The Pilgrimage by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
Ghisola watched the tiny bubbles rise as she dropped the egg in the wine broth, repeating her Paternoster, the syllables of the prayer timing the egg’s passage to perfectly cooked. A fissure formed on the shell and its rising froth became the foam at the edges of the rictus frozen into Ubaldo’s lips as her mind conjured the image of him convulsing in his last breath. At “forgive us our trespasses,” and the yolk just setting, she imagined the old usurer twisting now in his own boiling cauldron. Such images satisfied, but they never came alone. Inevitably his torture would transform into Agnese’s travail a few months later, her screaming despite Ghisola’s poppyseed tea, despite biting into the wooden statuette of Saint Margaret to ease her pains, clasping for some little comfort the Sant’Agnese doll, her namesake saint, retrieved from her marriage cassone. The poor girl had wrung the pearls from the doll’s gown with but one final bead holding still to the brocade. Worse then, those shri...
