MARCH 1493
He had thought it would take about a week to walk to Genoa, going to Pisa and then up along the coast between the mountains and the sea. Without thinking about it, he had been imagining himself walking as a solitary friar, being fed at the pilgrim halls of monastic institutions along the way. He had not realised that Isabella would be taking all her possessions and a wagon full of cloth. Having two wagons, and drivers to see to them, and a guard to ensure their safety, means they need to ride, but having horses does not make the journey faster, since most of the time the wagons go more slowly than walking pace. They are constantly getting stuck in the heavy spring mud, or one of the mules throws a shoe in a tiny hamlet with no blacksmith. Isabella is very subdued. Once, when they are moving goods to try to lighten a stuck wagon, she weeps when one of the drivers drops Pico’s for chased-silver hourglass in the mud. She wipes it clean and berates him for carelessness, saying that the glass could easily have broken. For the rest of that day she sits cradling it in her arms.
She does not really speak to Girolamo until the third day, when the rain clears midmorning and they stop to eat at midday in an inn perched on the slope of a hill. Girolamo has not had much experience of travellers’ inns before this journey, but he already has a very low opinion of them.
The road runs along a ridge in the narrow space between the mountains and the sea. The sea down below is a dark blue, flecked here and there with white as the wind whips it. The mountains above are snowcapped, still, but here on the lower slope the trees are green, pines above and chestnuts and hazel lower down. All around them the grass is thick with crocus and anemones. The well-used road is a ribbon of mud rolling out ahead and behind. The inn is painted white, and has an orange terra-cotta roof. Inside, it stinks of sour wine, scorched porridge, and wet dogs. The fire is smoking. Without discussion, Girolamo and Isabella take their meal outside, sitting on the wooden bench that runs around the outside of the inn. A brisk wind is blowing clean salt-scented air from the sea. They are alone out there. Everyone else has chosen to huddle inside.
He bites into his bread. It’s stale. “This is a rotten inn. Even worse than the others.”
“I’m glad we’re not staying the night. I hope we make good time this afternoon,” she says.
This has been the kind of conversation they have had all the way, the petty details of the road, between near strangers. But now she looks at him with her head tilted, in a way he remembers. “I’d venture you haven’t thought much about clothes, Master Savonarola?”
“Clothes?” he asks, disconcerted. “No, I haven’t.”
“That’s what I thought,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about them a great deal, since I decided to set up in this business. You see, clothes tell you a lot about a person. They tell you their social status, and very often their profession. Doctors, lawyers, scholars, senators, and of course their wives and daughters. And you can tell a lot from the cut and quality of cloth, too. Did Giovanni give you what you’re wearing?”
“Angelo Poliziano did,” he admits. He didn’t know where Angelo had found the clothes. Angelo had offered them to him the morning after he had realised he couldn’t go back to San Marco, and he’d pulled them on, awkwardly, hardly remembering how to fasten them.
“Angelo? I’d have thought he’d have more about him. But it was right after Magnificent Lorenzo died, wasn’t it, so he probably didn’t have time to think about it too much.”
“Why? What’s wrong with my clothes?” He looks down at his belted fawn tunic and dark hose.
She is smiling when he looks back at her. “They should have given you a scholar’s robes, you’d have found them more comfortable. What you’re wearing says that you’re some kind of middling guildsman, except your hat is wrong for that, and that makes you look out of place, so everyone looks at you and wonders. Now in Florence that doesn’t matter so much, because everyone who looks at you knows you were Brother Girolamo and First Brother of San Marco until you had a revelation at the deathbed of Magnificent Lorenzo and God told you to leave the monastery. But here on the road, where you’re not known, it makes people wonder about you.”
Girolamo is profoundly embarrassed. “Would you help me find something more appropriate?” he asks.
“I’m sure I can when we get to Genoa,” she says. “You are a scholar, now, aren’t you, like Angelo, or like Master Benivieni?”
“Not like Benivieni, I hope,” he says.
She laughs. “Don’t you like him either?”
“Since I left San Marco, he’s been at me constantly to tell him why. He behaves as if he’s enough of my friend he has the right to know, and he acts hurt when I don’t agree.”
“He’s just the same with Giovanni. And he’s gallant with me in a way that assumes that because I was living with Giovanni without being married to him, I must have no morals. I despise him.”
Far off in the distance, Girolamo sees the sails of a round ship heading north. “She’ll be bound for Genoa,” he says, pointing her out.
“I could have gone by sea from Pisa, later in the year,” Isabella says.
He nods, eating an olive sour enough to curl his tongue. It’s early enough that sailing is risky.
