The Book of Madness and Cures (24 page)

The Plague of Black Tears:

A Lachrymose Infection of the Tear Ducts, of Causes Unknown

Some midwives say the onset of a foul wind steals words from a person’s lips and causes this plague. Sometimes it afflicts nuns or monks of those orders who take a vow of silence. Prisoners who are forbidden to speak, people who lose their voices out of grief, children who are always ordered to be silent, may all succumb. I’ve observed a certain kind of dream that many of the sufferers have in common, the vision of a city where the inhabitants are forbidden to weep. Their tears must be clandestine, under bridges at night, or as one patient related, “Be sorrow’s vessel, don’t give it away.”

The person is usually not aware of the infection until she reaches the final stages when her tears thicken and turn black. Blindness and death may result. The plague is contagious and will even spread through shared dreams. Strangely this disease is also passed on by women who sew alone at their embroidery frames and cry from the unformed words that populate their loneliness, or by fishermen who are mute as they mend their nets, lost in morose humors that only the sea can bring on. When the women and the men weep, they unwittingly pass tears along the skeins of thread or filaments of net, which travel on to the next person who touches the line. They may also contract the plague if they kiss each other’s eyelids. The sick person may not know about the malady for months, even though she awakens in the morning with dark stains upon the pillow. She may assume the smudges come from her penciled eyelids or brows. But in the advanced state she can’t fail to notice the ink-dark tears that flow from her eyes.

My father often told me, “The patient owns the remedy.” In this wise I followed the cure of a young woman, Annabella, who saved her black tears in inkpots and then wrote with them until over time they clarified. Though the cure was long, the plague thinned and subsided at last. Several victims who didn’t know how to write were still comforted, though I can’t say exactly why, by the little jet-black bottles that they accumulated on their shelves. The only difficulty I encountered, especially in Venetia—a city where they will try to sell you anything—was the connivance of two or three disreputable fools who tried to hawk their own tears. Of course, for a while certain aristocrats coveted these inks that leaked from the intimate sorrows of others, but they soon discovered that their own tears darkened. No one was immune.

CHAPTER 15

The Vanishing Bend in the Path

After a rough
three-day sea journey from Leiden—we survived solely by chewing dried ginger (promoting heat in the body and alleviating the sea nausea) and by clutching the deck railings while the German Sea heaved itself upon the bow—we neared the port of Leyth, below the hills of Edenburg. Lorenzo fairly leapt to the coign of the crescent-shaped seawall to help the crew tie the lines. I felt dazed and scoured by the journey. Our poor animals, suffering from the voyage, set up a raucous braying in their excitement to regain the land.

Dr. Hamish Urquhart—I guessed it was him, for no one else resembled a professor there on the waterfront—approached the ship, leaning into the offshore wind like a dark snag to meet us. The professor almost immediately lost his flat cap as a gust picked it up and tossed it into the water, exposing a crop of red hair that flared like a torch. His narrow beard, a darker red, outlined his strongly contoured chin. Dr. Urquhart was a disconcertingly handsome man, and surely, I thought, there would be attendant arrogance, in spite of what my father wrote of his amiability.

I stood and attempted to straighten my coat and skirts, while the wind defiantly whipped everything into disarray again. I must have appeared ragged and unsightly, dark circles under my eyes from the sleepless nights at sea, and I couldn’t have smelled very pretty either. So much the better, then; let it work for me in my need of solitude.

Lorenzo meanwhile disembarked and walked up to the man without any qualms. He introduced himself and gestured toward Olmina and me on the ship. Once the mules had safely come ashore with our supplies, Lorenzo held my hand firmly and led me with unadorned courtesy down the gangplank, which dipped and rose with the frequency of breath.

The Scotsman moved with barely concealed enthusiasm to take my arm when I wavered on the stone pier, though I swiftly warned him away with my eyes. “I’ll be all right,” I said simply.

