The Book of Madness and Cures (25 page)

He led us through the entry, past a cold, unlit room that appeared to be stacked with books and furniture, and up a crooked staircase alongside plain walls of dark oiled wood to the second floor, mastering each step one ponderous breath at a time as he clasped the railing. I felt my own inhalation slow to a stretch of years, as if I might be old myself when we finally reached the top.

“We’ll dine here where it’s warm. Isabella will prepare our repast and bring it to the table,” Dr. Baldino announced, lisping through his gums.

A large woman with a gray braid that ran down her back in an ever tighter weave, until there was only a wisp of three or four hairs at her waist, stood busily trimming pale green and brown vegetables at the stone counter. The hearth roared loudly with the strength of a six- or seven-hour fire that had been constantly stoked and now heated a large black pot of soup. The kitchen radiated the heat of a long summer day. We seated ourselves gratefully, women on one side and men on the other, at the oaken table set with plain brown linens and pewter bowls and spoons, and began to sweat, gradually casting off the clothes we could respectably shed.

As we waited for our soup, I addressed Dr. Baldino. “As you may know, I’m seeking my father, who spent some time here several years ago, according to his letters, but he’s unaccountably vanished. He hasn’t written. I’d like to know if you can tell me anything about his stay or if you know where he is at present.”

Professor Baldino folded his frail hands upon the table and regarded me with impenetrable sadness. “I haven’t heard from him since he left Edenburg some years ago. He became a man of fulminant humors.”

I grew restless at this lack of news and stood up, startling myself and the others no doubt with my sudden distress. I paced over to the window, where I could see only a blur of rooftops, since it was steamed up from the pottage. Olmina came and stood beside me, laying her hand on my arm.

Dr. Urquhart must have pitied me, for he jumped in with his jerky speech. “Your father’s whereabouts…hmm—I can reveal nothing really, but…the distressing occasion of his lapse, six years ago. He suffered a commotion…of the mind, couldn’t understand the orderly passage of time. He kept very late hours in his quarters at my house, then…slept all day, sometimes the next night, barely emerging when I knocked loudly…his door. Only one of his servants remained, for the other…had fled with his purse.”

“That scoundrel!” I exclaimed, returning to the table. Olmina sat beside me.

Dr. Baldino watched me with heavy, kindly eyes.

“Fortunately he kept most of his money hidden…in his chest, or so…he told me—in confidence.”

“Money and medicine in the same chest? That seems unlike him.”

“I once observed your father through the half-open door, fully dressed in his doctor’s red robe, black skullcap…at his desk, staring…out the window, tapping his quill but writing nothing upon the page. In the end he…needed to raise money and was forced to sell…most of his books.”

His treasures!
My heart sank. “Did the collection include a copy of the materia medica from Wirtenberg?” I despaired of the answer.

“Yes, it did. Your father,” answered the philosopher, glancing to the side as if seeing the book there, “yes, mentioned it was a gift…from a Dr. Fuchs?”

My face must have fallen, for he looked concerned. “What?”

“Nothing, nothing.” I wavered.

“I would say he forgot himself,” opined Dr. Baldino at last in slow, measured tones. “Even though that rhetorician of Bologna, Boncompagno da Signa, tells us that men of melancholy temperament have the best memory, for they retain the impressions of things, owing to their hard, dry constitutions.” He went on with labored breath, “For I met your father many years ago in Padua, and I must say”—he paused to compose his words—“that in comparison to that period, the man appeared greatly altered. He could barely hold a conversation. His mind continually drifted and his eyes would fix upon a window, any window. If I had to say, it was almost”—he halted briefly, holding my eyes—“as though he’d lost track of time and only wanted to go into the fields and lose himself. Roam the land. I observed him more than once on the road to the Pentland Hills there.” He waved his arm to the south. “I saw him on nights flooded by moon after midnight. I too suffer insomnia. It brings me solace to sit and watch the country there, as if I were an old sentry of history. But he sometimes appeared to be walking on all fours, barefoot.”

After this astounding statement, I was dumbstruck. Dr. Urquhart interceded. “I don’t know if you really saw him…now, or one of our highland foxes, lengthened by his shadow…”

“It was a man, and I knew no one else out at that hour.”

“I can’t believe such a thing,” I said, even as my doubts grew.

