A Golden Web (10 page)

“Which is quite a lot, from what I’ve heard—Sandro! You’re the most famous student in Bologna, it would seem.”

“Well, I want to stay famous, if I must be famous, for the right reason. Oh, Nic—I’ve missed you so!”

They clasped hands and looked into each other’s eyes.

Alessandra hadn’t allowed herself to feel so weak and vulnerable since her arrival in the city, nearly a year ago. It required all her self-control not to break down into tears.

Nicco looked a proper man now. She wondered if she had also changed, reached up to touch her cheek, and then laughed when she realized how very different she looked since her brother last saw her.

“Come away with me, Sis—come home!”

“Don’t be daft—I can’t.”

“Oh, Mistress!” said Emilia, wide-eyed with excitement. “Couldn’t we? I am so lonely for Persiceto and all its comforts! How is Dodo? And our Pierina?”

“Dodo can shell peas and count to one hundred. And our Pierina…” He turned to Alessandra. “Pierina and Giorgio are betrothed.”

Alessandra stared. “Betrothed? But, Nic”—she grabbed his hands again—“Nic, she’s too young!”

Emilia, beside herself with happiness, wiped her face
with the rough linen of her sleeve.

“She’s so happy,” said Nicco. “And it means that both of them will stay at home.”

Alessandra paused, taking it all in. “It will have to be a long betrothal! Pierina can’t marry until I do—and I’m going to avoid the event altogether, if I can.”

Emilia surprised both of them by pointing out the obvious. “That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard you say, my pet. Would you have your sister be a spinster to suit your whims?”

“She’s only thirteen, Emilia—I mean Emilio. Oh, bother! She’s hardly in danger of becoming a spinster. And at the rate I’m going, I can get my degree in philosophy next year and go on to the medical school.”

Both Nicco and Emilia were looking at her the way they did when she was little and they’d caught her out in a misdeed of one kind or another.

“I am studying as fast as I can, I do assure you! And I will not marry now, no matter how many castles my bridegroom owns!”

“You might like him,” said Nicco. “Father took a lot of trouble about choosing him.”

“Or was it our stepmother who chose him?” She sighed. “Marriage is out of the question, anyway. I have work to do!”

Emilia gave a loud and audible sigh. “Poor Pierina!”

“She can wait!”

“Your year is up, Sis—you’re expected to come home from the convent this Christmas. It’s been all I can do to keep any of the family from visiting you there these past twelve months. I’ve run out of astrological events to keep them from traveling. In fact, they think I’ve gone there now, to bring you home.”

“Well, I won’t go. How can I?”

“Oh, be reasonable, for a change, Zan! You’ve had your year of breaking all the rules. You’ve stayed alive—cut your losses, girl!”

“You think it’s been merely a matter of breaking rules?” Alessandra shook her head. “You don’t know me, Nic.”

“I know you better than you know yourself—and I certainly know the world better than you do.”

“Not at this point, you don’t! I’ve lived on my own here and made a good job of it, too.”

“On your own you’ve lived, have you?” asked Emilia
with a shake of her shoulders that would have fluffed out her feathers if she’d been a bird. “And I suppose I haven’t devoted my days and nights to looking after you!”

Alessandra, forgetting herself altogether, gave Emilia a kiss on the cheek. “You’ve been wonderful, Emilia. And, truly, you should go home now. Go home with Nic!”

“But who will protect you, my little love?”

It was infuriating how, after all the strength and resourcefulness Alessandra had shown, Emilia still treated her like a child. It was her turn to sigh impatiently. “These clothes are my protection. Sandro, my alter ego, is my protection. I’m in need of no one else.” Alessandra looked at both of them. “Not even you, Emilia! Go home to Persiceto. I’m sure you’ll be most welcome there.”

“I wonder,” said Emilia.

“Father will see to it that you are. Take her home with you, Nic—please! Truly, I never meant to involve her.”

Nicco looked at Emilia, who seemed to be pleading with him to agree despite her protestations—and then at his sister, who had that stubborn look she got on her face when she wouldn’t be swayed from a decision, not for anything. He pushed his hair back from his forehead. “At least promise me you’ll come home for Easter! I’ll come get you.”

“I can come by myself.” She pulled her cloak aside to show Nic’s old knife, always kept by her side now. “You forget—you taught me well.”

“Too well, by all appearances.”