“Dr. Mondini, please be…after a long sea journey, one must…”

He spoke in incomplete sentences, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “Oh, pardon me…Dr. Urquhart, at your…service.”

A handsome gentleman without guile. I’d have to be doubly wary.

“I’ve obtained a carriage,” he offered.

“I’d like to walk a little and see the city as we approach. Is it far?”

“Not at all. We’ll pass along the Water of Leyth and be there within an hour.”

Olmina came up beside us and spoke frankly. “I’ll take advantage of the ride, sir, for I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to acquaint myself with your fine city.” Then she added pointedly, “And so will you, signorina.”

“I can’t get in a carriage right now. I need the still ground beneath me.”

“I’ll accompany her,” Lorenzo offered as he reluctantly turned over the reins of the rowdy bunch of roped mules to the professor’s manservant. Lorenzo gave the youth a few clipped instructions. “Hold ’em firmly, but let the rope play out a bit—they’ve been cooped up aboard ship. Let ’em have at some grass too.”

The professor appraised our animals with admiration. “If you ever decide…to sell one of your fine beasts…”

“Why would we sell ’em?” interrupted Lorenzo, narrowing his eyes.

“Oh, I only meant…I have a good man, kind to animals. Didn’t mean…” The professor grew flustered.

“Don’t worry,” I said, smiling a little. “We are perhaps more attached to our beasts than some. They’ve come far with us.”

“Ah, yes…of course.” He nodded and helped Olmina into the modest black carriage drawn by two small, stout roan horses. “Cowgate Wynd, then,” he directed the driver. We watched the carriage set off in spurts up the hill, jockeyed between the steady pull of the horses and the push of five spirited mules.

“I hope they get there,” muttered Lorenzo, pulling his rough green woolen cap down over his ears.

As we passed from the small port and walked along the damp footpath near the Water of Leyth, the landscape began to settle me after the days of rocking at sea. Lorenzo became like a young boy, cheerfully whipping the hedges with a willow shoot he’d picked up. Small clumps of leafless willows, alders, and aspen trees lined the banks and were studded with great numbers of tawny, rose-breasted birds that swung out over the soggy gold stubble of winter fields as we approached.

“Oh, what are those wonderful little birds?”

We paused, watching the flocks lift and fall in sinuous, then spherical clouds, their songs vibrating the air.

“Mostly linnets, a few buntings,” the professor said. “They love to sweep through…”

“Yes?”

“…the barley fields. Hmm, for seeds.”

“Are they tasty, then?” asked Lorenzo, probably thinking of spitted wrens for Santo Stefano’s day, after Christmas. It was a custom I’d never been able to bear.

“No, no. I can’t say.” Dr. Urquhart extended his hand as if to ward off the thought. “I don’t savor the little birds.”

I was grateful to hear him say it.

“What’s the difference between songbirds and, say, a nice, plump roasted goose?” Lorenzo shook his head. “You’re killing them all the same.”

“Yes, but the birds, they’re part of…some larger”—he paused—“spirit that must not be touched, something we don’t…”

“Understand, perhaps?” I completed his sentence. “If I killed the bird, I’d miss its song, its dazzling flight. A bright thing in the dark world would be lost.”

“Well spoken, Dr. Mondini.”

“Well, I like bird chatter too,” grumbled Lorenzo. “But I don’t think you’ve ever been hungry, signorina. It gives you a different outlook on the world.”

“Yes, you’re right, Lorenzo. Beauty comes to us more readily on a full belly.”

We continued walking silently for a while. Then I said quietly to Dr. Urquhart, “As you may have gained from my letter, I’m tracing my father’s journey to find out what I can that would lead me to his present whereabouts.”

“Ah yes, your father…” He frowned and looked away from me.

“Any news?”

“No, nothing since he left…though…we could ask Dr. Baldino, who often discussed the past with him.”

“Ah.” I sank into weariness. But then I thought,
I must get to know this man a bit, before he takes me into his confidence. There may be something in his discomfort worth the telling.

