The Book of Madness and Cures (20 page)

As we settled into our new lodging, I observed the view outside: you’d barely have known we were staying by a famous garden. Some valiant twigs poked through the snow; a few small evergreen yew trees in large pots suggested a pathway, while the pergola at the very center marked the demise of summer in its hood of snow.

As Olmina prepared our dinner, peeling and chopping, I pulled a chair up to the fire and turned to my notes, for it always lifted my spirits to touch the book once more.

Mithridatum against Poison

The Greek physician Galen has stated that this famous recipe contains fifty-four ingredients. Others claim that the antidote (devised by King Mithradates in Pontus during the first century) contains no more than thirty-six. Whatever the number, the king was defeated by his own antidote, a cautionary tale for whoever wishes to take it in daily dosage. For Mithradates became immune to poison, and when he desired to kill himself honorably in the face of his enemy the Roman general Pompey, the king could not die by poison. He was forced to beg his servant to slay him. Therefore my recommendation is to give in small sips only when the cause under suspicion is poison. Be sure of the signs (and surely this requires another volume for all the varieties of poison). Another danger of daily use is illustrated in the tales of the poison damsels, girls fostered upon small doses of venom from an early age. The slightest kiss from such a girl grown into a woman would be fatal, and so she would be shunned by all men.

CHAPTER 13

What Was Lost Was Returned

Over the next
few days, I became intimately acquainted with the sound of the wind. It advanced windmill by windmill and then passed over us, setting up a slow shudder that could be felt in the very floorboards. Surely everyone in that moment stopped what they were doing and noted the change before they turned back to curing herring, planing clogs, or weighing the Edam. The Hollanters constructed their lives up against the encroachment of water, for the windmills emptied the marshes and the storm tides reclaimed them.

I’d barely regained my footing after days of rocking on the Rhin ship, only to arrive in a place where one never forgot that land was temporary.

“Signorina Gabriella, haven’t you heard me calling you?” Olmina was clearly annoyed, having been drawn away from bread making. I looked up from my notes to see her hands gloved in dough, her brow dusted with flour, like some poorly applied face powder. I smiled at her.

“Oh, I forgot, you’re in that other world.” She raised her eyebrows, then repeated, “A gentleman from Piamonte is at the door on some important errand. He will speak only to you about it.”

I drew on my slippers and glanced for a moment in the small wavy mirror hanging in a blue frame on the wall. I suppose the gardener who’d occupied this cottage didn’t need to see much of himself; the mirror only reflected half a face at a sensible distance. But now that I was more freely a woman again, I longed for a larger mirror. I could see that my feathery hair sprang like the pluckings of a pheasant around my face, in a length too long for a man now, but too short and unruly for a woman. I struggled to push it into Cousin Lavinia’s snood, which ill served the purpose of containing it. She would have been amused. I could almost hear her back in Venetia saying,
Just throw away the snood, Gabriella. Let your hair wander.

At the door, I saw a man with lively, close-set eyes and a fine auburn beard woven with gray. He presented himself as Signor Vincenzo Gradenigo, a merchant of dry goods. His two young servants stood behind, clearly bored. They held mules with bolts of cloth poking out, no doubt cambrics, fine silks, damasks, and brocades, and probably also unseen scissors, needles, and threads of different weights.

A ring hung on a yellow cord around Signor Gradenigo’s neck, signifying Jewish descent, and his accent conveyed a cultivated tone. My ear was delighted by the slant of familiar sound, for Jewish physicians and scholars had often attended our midday table at home. The strict edicts of the Council of Ten forced them to return to the quarter built near the old foundry, the Ghetto, at night—though even this nocturnal exile within our city was not harsh enough for certain brittle minds, who wanted to banish Jews altogether.

“Signorina Mondini.” Signor Gradenigo removed his broad red hat and smiled at me in a friendly manner, and then he bowed, exposing the swarthy orb of his bald head as he bent forward. “I have the honor of your acquaintance several times removed. First through the good offices of the fine Widow Gudrun, at whose inn you stayed in Überlingen. Then through a certain student of botany in Tübingen, Wilhelm Lochner.” Here Signor Gradenigo paused and rose out of the bow to which he’d slowly descended. An involuntary jolt shot through me at the mention of Wilhelm. I struggled to keep a bland expression, though I doubt I’d fooled the merchant. At his full height, Signor Gradenigo examined my face, looking up slightly as he continued to speak. He was a little shorter than I, so I gained the rare advantage of a downward perspective toward a man.

His nose was narrow and handsome. His upper lip lay hidden beneath his mustache, while the lower lip formed around his words with great vigor. His brows joined in the center, and the veins were clearly written upon his temples. He drew back a little, and then I noticed that in fact his shoulders slumped (a habit of cloaked despondency, perhaps?) beneath the sumptuous broadcloth of his black shoulder cape.

He frowned slightly. He must have sensed that I wasn’t fully listening to him. I brought myself back in time to hear him say, “According to the instructions of Widow Gudrun, then, I have your medicine chest in my possession and have come to return it to you.”

“Oh!” I cried out in joy.

Signor Gradenigo extended his arm toward the mules, like a conjurer. I leapt forward and startled the poor man by clasping his shoulders in my elation. “Come in, then, dear gentleman!” I cried. “I’m truly indebted to you and would grant you a reward! At the very least you must take dinner with us.” I turned around. “Lorenzo, Lorenzo! Come and take care of the gentlemen’s mules!”

He appeared at once, as if he’d been waiting just behind the door.

“I’d be glad to accept your hospitality,” Signor Gradenigo said, nodding. “But first I must settle us in our lodgings. Perhaps the signorina would like to renew her acquaintance with the inestimable chest, which I’m sure has its own story to recommend. There are certain things that contain more than their own history.”

