There is a ring of pigeon blood round the bottom of her sleeves. Scrubbing with lye water has not brought out the stains.
White pigeons. Cimon fattened them, gleefully forcing apple kernels down their throats as they clawed and flapped. When they were well plumped, he and Flavia wrung their necks and did away with the heads, the guts and the feet, and distilled what was left in a limbeck with three hundred leaves of silver and gold foil. Finally they added an etto of breadcrumbs steeped in milk. The resulting soap is now sealed in little terracotta pots that Il Sicofante sells for a florin each. He says it will bring freshness to the cheeks of a woman even if she is on her deathbed. Flavia tried some on her own face. It made her itch.
Il Sicofante is growing desperate. He scours the hillsides and the market stalls for anything that is white or glowing and pounds it into the cerussa. So far he has tried cauliflower hearts, flint, the jawbone of a boar and sheep’s eyes. But the cerussa is not Venetian. It does not speak to the heavens. It is as flat as the lead that goes into it. Good enough for an artisan’s wife but the apothecary has pledged his soul to the Alfani matrons.
They must shine.
* * *
Three things Flavia no longer has: her shoes, her wig, Suora Dorotea’s Book of Common Ailments.
The day after she went to Susanna’s house, the apothecary summoned her to the blushing room and demanded ten recipes. She gave him two, both of her own making. One was a face wash designed to even the texture of winter-roughened skin; the other a digestive tonic to cleanse the breath. Il Sicofante tried both of them on Cimon, who woke the following morning with screaming diarrhoea and a boil the size of a quail’s egg on the end of his nose. Flavia protested that Cimon was an unfair subject, being closer to a toad than a human being, but Il Sicofante was furious.
Her heels are now hardening themselves on her old clogs. She has been careful to put them to good use whenever Cimon’s skinny bottom hooves into view. The wig was surrendered along with the shoes. She has seen it since, at the market, sitting pompously on the head of a banker’s wife. Instinctively Flavia put two fingers into her mouth and whistled like a herder to a straggling goat. She imagined her wig springing lightly off the banker’s wife’s head and romping back to its proper mistress, but it seemed happy where it was. Perhaps the banker’s wife combed it out more than Flavia did, maybe she picked out the fleas. Either way, Flavia has no time to dye or curl her own hair, so she plaits the fading coloured strands beneath her cap and tries not to think about it.
As for Suora Dorotea’s Book of Common Ailments, it is cloth wrapped and strapped in a courier’s saddlebag, trotting its way to a scholar in Venice. The scholar will doubtless write back to Il Sicofante, berating him for wasting his time with the ravings of a scatterbrained dispensary nun.
* * *
Flavia spends more and more time away from the apothecary’s house. She takes whatever messages or packages are thrust at her. Despite her losses she is glad to breathe in the city for hours on end. It feels familiar now. The Piazza Grande and its two-tiered fountain, the smart streets and the grubby ones, all of them more like home than the Casa Nascosta ever was.
She begins to forget she is country born, and thinks her father a fool for ever leaving the city of swinging black capes.
But she does not understand the dangers. One day she is cutting through alleys behind the Via Bontempi when an unknown man steps out of a doorway, his yellow teeth shaped in a grin. Without a word he pulls her towards him and swings her round until her back strikes wood. Tangled odours, feral and stale, rush into her nostrils as his head smothers the half-light of the alley. There are lips, tongue, teeth around and inside her mouth. A rush of saliva, not her own, which she can neither swallow nor expel. Her head is gripped in his hands, two mouths in bitter duelling.
Though her back tooth is burrowed through, the rest are good. She used them to smile at Vitale in the marketplace; now she uses them to bite hard on the tongue that does not belong inside her. There is a squeal that seems to be of her own making because he is so far inside her mouth. Fresh blood mingles with his spit and the tongue darts away like a lizard under a rock. Everything she can gather in her mouth she pools and fires at his face.
She runs. Out of the alley, through the tunnelling back streets and up into the Piazza Grande, there she leans and gags against the fountain.
***
She is used to feeling dirty on the outside. Powder under her nails and a ring of dust where her face meets her hair: she once stayed filthy for weeks until Mona Grazia dragged her to the trough with a bucket of lime water and a brush.
The mark on her face, that is outside dirt as well, put there by God or the devil – she is not sure which – but it is still outside dirt. At confession she might sit on a little stool and say she threw a pebble at Zio Alfeo or coveted her sister’s woollen stockings, but there was nothing to make her want to take the lime water to her insides as she does now.
It is time for mid-morning prayers and the door to the cathedral is open. Nervously Flavia creeps up the steps, into sudden darkness and the quiet air of a tomb.
A vast sanctuary of stone, pillars spreading higher than oaks towards a distant ceiling. Like the steady grind of pestle and mortar, the cool interior of the apothecary’s shop. No alteration, no decay. Her breath slows until she does not notice it any more.
A long curtain is strung deep along the nave: a wall to separate the men from the women. On the women’s side there are only two others: both black shawled, facing the altar. Seeking comfort among the sparseness, Flavia takes a seat a couple of rows behind them. There is still a foreign taste in her mouth and she sucks on the end of her sleeve, which tastes of dust and pumice and a bit of pigeon blood, all of it better than the saliva of the yellow-toothed man.
In front of her, the taller of the black heads stretches from side to side, the shoulders rising as a yawn is suppressed.
Flavia looks over to the priest.
His flesh is failing him; it can barely hang onto his skull. If he were in the blushing room she would take both cheeks and pull them tight to his ears, just to see what time has done. Much better looking is the statue over his head. The elegant suffering of the Lord, his body twisted in pain. The lacquered paint picks out the stretched sinews and his ribcage glistens in the rough altar light. White and red are Christ’s colours. His naked flesh and vibrant wounds. Il Sicofante says no one can blame the city matrons for their love of cerussa and fucus when they are the colours most found on the body of our Lord.
Again the shoulders belonging to the taller head in front of her rise up. A hissing yawn escapes in the pause after the prayer of absolution. The priest looks blearily from the altar, his lower lip a sagging line of laundry. Something in the redness of it, fleshy and unstrung, coincides with the hiss from the black head and makes Flavia’s heart tap softly at her insides.
There is something here, under this shawl with its covered boredom. Something even worse than the yellow-toothed man.
Flavia begins to ease her way back out along the bench. Halfway along, her foot catches on her skirts and twists them sideways until the pocket where she keeps her little pot of cerussa falls open. She leans down to grab it, striking her knuckles against the bench. The sound echoes loudly and the tall black head swings round.
Red lips and white skin. The two tones of Ghostanza Dolfin.
Flavia scrabbles to the end of the pew. Hurrying up the nave her clogs strike at the stones and echo between pillars. Behind her the priest’s words are cut in two by an angry bark of laughter.