Bushes and trees I couldn’t name gave off rich, pungent scents, sometimes reminding me of a steamy kitchen strung with herbs, other times of a garden mulched and abandoned to its season. I noticed the professor’s smell too, a pleasant, earthy smell of animal heat suffusing wool. The sun came and went, lowering like a snuffed coal, as we reached the edge of Edenburg and proceeded to Cowgate below the Castle.

As Dr. Urquhart took leave of us at the lodgings he’d secured, he said, “You may recall, Dr. Mondini, that we’re on the Julian, not the Gregorian, calendar here, so you’ve just traveled back…in time. It’s ten days earlier than when you were on the Continent, so reckon accordingly. You have a chance to relive those days.” He smiled broadly with some mischief in his blue-green eyes.

Our rooms were adequate, though small, the beds niched in the wall like cupboards with wooden doors that we could shut at night. The dun stone buildings all around were close and tall, but from our rooms on the uppermost floor I would be able to see a sliver of the Firth.

On that first night, questions I’d hidden within me since Leiden raked my mind like an anchor scoring the bottom of the sea as I tried to sleep in my cupboard, like a mouse in a narrow larder. Had Wilhelm Lochner really followed me to Hollant? His pale body on the dissection slab haunted me. Over and over his cut form repeated itself in the blue light of the anatomy theater.

Sometimes in the dream, Maurizio or my father lay cold, with eyes upturned to a dim ceiling. What did Dr. Urquhart mean by “Ah yes, your father…”? The anatomy theater loomed thick with night. I wanted to flee its dark, blood-muddied chambers, but I could not. Sometimes in sleeplessness I’d read one of my father’s letters written in an ordinary rather than extravagant voice, to settle myself.

Dear Gabriella,

You have kindly asked about my book, and I can say quite frankly that the work progresses, though it becomes overwhelming at times. There are so many diseases that I don’t know how I will fit them all in one volume. Perhaps I shall only include the ones with cures, for how desperate should we all feel as physicians to know so many that are incurable? Yet it is humbling, it is right, that we acknowledge them. It may be that some new medicine will come to light, from an old midwife or mother, or from some clever experimentalist locked in his alchemical cellar amid flasks, retorts, and furnaces. There is a clever man, Dr. Urquhart, a natural philosopher here who has made my days more companionable with his curiosity and pursuits of astronomy and metallurgy, from the melting of copper (that green dragon of the moon) to the larger schemes of matter, space, and time. I cannot pretend I understand everything he describes, but I find the conversation invigorating and amusing, though he sometimes becomes lost in the branching forks of his own thoughts and his Aristotelian studies. I recall a phrase I’ve read somewhere: “Where the natural philosopher finishes, there begins the physician.” For we must come to earth, to our patient with the swollen ankles or the sorry wound, though we may rely sometimes upon the natural philosopher’s theories and experiments. But now, my daughter, forgive me, for I must leave you. The practical gods have reminded me of their dominion. My lamp is out of oil.

Edenburg
Your father

A few days after we’d arrived, Professor Urquhart came round to collect Olmina and me for a midday meal at the home of his friend Dr. Baldino, who, he informed us, was in his ninth decade, a professor whose passion continued to be the study of memory and recollecting. He had also known my father.

This gentleman, Professor Baldino from Salerno, greeted us at the door of his four-story stone house. He appeared short and bowed like a hunchback, though he didn’t truly possess that infirmity. His insubstantial white hair and beard wafted about him like smoke, though he fastened his dark brown eyes upon us with an iron focus. I like this impropriety in the elderly, who sometimes stare more fiercely at this world even as they glimpse the next.

“Welcome to my northern home, Dr. Mondini. Come in, come to the kitchen and tell me about your journey.” He pressed my hand with crimped fingers that seemed white parchment stretched across the joints, hardened into a single brittle claw. He smiled at Olmina and Dr. Urquhart, displaying no more than four or five teeth, three on top, one or two (I couldn’t quite tell) on the bottom.