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 shrieks turned to whimpers, barely audible, to save the baby, until they finally ceased altogether. As far as Ghisola was concerned, pardon was out of the question, for her own sins or Ubaldo’s.

She hadn’t called Father Pietro as her friend agonized, lying to the other women that in her expert opinion, Agnese would pull through. As midwife, daughter to the midwife Zita, herself daughter to a midwife before her, Ghisola’s word ruled over the others, even her elders -- Agnese’s stepmother, Mona Lapa, first and foremost. Hours and minutes fled past, and with them the young mother-to-be’s life, but Ghisola feared what deathbed tales her friend might make shrift of.

Agnese’s reward in the hereafter was imminent and doubtless, as far as the midwife was concerned. Ghisola herself, however, would be left to her fate in the face of men’s justice, alone now in this world here below. Nor did she believe they had any right to pass judgment, no matter her deeds, their deeds. She said a prayer over Agnese’s body and hoped love would suffice, hoped that the dead woman had known in the end the extent of that love.

Finally, there was naught left to do but shut those wide brown eyes forever, take the blade and open the corpse that had once so delicately housed the soul that Ghisola cherished. Blood dripped down the ashen flanks, out of which slid a tiny life grasping on to existence, though why, Ghisola could not figure. She bathed the new little being in rosewater and placed honey in her mouth.

Absent a priest, she baptized the babe with her mother’s name. Through some miracle the tiny creature continued to draw breath, as Ghisola cuddled her and whispered her name, a name she had long sighed, waking and dreaming. Perhaps her prayer found favor, despite it all, and God in fact was merciful. She doubted it though. That night, with everyone gone, alone in her grief she took the blade that had opened up her Agnese’s womb and set it to chopping off her hair.

***

She absently fingered the scruff of fair locks brushing the nape of her neck and poured the wine broth with its poached egg into the wooden bowl. She had no appetite now. Her mind wandered back to the first time she set eyes on Agnese, when the town of Vallombrone celebrated its patron’s feast day as spring turned to summer.

During mass, near the sculpted marble pulpit, Ghisola spied a graceful profile inclined in prayer surrounded by a glow of blond. That halo burned into her eye and through to her soul. She could not even think to dare approach the girl as she knelt in her pew, for this was the daughter of the silk merchant Ser Teobaldo and his wife Mona Angela. Come night, Ghisola dreamt that Agnese came to her, held in the arms of the God of Love, eating Ghisola’s own burning heart.

Not long after, Ghisola in her apprenticeship accompanied Zita, her mother, to a woman brought to childbed: Mona Angela, Agnese’s mother. A long, arduous travail lay ahead, according to Zita’s professional prediction. The other women kept the fireplace roaring, placing soft cushions around the expectant mother, to absorb the pain. The midwife anointed Mona Angela’s belly with violet oil, while Ghisola, sweat dripping down her temples, poured poppy seed tea down the nearly unconscious woman’s throat. In the meantime, Agnese came in and out helping with the hot water, towels, and pillows. Mona Angela did not survive.

“Some women should not be delivered of children. They are too narrow and cannot support the labor,” Zita explained to Ghisola in her lowest whisper. “You saw how her canal and hips were not wide enough to let the babe pass,” shaking her head at the waste of it, even after witnessing the same desolation so many times over. On a lower note still, she nodded her head to Agnese sobbing in a corner. “There is good reason she has no siblings to mourn with. Now go to her.”

Agnese’s slim frame heaved with her weeping. Ghisola placed her hands on those winglike shoulder blades and whispered what words of comfort she could think of. Within the year it was Agnese whispering comfort to Ghisola when Zita was struck with putrid fever. As her mother suffered Ghisola tried everything to cool her body and bring her back from the brink. The ancestral recipes taught her by Zita this time came to no effect. Ghisola begged the apothecary for philtres and electuaries, she pleaded the generosity of the physician who, after all, could not work for naught. Finally, she took out loans from that soulless old usurer Ubaldo degli Ubalducci to pay for all their services.

***

Granted an interview, she found him hunched over his account books. As she entered, he did not look up but continued to scratch at the parchment, noting money in, and money out. Ghisola wondered at what high-flying figures they contained as she looked around her at the frescoed walls, the sculpted walnut desk, and the bookshelves holding volumes of manuscripts. Perhaps then he did read beyond his ledgers, or perhaps these precious objects were but investments, more expensive things to show to those ushered into his chambers.

A short cackle shattered the silence and he addressed her. “Who are you?”

“I am Ghisola, daughter to the midwife –”

He cut her off “You are young to seek a loan, what is my coin to go towards? A pretty

gown perhaps?” he eyed her plain dress and its common stuff. “Perhaps a lover needs some

pocket money as inducement?”

Her neck stiffened at this, but she took her best stance at humility, in order to successfully

plead for the funds.

“—daughter to the midwife Zita who, as we speak, suffers. I must pay the physician and

the medicine and have naught now to cover their fees.”

“Ah the old sick mother, I have heard that one before. Hah!” Another burst of cackling

laughter punctuated his remark.

He returned to his books, scribbling out more numbers in columns. Ghisola wondered if

her interview had been concluded and she should leave, but the grin at the corners of his lips

hinted that he enjoyed the torment of withholding a decision, savored her standing in the

awkward silence, waiting.

“Are you sure this is not instead to go to a young lover somewhere ?”

“—Sir, my mother—”

He looked with disdain again at her garb, “No I suppose not. Still, what does it concern

me if the money comes back to me with their due sums of interest ?”

He named his rate and Ghisola blanched. She thought however of her bedridden mother, the fever burning her flesh down to the skeletal forms below. She nodded her assent and signed her name to the debt. Zita died shortly thereafter.

* * *

Meanwhile, Agnese’s father remarried, with the young widow Mona Lapa his new bride. When his daughter was struck with her first blood, Lapa lost no time in choosing suitors for the girl. At first Ghisola and Agnese giggled at these old men, with their stoops and their shiny pates. When Mona Lapa insisted on her stepdaughter’s obedience, Agnese threatened to run away to a convent, to cut off her hair, or even her nose. Nothing, she declared, would take her from her Ghisola. Behind their hands, in church corners, in fields and under trees, the girls laughed, as the condemned do.

Finally came the day when Agnese escaped a moment to meet again with Ghisola and fell into her arms.

“They have set my price and my fate –- I am to marry that old Ubaldo before autumn comes .... I was told this morning.”

“Ubaldo? He’s --”

“--I know. But he’s rich. The richest of them all and my stepmother would not hear me refuse him.”

They both wept. Agnese choked out what they both knew were lies, “Maybe it won’t be so bad? Maybe he will be so distracted with his account books that he forgets I’m around…”

Ghisola was further sickened at owing the old miser anything. She caught her breath at the idea that a wretch with nothing in his soul but hard florins should be lord and master over the exquisite Agnese, that he should have her small, soft hand to do with as he pleased, her body along with it, that she might bear him children. Revulsion turned acid in Ghisola’s stomach.

