In my father’s house, the cobwebs have been swept from the eaves and the stone floor feels cool and smooth under my bare feet. There is a new copper pot hanging from the chain in the hearth, and the comforting smell of boiled onions fills the house.
Zenobia begins to remove the plates from the table, and I stand to help her. “Sit,” she says. “I will take care of it.” She stacks the ceramic plates and walks to the back door to dump the pigeon bones into the canal.
Beside me, Cristiano presses back into his chair, satiated from the dinner his mother has prepared for us. He takes my hand and sets his brown eyes on me, the eyes that have been in my head every day. My heart is so full that I feel it will burst.
Somehow, Cristiano and his mother have managed to bring my father’s workshop back to life. The room is still bare, but there are new things: a few ceramic plates and cups, linens on the beds, and a new cooking pot. In the root cellar, glass jars filled with the fruits of a summer harvest have begun to appear on the shelves.
“I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe all of this,” I say, gesturing around the room.
He shrugs. “My mother brought her own things from the pensión. And her friends helped by giving us what they could spare. It is not much, but you will have what you need.”
“Madre di Dio.” I am overcome, pressing my eyes with the heels of my hands. “How did we make it back here? I spent all those months trying to get to you,” I say, feeling a catch in my throat as the truth of all we have endured washes over me in a thundering wave. “I was at the monastery garden every Friday. Then I tried everything in my power to reach you here, but by the time I managed to get through the barriers to come here you were gone.”
His face is drawn, his once strong body now lean, but with a spark to rekindle. I must hope that I too might recover from my own emaciated form, my grey, sagging skin, my ragged hair beginning to grow out from when it was shorn.
“And I tried my best to find you,” he says, squeezing my hand and gazing at me as if he doesn’t notice any of it. “Your father would only say that you were working for a painter elsewhere in the city. I knew that you were in the San Marco quarter, but I had no idea where to look. And your cousin…” He shrugs. “Then they erected the barriers near the baker’s bridge and none of us could leave the quarter. We were well for a long time as others fell ill. But soon enough, your father and your cousin broke out in the black boils. Then I had to leave.”
“Father… He sent you away sick!” I say, my eyes hardened.
“No, you don’t understand,” he says, grasping my arm, his brow furrowing. “I was still well even after the two of them had taken ill. I tried my best to bring them back to health. Your father kept begging me to leave the house so that I would not get sick. I stayed as long as I could. I tried everything I could to save them, Maria. I am sorry.” He presses his palms to his face.
“You risked your own life for them,” I say, pulling his hands away and looking into his eyes.
“For you,” he says. “For your family, for this workshop. And for my own future. What else was I to do?”
“How did you leave?”
“One day the priest and the inspectors appeared at the door. They neglected to examine me, so your father insisted that I leave before the Sanità returned to nail the cross on the door. Even if I had never fallen ill, if I had stayed in this house it would have meant a death sentence for me, too.”
“But where did you go? The Health Office had no record of you.”
“When I left here I did not know where to turn. I tried to find my mother that first night, but she was not at the boarding house or at the laundry,” he says. “And truth be told I was already not feeling well myself. By the time I had packed up my goods and left the workshop I felt the fever beginning to start. The last thing I wanted to do was infect my mother or anyone who had been kind to me. The old battiloro’s studio where I grew up had already been sold to another guildsman; I could not go back there.”
I feel pained to think of him turned out on the streets, knowing that few would open their doors to a Saracen stranger, especially one who had fallen ill.
“The sisters at the almshouse at Santa Marta took me in,” he says. “Where else was I to go? I was there for only a few days when the black boils began to appear under my arms,” he says, gesturing to his armpits. “Then, well, they appeared here, too, just like they did with your cousin,” he says, running his palms over the insides of his thighs where they meet the groin. “I felt nearly dead already. I could hardly lift my head.”
“They put you in the infirmary?”
“Yes,” he says. “The doctor and some other officials came to visit us there and they told me that I had to leave; otherwise they would have to put the institution under ban and I think the nuns wanted to avoid that at all costs. So, they boarded me on the ferry with a few other foreigners.”
“But you are not a foreigner!” I insist.
“No. And once we were in the lazzaretti there was no difference between any of us. Surely you saw that yourself. There were people from every kingdom and state—rich, poor, black, brown, white, those from the ships out in the lagoon. Anyone who believes we are different, well, pestilence and death make no distinction between any of us.”
I press my hands to my face again and thank God that I am free of the hellish pesthouse. I feel Cristiano’s grip on my forearms, and he helps me to standing. He presses me in his arms, then he pulls me by the hand to my father’s bed, where a new firm, straw-stuffed mattress has been placed.
I have never been so grateful for the soft cradle of a bed. I curl into a ball, and Cristiano wraps his body around me. For a few long minutes I bask in the feeling of his strong arms holding me, and I can hardly believe it is real.
