The Ornatrix by Kate Howard

Author:Kate Howard [HOWARD, KATE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 FICTION / General
ISBN: 9781468314120
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2016-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

‘It will come back.’

A voice she remembers.

‘You will be as you were before.’

The flesh above her eyes is heavy, pressing them deep into their sockets.

It feels like daytime. Swifts shriek through an open window and the grunt of Suora Dorotea’s pestle carries from the dispensary. A hand closes over her own as it wanders among a mass of bandages, gaping in places to her ripped scalp.

A few strands, strangely soft, are all that is left.

She fell for a long time.

The ground thumped the breath from her lungs but she could not draw it back in because there was hand around her neck. Another pulled her cap loose. Then there was nothing but plucking and pulling, plucking and pulling: the rhythm of a determined rosary.

‘Your hair will come back. In time.’

The hand is still on hers. Careworn, hollow-palmed. The outgrown ring worn deep into the skin.

There must have been screams, but she did not hear herself make them. It only stopped when Madalena wrestled Ghostanza’s hands away, still clenching the remains of two brown stiff plaits.

Her hand is guided away from her head and settled on the sheets.

She tries her voice.

‘I cannot afford to pay you Maestro Vitale.’

A sense of something both dark and light standing over her. The voice that comes from another age, before there was either Ghostanza or Il Sicofante, before anything was beautiful or ugly.

‘You do not have to. I am here to attend Ghostanza Dolfin. She injured her wrist again,’ he pauses, ‘striking you as hard as she did.’

Again her hand travels to her face, prodding carefully around the swollen cheeks and the lip cleaved as fiercely as Zio Alfeo’s.

‘Flavia, I have spoken to the sisters. They agree that as long as Ghostanza stays here, you should not. Given what has happened here, I cannot doubt that your father will welcome you back.’

Back to the Casa Nascosta. Swollen faced and bald as a turtle. Hiding from Mona Grazia, Tommaso and Pia, the world.

‘No.’ Her fingers find the underbelly of the bird across her cheek, bare of cerussa. ‘Please …’

A bitter taste of poppy seeds makes her tongue curl. There is a sludge in her mind but she still has the ghost of sweetmeats in her belly and the painted women in the blushing room might be gathered at her bedside their faces are so clear.

In the dispensary Suora Dorotea’s pestle grinds to a halt. She tuts quietly to herself, leafing through her Book of Common Ailments.

‘You know, of course, the apothecary … on the little piazza near the marketplace?’

A sigh. The pallet sinks a little, as though the physician rests on its edge.

‘I know Il Sicofante.’

He does not sound happy. She does not care. The painted women are so close she could reach out and smudge their cheeks with her fingertips. She bullies her face into a smile.

‘Will you please deliver him a message?’

‘I will do what you ask of me, Flavia, if the message is truthful, and if you think to do good by it.’

Hearing

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