“But Giovanni wanted to pack me off right away. You wanted to get out and he wanted to get in, and neither of you could wait, or tell me what the hurry was. It’s not as if I’d have embarrassed him. It’s not as if he’s getting married.”
He looks at Isabella in surprise. The wind is whipping a tendril of her hair across her face. “I thought you were resigned to it,” he says.
“Did he tell you that?”
Pico hadn’t. He had told Girolamo that she’d been complaining. Girolamo was going on his memories of Isabella the other times, and they were two years later and from another world. “You seem so sensible,” he says, feebly.
“Well, in this world we have to make the best of what we have,” she says, biting into an onion. “My father was a bean seller. I’m lucky to have had what I have had with Giovanni, these last years, and luckier that he’s setting me up with a business now. But it’s hard to see him so eager to get away from me when I am so fond of him. Was, that is. I was fond of him. I’ll never see him again.”
“And he is fond of you. He’s making sure you’re comfortable.”
“Like giving away a dog,” she says, pushing away the strand of hair, trying to disguise the fact that there are tears in her eyes.
“He has always spoken well of you,” Girolamo says, and his always encompasses more than one life.
“It’s the onion,” she says, now openly wiping her eyes. “It’s a strong one, that’s all.”
“Of course,” he says, joining her in her lie. He eats a piece of hard dry cheese. It is a conundrum he doesn’t know how to solve. Clearly Pico should be a Dominican, for his own soul. Besides, he needs to become the Dominican preacher Florence needs to become the City of God, now that Girolamo can no longer take that place. And it is sin to fornicate without marriage, and as Isabella told him after Pico’s death in his previous life, they could never have married, because of the difference in their social status. The daughter of a bean seller could never marry a Count. “How did you meet him?”
“In the market. He charmed me away from the beans and lentils. I was sixteen. Five years ago. Many people aren’t happy so long.” She sighs.
“I suppose not.”
Isabella unfastens her headscarf. For the first time he sees all of her hair, a deep brown in the spring sunshine. She fixes the loose strand back, then refastens the scarf firmly. Her hands are deft and accustomed to the task. She sees him looking and blushes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”
“I’ve seen it before, my mothers, my sisters.”
“It’s so difficult on the road. And of course I think of you as a priest. I heard one of your women’s sermons. In San Lorenzo. On the Creation. It made me think.”
“You wouldn’t be able to live with Pico without being able to think,” he says. Has he failed this woman’s soul by ceasing to preach? Or would God find a way? He urgently wants to talk to the others about this.
She smiles, staring out over the waves. “I thought about taking vows, since he’s doing it. The way husbands and wives do, when they both go into the Cloister. But no one would have me but a Magdalen order, and I don’t want to spend my days doing endless penance. If I could be a Dominican and use what I’ve learned from Giovanni, maybe.”
He cannot pray, or even thank God, for him to address God would be to attempt to besmirch Him. Not being able to pray is like having an amputated arm that constantly aches despite not being there to ache. He tries over and over to reach out with the missing arm, and grasps only pain. Yet although he cannot thank God, and not being able to thank God is the constant reminder and yoke of his damnation, the wish to thank Him rips through Girolamo the way a strong gale uproots trees.
“You could become a Dominican in Genoa where people will know you as a widow,” he says, when he can speak. He notices that he has spilled his plate and the food is on the grass around his feet. “You have spiritual gifts.”
“Did God tell you that?” she asks. She picks up a wizened apple and an onion he has dropped and wipes them unselfconsciously on her skirt.
“God—I—indirectly, yes,” he says, in consternation, unable to explain. He wonders how she would react if he did explain. He imagines that she would take it well, but he dare not risk it for such slight cause.
“I have done nothing Giovanni didn’t do,” she says, unaware of the turmoil within Girolamo. “It is so unfair that the world holds different standards for men and women.”
“I have often thought so,” he says, accepting the apple and the onion back from her. He bites into the apple. It is old, but sweet and good, and the taste of it fills his mouth. He swallows. “There is a house of Dominican nuns in Genoa, the New House of St Dominic.” He remembers corresponding with the First Sister there, in other lives.
“I will think about it and pray,” Isabella says. “I would not lie before God. Passing as a widow in business is different from saying I am one to take vows. And no nuns would want to live with me if they knew.”
He remembers her outfacing him on this subject last time. “As long as you live to love and serve God,” he says.
She looks at him oddly. “I don’t want to pry like Benivieni, but it seems very strange to me that a man like you would leave the Cloister.”
He cannot burden her with the truth, dares not. “It was necessary,” he says, and concentrates on eating the rest of his apple slowly, enjoying the fragrance and flavour of it. She watches him, and after a while when he has finished she silently hands him the matching apple that had been on her plate.