Her churning innards brought inspiration: a copse she knew in the midst of the greenwood, at the far limits of the contado, around what the people of Vallombrone called the old leper hut. In that deserted forest clearing, lost amongst the dense thickets, grew things that could aid a midwife in giving help for women’s woes. They could ease travail or bring on the menses when they would not come and more besides: deeds spoken, deeds but whispered, and those admitted only upon pain of death, if then. Ghisola feared none of that. She would do what she must.

* * *

Her egg had gone cold when a knock surprised her from her reverie. Ghisola expected the worst--the Ubalducci heir’s henchmen come to claim the dead man’s due. Ghisola could pay the interest, or part of it at least, if she couldn’t stave them off again. Or had someone caught on that he only passed with help? She took a deep breath and opened the door to find Father Pietro and the notary, Ser Pangrazio. She looked from one -- barely holding up his arrogant head under the pile of his damasked turban -- and then to the other -- in patched Franciscan habit, the cord knotted with his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience hanging before him. What their most unexpected appearance here on her doorstep portended she did not like to guess.

“We must speak to you of Mona Agnese,” began Ser Pangrazio, drawing out the words as though a trumpet accompanied his address.

Ghisola, however, could not bear the wait for him to circle around in his usual fashion to come to his point and interrupted. “There was nothing I or anyone could have done. The babe yet lives?”

“Yes, it lives, although a boy would have been a greater consolation. But the family has renamed her in accordance with tradition, after Ubaldo’s mother, Umiltà. Mona Vanna looks after her—a wetnurse has been hired, you needn’t worry.”

Ghisola swallowed back her disgust. Mona Vanna, Ubaldo’s youngest sister, - who married into Vallombrone’s other ruling family, the Barbadori -- could not keep even the trace of Agnese’s name for her daughter. It did not surprise the young midwife, for she knew from Zita all about this woman. Her daughters—for they were daughters all-- looked not like her husband, Ser Ridolfo Barbadori.

Luckily, they resembled their mother. Some said the girls had instead the condottiere Ser Filipuccio’s turn of nose, or even that of Ser Filipuccio’s son – to decide between the two would be difficult, given the hushed rumors of Vanna’s ways. Young Puccio still buzzed frequently around her ripe person. Vanna played with her very life should the scales finally fall from Ser Ridolfo’s eyes. His blindness could last only so long. Ghisola had even considered leveraging her extensive understanding of Vanna’s network of lovers for the remission of the debt, but beyond the lady’s sour disposition and tendency to leave her mother’s fees unpaid, Ghisola thought that women’s lives had little enough pleasure and kept the lady’s secrets to herself.

She and Agnese had secretly hoped for a girl, planned for it even, despite the dim fate that awaited the weaker vessel throughout life. While Ubaldo lived, Ghisola advised Agnese to unclench her hands during intercourse, to improve the chances. After his demise, the familyoffered his expectant widow a birth tray, a desco da parto with the birth of the Virgin Mary to bring her luck in labor. Ghisola told Agnese to handle the tray and gaze at the handmaidens, at Anne and Mary, encouraging her through contemplating women to bring forth female offspring. Ghisola massaged Agnese’s left breast and the left side of her swelling belly, the better to develop a girl. Through her care and ministrations, it came to pass. And the little girl—tiny Agnesina, thought Ghisola, refusing any other name--still breathed.

Ser Pangrazio cleared the pompous tones of his stentorian throat, bringing Ghisola back to the present.

“What then?” she asked the two men before her, shaking these thoughts from her mind.

“Mona Agnese --” Father Pietro started in a gentler tone. At the name, Ghisola’s eye went to the Sant’Agnese doll lying over on her pallet, with what trimmings survived the birth, the death, the one pearl left hanging by a thread. She looked away again. “-- has left you a legacy.”

“A legacy?” she repeated. She must have misunderstood.

“Yes, her testament reads: ‘In my cassone you will find my three best overgarments, with linings, which are to be sold and the proceeds spent on a pilgrimage to be undertaken by the midwife Ghisola with all possible haste after my passage from this light for the comfort of my soul. She may receive in advance as much as she needs for expenses and ...’ ” At these words of Agnese’s, whispered to her from beyond the grave, Ghisola wiped back her tears. The lawyer paused out of respect and then continued, “...at the monastery of Santa Vergine delle Fontane.”

The shock dried her eyes. Everyone knew that the Virgin had appeared there, far to the south. A hunter had seen her in the guise of a doe, but the sanctuary lay over a hundred, even two hundred leagues away, perched high on a mountain top where the hunter became a hermit, San Artemidoro, accompanied in his orison only by five stags with five pointed antlers of gold, upon which the holy man prayed Christ’s five wounds. Those that returned from the journey were hailed ever after, with reverence, as “Fontenallato” or “Fontenallata” if they came back with the Holy Water from the monastery. But that journey was far indeed.

“That...that’s down in the kingdom of Sicily!” Ghisola cried.

“The amount will be sufficient.”

He named the sum and indeed it was more than Ghisola had ever seen in her life. So Agnese had bequeathed to her funds not from Ubaldo’s cash box, but rather the dowry money drawn from the silken gowns and pearled damasks she had, like her namesake doll, worn such a short time ago.

They had arrayed her like a queen for the procession in which she quit her father’s roof to reside under her husband’s. In this way, Ubaldo’s polluted money would not be making the journey possible. It amounted to more than she had ever had as payment for her services as midwife and guardadonna, but she would need every coin for a journey that far, three weeks perhaps, at the very least, just to get there, and that was with her mule. But a pilgrimage also meant a moratorium on debts and, if she were careful, perhaps there would be enough left over to pay them off at the end. At least, again, the interest.

“...and in a few weeks’ time we should have found enough willing souls to form a cohort for you and accompany you there and back.”

This, though, froze her bones. Of course, there would be a group of them. In her surprise, she hadn’t thought that far. She regretted not a jot or tittle her part in Ubaldo’s death. She could make this journey to comfort the soul of Agnese-- she would have made even the trek to Jerusalem at Agnese’s merest whim. But to be surrounded by those none the wiser, to disguise her face and heart to them the length of the journey down and back again repulsed her soul.

These were the same pious and right-thinking individuals who spoke of the souls of husband and wife joined for eternity - she remembered their platitudes from the burial at San Andrea- and Ghisola would have to swallow back her shudder and force her lips into some mockery of smile day after day for weeks, perhaps months. United in death, indeed. She thought of Agnese’s disfigured face, swollen and bruised after her refusal once, and once only, to pay up to Ubaldo his “conjugal debt.”

Ghisola’s thoughts escaped her again, returning to her many nights of plotting with Agnese, collecting both their menstrual blood, and mixing it with toadskin and other herbs she knew. How far afield into Vallombrone’s contado they’d wandered to collect just the right elements, right up to the clearing with the old leper’s hut where the most potent monkshood grew, where she could catch the most virulent toads that would set Ubaldo’s throat gurgling up red spit as he clutched at the twisting innards of his belly.

After a long trek out of the town, to the north and then to the east, and into the countryside, then into the thickets of the underwood and finally the forest proper, they came at last upon the hut she knew as the landmark. It stood, as ever, silent and dark. Too, as ever, no smoke rose from the chimney, the shutters tight, despite the rampant rumors about the defrocked, leprous friar who lived there, or had. It was said his face could cause a woman to miscarry. But whenever Ghisola had had occasion to cull herbs out this way, she had never seen or sensed a trace of him and did not believe the old tales.

