Plague in the Mirror (19 page)

“Your father was always handy with a quote. One for every occasion. I never knew if he was mocking me or not.” It’s impossible not to pick up the subtle shift in Gwen’s voice, from amused to bitter. “He had a way of making a person feel pretentious.”

May can tell by the way Liam looks down, stirring the soggy flakes left in his bowl, that this is in the category of Too Much Information. Did Gwen date after Billy left? It’s a weird idea, even weirder in a way for May than her own mom dating. Both Gwen and May’s mom seem to live in their heads. Did you get old and just stop sharing yourself that way? Or will May have to deal with a stepfather or stepmother? Or worse — siblings? She’d always wanted brothers and sisters when she was young. But not like this. And that was then.

“I have a question. What’s a wet nurse?” she demands, in a voice that suddenly seems way too loud.

Gwen smiles, her gaze intent. “A lactating mother who nurses another woman’s baby. Often a servant or a peasant hired by a wealthy woman who can’t be bothered to do it herself. You don’t hear the term much anymore.”

“
Lactating
is not a word I hope to hear again
any
time.
Ever.
” Liam winces, raising an arm as if against a blow when they turn scolding looks on him. He walks his bowl to the sink, rinses it, and turns to the window. When he speaks again, his voice is cheerful enough but far from kidding. “I’m bored, Ma.”

His mother abruptly clears butter dish, jam, and fruit bowl from the table. Her sigh goes on forever, and she actually looks angry. “You know me pretty well, Liam, and you know boredom’s one sin I won’t tolerate. You can drink beer or cuss or bring home the occasional C in calc, but you can’t, you don’t
dare,
look me in the eye and admit to being bored. Not here. Not anywhere. Stupid people are bored. People with no imagination.”

May looks away, embarrassed for him.

“Ouch,” Liam goes on, “that’s harsh. But May’s bored, too. Aren’t you, May? Work with me here.”

“No,” May says. “I just feel disconnected sometimes, left out, like I’m missing the point. Like a tourist, I guess . . . and not just because I’m in Italy. Does that make sense?” It feels weird, admitting this, but Cristofana, who hardly knows her, sometimes knows more about May than May does.

Gwen smiles. “It makes perfect sense. I often feel the same way — especially when I travel — until I find myself in some conversation or landscape that reminds me why I came and brings me back to wonder.”

“Please don’t get her going about wonder and imagination.” Liam groans. “Then it’ll be Einstein and on and freaking on.” He turns to May. “Here’s why Dad had to go around groveling and quoting Great Thinkers all the time.”

May shrugs, so he turns back to Gwen. “Can’t we quote Lady Gaga instead? Or SpongeBob? I’d like to talk about SpongeBob.”

He’s kidding, May thinks, but he isn’t, and part of her understands . . . part of her wants to be lying on the rug on Saturday morning watching cartoons, with a milk mustache and a bowl of Lucky Charms at her elbow and True licking the last of the milk out of the bowl. No relics or divorces or essays to write, or phantom lovers or babies to rescue from sociopathic doppelgängers when you’re not physically in the same layer of time. May rubs what she imagines are dark circles under her eyes with her thumbs.

Gwen reaches out, lifting her chin. “I’m curious,” she says. “What made you ask about a wet nurse?”

May looks at Liam, who shrugs as if to say,
You’re on your own with this one.
“I had another bad dream, I guess.”

“About a wet nurse?” Gwen’s trying not to smile. “That’s, well . . . different.”

“Not exactly
about.
”

Gwen’s digging in now, looking too hard at first one and then the other of them, so May knows she’d better tie this up. “What I’d like to do today is learn more about the plague here in the fourteenth century. I’m writing one of my essays about it, remember? The one for history.”

Gwen’s face lights up. “I’ve got just the place, then. I know a museum with an interactive exhibit. . . . A microcosm of medieval life, at least as the underclasses lived it. The exhibit’s a bit sensational, but it gets its point across. I came when I was here last time.”

