Signora Da Vinci (2 page)

But the truth of my unsuitability for marriage, I realized as I knelt before the plain wooden chest at the foot of my bed, I was now holding in my hands. It was my much-worn copy of Plato’s
Timaeus
. . . in Greek. No one would want so freakishly educated a girl as I was.

A girl with secrets even worse than that.

I carefully wrapped the book in a scarlet and gold silk scarf Papa had given my mother before she died—it was now one of my prized possessions—and carefully placed the package in my sturdy cloth herb sack. I took the stairs down another flight, knowing I would find there in the kitchen or sitting room the first obstruction to my hoped-for day of freedom.

“Eat something, Caterina!” I heard, before I saw, Aunt Magdalena calling out as she bent over, retrieving our morning bread from the oven. Her substantial buttocks pointing in my direction blocked sight of all the rest of her, but her position made my “Not hungry!” and my flight down the final set of stairs all the easier. This last would be the difficult part.

All along this lower staircase bunches of drying greenery hung, flower side down, wafting lovely fragrances all round my head, announcing my descent into the world of the apothecary. The entire ground floor, inside and out, was dedicated to the herbal arts. The storeroom and drying room into which the staircase emerged was piled bottom to top with barrels and crates, giant jars and boxes that, through their pungent odors as much as their lettering, sang of exotic lands and mysterious spices.

But I could not linger here. My devious plan took me outside to the garden, Papa’s apothecary garden. I suppose it was mine as well. I was more than useful amidst vegetation. Owned great knowledge of it. Took much pleasure in it. This morning, however, I would shamelessly exploit it. Even destroy a part of it . . . for my selfish purposes.

But it was spring. A fresh, glorious, sun-spangled morning. And it was
not
my scheduled day for gathering plants in the wild—ones that either refused to grow in our garden or ones that needed restocking, either by seed or seedling.

I had to be outdoors this day. I’d woken with my blood racing and my lungs aching for the crisp moist air that could only be found near running water.

I knew Papa needed me at the shop. There were countless poultices to be pounded this day, seeds to be ground into fine powder. Decoctions to be mixed for our neighbors, who so depended on Ernesto, the well-loved apothecary of Vinci. There being no physicians or surgeons in our tiny village, he had treated the wealthiest landowners and the poorest farmworkers alike. He was even distinguished as a worker of the occasional miracle. I walked in his golden shadow—beloved child in the image of her sorely missed mother. Good-natured young neighbor who was always willing to run an errand or lend an ear to a bit of complaining, and not much of a gossip.

I hurried to a corner of the garden where I knew the verbena to grow. There it was, a fine healthy clump growing in the loamy earth near the garden wall. Before I allowed myself to ponder my wickedness I gave a final surreptitious glance around me, grasped the base of the greenery and ripped out the clump, roots and all. Stowing it in a waxed cloth bag, I stuffed it in my herb sack and stood.

I straightened my skirts and brushed off some small clods of earth that had fallen on my bodice. As I cleaned myself I could not help but notice the size of my breasts—an altogether new development—one that I suspected had more than a little to do with my recent untoward wildness.

Herb sack over my shoulder, I came back through the storeroom, and doing my best to calm myself, envision myself as the dutiful,
truthful
daughter I had always been, I let myself in through the back door of Papa’s apothecary shop. With its shelves of herbs and jars of potions—bottles of leaves and barks and spices—it was a simple and humble workplace. It was small—for the house itself was small, as most of the four-story homes in Vinci were—and twice as long as it was wide. If a family had a business, it would be found, like Papa’s shop, on the ground floor in the front, facing the street.

An easy and graceful exit was not to be mine this day. Signora Grasso was sliding a basket of ripe tomatoes across the counter at Papa with a grateful smile. Grateful, I wondered, for the cure he had provided for her daughter’s liver flux or for accepting his payment in vegetables?