“I once mistook a goat for a woman from afar, when it stood up against an olive trunk to pull at the olives,” declared Olmina.

Dr. Baldino frowned at her.

“The oddest thing, to return to your father,” said Dr. Urquhart, “was that after a brief stay, only six weeks in Edenburg, he’d…gone without even a leave-taking. May have suffered from severe nostalgia, a desire to go back to Venetia and…”

My head began to ache. “But I received letters from my father
after
that time,” I said, trying to remember all the letters, “from France and the Kingdom of Spain, and he never expressed such an intention.”

Dr. Baldino placed his hand on mine across the table. “It may be that I’m mistaken. Nothing is certain. But it’s true that your father wandered the land at night, wrestling with something unknown in himself.”

Isabella served our pottage. There was much silence over mushy colewort, parsnips, cabbage, beans, and dreadful oatcakes. We also had stringy pullets, which were oversalted and overcooked. I realized with embarrassment that the meal was prepared for the nearly toothless Dr. Baldino, and I had no cause for complaint, having all but four of my teeth still in my mouth.

As I chewed, a sentence I didn’t speak aloud came to my mind. Not
My father has disappeared,
or
My father is lost,
but
I’ve lost my father.
As if he were a fallen coin I could find by dropping to all fours and patting the floor with my hands.
I’ve lost my father.

Owing to harsh weather, we decided to remain the winter in Edenburg. Finally, Olmina proclaimed, I’d come to my senses.

One afternoon before Christmas I observed Hamish in the square in front of the church when he didn’t know that anyone was watching, for there was a considerable crowd milling about. A few merrymakers flouted the recent Presbyterian rules that banned the old celebrations, electing a lord of misrule and parading him through the square on their shoulders with a pot upside down on his head (and ample ale in his belly, no doubt). Some lively carol singers (also at their peril from the church, whose special officers were luckily nowhere to be seen at this moment) imitated the joyous sounds of the animals at the birth of the Holy Child—the ox lowing, the ass braying, the calf bellowing, the cock crowing, and the goat bleating (the latter so pitiful that everyone began to laugh).

Hamish stood alone to one side of the western doors of High Kirk, just below the line of sunlight as Olmina and I strolled by. He was absorbed in a book, and his reddish hair stood about his head as if he’d run his fingers through it many times. He chewed on his nails thoughtfully, seeming to taste words that were impossible to place upon the tongue, as he leaned back against the wall, with one knee bent, oblivious to the revelry around him. I managed to discern the title—Aristotle’s
De divinatione per somnum
—and recalled one intriguing passage:

The most skilful interpreter of dreams is he who has the faculty of observing resemblances. Any one may interpret dreams which are vivid and plain. But, speaking of “resemblances,” I mean that dream presentations are analogous to the forms reflected in water…In the latter case, if the motion in the water be great, the reflexion has no resemblance to its original, nor do the forms resemble the real objects. Skilful, indeed, would he be in interpreting such reflexions who could rapidly discern, and at a glance comprehend, the scattered and distorted fragments of such forms, so as to perceive that one of them represents a man, or a horse, or anything whatever.

So Hamish mulled upon the nature of dreams. I wanted to steer us away quickly, before he noticed me, but he peered up from his book—“Gabriella!”—and I was caught. I flushed like an aching girl.

Olmina tugged at my arm and said, “We must return to the house. The signorina is not well.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted, and I disengaged my arm from hers. Without any preface I asked, “So do you believe in divination by dreams as foretelling, simply tokens, or coincidences?”

He stared at me with curiosity. “It depends on what manner of dream we’re interpreting. A night dream, a daydream. A consequence of tough pullets,” he said smiling, “or some nocturnal form of Nature’s sacred design. Or even the grace of a lovely woman.”

It was the first time I’d heard him speak in complete, uninterrupted sentences. The narrow white gathers of the tight linen collar at his neck flickered ever so slightly with his pulse and breath.

“I believe,” I said, “there may be resemblances to events in the future, or even anticipations of malady or healing. For once I dreamt that all the remedies and instruments from my medicine chest were scattered in the Venetian Lagoon, and I did lose that chest in Lake Costentz. Yet even after the chest was recovered, I found the medicines mislaid. Maybe the dream points to the cures written in my father’s
Book of Diseases,
lost when he disappeared.”