“A little microcosm is just what I need,” May says, looking at Liam, who rolls his eyes. “Right, Li? ‘Heaven in a grain of sand’?”

“More like Hell,” Gwen adds, her voice matter-of-fact and chilling. “And the exact lines are ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, / And heaven in a wild flower.’ Has anyone seen my other hiking boot?”

“‘Through interactive guides, films, and images,’” Gwen reads from the guidebook, “‘the display creates a picture of life as endured by those men and women not born to wealth and noble privilege,’
blabbity blabbity,
‘an existence characterized by injustice, disease, and filth. Here the republicanism and’
blabbity blabbity
‘for which Florence was famous were nowhere in evidence. Law and punishment were dispensed by the rich at the expense of the poor; those with money paid; those without were executed.’”

When they arrive, Liam more or less camps out in a room full of torture devices, while May and Gwen continue on past a re-created market cart stocked with typical Florentine fare of the day — most of which the average peasant could only salivate over, an interactive audio explains in Italian, English, German, and Japanese — and, finally, past a room devoted to medieval medical and dental practices and diseases like leprosy and, yes, the plague.

Though May can’t help comparing the audio and what she reads on the placards to what she’s seen, she’s too distracted to form an opinion either way, though Gwen keeps soliciting one.

Next up is a reconstructed peasant dwelling, an underground building with no windows or light coming in from the outside. The ceilings are barely five feet high, and it’s humid as hell inside. The audio guide says that in real life the house would be teeming with vermin, parasites, and the stench of human waste. Here again, in the back of her mind, May can’t help comparing these models to the real thing and wonders all over again what’s real and what isn’t, wonders — at mention of parasites — if her dad is remembering to give True his worm meds every month and check him for ticks.

More or less exhausted by worry over her dog and her parents and herself and Marco, and now, in a surreal twist, this baby — Pippa — May ducks out of Gwen’s sight line into a sideline display on medieval magic.

In the arched cave of the film nook, she sits on the rug-covered bench alone in the dark for three full loops of a mini documentary on alchemy. The man on-screen is dressed like a wizard. He’s seated at a big table lined with fat leather volumes, floaty dead things in jars, and liquids bubbling in beakers, neat and tidy enough to be a little museum display in its own right. The man’s robe is a spotless royal purple, and the big fire burning in the hearth behind him makes the whole thing feel a bit like
Masterpiece Theatre
on dope. The tour’s in English because May got to choose her language, but the voice actor’s Scottish or something, and she can barely understand what he’s saying. His voice is deep and slow, persistent like flowing water, both soothing and unsettling. “Step lightly,” the Italian-Scottish alchemist urges, looking straight at her, and here’s what’s wrong: his face is flickering, bleeding into someone else’s.

“Close your eyes.” May hears it distinctly now, Cristofana’s muffled voice sounding under the drone of the audio tour, familiar and teasing. One minute it’s the Scottish dude talking, and the next it’s Cristofana. One minute the camera pans over his orderly table, and the next, the witch presides over a mockery of the theatrical set. Part spilled contents of a crazy bag lady’s shopping cart, part jumbled secondhand store, part withered garden, her table has bottles and books, just as his does. But it’s also heaped with dusty objects of every sort — the scraps, bits, and bobs of a scavenger. Her robe is a mockery, too, a crazy-quilt of stolen brocade and peasant sack, silk and rags, jewels and feathers.

The Cristofana-wizard is holding up a large, clear jar with a little doll slumped inside, made of some kind of hairy root with a lock of dirty-blond hair tied on top with twine.

“Come,” he says — or she does, flickering, crooning —“and cheat time with me. I have your poppet here, see? In this glass. Do as she does. Move as she moves. Little You.”

Little Me.
It could as easily be Cristofana, though.
We correspond.

“What
is
that thing?” May asks out loud.

“
Mandragora officinarum,
also known as Satan’s apple, Circe’s plant, dudaim, ladykins, manikin . . .”