“Caterina, beautiful child!” she called out at the sight of me. “I tell you, Ernesto, she is growing more lovely every day. The image of her mother.” She looked me up and down so carefully one would have thought she was buying a horse. “But I must say she has your height. Though there are some men who might not mind a tall girl.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with today, signora?” Papa said in that soothing, unrushed fashion the townspeople loved so much. He was, indeed, a long, lanky man with the air of good health about him and a splendid headful of silver hair. He dressed simply and unassumingly, a style that so matched his nature.

“Well, I do have a rash, Ernesto, in a place I will tell you about, but not show you,” she said confidentially.

Just then the bell over the front door jangled and my heart soared. Now there were
two
patients to distract him.

“Papa,” I said, “I find we are out of verbena.”

His eyebrows furrowed. “Did we not have a good patch of it near the south wall?”

“We did,” I said, grateful for the small honesty before the larger lie. “But we used it up.”

“Used it up?”

“Remember? Signora D’Aretino for her jaundice and Signor Martoni and his son for their eyes . . . ?” I paused, as though I had a dozen more who had used up our supply, though I really did not. But I knew very well how long my father allowed himself to ponder trivialities, and was not surprised when a moment later he said, “Yes, Caterina, would you go and get us some? And it would be the time, would it not, to find us some woad along the river?”

“Woad,” I repeated, thrilled that my plan had succeeded. I’d forgotten we had nearly spent our supply of the plant that, made into an ointment, was used in the treatment of ulcers. We both knew it would just be coming into flower.

“I’ll go immediately,” I called, already half out the door. I did not wish to hear any last-minute requests, or reminders to finish my chores before leaving. And I knew the alchemical fire would burn quite happily with no further attention till I returned in the afternoon.

 

As I walked the cobbled streets of Vinci—a hilltop village of perhaps fifty households—with its church and the old castle the only buildings of any size, I pondered my newfound rebellion and felt a touch of shame.

Papa had given me so much . . . and this was how I repaid him. Ernesto was the only parent I had ever known, my mother having died of a fever within weeks of giving birth to me, all of her desperate husband’s potions unable to save her. Throughout my young childhood I had been cherished and doted upon. All the love my widowed father owned he lavished on me. There were no beatings. No abuses. I was made to do the lightest of chores, as everything else was seen to by Magdalena.

Most days I had sat on the apothecary counter and entertained Papa’s customers. I was a natural mimic and could replicate birdsong, a braying mule, or a neighbor’s laugh. Several days a week Papa would take me up into the hills while he picked the herbs that did not grow in his garden. I loved to hide from him in the tall grasses, chase butterflies, or throw my arms wide and race the wind.

He showed me the springs where birds gathered to drink and bathe. They always seemed ecstatic, taking their turns in the shallows. Papa and I would laugh as the sleek feathered creatures turned into shaggy, bedraggled monsters. All in all very little had been expected of me. It gave Papa joy just to know I was such a carefree little girl.

On my eighth birthday everything changed.

He had taken me to a cave that, until then, he’d kept secret from me. It was dark except for a single shaft of light that shone in from its rocky roof. We’d stood silently in that beam of sunlight, altogether illuminated yet surrounded by utter blackness.

“Eight,” he said, his portentous voice echoing in the cavern. “Eight is the greatest of all numbers.”

“Why, Papa?”

“It is the number of Infinity.” At our feet in the sand he drew the number and the symbol, and taking my finger traced it round and round, showing me how it had no beginning and no end. “Eight is the number of endless possibility. Worlds untold. You are eight years old, Caterina. Now begins your true life. Now begins your education.”

And so it had.

That evening after Magdalena had gone home, Papa, carrying a torch, took me up the stairs past our bedrooms to the third-floor landing. Here were two rooms, his
sanctum sanctorum
, that until then had been locked and I’d been forbidden to enter. Obedient child that I was I had obeyed his prohibitions.

First he had unlocked the street-side door. When we entered I found myself in a bright, airy, but unadorned room. It was filled with tables, and the surface of every one of them was covered in books.

