Page 2

“Well,” he said, “what would you do instead, if you stayed?”

The question stuck. What was she doing? She kept her business at a discreet address, her deals small-time. The full extent of her talents hidden. It was safest that way. But there had been years, now, of doldrum days and lonely evenings. The sharp edge of her fear was dulled by boredom. Perhaps, Ginevra thought, she had removed herself from the world more than necessary. Here was an invitation to rejoin it. All she had to do was solve a “small problem.” She closed her eyes and searched her secret heart and found in it a tiny flame that still burned with hope for a full and visible life—a life rich with love and with friendship.

The flame grew large and bright, consuming worries of personal danger and questions about the letter’s meaning. She turned back to the boy.

“Yes, Piero, I will return with you. I will not make you go alone.”

PART I

THE GOLDEN STRINGS

OF THE UNIVERSE

Excerpt from the Lapidary Book

of Ginevra di Gasparo

MS. M.419, The Morgan Library & Museum.

Italy, Florence, ca.1340

We are told

That the powers of stones are various and wonderful

When invoked by one who is tied to the invisible golden strings

Here is the green crystal called smaragdus, carved with the sacred words of the Arabs. Look upon it when your eyes are weary and you will see with fresh perspective.

Here is the shimmering black obsidian, made by the heat of volcanoes. It is good against fevers.

Here is the hyacinth, which will take your place in death.

And here is the red coral, petrified blood of the Gorgon. It is part plant, part animal, part stone. It is good for all sorts of things.

ONE

HER OWN SELF

About 1330, City of Genoa

In the very old days, before even Rome was great, there were many doctors and witches in Italy who used stones and plants and odd bits of animals to make things happen that wouldn’t otherwise. They might, for instance, pound pastes to banish madness, or arrange amulets on women’s beds to ease their labor. They could build a charm to warn a prosperous lord when his food was poisoned, and read the future in birds’ guts, folding them inside parchment packets to seal the prophecies. Powerful magi hoarded precious gems with secret words engraved upon them, and old women mended broken hearts with bundles of parsley tied up just so.

As Christianity spread, overtaking the ancient religions, the princes and priests of this new church became greedy in their power. Jealous and afraid of the old ways, they condemned any miraculous event with roots outside of Christian ritual. Those who remained artful in the ancient secrets, who remembered how to coax magic from stones and potions from plants, found it prudent to become quiet in their practices. The ones who were brash lost their livelihoods, and found themselves prodded with all sorts of unpleasant and spiky things.

It was into this fraught time that Ginevra di Gasparo was born, to parents of no great importance, about the year 1320.

Her city of Genoa was built right up against the sea inside a large and beautiful harbor. It was filled with sand-colored buildings topped with red tile roofs, all jumbled up with one another and pressed out against concentric rings of stone defense walls. Every day, vessels arrived, sitting low in the water with holds full of treasure from Africa or Britain or some such place. And each year, the Genoese trade routes stretched out farther, like the fingers of an eager hand, poking their way through to Crimea, Antioch, and Tripoli. Merchants returned with gold-threaded tapestries from Flanders, blue lapis lazuli from Kabul, cotton gauze from Egypt, and perfumed woods from the forests of Ethiopia.

From an early age, Ginevra knew about the luxurious cargoes and important transactions taking place in her city, but as a daughter of poor fishing folk, her life was generally devoid of fine things. The pungent scents of fermenting fish and pitch boiled by shipbuilders permeated the district where she lived, so Ginevra’s light hair and undyed wool dress always smelled of dockside industry. Her father, Gasparo, made his living fishing for the red corals that grew in sharp crags on the sea bottom. From the time she was very small, Ginevra’s father would take her out onto the water to help him with his work. Instead of a net, they would drop a sort of wooden cross from their little boat and drag it across the reefs to crack the corals from their rocky bases. The slick lava-red branches were hauled into the boat and laid out to dry, and Ginevra would watch the tiny white polyps who lived in the coral pulse and writhe about as they suffocated in the air. This filled her with sorrow, because she did not like to see living things suffer. After the harvest, Ginevra’s mother, Camiola, would break the dead corals apart. Eventually the pieces would be sent to nimble-fingered orphan girls who polished them into beads to be strung as rosaries, mounted in monstrances, or made into pairs of bracelets that were put on babies to keep them safe.

The corals processed by Gasparo and Camiola were pledged, at deep discount, to a merchant who built his own fortune at the port long ago and now used violence to ensure no others could follow the path he took for success. But, in defiance of the cartel, Gasparo made an arrangement with an old woman called Monna Vermilia, reserving a small portion of his coral for her each week.

To avoid attention from the merchant’s agents, Gasparo sent his daughter to the old woman’s dingy abode to deliver the parcels of tiny red twigs hidden inside a round of stale bread. Vermilia needed the corals because she still knew the old ways of healing and made her living from them. She said special blessings over the branches and put them on cords, then sold them cheaply to couples who could not afford polished bracelets but were still afraid for their babies. She sold them also to sailors to protect them from drowning, and shopkeepers afraid of losing their inventory.

Ginevra did not know it, nor did her parents, but she had, through her mother’s side, the blood of a priestess who could talk to oak trees. And through her father, she was descended from a long line of gentlemen soothsayers, who were shunned after auguring that a young viscountess would betray her husband with a servant (she did). Neither Gasparo nor Camiola had inherited enough magic to amount to anything unusual. But because Ginevra possessed a bit from both of them, she was born with an aptitude. And when she walked, the invisible golden strings of the universe were plucked and caused the faintest vibrations in the air, and it was through these strings that the old magic could flow.

Though eccentric in appearance, Vermilia was no fraud. She was attached to a few of these golden strings herself, and when Ginevra delivered the first loaf of clandestine coral Vermilia felt the vibrations. In the blackest morning of the month, she killed a little sparrow and spilled its blood and saw in the drops that the child could be capable of great things if she was correctly guided. Monna Vermilia went to the girl’s parents and asked if she might have her as help. Gasparo balked at first, but his wife told him he’d be a fool to refuse a woman like Vermilia.