She could feel Agnese’s reluctance in her hesitant step treading more slowly, warily. A herd of deer gathered at the hut’s rickety wicker door, belying any human proprietor, like a troop guarding it against infraction. The stag looked up directly at Ghisola. The late afternoon light fell upon his ten-point antlers like burnished gold. She blinked and the after- image imprinted into the radiating dark behind her eyelids. In the flush of the moment, she trembled with something she did not fully grasp, as the stag stared into her eyes. Her heart froze, though not with cold or fear. Was this then the awe that the priests had taught her in vain to feel for the Eucharist? How many paternosters long that moment lasted until the stag came up to the two girls, a mere hand’s length away? Ghisola could not say. She gave up all attempt, instead passing an apple over to Agnese and nudged her.

The younger woman proffered it to him, hesitant. He ate of it, tenderly lapping at her palm and wrist, her hand gently caressing his fur between his antlers as he bent his head. The apple finished, he turned to the others. The herd bounded off with leisurely leaps into the greenwood, but the stag stayed a moment behind, spying them through the screen of leafage.Agnese’s lingering smile died when she turned from him to look with dread at the hut. She gathered Ghisola’s hand in her own. Ghisola felt her shiver as she whispered in the forest hush.

“I’m not sure we should be out this far. I think I’ve heard of this place.”

“There can’t be anyone living there, not with creatures as skittish as that lording about like the kings of the realm.”

“My nurse used to tell me of it, that an accursed old man lived here and that he could set your flesh to rot by just looking at you.”

“All nursemaids tell that to children, but no one has ever seen him,” she whispered back and held Agnese to her breast, encircling her with her arms. Over Agnese’s slight shoulder, Ghisola glanced back. The stag gazed at her still, alert and on guard, as though waiting to see what the couple would do next. Ghisola felt gooseflesh rise on her skin at his unflinching stare. She cast her own eyes downward a moment but looking up again he had gone.

“I think this place will serve us well, you and me. You’ll see. I promise. None shall lay a hand on you without reckoning with me.”

Under hum and chirp, the two girls wordlessly culled and assembled the ingredients. Later Ghisola would blend and distill them at the precise lethal, but untraceable, proportions.

“When he’s good and dead, you’ll come stay in the palazzo with me, for always and forever.” murmured Agnese, snuggling her head into the hollow of Ghisola’s shoulder. “No one shall put us asunder again. You will, won’t you? We will go through the years granted us side by side, hand in hand to the forever-after that is our fate.”

Ghisola’s tongue caught in her throat. She longed to pronounce a fulsome vow of eternal devotion, better even than the of poets of old. So that she might know, so that she might never doubt. For all answer, however, Ghisola only embraced Agnese tightly in her arms, inhaling as though for her life’s breath her Agnese’s iris perfume over and above the sweet scent of her skin. Ghisola had indeed come to make her home there after the murder, ostensibly to attend to Agnese in her confinement, but neither had any intention of her leaving again. It had ended in blood and humors and viscera and a screaming infant, a tiny Agnesina, now in the hands of the usurer’s kin, raised with no idea of her mother and ignorant even of her true given name.

Ser Pangrazio’s sententious voice interrupted her thoughts once more.

“What do you say, Ghisola?”

“Very good then, when do we set out?” Spring was well upon Vallombrone and the countryside and going south, the weather would only become warmer. It opened the season of such journeys.

“A few weeks at most. Mona Lapa and Ser Diodati and Ser Filipuccio have been wanting to make the pilgrimage and there is also Frate Andrea and Frate Ugolino. I think together they could make a safe party for the journey. We can have mass said for your departure in a fortnight.”

Ghisola nodded and made other plans.

* * *

She wrote her own testament, and had it witnessed, as pilgrims must. Not that she possessed much beyond the tools of her trade, her books, and now the money from Agnese’s garments. It would still be a good week before the rest of the cohort made their final preparations, much good may it do them.

Ghisola waited till the town slept, and washed her hair in rosemary and walnut gall, darkening what was left of her blond curls. Then counting out the coins she sewed them into a doublet and hose that she had lifted from the drying line at the laundress’s place, outside Vallombrone’s walls. She spared a thought for some young jackanapes who would go without his frippery to impress what damsels he might and his friends in the bargain, with this well-cut cloth of deep red velvet. She hadn’t wanted anything that stood out, but she also did not have her pick of garments available to her quick and agile fingers. She slipped her feet into the hose, unaccustomed to the liberty of limb they allowed, tied on the stuffed codpiece and buttoned up the doublet, tucking the little Sant’Agnese doll close to her slight breast. Donning a feathered cap over her short, somber locks, her disguise was complete. By the light of the full moon, Ghisola set off, praying the mule would make no sound to disturb the town’s sleep, at least until beyond the fortifications. Sitting astride the beast felt odd in the hose, as she had never ridden this way before.

That aside, as she engaged the highway, the Via Cassia, her journey began in earnest. She searched her heart for any feeling of regret beyond her grief and found nothing. If this pilgrimage that Agnese willed to her were a penance, it was a pointless one. Still, she would go and honor her beloved’s wishes. Perhaps the journey, the very distance, might be balm for Ghisola’s soul, who wept to the mule’s rocking clip clop until the sun rose. Perhaps that was what motivated her late friend to send her so very far away-- not guilt for what they had done together, but a possibility of relief, the soothing of new sights to eyes bereft of Agnese’s beauty, to at least distract her heart from its loss. She could not know, but she preferred this explanation.

Startled by a deer bounding before her, her mind returned to the path in front of her. She glanced backwards to the shadowy walls of Vallombrone, grown smaller in the distance, now simply black stubs under the moonlight. As she turned her attention to coaxing the mule back into movement, her eyes fell upon the hind who had not in fact bounded away into the darkness, but stood by the roadside, as though observing, as though guarding the pathway forward. Her eyes glowed, reflecting the glow of the orb above. The mule at last stepped forward, distracting Ghisola from the deer for a moment. As her mount rumbled back into his slow action, the pilgrim looked back: the deer had gone.

As the days passed, she did fall in with other travelers, for it was only good sense to voyage in company. The roads always carried merchants, adventurers, friars, students, drovers, and messengers. She met up with a knight and his squire, then a noblewoman with her retinue on her way to her marriage. Ghisola shared the route with them all-- a bit of road with some and a further stretch with others. She took advantage of the protection they offered from bandits ready to set upon beleaguered wayfarers. But then she would make good her escape when the pilgrims turned off en route to whichever final destination was theirs, in order to pay their respects to the Volto Santo at Lucca, the Annunziata in Florence, or the Virgin’s girdle at Prato, collecting badges from the different holy sites along the way.

