The silver brooch wasn’t the only thing her mother had left her. There were two drawings of Santa Lucia that she wasn’t allowed to touch any more because her fingers had worn so much of the ink away. The first one showed Lucia punished and strapped to a team of oxen. She was looking to the heavens as a pagan came towards her, his knife drawn and ready to cut out her eyes because she used them only to see God.
The second picture showed Lucia in the clouds, holding a plate with two big eyes sitting in the middle of it like a pair of poached quail eggs, because what she had lost in life the heavens had given back to her twofold. Eyes to replace the ones she had lost, and an extra pair for healing all those who wander blindly through their lives.
* * *
Ghostanza had got a bit fat but she had stopped being sick, which was very useful because Gilia needed help in making a tableau of herself like Santa Lucia strapped helpless to the oxen (in this case four of her larger dolls) with the peace of martyrdom on her face. When it was finished, Ghostanza looked at her lying on the floor with hair ribbons looped about her wrists and said the enactment of suffering was Gilia’s only true talent, which was cruel sounding though she said it with a smile. Gilia sulked a little as she undid the ribbons. Parassita chased the ends of them around, her paws skidding on the waxed floor until Ghostanza picked her up by the scruff of the neck and threw her out into the passageway. Gilia cried out when she saw it, and then bit on her lip to stop herself saying Antonia thought Ghostanza was a strega and a curse layer; that nobody in the Palazzo Tassi except Gilia and her father liked her at all.
Ghostanza didn’t say sorry about Parassita but she did take Gilia to her dressing table and ground up some powdery red dust which she mixed with water so that Gilia could have Santa Lucia’s tears. Ghostanza dabbed a wet brush down her cheek and sent her along the passageway with her eyes dripping crimson. Gilia felt happy then, because her stepmother was calmer and not always swinging between anger and amusement, and there was no more talk of admirers which brought all the wrong colours to the Palazzo Tassi: Jacopo’s purple face and her father’s grey one, and the dark shades that couldn’t really be seen but crept sometimes inside Gilia’s head among the moved-about furniture.
She wandered wet cheeked towards the kitchen, thinking of Lucia and her extra eyes, but also of the Venus temple and the torch that lit the word ‘Amor’ which Maestro Alessio said meant love, until the clatter of plate and the screams of Antonia brought her back to herself.
It was the wrong time for games said Ricca, sending her to bed. Jacopo was in her father’s study all day. Household accounts, said Ricca. Names, said Antonia. Marcello Sciri, Paolo Corgna, Ridolfo Alfani. All young men of the city, all unmarried, grinned the maidservant slyly, taking Gilia’s hand and saying, ‘you are near fifteen after all,’ which seemed like an obvious thing to say until she realised what Antonia meant. Then she was all over her maidservant and pulled at her apron and her cloth cap until she hissed her be still so she could tell her that Jacopo and her father talked longest around one name, which was Ridolfo Alfani.
Gilia was very quiet then and her breath stopped entirely, because Ridolfo Alfani was said to be the best in everything. Not just the look of him but in hunting and riding and all the things young men were meant to be good at. Antonia said he was the best too, though Jacopo murmured things around his name that she could not hear. After that she said they talked of Ghostanza, and every so often her father said no and sometimes he cried. Gilia asked then if her stepmother was still her father’s legend of emeralds and water and Antonia laughed in a short harsh way.
Afterwards she curled herself around Parassita and thought about Ridolfo Alfani who was the best, and a bit about Ghostanza’s gold dice and her ivory combs that she kept in her painted jewellery box. She pushed her hands under her pillow, snuck between the cold linen to the ghosts of the beads her father hid there when he came back from the north to tell them about a woman so beautiful she made the stars pale.
For the first time, Gilia was not sure if she was happy her father had married Ghostanza.
Without knowing exactly why, she suddenly wished he had brought back someone like Ricca. A woman with bad skin and a nothing face.
* * *
The engorging of sin is always painful. So said Fra Michele when he heard her confession in the Chiesa del Gesu.
She looked at her hands, which were still pink from washing away Santa Lucia’s tears. Fra Michele gave her ten Our Fathers but she never did them because later that day she was sick down her dress and Antonia said she must be still and not fuss Parassita or even look at the wood panelling above her bed. She asked for Ghostanza to bring Ibn Yunus and sing for her but Antonia said it might not be safe, which was strange because, although they were often gloomy, none of her stepmother’s songs had sounded dangerous before.
Sweating through her third undershirt of the night, she heard the slap of waves against stone.
* * *
The next day there was a strange man in her room. Antonia said he was a physician and stayed right beside her so she wasn’t afraid even when he took the bedsheet away and put his hands on her head and her throat. Then Ricca came to the doorway and asked if he might come to see Jacopo too. After he left Gilia stared up at the panelling and saw Apollonia writhing in her flames and knew exactly how she felt. She pulled at her undershirt until the parting threads scratched at her ears. Antonia was saying, ‘Stop, please stop,’ but all she could hear was Apollonia screaming and the plucked strings of Ibn Yunus.
Sometime later she woke and there were no more sounds except the physician and Antonia talking quietly to each other. He came to sit by her bed and said she should not look so much at the ceiling. She said it was easier when Ghostanza played for her on Ibn Yunus, and he looked thoughtful then said perhaps he could tell her a story instead. She tried to nod, though it hurt the back of her head. He asked what kind of story and she said a dark one like Ghostanza’s songs. The physician said he would give her both light and dark in the tale of two sisters. Were they saints, she wanted to know, and he said no he could not say that, although one of them was very good.
Lailah and Lillith, he said. Twins of comfort and ruin.
Lailah. Midwife of souls, they called her. When the soul was very new she lit it a candle and taught it all the other places it had been throughout time. When it was finally ready to come into the world, Lailah lightly struck her finger to the child’s lip, as if to say ‘shh,’ and the child forgot everything it had learned in its mother’s belly, because knowledge must be gained, not given.
Lailah was light.
Lillith, darkness.
Lillith was the strangler of newborns. The night hag they called her, sucking their blood. A demoness howling in the desert and in the night. La Strega, the witch. Demon of lust, destroyer or life.
Antonia did not like this part of the story. She shushed the physician then and he said he was sorry, it was a story his uncle told his little cousins and there was nothing really in it. Gilia told Antonia to be quiet because she wanted to hear more about Lillith but then Ricca came in again and the physician asked if Jacopo was worse, but it was not Jacopo.
* * *
Antonia said Ghostanza came early to the birthing stool.
Gilia’s first thought was Lailah and Lillith.
She asked Antonia which of them had been at the birth. Lighter of souls or strangler of newborns.
Antonia said neither.