Read Online The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O'Melveny - Free Book Online

petit-point work she’d brought with her, colored silks on a linen book bag for one of Dr. Cardano’s herbals. The half-completed embroidery showed a woman gathering herbs that towered above her all out of proportion—great trees of rosemary, fronds of anise, copses of basil. “I think he was a very sad man. I saw him pacing in his room one night when I brought him his tea, and he said that he longed for his own city. I didn’t say anything because it’s not my place, you understand, signorina, though I wondered why he’d leave it, then. That’s when he also mentioned you.”
    “Oh?”
    “He said, ‘I once had a daughter who… ,’ but then he didn’t want to say any more, and he seemed upset. He gestured that I should leave him.”
    “Did he ever say more, to Dr. Cardano, perhaps?” My voice remained calm, though my stomach clenched.
    “I’m not the sort who listens at doors. But sometimes I heard them speaking about things I didn’t understand. Mercury and flasks and fire, I don’t know.”
    “Don’t worry, Giannetta, I’m not going to lay blame on you. If you think of anything else, you can tell me, yes?”
    “Oh yes, signorina. You know, I never had a father, so I think you must be very lucky.” And after that, as if embarrassed by saying so much, Giannetta fell silent and turned diligently to her sewing.
    Lucky, I thought, cautiously turning the word around in my mind as if it were a barbed thing. The rhythmic clicks of her needle against the thimble, and the taut pull as it pierced the cloth, joined the sputtering fountain and the monotonous tick and whir of insects to lull me to sleep.
    I stand at the edge of an island. The rushes hiss warnings, shhh, shhh, shhh. Venetia floats before me like a dead stickle fish, her spines become toppled bell towers, cathedrals, the pitched roofs of the Ospedale degli Incurabili; all these protrude at odd angles from her bloated form. I wade through sedge grass along the shore. The edges of my sopping gown trail me with small delayed ripples as I search for something in the dull green water.
    Then a chest—a medicine chest—appears upon waves that move like lips in speech.
    It rolls toward me. As the deep red box dips, I notice the crest of the Mondini family painted upon the lid, a double griffin with a snake in each claw.
    The chest opens and spills loose vials upon the water. Hundreds of little bottles roll and gleam and drift apart like droplets of mercury. I try to gather them up in my skirts, but the current disperses them, clinking against each other, into the rushes. I can barely move from the weight of soaked skirts and the pull of mud on my slippered feet. The rushes sigh, shhh, shhh, shhh. The bottles ring out all over the marsh. Other things escape as the chest capsizes—lead boxes, glass bowls sealed with parchment lids, blue quetzal feathers from the New World, snake castings, light bones like wands spinning haplessly in the water. Then scissors, surgical knives and saws, lancets, clamps, forceps, and bleeding tools, mortars and pestles, which unaccountably float. Leeching cups, urine flasks, ear scoops, artificial noses and ears of wood that suggest submerged bodies.
    All scatter inward toward the stagnant meanders of the marsh. I want to gather them up.
    But I’m gripped by the mud.
    I can reach the handle of the chest, however, and right it. But now it is larger and becomes the long skiff of a casket. Shhh, shhh, shhh—
    I awoke with a jolt, sweating and adrift. Giannetta still sat next to me sewing (it seemed she must have been stitching an eternity). She took one more loop and left the needle in the cloth. She put her arm lightly around me and wiped my forehead with her handkerchief.
    We sat a little longer, saying nothing, before we returned to the house.
     
    That night in Dr. Cardano’s study—he was kind enough to leave me alone at his tilted desk during the evenings—I began work upon my own notes for The Book of Diseases. I took