Sometimes she stayed with them at the pilgrims’ ospedale, or a roadside inn. There, she would pass the night holding the Sant’Agnese doll close, careful of the remaining pearl, inhaling its scent deeply for a trace of her own Agnese’s iris perfume, her warm honeyed flesh. Perhaps Ghisola might also sleep, tormented though she was by nightmares of Agnese bleeding out of her sex and the flank that she herself had sliced open. She was haunted too, not by guilt at Ubaldo’s death, but rather by her silence at Agnese’s promise of eternal love, her invitation to come forever after to live together. Palazzo or hovel, Ghisola would have accepted, and so she did, but that she had never been able to say as much. What was left unspoken tormented her. Nothing in this – along with the flea-ridden beds and the bare pallets, the snoring of her companions of fortune, the smell of their sweat-- led to rest.

At all events, well before daybreak, with the sky just lightening and her bed paid, she would slip out again, continuing her route alone, however dangerous, even for a young man. Perhaps it was more dangerous still for any companions to guess her sex, and so she always gave them the slip before a day, two at most, had passed.

So she spent the hours sunrise to sunrise, and then weeks, with summer setting in and the southerly light bearing more brightly down on her shoulders. By one late afternoon -- she had lost which day of the week-- weary of the sun on her face, her haunches aching from the leagues she had behind her, tired at the thought of how many lay still before, she arrived at Lazio, so far safe from robbers or discovery.

Following the rhythm of her mule’s heavy step, in the distance the jingle of a bell drew ever closer. It meant but one thing and thus Ghisola was unsurprised to turn and find a man with a rotted nose, and a greyed temple beside a half-eaten eye socket. Even without the ulcerated face, his staff and gloves and sackcloth confirmed what the sound of the bell had warned of. She did not however expect a leper to be riding a fine mount.

He hailed her, “Peregrinus! I am a stranger in a strange land, myself. Do you seek company for your journey? I am only a poor companion but have stories to tell as well as ears to hear yours, and know too how to keep my distance. Tell me, if you’re willing, your name and whence you hail, whither you go.”

She wondered how the leper knew her for a pilgrim, for unlike him she wore no badge, no broad brimmed straw that protected the voyager from the sun. This was his headgear, upon which he bore badges of various sanctuaries along this route and beyond. Ghisola figured she would lose him fast enough in Rome where travelers flocked to see Christ’s very face imprinted on Veronica’s veil every Friday. This was most everyone’s last stop before returning homeward. Whatever today was, the city still lay a few days’ journey away. She could manage him for that long if she couldn’t free herself any earlier. At any rate, they quickly approached a wood, and company at this juncture would not come amiss.

“My name is Gherardo, I am from Vallombrone.”

“Ah Vallombrone! Back before I became a pilgrim I lived in the contado for many years.”

Ghisola looked at at this half-rotted man and thought immediately of the abandoned hut with its tall tales and its monkshood.

“My name is Cecco. Born in a palazzo in Milan, I lived a long, long while in that hut. My father was wealthy and titled, and helped me avoid the leprosarium. It was agreed, however, that I should go abide somewhere else, far from kith and kin. I had inherited some land of my own outside Vallombrone’s walls and built a domicile in the environs with my own hands, in penitence. Bare of many comforts in that hut, I regretted my sins, this God-given shame. Still, it long sheltered me and kept me from inflicting my suffering upon other souls, but then I took my penance to the roads. For all I know it stands there still.”

Ghisola had to know more. “How close to Vallombrone?”

“Somewhat northeast of the city, a league or two, perhaps. It was a comfortable enough hermitage for me.”

She turned to take him in again, the odd wight. The damaged features under the dark hair lightening with age. This then was the leper of the woods. The very leper of the woods was now her traveling companion. She inwardly shook her head at the strangeness of it. Ghisola let herself follow her remembrances of the hut and how its surroundings had furnished her with the means of freeing Agnese from Ubaldo, of how the two had gone there to collect from the clearing herbs for their grim purpose.

He continued, “I am heading to Sicily, and from there to the Holy Land in hopes of healing. As you can see,” he jangled his badges, glinting in the sun, “I stop off at all holy places en route, to cause no offense to any of the heavenly host of saints. I have been to Cologne to honor the Three Kings, to Canterbury for Saint Thomas, and then to Compostela, even.” He showed her his scallop shell. “Now Rome awaits, and finally Santa Vergine delle Fontane in Sicily before I am ship-bound truly to Jerusalem. Maybe there, relief will finally find me. We must pray. I have certainly been long abroad. So, pilgrim, whither are you headed?”

“Why is it you take me for a pilgrim?”

“I can see the heart that yearns to unburden itself of its woe.…”

She laughed to herself. It was bitter. “I go, yes, for the comfort of my beloved’s soul, to Santa Vergine delle Fontane as well.” The words felt good to say openly, if only in a young man’s guise. “My path however will be a straight one.”

The leper spoke to the first point “Ah, a lady love.”

“She was taken from me, from this world, too soon.”

“The good and the beautiful are often snatched up from this earth, the angels are jealous

of their time among us.”

She turned her head to take in his ravaged face.

“Like you, I was handsome before this, long ago, when I was your age. Most cannot look at me so directly as you do now.”

A deer leapt in front of them, from the trees at the westerly edge of the road and into the wood that continued from there to the easterly side. Both pilgrims’ eyes followed the beast’s path until it disappeared into the forest’s shadowy depths. Ghisola thought of Agnese feeding the stag.

At her silence he continued, “But once I too had a beautiful friend, a beloved one, Cristofano was his name, a head of dark curls, much like yourself. Together we grew to manhood, you must have been but a wee thing back in that day. Then, after all our plans to go to attend the University of Bologna together, he decided that he must join the Preaching Friars first. I feigned my own vocation, to join him, thinking I could not be without him - I took the vows but they were not in my heart, which contained but Cristofano, and Cristofano only. So, you see before you an apostate and foresworn - and more still, the Lord knows. Soon afterwards He struck me with this disfigurement and rot to soften my hardened heart, for I am not, or at least was not, even sorry. I was banished to the woods for this, my curse. I had to learn to live without my friend by dint of this separation from the world. News from my Brothers at the monastery came but rarely. A springtime message however did arrive one year, as though the Lord must strike me harder still to come to my senses. Plague, they said, had carried off Cristofano. There are few I love, and none like him; His death was a revelation to me of how grave my misdeeds must be. And so I wander from holy site to holy site and now will go farther still, for no relief has been granted me yet. Perhaps because I lack contrition, which I cannot seem to summon to my heart, only the image Cristofano. I pray Our Lady will grant me true penitence and perhaps then even heal me of this affliction in forgiving me, however profoundly I have transgressed. I should like to once more embrace my fellow man as one amongst them, and not this all-but- deceased haunting the earth before death has fully overtaken me.”

Ghisola held her peace, thinking of her own heart, of Agnese. His bereavement touched her. He seemed unmoored by it, wandering the earth after something that rang hollow to her, and perhaps to him. She did not usually take to others and their lives, having already seen too much in her young existence. In birth chambers came not only life and all too often death, be it of mother or child: in the breath between one state and the other came also secrets--secrets women whispered not even to priests--of grief and regret and sometimes even of love. So stories she had heard myriad, spoken from the heart, too many perhaps to easily risk attaching her own heart to her fellows. More practically, she also knew the less she spoke, the longer her disguise would last. She kept her thoughts to herself.

