The illness came back to him first. It had begun with a skin rash, purplish-black blotches on his chest, then his arms, then everywhere. Soon afterwards he developed a painful lump or bubo in his armpit. He had a fever, sweating in his bed, tangling the sheets as he writhed. He had vomited and coughed blood. He had thought he would die. Worst of all was a terrible, unquenchable thirst that had made him want to throw himself into the river Arno with his mouth open.
He was not the only sufferer. Thousands of Italians had fallen ill with this plague, tens of thousands. Half the workmen on his building sites had disappeared, as had most of his household servants. Almost everyone who caught it died within five days. They called it la moria grande, the big death.
But he was alive.
He had a nagging feeling that while ill he had reached a momentous decision, but he could not remember it. He concentrated for a moment. The harder he thought, the more elusive the memory became, until it vanished.
He sat up in bed. His limbs felt feeble and his head spun for a moment. He was wearing a clean linen nightshirt, and he wondered who had put it on him. After a pause, he stood.
He had a four-storey house with a courtyard. He had designed and built it himself, with a flat façade instead of the traditional overhanging floors, and architectural features such as round window arches and classical columns. The neighbours had called it a palagetto, a mini-palace. That was seven years ago. Several prosperous Florentine merchants had asked him to build palagetti for them, and that had got his career here started.
Florence was a republic, with no ruling prince or duke, dominated by an elite of squabbling merchant families. The city was populated by thousands of weavers, but it was the merchants who made fortunes. They spent their money building grand houses, which made the city a perfect place for a talented young architect to prosper.
He went to the bedroom door and called his wife. “Silvia! Where are you?” It came naturally to him to speak the Tuscan dialect now, after nine years.
Then he remembered. Silvia had been ill, too. So had their daughter, who was three years old. Her name was Laura, but they had adopted her childish pronunciation, Lolla. His heart was gripped by a terrible fear. Was Silvia alive? Was Lolla?
The house was quiet. So was the city, he realized suddenly. The angle of the sunlight slanting into the rooms told him it was mid-morning. He should have been hearing the cries of street hawkers, the clop of horses and the rumble of wooden cartwheels, the background murmur of a thousand conversations – but there was nothing.
He went up the stairs. In his weakness, the effort made him breathless. He pushed open the door to the nursery. The room looked empty. He broke out in a sweat of fear. There was Lolla’s cot, a small chest for her clothes, a box of toys, a miniature table with two tiny chairs. Then he heard a noise. There in the corner was Lolla, sitting on the floor in a clean dress, playing with a small wooden horse with articulated legs. Merthin gave a strangled cry of relief. She heard him and looked up. “Papa,” she observed in a matter-of-fact tone.
Merthin picked her up and hugged her. “You’re alive,” he said in English.
There was a sound from the next room, and Maria walked in. A grey-haired woman in her fifties, she was Lolla’s nurse. “Master!” she said. “You got up – are you better?”
“Where is your mistress?” he said.
Maria’s face fell. “I’m so sorry, master,” she said. “The mistress died.”
Lolla said: “Mama’s gone.”
Merthin felt the shock like a blow. Stunned, he handed Lolla to Maria. Moving slowly and carefully, he turned away and walked out of the room, then down the stairs to the piano nobile, the principal floor. He stared at the long table, the empty chairs, the rugs on the floor and the pictures on the walls. It looked like someone else’s home.
He stood in front of a painting of the Virgin Mary with her mother. Italian painters were superior to the English or any others, and this artist had given Saint Anne the face of Silvia. She was a proud beauty, with flawless olive skin and noble features, but the painter had seen the sexual passion smouldering in those aloof brown eyes.
It was hard to comprehend that Silvia no longer existed. He thought of her slim body, and remembered how he had marvelled, again and again, at her perfect breasts. That body, with which he had been so completely intimate, now lay in the ground somewhere. When he imagined that, tears came to his eyes at last, and he sobbed with grief.
Where was her grave? he wondered in his misery. He remembered that funerals had ceased in Florence: people were terrified to leave their houses. They simply dragged the bodies outside and laid them on the street. The city’s thieves, beggars and drunks had acquired a new profession: they were called corpse carriers or becchini, and they charged exorbitant fees to take the bodies away and put them in mass graves. Merthin might never know where Silvia lay.
They had been married four years. Looking at her picture, garbed in Saint Anne’s conventional red dress, Merthin suffered an access of painful honesty, and asked himself whether he had really loved her. He was very fond of her, but it was not an all-consuming passion. She had an independent spirit and a sharp tongue, and he was the only man in Florence with the nerve to woo her, despite her father’s wealth. In return, she had given him complete devotion. But she had accurately gauged the quality of his love. “What are you thinking about?” she used to say sometimes, and he would give a guilty start, because he had been remembering Kingsbridge. Soon she changed it to: “Who are you thinking about?” He never spoke Caris’s name, but Silvia said: “It must be a woman, I can tell by the look on your face.” Eventually she began to talk about ‘your English girl’. She would say: “You’re remembering your English girl,” and she was always right. But she seemed to accept it. Merthin was faithful to her. And he adored Lolla.
After a while, Maria brought him soup and bread. “What day is it?” he asked her.
“Tuesday.”
“How long was I in bed?”
“Two weeks. You were so ill.”
He wondered why he had survived. Some people never succumbed to the disease, as if they had natural protection; but those who caught it nearly always died. However, the tiny minority who recovered were doubly fortunate, for no one had ever caught the illness a second time.
When he had eaten, he felt stronger. He had to rebuild his life, he realized. He suspected that he had already made this decision once, when he was ill, but again he was tantalized by the thread of a memory slipping from his grasp.
His first task was to find out how much of his family was left.
He took his dishes to the kitchen, where Maria was feeding Lolla bread dipped in goat’s milk. He asked her: “What about Silvia’s parents? Are they alive?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t heard. I go out only to buy food.”
“I’d better find out.”
He got dressed and went downstairs. The ground floor of the house was a workshop, with the yard at the rear used for storing wood and stone. No one was at work, either inside or out.
He left the house. The buildings around him were mostly stone-built, some of them very grand: Kingsbridge had no houses to compare with these. The richest man in Kingsbridge, Edmund Wooler, had lived in a timber house. Here in Florence, only the poor lived in such places.
The street was deserted. He had never seen it this way, not even in the middle of the night. The effect was eerie. He wondered how many people had died: a third of the population? Half? Were their ghosts still lingering in alleyways and shadowed corners, enviously watching the lucky survivors?