“Good morning, Chiara,” I said as she came in to open the shutters one morning.
“Good morning, Madonna,” she said. “Why, it is so good to see you looking well. You are better every day!”
“I do not know if I should hope that it lasts, this time,” I said. I bit my lip. “It has been so long…”
Chiara sighed and crossed herself. “Have faith, Madonna. God hears our prayers. Perhaps you shall finally be well again now.”
“Perhaps,” I said. I got up from the bed. “Send to the Medici palazzo, if you will, and see if Clarice would like me to visit her this afternoon.”
“Si, Madonna.” Chiara bustled away to send my message.
I heard a few cheers from the street below when the window opened, but nothing like it had been. My illness—a long one, this time, with only a few intermittent days of good health—had kept me out of the public eye for some months.
As though God were punishing me for my many sins, I was stricken again early the previous summer, soon after Sandro and I had declared ourselves to each other. Marco and I had not been able to go for a visit at the Medici villa, as we had been wont to do in years past. My world had shrunk to my bedroom; there were no more parties and dinners—or, rather, there were, but I was always too ill to attend. There had been a few frightful bouts, days of fever and coughing up blood that I scarcely remembered. Each time Marco—looking so haggard and worried, as though he still had some love for me left after all—told me both he and the doctor had thought it was the end. Yet always I rallied, always I came back from the brink. Then there would be some days—weeks, even, if I was lucky—where I felt perfectly well before the illness struck me down again.
What no one told me, but what I could divine for myself, was that I could not go on much longer like this. We had not known, when first the doctor had given his diagnosis, how much time I might have left; yet what seemed to be plain was that the consumption was determined to claim me before too much longer. It felt as though there were an hourglass lodged inside me, and the sand was beginning to trickle down at an alarming rate.
I had had much time to consider this on the days when I lay in bed, much time to rage and weep and beg and bargain with God. I had accepted my fate as fact, had accepted that my fears now seemed more likely than my hopes. Yet that did not mean that I was at peace with it.
If only I might live to see Sandro’s painting. To see The Birth of Venus. If only I might live that long, at least.
Our work together had been very infrequent over the past year, since that one night that was seared on my memory. Perhaps only three more times after that had I gone to his workshop. We could correspond but little; only when I could send Chiara with a note—when I was well enough to write one—and when she could find him at home to deliver it in person.
Chiara returned to help me dress, and I went downstairs to break my fast. Meanwhile, I received a reply from Clarice that she would love for me to join her for the noon meal, if I desired. I sent back a reply in the affirmative, and went upstairs to gather the last few books I had borrowed from the Medici library—I would take them back and retrieve a few new ones while I was there.
Clarice, when I arrived, was well, if a bit harried from the demands put upon her by the ever-growing brood of Medici children. It had ceased to pain me quite so much that I had never conceived—no doubt due to my poor health, even if we did not know early on that this was the reason.
And perhaps it was just as well that I did not leave a child—or children—without a mother.
“You are looking quite well, Simonetta,” she said, when she had passed off the children to their nursemaid. “I was so glad to receive your note. I have missed you.”
“And I, you,” I said. “I have been a poor friend of late, I feel.”
“Do not say that,” she said. “You have been ill.” She reached out and took my hand. “I hope you know that I pray for you every day,” she said softly. “I pray that God…” She broke off abruptly. “No, quite enough of that,” she said briskly. “Quite enough gloom when you are looking so well.”
“No, Clarice,” I said. “Tell me what it is you wanted to say.” I hesitated. “You may not have as much time as you think.”
“Oh, Simonetta, no,” she said. “Do not say that. I only meant—”
“Please, amica,” I said. “Do not play false with me. When I am not ill, Marco acts as though I am as well as I have ever been, and … somehow that is more grating than the consumption itself. Let us speak plainly to each other.”
And so Clarice, with her quiet strength, took a deep breath and looked me straight in the eye. “Every day I beg God not to take my only friend,” she said. “Because you are, you know, Simonetta. The only true friend I have had since I left Rome.”
This time it was I who reached out and took her hand. “Then perhaps God will see fit to spare me after all, since it is you who beseeches Him,” I said. “For I know of no better, kinder soul than you.”
She smiled, blinking away tears. “If He hears any of my prayers, I hope it is this one.” She shook her head slightly. “Now, though, it is enough of that. No doubt one day when we are old women together we shall look back on this day and laugh.”
I smiled, releasing her. “Perhaps,” I said.
I spoke the words, even though I did not believe them.