The leper took up again, embarrassed, “Please pardon so much confession at so little acquaintance, I have coin enough, but company lacks and I find my tongue runs away from me.” The clopping of the hooves rhythmed their journey towards Rome where Ghisola intended give him the slip. Even as the moon rose high and then set, still they ventured onwards until fatigue overcame them both and they slept under the blazing embroidery of stars upon the velvet night and its enfolding hush. 

Or at least Cecco fell immediately into a deep slumber, while Ghisola feared her usual nightmares of mewling newborns and bloody entrails. She noticed though that he murmured in his sleep. Ghisola could just make out one word, “Cristofano.”

Ghisola pondered his earlier phrases, his love for that young man, mad enough to follow him past unmeant vows and into the monastery, risking his immortal soul. Her own path had in its way followed a similar route. Perhaps she could offer little in the way of comfort but she could provide company to a man whose flow of words revealed a long habit of solitude. Ghisola decided that Rome was not so far out of her way after all.

***

As they came upon Rome, Veronica’s veil and its promised indulgences were too much for Cecco to resist and Ghisola found herself keeping him company. The patter of his stories and the chiming of his bell had become familiar, a comfort. They sounded through the streets lined with five story buildings. She craned at their dizzying height at all the other glories of the ancient capital, amidst the stench of mule droppings and other filth. The plazas held statuary and crumbling ruins and marble arches. Cecco told her the latter celebrated great victories she had never heard tell of. The words began to bounce off her skull and her neck was sore from marveling at the curiosities and grandeur, when all seemed melt into a blur of color and heat and noise. Relief overtook her when her companion had his new badge and they found themselves once more upon the Via Appia, now to Capua.

He seemed by then to have accepted her taciturn ways and made up for it with his own inexhaustible store of chatter. Had he any suspicion that she was not as she seemed, he made no sign of it. And so they pursued their way south. As usual, bridges went out, innkeepers overcharged, vermin infested the bedding. In one town they faced refusal of bread during a grain shortage, while preceding another they heard rumors of robber barons holding pilgrims for ransom. This they escaped, but perhaps a worse fate lay among the alewives in the taverns marking the route. None wished a leper amongst the guests, but Cecco’s generous purse always found them a place, and sometimes even near the hearth.

In one of these inns, a fellow wayfarer slipped out a double pipe and Cecco sounded his bell in rhythm to the skirl of the melody. Ghisola could but laugh, in spite of herself. A merry tune escaped him in silken tones that defied his split lips. One more mournful followed.

“Dark eyes ...” he sang “spark fires” he began in a lilt and finished off with “embers burning still.”

Her companion’s eyes rested now on the fires in the hearth. Those around them fell into a hush that Ghisola was loath to interrupt, but felt too, despite her rule of speaking as few words as possible. She could but muster that the song was beautiful, leaving unsaid the wish that she might enshrine Agnese’s memory with such a gift.

In explanation he offered, “Before, well, before Cristofano received his calling. We were poets, we wrote sonnets one to the other and circulated them amongst our set. He gave it up at his novitiate while I pretended to, still scribbling in notebooks I kept hidden. Since his death I have truly renounced the practice, whether in penance or avoiding his memory, I know not, but sometimes a song will come and I remember the rhymes. It takes hold of me.”

“I wish I had the gift of words,” Ghisola admitted.

“They help in their way--singing them, speaking them, brings the grief outward. The poets have always known this.”

“My beloved swore her love to me. I could not find the words to reply with my own. I simply could not find the means to express what my heart said. I tried to show her, as I could, in my way.”

“We cannot hide love, try though we might. With eyes like yours, I can guarantee you she knew in a way that surpassed what piddling little rhymes might convey- what your gaze expresses when you speak of her could not be misunderstood.”

Before she could reply, the inn doors opened at the hand of a monk, with a belly that belied his calling. His eye, roving over the crowds, landed on Cecco, his lips turning down with grimace of distaste. Then, however, he lit upon Ghisola. Directing his bulk through the crowd he settled himself in the seat next them.

“Ho a pair of pilgrims! Wither go ye?”

Ghisola looked at him and something in her refused to answer, despite the Brother’s probing eyes on her. Instead Cecco spoke, in what Ghisola felt as a kind of verbal shielding.

“Ah Santa Vergine delle Fontane!” exclaimed the Brother- “my own home! You will do us honor, young man,” he said with a glance over Cecco’s head, as though the words had been for Ghisola. “A worthy destination, to be sure,” he continued, ingratiating and self-important. Cecco insisted on marking his presence and addressed him again. “Many old legends surround it, I understand, of San Artimidoro in the woods as the stag came upon him – Can you tell us the tales?

“How does the young man feel about listening to an old windbag like myself?”

The monk had a peculiar way of stressing “man” in his sentence and Ghisola was on guard. He put his hand out and caressed her cheek, further reaching toward her as she pulled back, letting his hand drop along the breast of her doublet. At the slight swell there, he smirked and looked at her codpiece.

“What a downy cheek you have, no beard to sully it – and yet you are of an age to travel alone.”

Cecco raised himself and dared the monk with his glaring half-lidded eye to make one move further. Despite the leper’s infirmity, he managed to cow the Brother into lifting his hands away, and up, as though proffering surrender.

“Well, it passes the hours of the evening, so be it.” He settled himself into the wooden bench and began to tune his voice to the tone of stories. “In the times before the present age of Grace of our dear Lord, our monastery was a very different place. It was once sacred to the lady of the Pagans, who claimed maidenhood, though this was one of the Devil’s lies since she also supposedly administered to women in travail, and how could a virgin do this? Stories tell that, mistress of moonlight, she mastered all wild things, and caught five golden horned deer but we know this to be another falsehood, for the golden five-point antlers were to announce Christ’s wounds in His death upon the cross. She had a pool that was called her mirror - teeming with demons, it was, but San Artemidoro dried up those sinful waters and now it is safe for souls to venture to us for divine mercy and the forgiveness of their sins. Miracles happen there even now!”

At this, as though in glossing the friar’s speech with an ironic flat note, the pilgrim with the pipes began another song, and a second pilgrim began singing words much bawdier than Cecco’s. The dogs set to barking while the house mistress, counting coins, scowled their way. Come morning, they continued their way along the Via Poppilia and in the days following, down further to Messina.

Near Naples she saw an opening going downward into the bowels of the earth, from which steam arose stinking of sulphur. Cecco told her that here the living might descend into the depths and see those condemned to their eternal perdition, for this was an entry into Hell that gaped, to catch the unwary. Ghisola shuddered and made no reply. If this was life without Agnese, what then might damnation be?

***

On the ferry, she vomited into the angry, tossing waves and seething whirlpools, as Cecco held her shoulders. She had become used to these small gestures of care from the leper. Any lingering fear of his affliction had long since vanished. He had sensed this for some time it seemed to her with his casual back pats or ruffling of the short locks on her nape. Now he supported her as she retched violently over the ferry’s starboard.

The boatman cried out, “Mount Etna!”

Lifting her head again, and wiping at her lips, catching her breath, she could see in the distance a gigantic slope topped by black smoke and sparks, a frightening monster breath belching into the heavens.