“It is not out of desire to be one of your gender that I dress this way.” Alessandra thought of her mother’s portrait, a nipped-at piece of gold now, with only traces left of the Virgin’s robe and the feet of the angel Gabriel.

She suddenly missed home. She wanted to see her other siblings and go by herself to the storage room, where she could open the trunk of her mother’s clothes and touch her cheek to them. “I’ll come,” she said. “I promise. There will be no lectures, anyway, on the holy days at Eastertime.”

Nicco held her by both forearms and smiled. “Good man, Sandro!” he said loud enough for anyone in the place to hear.

“But I will have to find new lodgings between now and then—and it is no easy thing these days, with the city overflowing with students.”

“Never worry.” Nicco laughed. “I know just the little man who will turn Bologna inside out to help you!”

Under the influence of another silver coin from Nicco, Tonio
asked Sandro where in all of Bologna he would most like to lodge. And Alessandra told him, “At the home of the great doctor, Mondino de’ Liuzzi. I’ve heard that he and his wife take in boarders.”

The fact that Mondino had already heard of Sandro made Tonio’s job rather easy. As it happened, a room in Mondino’s house had just become available, as the student occupying it had been called away on family business. Sandro could move in that very day. Tonio
himself would carry Sandro’s belongings and show him the way.

To Alessandro, Mondino’s household was strongly and pleasantly reminiscent of her own home in Persiceto. The baby, Leoncio, was just Dodo’s age, and Maxie, the elder daughter, was the same age as Pierina. Mina was Mondino’s second wife—but, unlike Ursula, she loved and was beloved by all her husband’s children.

The other boarder, Bene, was, like Sandro, striving for admittance to the medical school. The big-boned son of a butcher in Lombardia, Bene had astonished his entire village by learning to read and do sums at an age when other children remained as ignorant as puppies. Eventually his parish collected enough money to send him to the University of Bologna, with the condition that he return to them when he earned his advanced degree. They hoped to draw skilled artisans to their village with the presence of a licensed
medico
.

Landing this spot in Mondino’s household had been an enormous coup for Bene. And then along came this Sandro—wealthy, refined in his manners, and reputed to
be the most brilliant undergraduate in Bologna. Bene looked for—and found—a hundred reasons to resent and dislike Sandro, from his girlish voice to his frequent—and, to Bene’s mind, affected—use of Latin.

Mondino had a bit of land he’d recently acquired in Barbiano, in the hills. The land had a house on it—a ram-shackle old thing, which all the family worked on every Sunday after church to make into their summer home, where they could retreat from the heat and filth of the city, grow their own vegetables, and cultivate an orchard.

For Mondino’s children, these weekly jaunts to the countryside were pure delight. They saw more of their father than they ever did at home, where he was constantly called upon to diagnose the illnesses of people who came from far away to consult with him, to cut up the bodies of people who died and pronounce on the cause of their death, or to demonstrate the wonders of the human body to students and other doctors who came from as far away as Paris to attend his anatomy demonstrations at the medical school.

In Barbiano, though, Mondino liked nothing more than building and planting and sitting at the head of the table in the makeshift dining room they set up under some
ancient pear trees. At night they’d light a fire outside and hang lanterns from the trees, and Lodovico, the second son, would strum a lute and sing for them—and sometimes, if she’d had a little wine, Mina could be convinced to dance.

Alessandra soon became a favorite among all the children, who saw in her an unbelievably kind and gentle boy who cuddled the baby and always offered to help with even the most womanish chores, and yet rode and hunted as well as any of the boys. Maxie—the pretty blond daughter who reminded Alessandra so much of Pierina—Maxie grew pale and silent whenever Sandro was near, even though she always contrived to sit by him at table. She did her best to distance herself from Bene, though, whose poverty and humble origins repelled her.

Alessandra was so enjoying the respite from her cares—due to the success of her disguise in her new lodgings—that she failed to notice either that Bene hated Sandro or that poor Maxie had fallen in love with him.

Despite Mondino’s reputation and the high esteem in which he was held, the cost of maintaining his large
household was always just a bit more than his earnings. So when Otto Agenio Lustrolano came along, offering to pay a princely sum to rent the third extra room in the main house—a small, mean room that had been used previously for storage—his offer was gladly accepted.

