,
” comes that level voice, floating out from the fog, reeling May in, and at first she doesn’t trust that what she’s hearing is real. “Come look what I’ve found.”

Ghost Cristofana steps from the yellow tendrils of fog with a ghost baby in her arms, a large one swaddled in a too-small blanket. “I found her alone in all the world. She has not words, but she loves my voice. Listen.”

The baby’s hollowed cheeks puff in and out as it sucks furiously on Cristofana’s milky-faint index finger.

Healthy,
May thinks.
Thank God.

“If I do not sing or stuff my finger in its craw, it howls like a demon.”

“It’s hungry.” May reaches to touch the downy ghost forehead in that automatic way you do when someone holds a baby under your nose, but her hand passes through. “It needs milk.”

“And you have some?” Cristofana snaps. “No, nor do I. If there is a wet nurse anywhere in our foul city, she is busy with every orphan from here to Pisa.” Pursing her lips at the creature, Cristofana croons, “Isn’t that so,
ninna-oh
?”

“Then go find her, this nurse.”

“You think yourself fit to order me about like a mistress? Do you suppose you have the florin to pay for my service?”

Patiently, as if speaking to someone on the ledge of a tall building, May lowers her voice. “Let me help, Cristofana. Just listen. That’s all I ask.” She takes in a sharp breath. “Bring her to the convent.”

Cristofana’s eyes lock on her, intense and frightening. She steps close, bouncing the baby in her spectral arms. “What did you say?”

“I said bring her to the convent.” May’s voice cracks under the strain of her twin’s puzzled, disbelieving stare. “Yes, I know about your sister. She’ll help you. Bring the baby there.” May shudders at the thought, remembering the place, the smell and the despair. “With the other orphans.”

“I see I am not the only one who sneaks and studies.” Cristofana’s grim expression lets up, as if she’s gained newfound respect for May, but her voice is furtive. “I could bring this there, but why? It amuses me. Watch.”

She removes her finger from the baby’s mouth and tickles the child’s dimpled chin with it, her voice warbling in a way that’s almost comical for its gentleness.

May takes in the sweep of the riverbank. The fog is a patchwork, and ahead in a clear patch she sees where Cristofana likely came through, a dim alley leading back up to the crooked cart roads of the old city.

The riverside, what she can make out of it, is deserted, desolate. Despair wells up in her. May knows she won’t be able to reach out and rescue the baby, just as she couldn’t snatch the kitten from the bucket, just as she couldn’t reach for Marco after that first time (lips, skin, longing). “Please.” Her pleading voice sounds cracked and feeble. “Just think about it. Don’t let her die.”

Cristofana isn’t listening. She’s rocking the baby almost tenderly, breathing her vitriol into its entranced face.