Cecco nodded “This they say is where the souls of Purgatory suffer, that you can hear the wailing of the suffering from far off when the wind is right.”

Ghisola thought briefly of stopping to climb the behemoth of rock and thence throw herself down its blazing maw for the chance at once more gazing upon Agnese, even there.

Perhaps she might even share in the harrowing acts her beloved must undergo, shoulder some of the torment for her, so that she might know the depth of her feeling. She wondered if in Purgatory words of love could be spoken, exchanged.

But pondering this looming, majestic shadow on the horizon, its lordship over all it surveyed, its very power, she thought that perhaps these travelers’ tales only cast aspersions upon what they could not grasp. She heard herself murmuring a prayer to the volcano to watch over this final stretch of their journey.

* * *

Once landed, the two pilgrims took up their route again, mule for one and steed for the other. Soon they could see the monastery’s vertiginous perch, looming closer by the hour, then by the minute.

Just after daybreak, they arrived at the foot of the mountain. Their beasts did their best to lay sure foot after slow foot along the treacherous and narrow paths. At many a moment the pair had to dismount and lead the creatures upwards. Cecco stumbled and Ghisola caught him, instinctively. Speech had grown difficult, but he thanked her with a grateful glance. As they ascended, her breath ached in her lungs and her nose bled now and again over the hours. Finally, in the late dusk she could see the monastery’s sculpted door of bronze opened onto flaming lamps welcoming weary travelers to their destination. Monks chanted the office and their praise echoed off the stone walls.

Despite the hour and the exhaustion of her body, Ghisola joined the line of pilgrims making their way chapel by chapel until they could descend into the crypt to honor Artemidoro’s holy remains.

***

In the chapel of the Holy Virgin, the Madonna’s image watched over a sea of ex votos: crutches and swaddled babes, wax effigy candles, miniature wooden ships for safe passage, ears and eyes for deafness and blindness, even wombs for an easy birth or to bear a child at all. Cecco, just before her, left his bell. Wondering what offering she herself might have left, she slipped Agnese’s beads through her fingers, but choked on the words “pray for us now and at the hour of our death,” stifling the air into her lungs.

Finally, after countless tiny shuffling steps with the pressing lines of crowding, stinking, milling pilgrims, she arrived at the chapel before the descent into the crypt. Here stood a confessional booth. Dread’s stranglehold overcame her-- one by one the pilgrims entered that dark place and came out again, smiling or in tears. As Cecco left it, face blanched, finally it was her turn.

“Forgive me father for I have sinned ...” Her lips formed the words of the ritual opening and she could feel her tongue around her confession, readying it to birth into sound, “I murdered a man in cold blood, nor am I sorry. I would do it again. I would do another murder if I could bring back from the dead his wife whom I loved more than my life, for the mere chance of telling her as much.” Instead, she heard her voice, “I have sinned by act and by omission.”

The faceless cleric on the other side of the screen grew impatient, knowing the numbers of confessions awaiting his attention, and interrupted her.

“Have you any deadly sin on your heart?”

“No, Father.”

He assigned her a series of Aves and Paternosters and she left the confessional.

At the tolling of the hour, her turn came to enter the relic chapel. The gates, however, which opened and shut for each individual pilgrim, stuck and would not allow her to pass. While the bell marked the passing moments, telling of the time of night and the office to be prayed, monks and pilgrims looked at her, some even crying out. Just behind her, a red-headed man with a limp fought off obvious panic. The Brother at the gate shook the iron to no avail. Others joined him, trying to understand what was blocking the gate from swinging open again.

Ghisola turned her face away. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied a stairwell plunging into shadow, the steps worn into a curve carved out by ancient footfall. Thinking this an alternate route to the relics, she followed it downward, down and down into the earth. As she descended into the entrails of the monastery, of the mountain itself, she turned back. Not a soul stepped in her wake. She was alone and her feet echoed on the sunken steps of the stairwell.

At the last of them, the stone opened into a cavern where a spring bubbled into three pools, dim with shadows cast by she knew not what light. She wound round stalactites and stalagmites to the water’s edge which was surrounded by small dolls made of rags, little manikins of cloth and twine.

She went over to it and dipped in the stoppered bottle she had meant to use for bringing back holy oil. At the silken caress of the water, she dipped in her other hand and cupping them both brought it up to her parched mouth to drink. She lifted her head. A doe came up beside her. In the daze of exhaustion Ghisola hardly remarked it or how odd that it should appear there among the stalagmites instead of its usual woodland haunts. The creature looked into her eyes.

The gaze was direct, deep even. The soft darkness of the deer’s wide, great eyes stabbed at Ghisola’s heart, even as she felt engulfed in their immense, liquid gaze. The pilgrim began to weep tears but as they ran down between her lips they tasted not of salt but of honey, flavored with iris, until her clenched mouth opened onto wide mouthed sobbing. The doe inclined her head to the crouched girl and licked at her tears until the tears ceased. Once Ghisola caught her breath again she thought of the apple she had in her knapsack, dug it out and the doe fed upon it from her hand, twitching delicate, furred ears.

Soon however, this intimacy was broken, as in trod five stags wearing golden antlers. The creatures wore them, to Ghisola’s eyes, like so many crowns, their heads erect under the weight of these racks in effortless nobility. Gold they were, though, now flashing dull fire in the dimnessof the cavern, now flashing a reflection from some other source of light she could not find. Wonderment won out over all trace of terror. It overtook her as she watched them dip their points into the spring. In a gesture both wild and gentle, they shook the droplets out, spraying Ghisola over her head, her face, her body.

The water on her skin awoke in her an imperious need to immerse herself in it, to let it close over her head in cleansing her of her exhausting grief.

She doffed her hose, unbuttoned her doublet, and out slipped the Sant’Agnese doll from the belly. She brought it with her as she stepped into the spring, cooling her overheated flesh and washing away the sweat, the reek of mule, and all the dust of the long, long journey. She swam. The waters were a kind of forgiveness. No taint of judgment spoiled their laving effect. The warm fluid simply accepted her body. It asked only that she abandon herself to the slight swell of the liquid, as the waves went about their task of ablution. Her heavy lidded eyes watched as the deer trotted away, weaving their careful path through cavern until the shadows swallowed them up and they became one with the darkness. All she registered now were the tiny wavelets of water lapping at her breast until she felt she could leave its gentle, rocking embrace.

As she climbed out, exhaustion overtook her, something beyond her bodily aches at the voyage endured, an exhaustion of the soul. At the lip of the pool she fell deeply asleep, clutching the sodden doll to her breast.

Agnese appeared.

No iron stench of death fouled the air. No blood sullied her fair flesh. Her form stood before Ghisola whole and glowing. Her eyes were those of the doe, wide and dark, taking in sights beyond the vision of mortals, who could not see past the tomb and its worms. Nor did the girl scream or moan as in the last time the midwife tended to her. Rather, the apparition seemed filled with a silence of ineffable peace that, as she leaned over and kissed Ghisola’s forehead, engulfed the mourner. Instead of words exchanged, their lips met and the spirit vanished in a ripple, just as the soft waves of the spring blurred her reflection in the pool. Agnese had gone. A sweet oblivion overtook the pilgrim.