“Certain things too that erase history,” I responded without thinking, and then, sensing my color rise, I quickly thanked him again.

The gentleman nodded graciously and delivered the medicine chest into my arms, with a slight pressure of his hand against mine as he released it.

I couldn’t wait to take an inventory of the chest’s contents. I instructed Olmina to leave me undisturbed for the rest of the day. I carried the chest to my room and touched the lid gently, in the way one would welcome an old friend, as I examined the brass hinges and handles, read the nicks and scratches that formed an account of its passage.

I say “read,” but the chest was also largely illegible to me. I was shaken by the sense that it was no longer entirely mine. In truth it had become a foreign object, smelling of foreign goods. Woolen carpets, cinnamon, and oranges…perhaps rose water? And something sour I couldn’t identify.

It had been my intention this very week to commission a new chest here in Leiden. I’d delayed so long, refrained from purchasing a plain chest, because nothing could replace the old one, and now the Venetian chest was back in my possession! What was lost was returned, but I could see immediately the contents had been viewed and handled by strangers. I realized this would also be an inventory of the lost, the stolen, and the damaged. Though a few things were reduced (the mercury one-fourth its original amount) and other things were missing (someone had broken a bottle of black salsify water and spilled chamomile powder all over the bottom of the chest), the actual losses were few. (Had the lake, the widow, or the merchant spirited away the rare and expensive Spanish oil? I wouldn’t begrudge anyone this if it were so…) The Widow Gudrun had appeared sympathetic while we stayed at her inn, but perhaps she’d already discovered and hoarded the chest? It may have been close by, in the attic, where she’d ascended each night.

Gudrun (or Signor Gradenigo?) had taken out all the drawers and trays, all the pewter- and parchment-capped bottles—round, square, triangular, and rectangular—and examined them. Someone had manipulated the bowls, scales, and small brass weights, marble mortar with agate pestle, pewter boxes, brushes, lancets, and needles and put everything back in the wrong order, though clearly some attempt had been made to arrange them, and this attempt was more disconcerting to me than a random shuffle. Someone had insinuated herself or himself into the scheme of things. Someone had stroked the wood with uncomprehending hands and scribbled words at the edges of the drawers, words whose meaning I’d have to inquire of Professor Otterspeer later.

The chest had suffered from the cold. The oak had tightened and warped against the brass corners and hinges. One night, I imagined, the widow must have understood she couldn’t keep it, as her brittle hands wavered across the dolphin handles and the cartouches of a woman’s head mounted upon them. Perhaps she looked upon the inner lid, the god Asclepius and his daughter Hygieia staring back at her as if they would ask,
Would you take what isn’t yours?
and she became frightened. So Gudrun gave up the chest to one of her guests, the cloth merchant who was also on his way north, among his destinations Tübingen and Leiden. If this was all so, then I was glad that she chose her courier well. Another might have been sorely tempted to sell its valuable contents.

Though these intrusions into my medicine chest unsettled me, I was more surprised by what had been
added.
I soon found a needle, like an amulet or hex slipped into a person’s clothing, the thin silver spike driven into the drawer groove in such a way that I couldn’t easily remove it. A short length of red thread ran through the eye. Was this the widow’s way of protecting herself against bad luck? Or was it the merchant’s needle and thread?

I would have to find out.

Through the window shutters I could hear voices clamoring in the lane below. I cracked open the shutter, and the chill evening crept in. Stars pricked the sky like dull tacks, and a thin membrane of ice shone dimly on part of the canal below. To my amazement, the insubstantial had grown solid: the whole canal was covered with a frozen skin webbed with pale capillaries, cracks that formed as it wavered slightly from the motion of the water beneath. The canals in Venetia rarely froze, and I’m sure my father would’ve liked to see this. Perhaps he had seen it.

Why—I suddenly questioned myself—did I always wish to see things companioned by his eyes?

In a letter from Hispania in the summer of 1587, my father had written:

Remember when Avicenna noted, “The eye is like a mirror, and the visible object is like the thing reflected in the mirror.” The orb of the earth, like an eye, collects the light from the sun, passing it through a crystalline atmospheric lens to retinal purpose, envisioning us. Maybe that’s all we are, the little figures at the back of the vitreous humor of night, moving, gesturing, dying. Upside down like the creatures reflected on a spoon. And we think we are so large! We are so important! But we are socketed in our illusions. I am large to you, dear Daughter, and you are large to me. But we only flicker like insignificant sparks upon this earth.

That evening, though I knew well enough it was foolish for a woman to go out alone, I yearned to breathe fresh air, if only for a little while. So I dressed in warm stockings and breeches—I’d kept the men’s clothing I’d purchased in Tübingen—and crept downstairs. No one in the cottage awakened. My companions (truthfully, after all that we’d been through, I could no longer simply call them my servants) lay snug in their bed upstairs. Lorenzo’s snores reassured me.

I put on my boots and went out.

Frost on the ground crackled underfoot as I strode briskly along the canal. I liked being outside alone in a city of sleepers. Feeling myself a sort of ghost, I slipped through the town gate, which had been neglectfully left unlocked, and found myself outside Leiden’s walls on the south bank of the Rhin.

Such a relentlessly horizontal country, the Netherlands! My life would thin out here. Rarefy. Where was the night watchman? The river was black and loud now, and though ice had begun to sheet at the edges, the currents carved away at it.

I stood there motionless for a long time.

When I turned my eyes back to the shadowy gateposts, two men moved there. One slid open the side of a lantern and lifted it toward me. The watchman. I also recognized Lorenzo’s voice. He’d followed me.