Certainly I had seen books before. Papa would always have one near his bed at night. Sometimes if I couldn’t sleep and wandered into his room for comfort I would find him, by the light of a candle, leaning on one elbow over the open pages. He would always close the book and welcome me into his bed to warm me and rock me, and tell me a story. He kept a book of medicines in his apothecary—a list of the curative properties of plants. I thought nothing of these books, no more than I did of the Bible from which the Vinci friars read every Sunday at mass.

But here were dozens of hand-copied books lying on the tables, some of them very large, their pages spread open. Papa held his torch over one of these and I saw not just written words but beautiful golden leaves and vines intertwined with giant letters, and tiny pictures on the pages in every color and hue.

“This manuscript,” he told me, his voice suffused with awe, “is one thousand years old.”

One
thousand
? “Where did you get such a book, Papa?” I asked as I moved slowly round the tables looking at the volumes, which he allowed me, very carefully, to open. I saw many in Latin, which, though I had not learned to read or write, I recognized as such. But there were others with letters that appeared in strange jagged shapes, and others in graceful curves.

“Tell me, you must tell me how you came to have so many books.”

As I was doing, he now began to move about his library, stopping to gaze at a text, holding his torch above his eyes, squinting down and reading a bit, nodding now and again. After a while he began to talk, weaving a story in the same way he had done on those sleepless nights of mine. But these were no stories of dragons and their mountain lairs, or spirits that inhabited the heads of waterlillies.

This was the story of his adventurous youth and his apprenticeship to the notorious Florentine historian and scholar Poggio Bracciolini, himself in the employ of the greatest man in Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici.

“He is still today much loved for his modesty and humble leadership despite his astonishing wealth,” Papa told me, “but in the old days Cosimo took up the notion that the learned men of his beloved city must begin reading the ancient Greek and Roman writers, scrolls and codices that had been scattered all around the world after the destruction of the great library in Alexandria—that is, Egypt. Many of them were hidden from the Christian church fathers, who thought them heretical.”

“What is ‘heretical,’ Papa?”

“Heretical is believing any notion that the priests cannot find in the Holy Scripture. Heretical is a dangerous thing to be. Heretical is what I am, sweet girl.”

I must have looked terrified, for he picked me up and smothered me in a warm embrace. Then, clearing a place on one of the library tables, he sat me down on it.

“Dangerous or not, Caterina, what lies within the pages of these books are truths that we must never allow to be lost to the world. Truths that must be learned by you.”

“Me?” My voice was very small and filled with dread. Hadn’t Papa just told me that the books were heretical and that this was dangerous?

“Listen to me.” He knelt before me so his face was close to mine and he spoke with a passion I had never before heard in his always kindly voice. “You are a female child. In this society of ours you might as well be a clod of cow manure.”

I stared at him without understanding. I was loved, even coddled in my home. If other girls my age were treated differently, I was yet unaware.

“Soon your ‘only worth’ will become apparent—your ‘marriageability.’ If you should marry higher than your station, you will be thought to be increasing your family’s wealth, its standing and connections.”

I really did not comprehend his meaning.
Wealth. Standing. Connections.
These were words never spoken in our household. I guessed they were in short supply here. Surely I had heard the older girls and women speak of marriage as they sat in their basket-weaving circles by the Vincio River, and until then I had always expected to marry.

“But in other places, other times, Caterina—ancient times, pagan times,” he went on, “females were revered. They were high priestesses. Rulers of great lands. They were even supreme goddesses, worshipped by all.”

“Goddesses?” I said uncomprehendingly. “Like the Virgin Mary?”

“No.” He shook his head and laughed a small laugh, then picked up a book with the strange angular letters, and placed it in my lap. “This is the Greek language,” he told me. “In this book the author speaks of Isis, Egyptian goddess of life and love and all of Nature.”

“Does she know Jesus?” I asked.

“No, Caterina, Isis had been a goddess for thousands of years before Jesus was born. But you,” my father told me as he lifted me down off the table, “you will learn to read Greek and Latin and Hebrew—the language of the Jews. I believe that if a female is good enough to become a goddess, then a little girl is good enough to become a scholar.”