* * *

Ghisola came to. Surely, at least with the depth of her rest, a whole night had passed since her dream. This twilit space made it impossible to know the hour. She rose and donned her clothing once more, leaving the ragged little Sant’Agnese with its one bedraggled pearl at the water’s edge with so many others.

Ghisola climbed the stairs again, her thighs and back and shoulders no longer aching, and found her place in line. Instead of a procession of new faces however, she could clearly recall the reddish beard and limp of the pilgrim just behind her. The monastery bells continued tolling the rest of the hour just where they had left off when she decided to follow the stairs downward. She was past asking questions at this point, when the gates opened at her touch. Faced now with kissing the relics, however, she turned on her heels and fled past the crowds through the string of chapels, back to the bronze doors and the world outside, the mountain and its towering firs, over which waxed a crescent moon, clouds flying by. She might touch the stars so high the mountaintop rose, and she atop it. To embrace instead dead bones now, with the scent of the spring still on her skin, seemed to her a betrayal of the deer, of her voyage into that world below, and above all of Agnese’s visitation, her blessing. She readied herself to take a step, to rejoin the world of the foothills and flatlands.

As her feet hesitated at the descent, Cecco stepped toward her from the shadows of the threshold. He held in his hand the pilgrim’s badge of Santa Vergine delle Fontane, which he had acquired after completing the ritual.

“I thought I might find you out here. You disappeared there for a moment -- I think there was some difficulty with the relics?” He asked no further but handed her the memento, the proof of her pilgrimage, a small tin semblance of a doe backed by a pin to attach to her doublet, “To remember me by, along with our journey I should hope, and your beloved’s soul. I hope you have found the peace you sought.”

Ghisola, weeping, wiped her eyes and took a bit of the water in her stoppered bottle and touched the open wounds of his face, her fingers damp with her tears and the spring water. The clouds parted and in the moonlight his affliction seemed to vanish. A face made whole stared back at her. Ghisola watched it dawn on him: the ease with which his eyelid now closed over the once-rotted socket or his own tears which flowed without stinging. He raised then his hand to his nose, intact, ran his fingers over its slight bump restored and his full nostrils that painlessly took in the night air.

He fell to his knees before her. She raised him up.

“Where to now, my friend? Will you push onward or go back home?”

He stood, head bowed, speechless.

“I pray only dear Cecco that the next time you find a looking glass, whether it be in Milan or the Holy Land, think of me.”

She took him into her arms and embraced him, lingering, sliding her hands the length of his arms, then barely touching his fingertips in a wordless farewell. For with Agneses’s wishes accomplished, the time had come for Ghisola to turn back home.

Far away the Brothers began to chant the divine office.

* * *

Road wound upon road back up to Rome and then through Umbria into Tuscany. Without Cecco, however, his easy conversation, the flow of words that stood in for her own lack of them, the weeks of journeying stretched longer still. Hills seemed steeper, the inns lonelier, her chance companions grating on her nerves more than ever. None had his grace despite that face that so frighted other pilgrims. She wondered now if his beauty returned eased his own path further east and on and on to the Holy Land, or if he had turned back to join his family in Milan. In lieu of his company, her thoughts of him occupied her mind as the mule clopped slowly onward.

Every day that she grew closer to Vallombrone, her jerkin grew dingier, grimier. By the time she entered the contado, the silvery tin of the badge sewn against the red, dirt-dulled velvet, announced to one and all that this traveler had come from far indeed. The traffic on the final road home, with its share of merchants and joy-seekers, was both distantly familiar but now somehow turned strange to her eyes. She recognized none and in turn, none recognized her in her boy’s dress and short dark hair under the traveller’s cap. Still, to avoid risk, she spied a barn in a field of wheat, where she awaited moonrise and the silence and solitude the cover of night offered. Ghisola emerged under the glowing orb and looked at the walls of Vallombrone as they loomed higher, closer.

Just before turning onto the road that would lead her to meet whatever awaited her there now she startled, for a doe leapt across her path not three feet in front of the mule’s nose. In the creature’s bounding grace, it sketched a kind of triumphal arch like those Ghisola had seen in Rome. She continued under the phantom outlines of the stretched legs only moments after the deer disappeared far into the wood. Soon came the gates proper. Once past the watchman, she followed the lanes that took her to her abode and there climbed into her bed, stuffing the doublet and hose underneath, just in case. It felt good to be in her camicia once more.

As soon as her head lay upon her old pillow, she was dreaming. Agnese came in. She leaned over her pallet, so close that Ghisola smelled the iris, the warmth of her flesh. A silken lock of blonde tickled the midwife’s cheek, as the figure climbed into the slim bed under the coverlet and nestled against Ghisola’s body. Ghisola held her close, held her tight. The apparition, if apparition she was, spoke now, words that upon waking Ghisola would never recall, only the essence of them, her vows, their vows, all the words the returned pilgrim wished she might have expressed to the girl while alive, Agnese acknowledged as though spoken while she still breathed, while her ears could yet take them in before stopped up with earth and worm.

* * *

The following morning, Ghisola built a fire and began to cook a bit of porridge.

Tomorrow she would venture to the market for supplies and face them all, but for the moment she allowed herself to rest in solitude, still in her camicia, her windows shuttered. She took comfort in the crackling hearth and the repose of her flesh and bones which still felt the imprint of the slow rhythm of the beast that had carried her to the ends of the earth and back again. She gathered up her strength once more in the darkened room with the flickering shadows from the hearth, the slow creeping sunlight through the shutter slats. As she looked into the flames she pondered the vision that came to her in her sleep and began once more to weep. She needed no grand life in a palazzo as Agnese had promised her. She needed no marble floors beneath silk- slippered feet, no spiced wines in fantastically sculpted ewers, no frescoed walls with prancing goddesses. Simple pleasures – the warmth of the porridge in her stomach, the warmth of the fire that cooked it – could suffice for bliss, were only her beloved beside her.

At that, her mind turned to Cecco, perhaps returned now to the world of men, perhaps fo love to find him again somehow, or at least not wandering forever in the living death of his affliction. The curse written upon his flesh had changed into a new chance at life among his fellows. She hoped he had begun to write poems again.

She thought too of her transmuted dreams. Ghisola glanced back at the bed. The doll. She had been embracing the doll all night. Even that final silken thread holding on to the last pearl still hung from its hem. Before she could put a sense to this, however, her door began to shake with a banging of large-knuckled hands. The fire must have given her away already. She quickly donned her dress, feeling the now odd swish of the skirts once more round her ankles.

She opened the door at the third set of knocks. Ser Pangrazio and Father Pietro stood again at her threshold. They continued their hammering but now with words.

In high dudgeon, Ser Pangrazio started, “Your neighbor told us of the smoke from your chimney. Just where have you been?”

“You know where I’ve been-- I’ve only just returned.”

“How can anyone know that, that you weren’t out gallivanting the Lord knows where and with whom!” He looked with dismay upon her short locks, the blond coming in after the walnut gall coloring.