The words themselves ring like a spell, and May wonders if she’s being enchanted. Her head feels light and her eyes blur in the cool dark of the deserted exhibit. Where are Gwen and Liam?

“The mandrake came of the same clay as Adam,” the wavering voice says, “and so the Devil holds it in great favor. If grown beneath the gallows, or where suicides lie buried at a crossroads, it is powerful indeed.” He-she smiles absurdly wide, white teething glimmering. “You must go at sunset or in the dead of night and loose the earth. With the point of a two-edged sword that has never drawn blood, scratch three circles around the plant to stop the demons from rising with the root. You have meanwhile tied a black dog — a starved animal is best — to the stalk with a stout cord. Stand back with a trumpet to your lips and hurl meat out of the animal’s reach. Aim carefully, and he’ll lunge and tear the root from the earth. But beware,
bella.
Make a shrill blast with your trumpet, for when you pull it up, the mandrake sounds a shriek that brings death to all who hear it.”

Earplugs, anyone?
“Including the poor starved dog,” May complains, thinking of True, of the kitten. The Middle Ages were no place for hapless animals, it seems, no place for anyone.

“The foolish crave ladykins for their love potions and flying ointments, so I am not above improvising.” Cristofana-wizard gropes a loose manikin from her piles. “A bit of poisonous bryony root is a brave substitute. Carve it roughly into human shape. Attach a seed of barley or millet to both head and chin. Bury the root for several weeks, and you’ll see the seed sprout, appearing like so. Amazing! No knife marks. Note how the new tissue has grown over. I challenge you to distinguish it from any true mandrake or womandrake.

“Now, then. Wash the root in wine. Bind it in silk and velvet. Feed it . . . with sacramental wafers stolen from a church during Communion . . . and you have your manikin.”

Abandoning her bryony forgery, Cristofana-wizard lifts the jar and displays Little Me on her palm, pivoting it for the camera in a way that would make Home Shopping Network proud. “But I took every precaution,” she concludes, “in your case.”

“Are you ADD or what?”

“They say that to imprison an imp in a bottle rattles its wits,” she goes on. “Over and over it will change shape, anxious to escape, but the bottled imp will perform all manner of miracles for its master. It will divine gold and cause mischief for his enemies.” She sighs morosely. “Which bodes well, but your poppet will not play. This does not rule you or anyone else.” She sets down the jar and extends her hand, which seems to reach from the screen in 3-D, the ruby in her gold ring glinting. “Even still, I have my ring. You will come peacefully, yes?”

“Ring?” May asks, confused, for now the actor playing a medieval Italian alchemist is yammering in his lilting Scottish accent about a philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, about universal cures, potions, and powders . . . about drinkable gold and a ring that might make its wearer invisible or give him two bodies at once.

“Yes, you remember her. The girl with the ruby, the finger I sawed away?”

The voice is blurring now, and the face fading in and out. “You asked for a spell, and here I have one. It is my own favorite,
bella.
Do you have your quill, as my first master used to say? He was a seer, one who closed his eyes and groped into the dark as I do, but his visions sought only artifacts, those imbued with special meaning by God or his disciples. He was a materialist who would reach back in time and gather all the great objects of biblical lore, dusty shrouds and coins and vessels, but he never thought to look into the future,
bella,
where I found you. He never watched his back, either, though when he died, he placed this ring on his daughter’s finger — she was all he had left, though I was more his sort than she was — thinking it would render her invisible and keep her safe (from me, perhaps). But the ring has another use. It can grant the wearer two bodies. And so we are two, you and me. Are you ready? Here it is. Your spell:

“Are you telling the truth?” May asks, afraid of the answer, her head reeling, unreal. “Even a little?”

Cristofana throws back her head and laughs uproariously. She doesn’t stop laughing for what seems like a long time, and in that time the room grows cold and small. It becomes a room again, with edges and shadows, with the murmur of museumgoers beyond walls.

“No,” she says. “It’s a lie, of course, every word. How silly you are,
bella,
to indulge me at such length.”