Then the events of the past months begin flooding into my head.
“I went to the lazzaretto looking for you,” I say, turning to him and looking in his eyes. “No one could tell me if you were there, and I was scared to death. I wanted to tell you that I was carrying your child.”
“But Maria, I knew,” he says softly. “It is the only reason I am still here walking this earth.”
“You knew?” I gasp, pressing myself up to sitting.
“How do you think I recovered from that place?” he says, the corner of his mouth turning up. Then he draws me into his chest and closes his eyes. “A son. I could not believe it. But it is what made me fight for my life.”
“You knew!” I exclaim again. “How?”
“One day I was working out there,” he says, gesturing to the worktable on the other side of the room where my half-gilded boxes still stand. “It was before your father first fell ill. A boatman appeared in the canal. He slowed when he saw me, and asked if I was Cristiano the battiloro. He said that the gilder’s daughter was sending me a message. It took me a moment to realize that he meant you.”
“A short man in a fine gondola?” I say, grasping for the knowledge that the painter’s boatman might have succeeded in reaching Cristiano, and wondering why that evil boatman did not share this information with me.
“No,” he says. “It was a small skiff like the ones they have at the traghetto. The boatman was tall and as black as I am. He said that he had been paid to bring me a message. The message was that the gilder’s daughter was well, that she was housed in the studio of a painter named Master Trevisan in San Marco, and that… that she wanted me to know that she carried my child.” The battiloro pauses and huffs, reliving the scene in his mind. “And then he was gone, just like that. Unbelievable.”
I marvel, realizing that my plan to get word to reach Cristiano had worked after all.
“For a long time after that boat disappeared,” Cristiano continues, “I wondered if I had imagined the whole thing, if it was all just inside my head.” He runs his palm over his scalp.
“It was real,” I say in earnest. “I tried my best to get a message to you. It was the only way I could think of, but I did not think that the message reached you.”
Cristiano continues. “What he told me… That you were safe, that you were carrying my child. That is what I kept turning over in my head while I was in the pesthouse. It was difficult for me to believe and surely impossible to verify. But as I considered it I felt in my heart that it was true.”
For a fleeting moment, his face brightens and he places a tender kiss on my head. “Somehow I felt it here,” he says, pressing his fingers to his heart, “that you were communicating with me from somewhere else in the city. Then your father got sick, I left, and within a few days I was on that ferry.” A shadow crosses his face and he falls silent. Both of us had survived the pesthouses, and there was no need to say more.
“Maria,” he says, “I swear the only thing that kept me alive, that gave me hope, was the idea that I might see you, that what that strange boatman told me might be true. That you were out there somewhere in the city carrying my son, and that we might find each other once this horrid thing was over. I am just sorry that your father and cousin did not come out on the other side.” He grasps my hands. “I never saw them in the lazzaretto. They were just… gone.”
Cristiano flips onto his back and stares at the wooden beams above our heads. We lay silent for a long time, our bodies pressed together in the hot air. I say nothing, but stare at his face, soaking up the knowledge and the realization that he is still here.
I hear Zenobia walk from the courtyard and into the shadows of the house. She takes the copper pot from the chain and returns to the courtyard with it.
Cristiano takes my hand and squeezes it between his palms. “And now it’s your turn,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“You must tell me what you have been doing all these long months. How did you manage as a pregnant woman on your own in this Most Serene Republic of ours?” I hear the sarcasm in his voice. “And Madre di Dio, what has happened to your hair?” He laughs, a loud bark.
I run my hand across my shorn locks. “Let us say that things got complicated after my father turned me out.”
“He was not trying to turn you out, Maria. He was trying to have you married.”
I nod. “Yes. He almost succeeded.”
“As much as your father’s decision pained me,” he says, “I know that he wanted you to prosper. He thought that the gold would die.”
“But the gold,” I say. “It is not dead. You shall see.”
“I hope you are right,” he says, “for I know nothing else.”
“We have a lot of work to do, you and I.” I prop myself up on my elbows and reach for Cristiano’s hands. “Do not ever leave this house again.”
He looks into my eyes. “Maria,” he says. “The last thing I want to do is leave here. But what future can we have? Who will accept me?”
“You have been working here legitimately for many months,” I say. “No one doubts your strength or your skill. They respected my father and me. They respect your work. Besides, you belong here with me. And our son,” I say.
“What priest will marry us?” he asks.
“I do not care,” I say. “We have been through too much to let them stop us from living here together.”
The shadow that falls across Cristiano’s face this time is profound. He sits on the edge of the bed, and from this vantage point, I see how frail his body has become, the outline of his ribs visible under his linen shirt. He presses his face in his hands, and I know that as much as we both want it, it will not come without a price.