“One moment--” She went now to the doublet under the bed and unpinned the badge. On her return to the doorstep, she brandished it like a talisman to ward them off.

“So you took it in to your head to go alone! Child, to go off on your own against all and any wisdom, and do this senseless deed! What were you thinking, with the roads infested with brigands and worse still? We had thought that old leper had returned and taken you perhaps!” Father Pietro’s worry seemed sincere.

Ser Pangrazio took an entirely different tone “Girl, are you possessed of a demon?

Furthermore, you breached a contract! What of the rest of the party that put up money and planning to accompany you? What of how you inconvenienced them all, your betters at that?”

“I am Ghisola Fontenallata, as you see from the badge. I have returned from Santa Vergine delle Fontane and so have fulfilled Mona Agnese’s wishes. If I went alone that was my own risk to take and whether the others did or did not take the pilgrimage is none of my concern. What now do you want of me?”

The two men paused, exchanging glances. Had she in fact breached a contract, the notary wondered? Was she in need of exorcism, Father Pietro asked himself? In their silence Ghisola looked at them with undisguised impatience and began to close the door.

Ser Pangrazio stopped the door from swinging fully shut and Father Pietro explained that their visit had another purpose.

“In thanks for saving the girl child, the Ubalducci have chosen to forgive your debts to them. In thanks and in return, I advise you to attend to Mona Vanna who has need of your services, this instant-- it seems her time is upon her and she not yet at nine months along. As soon as she heard of your return, she sent us for you. Fetch your things and get yourself thither.”

Aching in her bones from the long road, she nevertheless made her way to the palazzo she once called home with Agnese. Mona Vanna would surely cheat her of her midwife’s fees, when the bill came due, with her fine excuse now of the Ubalducci debts forgiven, but she went anyway. Her thoughts had taken a certain direction, and she was determined, paid or not, to see them through.

She knew these soft hangings, for they had framed Agnese’ suffering, her death, had hid from the others the most apparent effects of it on Ghisola’s distraught face. The heat of the chamber with its roaring fireplace was immediately familiar to her skin. Not from her longexperience with different birth chambers, but the very swelter she had worked under watching Agnese slowly slip from her white knuckled grasp into the crackling, heavy air. The same bustle of women animated the room, like phantoms at their endless duties. She had lost Agnese, then saved Agnesina, only to lose her again.

“This time,” she swore under her breath, “Matters will go otherwise.”

The lady spoke to the midwife, “I hope you expect no fee after the generosity of the Ubalducci in removing your debts from the account books.” Her tone was commanding for one crying out between two contractions.

Ghisola did not reply. She was not at all of a mind that Ubaldo’s own debts to herself had been absolved, could be absolved. And she knew just what she would accept in the way of amends. She kept her silence however, reserving her words for a very precise end.

The hours trudged on.

Vanna prayed the saints and angels for a boy, then she began to demand it of Ghisola, as if women did not create male or female through the process of growing the child in their belly. “And this must be an heir, now, do you hear?”

The women whispered, tended to the fire, building up its flames to a degree difficult to withstand. The chamber stank of everyone’s sweat, then, as the night wore on, of far worse, the body’s waste that could not be held in as the mother-to-be pushed out her progeny. Cousins and sisters fussed over Vanna as she moaned her suffering, slurping down the poppyseed tea and demanding more.

Finally, near daybreak, the odor of blood joined that of the other effluvia. The babe entered the world, a boy, after all, but one that did not draw breath.

“Do something, girl! Make it live!” Mona Vanna ordered from the red-drenched bedlinens.

Ghisola’s voice welled up from her throat. At first the words would not come. She felt only an inchoate sound burbling up from her mouth. And rusty too. For long months, all the time of her journey, she had spared it, the better to keep her disguise. But she had spent her life tamping it down, that voice she cursed for having failed to tell Agnese of her love when it had mattered most. Now, though, it rose as if from the dead, and this time it served as weapon, for love, yes but a weapon all the same. She would wield it as a master in the art.

“For breathing, there is naught my skill or any other can do. Ser Ridolfo will surely be distraught over the loss of an heir,” she leaned in close to Vanna and whispered in her ear, that weapon now honed to cut to the quick. “And yet the babe’s nose does not favor the Barbadori line. No, not at all. Nor even the Ubalducci on your own side.”

Mona Vanna did not reply. This too came down to life and death, for her husband, Ser Ridolfo had begun to look at her questioningly. His leash was long but did not brook the cuckold lightly. The last time she flirted with Puccio, he had that night placed his hands on her neck and stared into her eyes, before walking away.

“That nose, nay the blue of those eyes, are the spitting image of the young Puccio who has been circling and sniffing about your skirts for a year and more. You have long fluttered around flames, Mona Vanna. And long has Ser Ridolfo shut his eyes to what all have beheld. But I have seen him stare at your exchanges with whatever popinjay drew your attention at a given moment. Should your lord and master have those doubts confirmed by a third party who has reason to know, a midwife for example?”

Mona Vanna reflected. Ghisola could almost see her thoughts moving beneath her forehead. Should Ser Ridolfo hear from someone, even or especially were that someone a woman, a midwife at that, her days would be numbered.

“Name your price,” the exhausted woman choked out.

So Ghisola did.

As she turned to leave with her prize, the lady called after her, with her last strength, depleted as much from her labor as the deal she could hardly believe she had just made, despite her relieved grief at the death of the child and a way out.

“Beware girl, your own deeds will come back to haunt you!”

Thus, when Ghisola left the palazzo, it was with a bundle cradled in her arms. She took out her stoppered bottle of spring water and sprinkled it on the two-month old’s forehead, whispering once more “Agnesina.”

She knew that there was no coming back from this, that in a town essentially ruled by the Ubalducci and Barbadori clans, her days also were numbered should she be foolish enough to stay in Vallombrone’s walls.

And so, with the child swaddled safely in her embrace, stopping briefly at her domicile she gathered some small things – books of her mother’s and her mother’s before her, of women’s illnesses and other cunning. She was sure to grab the pilgrimage badge in memory of the one who had offered it to her. But as soon as she had a knapsack full, she left again, locking up door and shutters. With the little girl child strapped to her torso, Ghisola continued on, knowing precisely whither her feet directed her, whither her heart led.

She left the city by the northern gates, crossing the Ombrone, taking the road north and then east into the tangle of thickets of the greenwood.

A sudden appearance of deer surprised her not at all. The stag, like a benediction, emerged from the roadside wood, looking into her eyes with his own alert gaze, under a rack of ten points. She spied him along the route, from time to time, peering out from the woods, as though to see her to her destination, a league or two farther on, perhaps a bit more, to a clearing in the wood, where the monkshood and belladonna grew in abundance, a haven for the toads with the power to free a woman from a brutal fate. There stood a hut, abandoned by now, surely, once and for all. What need now had he to hide? She knew too that she possessed now the ways and means to cleanse it of any lingering mal aria, of illness, to make of it a safe home for both her and Agnesina for all the years to come.

FIN

Image: Map of Italy 1467 edition of Cosmographia Claudii Ptolomaei, National Library of Poland (via Wikipedia)

"The Pilgrimage" first appeared in Triptych N°2 July 2026

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