Deborah Noyes - Plague in the Mirror

“Mi dispiace,” May tries, speaking directly to the man but dropping her gaze. Even when she can’t see him anymore, May feels him watching her, and when she finally summons the nerve to meet his eyes again, they seem lit from within. He looks genuinely curious, intrigued even, and she’s so grateful for this kindness that she wants to hug him.

“Forgive me,” May tries in English, in case “I’m sorry” isn’t archaic enough, lowering her voice because in a weird way it’s just the two of them now. He probably doesn’t understand her English or her Italian. What year is this? It’s a little late in the game to be asking the question now, and to be honest, May doesn’t care anymore. She can’t believe this is happening. She can’t believe, looking again into those eyes, that it’s never happened before.

The man shrugs. No, he doesn’t understand her any better than she does him. He looks poised at the edge of his seat, and his eyes roam over her as if to solve a puzzle or answer some penetrating question. But the search stops somewhere in the neighborhood of her knees, and his face clouds with concern.

One of the other artists has already turned back to his work with a baffled shrug, but the second, wiping plump hands on his tunic front, continues to monitor the exchange, watching with somewhat stern interest as the man at the back of the room stands up.

He’s young, with a tangle of dark hair and skin the shade of caramel, so tall he seems to stoop just slightly to put the world at ease. But there’s nothing slumpy about him. He’s lean and muscular, rangy like a wolf, and though he hesitates for what seems forever, all May can think, stupidly, watching him cross to her, is Oh, my God.

He kneels at her feet, his long hair falling forward, concealing his eyes. His hands have the same rough beauty as his eyes and close urgently around her calf, giving her what amounts to an electric shock even with the bloodied fabric of the dress between them.

“Stai sanguinando,” he tells her, glancing up, but May can only tilt her head like a confused animal, because she has no idea what he’s saying, no real thought in her head at all except that his voice is deep and a little hoarse and so compelling that he could be reading her death sentence and she wouldn’t stop him, and her heart is still thumping hard from what happened outside.

He leads her back to his shadowed workstation. His puzzled eyes linger on the flip-flops a moment, darting to and from her eyes as he raises the hem of her dress discreetly, working at what must be more than a scrape (it’s finally dawned on May that her right shin is wet with blood, enough to soak through her stolen dress), sopping the wound below her knee with the hem of his linen shirt, his full mouth pursed in concentration, and she’s all but shaking with shock.

He is touching me, she thinks, almost hysterically because she can’t calm down, can’t manage to take all this in. A man is touching my leg in medieval Florence. The most beautiful man in the world is touching me, and he is a man, she thinks, not a boy.

He can’t be much older than May, but he has what she can only imagine is a man’s smell, rich and strong and spiced with the secrets of his trade, walnut oil and shaved wood and turpentine. He moves like a man, capable and sure, his white shirt stained now with her blood.

As he rises and crosses to the big fireplace, where he sets about clanging iron pots and rooting around in the lengthening shadows in search of something, he leaves her skin burning with absence. May feels greedy to have his hands — scarred and paint-and-blood-streaked but beautifully brown and strong-veined and sure of themselves — back on her, and when he returns to lead her to a chair by the wall, urging her to sit, she feels her whole body sigh with relief.

He kneels again at an angle, lifts her leg apologetically, and props it over the hard plane of his thigh. His hands go to work again, cleaning the wound with a wet scrap of linen torn from his shirt, lightly smoothing away pebbles embedded in her raw skin with his thumb. Every stroke is electric, despite the pain beneath it, and May suddenly remembers a morning last summer, alone on a dock in Maine. The sun was just rising, and there was a steady breeze, more than a breeze — a teasing wind — blowing over the surface that made the skin of the water shiver in dancing, swooping spirals, made it rise and shimmer and fall and rise, and that’s how her skin feels now, wherever he touches her, restless and shining.

By the time her medic concludes, pressing her hand over the cloth he’s tied to the wound, applying an instant’s extra pressure, May’s whole body feels quavery and strange. With him at their center, her surroundings have locked into focus. Everything is clear and vivid, alive in her senses as if the room itself is breathing, as if together they have become the room’s heartbeat.

But in her peripheral vision May spots the pudgy painter peering from behind his easel, his eyes full of judgments she can’t guess at, and the spell is broken, her moment’s calm absconded.

What’s more, there’s a clamor out on the street, one that quickly draws the two disapproving artists outside.

If not for his mysterious patient, the man at her feet would go investigate, too — she can see he wants to; he’s torn — and when May gestures that he should go, he nods, quickly covering her hand with his to assure she’s applying enough pressure to the cut, sending another charge through her. He touches her cheekbone lightly, a feather brush with his knuckle. His knowing smile warms her through, and then, as quickly as the artist entered her life, he leaves it.

May sits very still a moment, following him with her eyes, watching him disappear, impossibly confused. She’s almost relieved to find her reflection looking back at her then through the shop’s display window, though there is no window, of course. No glass, anyway, just shutters opening onto the street. On the other side, Cristofana in ghost form smiles gravely and hooks a finger, beckoning.

Somehow May had forgotten.

How long has she been back?

May suddenly feels exposed, unsafe, more vulnerable than ever. It must be the look in her double’s eyes: smug and scheming, the look of a lion about to take down a wildebeest.

“Please,” May says in a voice more confident than she feels, “are we done here?” Her right leg’s really hurting now, but curiosity demands a detour, and she manages to limp calmly to the rear of the workshop and peek at the charcoal sketch on the beautiful artist’s board: it is terrifying, a sort of female gargoyle, its powerful neck extending from the edifice of a building, craning out over a fiery city where hundreds of thousands of tiny figures huddle together, indistinguishable and doomed in the shadow.

It’s incredible and terrifying, nothing like the flat, formal paintings in all the old churches May’s been visiting, thanks to Gwen, or like the Madonna and Child riffs on the other two men’s easels. The sketch is a nightmare as modern or at least as universal as anything May’s ever seen, and the paradox makes her ache. She felt so safe with him in those few minutes — as safe and seen as she’s felt for a long time — but who would keep him safe? Where did visions like this come from?

May limps obediently to the front of the room, because in the end, she has no other guide, no other way out. She follows the shadow of her double — who’s also limping, May notices, also bloody at the knee (probably more so without a bandage), though the blood on her long gown, like the rest of her, appears opaque — back to the abandoned alley and the stone wall with its faint sideways 8.