Out of fairness for the price paid, Signora Mina moved Bene out of his room, which was next to Alessandra’s, and into the storage room. And thus, within the space of a month of first seeing the comely young Sandro, Otto had managed to set up things so that he would be sharing a wall with him—a wonderful arrangement, Otto reasoned, for cultivating a friendship with the famously brilliant youth to whom he felt so strangely drawn. On the weekends, when they all decamped to Barbiano, he and Sandro could get to know each other even better.

Otto had never met his equal among the youths of Lustrola—and he’d never had a brother, although he’d always longed for one. He felt an odd, unsettling sense of excitement whenever Sandro was near. The thought of making him a bosom friend was unspeakably attractive to him.

Alessandra saw Otto, for the second time in her life, at
Mondino’s dinner table, where she appeared late as usual, rushing from a final disputation she’d managed to squeeze into her day.

“Sandro,” said Mina. “This is Signore Agenio—our newest boarder.”

“Agenio,” Alessandra said. She recognized the name of the primary supplier of calf-and sheepskins to her father’s workshop. She looked across the table and saw the face of the handsome scholar who had been ogling her at the lecture.

He smiled more broadly at her this time than he had that day in the square. “‘Otto’ to everyone present.”

Alessandra looked at him longer than she should have and then blushed. Out of all the places he could have chosen to board, why had he chosen this one? It was too unfair! Grabbing the last piece of bread that wasn’t already sodden, she managed to say, “I’m ravenous, Signora Mina—and I’m very sorry to be late again. Is there anything left for me?”

Maxie passed Alessandra a big hunk of meat on the point of the knife she shared with her sister, Horabilli. “I saved this for you, Sandro!”

“I thought you were being rather a pig,” said Mondino’s other daughter.

Mumbling her thanks, Alessandra didn’t dare look at Otto again. She’d felt so hungry—but now that she found herself with food before her, she could hardly bring herself to eat. How would she hide her gender, at such close quarters, from this man who made her heart beat fast and her knees feel weak with a longing to be held in his arms?

“It pleases me greatly,” said Otto, “to be rooming here with another student who shares my passion.”

Maxie nearly fell over her own feet as she hastened to bring Sandro a goblet of water for the fit of coughing that had overtaken him.

“Be three times happy then, my boy!” Mondino said with a nod to Sandro and a hearty laugh. “All the students at this table are equally entranced with the subject of medicine.”

Otto nodded first at his host and then at Bene. “We will all three of us be a merry band of scholars then, privileged to sit at your table,
Professore
.”

Bene thought how poor a figure he cut among these
swells, with their rich clothes and fancy airs. He stole a look at Sandro, who was biting down on his rosy lips and largely ignoring the lovely piece of meat he’d just been given. This Otto, at least, looked and sounded like a proper man.

Bene vowed to find a way to win back his place, so lately usurped, as Mondino’s protégé. Like every other man who was honored and admired, Sandro surely had a weakness that he kept hidden from the world. All Bene had to do was find it out and make it known.

They rode out early in the morning, the hawks hooded and held high, perched on the leather gauntlets worn by Mondino and his eldest son.

Otto stayed as close as he could to Sandro, who raced ahead with all the joy of being free and out in the countryside again. Alessandra had a good horse beneath her, and no one—save Otto—was paying much attention to her at all.

Sometimes, when riding, Alessandra was able to think in a way she couldn’t when she was standing still. It was as if she were racing side by side with her own
thoughts—and an insight or a new idea would slip inside her. The sweetness of understanding seemed to be all around her then, in the air itself.

When the horses stopped, she tried to gather that sweetness close to her and hold it tight.

They were in a clearing on a rise overlooking a pond.

“There!” said Mondino, spotting the flock of ducks on the surface of the water far below. He brought his hooded goshawk close to his face and whispered a word to her while she shifted from foot to foot and jingled the silver bells attached to her leg. Using his teeth, Mondino untied the cord that held his bird’s hood in place and hove his arm aloft. The unhooded hawk was suddenly airborne, flying toward the body of water below. “We’ll have a duck for dinner tonight, eh, Dino?”

Gabardino, Mondino’s eldest son, also launched his bird—a red falcon—its bells tinkling, into the sweet, clear air. “Two ducks, I should think, Father!”

Lodovico, Mondino’s second son (who didn’t yet have a hawk of his own) walked his horse up to Otto and Sandro. “There’s a good place near here for wild onions. Come with me, you two?”

