38

Thomas Kelly was right on her heels as Livia slipped behind the carved wooden screen to the far side of the apse, then through the blue folds of a velvet curtain and around a chapel to an unremarkable door against the far wall. Anyone might think, she reflected, that people made a habit of slinking around Santa Maria della Scala without being seen. Of course, since an order of cloistered friars had lived here for six hundred years, they probably did. The lock on the door was easy and Thomas Kelly, though he tsk’ed in obvious unhappiness when she picked it, had the sense not to speak until it was closed again and they were on the other side.

“What now?” he demanded in a whisper, glancing at a staircase that led up into dimness. “This doesn’t look like a way out.”

“No. We need to work out what this poem means before we go anywhere. This is a place where we won’t be disturbed.”

“What happened to ‘you and your priest must leave’?”

“I’m not the one who said that. Look, Spencer can be hard to take, I know. But he has a marvelous mind and he’s a loyal friend. And his work has been very important to the Noantri.” At that the priest scowled. Without knowing why—did she really think Thomas Kelly would ever feel kindly toward her and her people? And did it matter if he did?—Livia went on, “Spencer studies the history of the Noantri, of our people. It’s an odd thing, to have lives as long as ours but no sense of continuity as a people, no shared history, until a few hundred years ago. I could introduce you to Noantri who rode with Genghis Khan or sailed with Christopher Columbus. Others who helped build the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China. Each of them, for centuries, knew only that he was different from those around him. Knew only guilt and fear as he tried to satisfy hungers over which he had no control. Each knew only his own story, do you understand? Since the Concordat it’s been possible for us to try to bring our stories together. That’s Spencer’s work: to help us begin to understand who we are as a people.”

She stopped abruptly, feeling her cheeks grow hot. She’d never spoken to any of the Unchanged about her people’s history and yearnings, the power of their need for connection, the relief and joy of Community. The few Unchanged outside the inner ranks of the Church who knew about their existence, and the even fewer who were considered friends, were nevertheless rarely presented with any evidence of Noantri misgiving, unhappiness, or doubt.

Livia brushed past Thomas Kelly and started up the curving stone stairs, though she noted as she did that his aversion seemed to have been neutralized, however briefly, by interest, as the scholar in him considered what she’d said.

She led the way up to a landing with a window in the left-side wall and glass-doored cabinets to the right. On the shelves stood ranks of bottles of red, blue, and amber liquids. Most bore labels describing the contents—Perle della Saggezza, Tonico del Missionario—in precise and fading script, though on a few of the more recent ones the labels were the work of that at-the-time cutting-edge technology, the manual typewriter. Livia briefly left Thomas Kelly to his surprised inspection of the shelves and worked on the lock on the door between the cabinets. Kelly didn’t cluck his tongue this time, though he did catch his breath when she got the door open and they walked into the room beyond.

What had taken him by surprise was not, Livia knew, the trompe l’oeil drapery or the aged wooden counter, not the Murano glass bottles or the ceramic jars with their bright painted lids. This was the eighth or ninth time Livia had been in this room, and the glorious aroma that greeted a visitor as the door creaked back was one of the reasons to keep returning.

Thomas Kelly stood in awe, as most first-time visitors did, though Livia knew he couldn’t parse the wave of scent as finely as she could: sweet columbine and spicy goldenrod, the faint rankness of deer’s antlers and the astringent bite of arsenic. And so many, many more: the air was a tapestry of olfactory threads, thick and thin, sharp and soft, bile-bitter and honey-sweet. Over two hundred herbs, flowers, leaves and barks, fruit essences and tree saps, ground minerals, cracked bones, and crumbled earths were stored in this room, in drawers, in jars, and in bottles, waiting.

“What is this place?” Kelly breathed.

“The old pharmacy, from the fifteenth century.”

“Is it still in use?”

“Not since 1954.”

“But it looks so complete. So . . . ready.”

She shook her head. “When it closed, the last apothecary monks just locked the door and walked away. Their order had been pharmacists to the Popes for six hundred years. I think they didn’t really believe they’d never be called on again.”

Now Kelly turned to her. “You think. You knew those monks, didn’t you? In 1954. You were here.”

Livia faced him, calmly but squarely. “I’d moved away for a time, before the Second World War. We have to, every now and then, no matter how committed we may be to our hometowns. We stay away for years and change our identities before we return. We call it ‘Cloaking.’ It’s our own kind of internal exile, and it’s hard on us. But yes, by then I was back.”

Once again, she’d told him more than she’d meant to. She braced for his shudder, even a curled lip of disgust; but to her surprise, they didn’t come. Nor did a kind smile, or sympathetic eyes, but those would have been too much to ask. Kelly just nodded, as though an academic hypothesis had been confirmed, and returned his gaze to the room.

Above the counter where the apothecary friars had traded herbs and elixirs for customers’ coins, a painted angel peered over the trompe l’oeil curtains. He was there, a monk had once told her, to ensure honest dealing.