The latter were occupied by two young women clad in shabby brown dresses. They dropped their mending after making the same gesture, finger to lips, before they hurried to me.
Clumsily, they began to remove my gown. I doubt they had ever seen anything as fine, for they didn’t understand how to unlace the sleeves, but at last my gown slipped free and I stepped out of it into an uncertain future.
On one of Florence’s most oppressively narrow streets lies the Dominican convent known as Santa-Caterina da Siena. The convent’s denizens fiercely opposed the Medici and supported the rebels, no doubt because it catered to the poor. Its six boarders—girls of marriageable age or younger, from families who had discovered that it was cheaper to keep them at the convent—were born of the lowest class of workers: the dyers, weavers, and carders of wool and silk, men whose occupations stained their hands, twisted their bodies, scarred their lungs. These were men who fell sick and died young, leaving behind daughters who could not be fed. These were men who had torn down our Medici banners and ignited them out of hatred for the rich and well-fed.
Santa-Caterina stank because its ancient plumbing and sewers were in disrepair. Nuns were always on their knees scrubbing floors and walls, but no amount of cleaning overcame the smell. The inhabitants were all thin and hungry. There were no Latin lessons here, no efforts made to teach the girls letters or numbers, only work to be done. The abbess, Sister Violetta, had no energy to like or dislike me; she was too busy trying to keep her charges alive to worry about politics. She knew only that the rebels paid for my care on time.
I shared a cell—and a dirty straw mattress alive with fleas and a family of mice—with four other boarders, all of them older than I. One of them hated me bitterly, as her brother had been killed in a clash with Medici supporters. Two of them did not much care. And then there was twelve-year-old Tommasa.
Tommasa’s father was a silk merchant whose mounting debts had prompted him to flee the city, leaving his wife and children to deal with his creditors. Tommasa’s mother was sickly; Tommasa, too, was frail and suffered from frightening bouts of wheezing and breathlessness, especially when she overexerted herself. She had the long, thin bones and delicate coloring of a Northerner: pale hair, white skin, eyes blue as sky. Yet she worked as hard as the others without complaint, and her lips were always curved in the gentlest of smiles.
She treated me as a friend, even though her brothers were passionate advocates of the rebel cause, so much so that Tommasa never mentioned me to them.
Tommasa was my sole link to the world beyond Santa-Caterina’s walls. Her mother visited weekly and always brought news. I learned how the Medici palazzo had been pillaged, how its remaining treasures had been seized by the new government. All the banners bearing the Medici crest had been torn down, and all sculptures and buildings bearing the same had been crudely edited with chisels.
I asked about Aunt Clarice, of course, and tried not to cry when Tommasa told me she was still alive, though no one knew where she had gone. Ippolito’s and Alessandro’s whereabouts were also a mystery.
When I commented on Tommasa’s kindness to me, she was taken aback.
“Why should I treat you otherwise?” she asked. “They say your family has oppressed the people, but you are kind to me and the others. I can’t punish you for something others have done.”
I loved her for the same reason I had loved Piero, because she was too good to glimpse the blackness hidden in my heart.
I spent a dismal summer fearing execution and hoping for news. Neither came, and by the time autumn arrived, I dwelled in a haze of hunger and grief. I lost will and weight and stopped asking questions of Tommasa as she relayed the latest gossip.
Winter came and brought an icy chill. Our room had no hearth and was freezing; I never stopped shivering. The water froze in the tiny basin we five shared, but we were too cold to bathe anyway. The fleas guaranteed that, if I slept at all, it was poorly. The cold never eased but grew more bitter.
One morning in late December, I headed with the other girls to the refectory. As we passed by a cell, a pair of nuns were carrying out a third. The last was completely rigid, and her sisters had lifted only her head and feet, as if she were a plank of wood. The two nuns glanced up at us, their forbidding gazes intended to silence all questions.
As they passed, Tommasa quickly crossed herself, and rest of us followed suit. We held our tongues and our places until they had disappeared down the corridor.
“Did you see that?” Lionarda, the oldest girl, hissed.
“Dead,” one of the others said.
“Frozen,” I said. But at the refectory, as we were waiting to have our bowls filled, one of the novices in front of us fainted and was taken away. I thought little of it: I swept floors and patched worn habits, unflinching when I pricked my chill-numbed fingers with the needle. I didn’t worry until that evening at vespers, when I noticed that the chapel was only half full.
I whispered to Tommasa, “Where are the other sisters?”
“Taken sick,” she answered. “Some sort of fever.”
That night, I counted five separate times that the nuns hurried up and down the corridor. In the morning, four of us rose from the mattress. Lionarda did not.
Her breath hung as white vapor in the frigid air above her face; despite the cold, her forehead shone with sweat. One of the other girls tried to wake her, but neither shouting nor shaking could make her open her eyes. We called for the nuns, but no one came; the cells near ours were empty.
Tommasa and I stayed with Lionarda and sent the other two girls to get help. Half an hour later, a novice came in her white veil and black apron. Silently—for it was during an hour the nuns did not speak—she slipped her hands beneath Lionarda’s nightgown and ran them swiftly over her neck, collarbone, armpits. She then reached under the gown to feel the area around Lionarda’s groin and drew back with a spasm of fear.
She lifted up a corner of the nightgown to reveal a lump the size of a goose egg at the top of the girl’s thigh, encircled by a dark purple ring, like a perfectly concentric bruise.
“What is it?” Tommasa breathed.
The novice mouthed an answer. I looked up too late to see it, but Tommasa gasped and lifted her hand to her throat.
“What is it?” I echoed, directing the question at Tommasa.
She turned toward me, her eyes and nose streaming from the cold, and whispered:
“Plague.”
After they carried Lionarda away, Tommasa and I went to the refectory for the morning meal, then headed to the common room. Sister Violetta normally assigned us our chores there at that time. But the room had become a hospital, with a score of women lying on the floor—some groaning, some ominously quiet. An elderly sister intercepted us at the doorway and gestured for us to return to our cell. There we found the other two boarders, Serena and Constantina, sewing shrouds.
“What happened to Lionarda?” Serena demanded, and when I explained, she said, “Half the sisters were missing from the refectory this morning. It’s plague, all right.”
We huddled on the bed, our conversation anxious. I thought of Aunt Clarice, of how devastated she would be to learn that I had died in a squalid hovel, of how Piero would cry when he learned that I was gone.
After two hours, the elderly sister appeared in the doorway to tell Tommasa her brothers were at the grate—and to warn her that she was not to speak of the sickness at the convent. Tommasa left, and within the hour returned, her eyes bright with a secret. She said nothing until midday, when