They rode another mile or so, following Lodovico’s lead. Alessandra was suffering agonies of needing to urinate, and riding more was making the situation that much worse. She was grateful when they found the patch of wild onions and got off their horses.

“God, but I have to pee!” said Lodovico, lifting his doublet and starting to push aside the fabric of his breeches.

Alessandra turned her face away, furiously pretending to occupy herself with her horse’s bridle.

“Come, you two!” said Lodovico above the sound of the stream of his urine hitting the ground. “Is it possible that you don’t have water to spend after all these hours of riding?”

Alessandra was afraid of wetting herself, so desperate was she to do just that. “I’m going to check the woods for mushrooms!”

“What a fine idea!” said the good-natured Lodovico, shaking himself off and doing up his clothes again. “I’ll come with you!”

Otto dug him gently in the ribs. “I think our Sandro might have some solitary business to take care of in the woods,” he said in a low tone of voice.

“Are you too proud to shit with your mates, Sandro? Come—I could go ca-ca myself, now that you mention it!” He moved off a bit, away from the onions, and made to squat down.

“I won’t be long!” Alessandra called over her shoulder as she ran as fast as she could toward the safety of the trees.

What a bother it was to be a girl sometimes! She found a place behind a fallen tree, where she was sure she wouldn’t be seen by anyone.

The relief was enormous. She thought how much a slave one was to the body and its needs.

She was just pulling up her breeches when she heard a male voice—the voice of a stranger and yet oddly familiar. He said her name—her male name, but with an obvious sense of irony. She gasped and scrambled to her feet, wondering just how much he’d seen.

It was Bene, standing to his full height with his arms crossed and a pugnacious look on his freckled face. “Sandro!” he repeated.

“What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I wasn’t invited on the hunt, was I? Butchers’
boys don’t go hunting, do they? Not with hawks, and not on horses.”

“They told me you wanted to study this morning.”

Bene snorted. “Yes, as it happens, I was studying anatomy this morning, and a curious difference between males and females, Sandro! What is your real name, anyway, you witch? And what gave you the notion that you could get away with this—abomination? Do you think the scholars of the University of Bologna will take it lightly, being mocked in this way?”

“Bene—”

“Don’t come near me!”

Alessandra nonetheless took a step closer to him. “Bene, you of all people should understand!” She spoke in a whisper, as she would have spoken to a wild, enraged animal. “There was no other way for me to come here as a scholar. You yourself have no doubt had to contend with a great deal to lift yourself above the state you were born into.”

“At least I was born a man!”

“It was your good fortune—not only to be born a man but to have the intellectual abilities that allow you to
pursue an academic degree. I have the ability, Bene—it is only my gender that is wrong!”

“It is a sin to try to change it.”

“I don’t wish to change it! I only wish to study and learn.” She came even closer. “Do you remember how that felt, when you were still a boy in your village—when you’d learned and read everything you could there?”

With a gesture that was still very much like that of a young boy, Bene put both his hands over his slightly protuberant ears. “It’s not the same,” he said, a little too loudly.

Alessandra looked at him, at a loss as to what to do next. Finally she said, “Are you going to tell the others?”

“I won’t listen to you!”

There was only one thing left to do. Alessandra reached inside her doublet and brought out her knife.

And then she yanked at her chemise, cut the hem open, and pulled out her hunk of gold. She looked at the flecks of blue paint that still adhered to it—the last traces of the image of her mother painted by Old Fabio. “It’s all I have,” she said, “and I’ll give half of it to you if you will keep my secret safe.”

Bene grabbed at the gold and bit down on it—then inspected the marks he’d left on it with his teeth. It felt wonderfully hot and heavy in his hands.

“All of it,” he said.

“But I’ll have nothing to live on!”

“What’s that to me? You’ll have your life, won’t you? It won’t be worth two
soldi
if Bologna finds out your deception. You’ll be burned at the stake!”

Someone was calling “Sandro!” in the distance.

“You can’t leave me with nothing!”

“Watch me, then!”

There was the sound of footsteps through the leaves.

“There you are!” said Otto, all outlined in sunbeams. Then, “Bene! I thought you were studying. Did you come here on foot?” He looked from Bene to Alessandra. “Is everything all right here?”

Bene smiled. “Just fine,” he said, slipping the hunk of gold into his pouch. “Isn’t it, Sandro?”