“Ah”—his eyebrows rose in keen interest—“I’d like to know more about it.” He closed his book and slipped a slender finger from the page he’d been holding.

“Perhaps we can speak further the next time we meet,” I murmured, not really sure how much I wanted to tell him. A damp breeze kicked up the air. I put my hand near my face to protect myself from the cold.

He clasped my upraised hand and pressed it between both of his warm palms, brushing my face with the back of his hand, and then he bowed. “Farewell, then. I look forward to our renewed conversation.”

“Yes, soon.”

I pulled my hand away, then turned, hooking my arm through Olmina’s soft, heavy arm once more, and strode away at a rapid pace, pulling her along with me, until she tugged back to slow me down.

“He’s a handsome one, that man,” she commented, “a bit rash, but the face of a seraph.”

Ah,
I thought, smiling,
so even Olmina has been moved by him.

After that meeting, I found his tall, lank frame a singular source of disruption whenever he appeared. He differed greatly from my father, who entered a room and immediately established a presence with others. I knew where I stood in a room with my father, even with his sporadic ill tempers, for he was, at least at one time, an almost predictable class of planet.

But whenever Hamish advanced, I was unsure of my ground. I found myself leaning too close to him at times. I remembered the
pavana venetiana, the pavana ferrarese,
the exquisite dances of my youth, accompanied by the lute, an instrument considered too sensual for women to play. The evenings at the Villa Barberini, lit by long rectangles of late sun falling from the windows as we passed in and out of the circles of honey-scented candles. Back then, my mother looked expectantly upon my unflagging joy in the music. She thought of suitors; I thought of gestures. She’d never savored that kind of freedom, for she’d married my father at fifteen and hadn’t known another before him. Sometimes when I danced, I imagined a homunculus, a little man dancing within at the center of me. (Is this what it felt like to be full with child?) I never tired of the saltarellos, the pivas, the
spingardi.
Until the death of Maurizio.

My notes for
The Book of Diseases
occupied me well as Edenburg’s dark days of winter progressed, but I began to cherish the occasions when I would meet Hamish, and fret when I did not.

Christmas in Edenburg was a solemn affair. The inhabitants were forbidden by the Presbyterian elders to bake yuletide bread in their homes, and even the poor bakers themselves were interrogated about those who might order any such cake or bun. To cheer me, Hamish had agreed to escort me on another walk along the Water of Leyth the following day. Lorenzo joined us.

After we passed through the town gates, we followed the footpath that ran along the banks of the water, southward this time, toward its source in the Pentland Hills. Dark red coppices of willow stood dripping in the fog. Gorse and withered grasses lay sodden beyond the trees. “I warned you that you won’t see much of the countryside today,” said Hamish, amused that I’d insisted on going out anyway.

“Yes, but we can sense the fields and hills, the scent of winter earth. Maybe we’ll even hear a few birds,” I answered, pulling my red Hollant cloak about me. Naturally I couldn’t admit to Hamish that I had just wanted to see
him.

Lorenzo piped up from behind us. “This cold could split a stone! Still, it’s better than coal smoke and gloomy houses.”

“You’re right, this is just the thing for a dry temperament, though I suppose we could do without the bilious cold,” I agreed.

“And so, do you organize your book by the humors, then?” asked Hamish.

“I’m not sure thus far of the classes of malady and cure. My father hadn’t yet suggested categories, so I lack his guidance.” We walked briskly as we spoke, to warm ourselves, and Lorenzo dropped behind.

“Wouldn’t it be more useful to gather them under the elements of place rather than humors? For those of us who live in wet regions would be able to turn to ‘Diseases Engendered by Rivers and Lakes,’ ‘Diseases Wrought by Swamps,’ and so on.”

I was delighted by this suggestion. “There is a great appeal to the Hippocratic Corpus,” I admitted, “the three environs of Airs, Waters, and Places. But the places aren’t entirely fitting for this work, though I’m drawn to the category of waters. When a person is porous, he is healthy. We may judge disease by the motions of water, how the urine flows, its color and quality, likewise the sweat, saliva, and tears. But the humors are more compelling for me. A melancholic can turn to her inclination and immediately find ways to restore balance.” As I spoke, I warmed to his presence beside me. No man had talked so freely with me about medicine since my father.