A THING MIRACULOUS

I thought I had more time.

One always does, when one is young, strong, beautiful. The bells pealed from the cathedral on my wedding day when I stood on the steps with Federico, my husband, and he raised our hands together—in triumph, in acknowledgement of the crowd assembled in the square below. They roared their approval, most likely enhanced by the wine my father had made sure was flowing lavishly from the casks strategically placed around the perimeter.

The wedding feast lasted six days—one day for each year of the marriage.

The bells pealed again, in that sixth year, but that time for Federico only. I stood alone on the steps, swathed in black, as the hearse and six black horses bearing his casket arrived at San Domenico Maggiore. I watched as his soldiers lifted the box and then followed it into the church.

After the priest had intoned his Requiem in Pace and shed drops of holy water across the gaping hole of the crypt, I returned to our villa and endured the muttered phrases and false sympathy of the Neapolitan nobility. I, too, as my father had done, opened the casks. It was easier to sustain my façade of the pious, bereft widow when everyone was distracted with good wine.

When the mourners were gone I gave the servants leave for the night, not wishing to have them hovering, witness to both my grief and my relief.

I was not suited to be a wife, but it would be some time before I found my bearings as a widow.

No children awaited me in the nursery. No fire glowed in the hearth to dispel the chill and the dark. I lit the candles, wrapped myself in Federico’s capacious, fur-lined robe that still smelled of him, and began to go through the papers that described the holdings that were now mine.

By the morning, I had a list to review with the steward. As a young girl I had sat by my mother’s side as she addressed the many tasks that fell to her in administering my father’s lands when he was away at war. Yields from olive groves, bales of wool to be shipped to Florence and the Medici mills, taxes to be levied to support the armaments and horses and food supplies that maintained an army. None of this was new to me. But I was twenty-three and now solely responsible for these decisions. I could not retreat into the villa’s chapel in my widow’s weeds, demonstrating the piety and solemnity befitting my station. If I did, the vultures would be circulating, either with offers of marriage or outright attempts to seize my property. I needed to display strength, not hide on my knees caressing my rosary beads.

I should have been exhausted. Not only from the sleepless night after the funeral, but from the weeks spent at Federico’s bedside nursing him as he lay dying of a festering wound. But a strange energy had taken possession of me.

I called for the servants and ordered them to open the windows, empty the hearths, scrub the walls of soot and the floors of mud tracked in by the physicians and hangers-on who had hovered around Federico in his final days and then drunk my wine after the funeral. I tied up my hair and my skirts, donned an apron, and swept out the bedchamber myself.

It was winter, but I welcomed the frigid air flushing out the sour, decaying odors of death. If I seemed to be in a frenzy as I cleaned, if the servants cast questioning glances among themselves, I did not care.

Matilda, my maid, finally persuaded me to stop and eat something.

“You will need your strength. Do not ignore what you must face in the days to come.”

I acquiesced and agreed to soup and wine, to a bath and fresh clothes in anticipation of what I expected would be a parade of both supplicants and advisors, all with their hands out.

The house was clean. My hair was woven with black ribbons and covered in a silk veil, and my husband’s rings were on my fingers when I finally sat down at his desk to confront my future.

My conversation with the steward was enlightening. Revelations of debts, poor harvests, diseased sheep, restless soldiers. I did not take his word at face value and instead ventured out myself into the groves and fields. I spoke to the shepherds and farmers. I visited the armory.

As always, the servants know before anyone else. They observe and accumulate knowledge like coin. No wonder Matilda cautioned me to prepare myself.

I wrote to my brother Inigo, and asked him to come.

He arrived within the week and I greeted him at the gate with an embrace. And then we got down to work. I had never been one to spend my hours over an embroidery frame. In truth, I’d rather be reading. But my time with the arrival of Inigo took on the tenor of a war room. One day I would be confronted with an enemy army at my door, but the battle I faced then was economic survival. Apparently my husband had squandered the bounty of our lands and it was up to me to restore them.

With Inigo at my side, I learned to negotiate, to barter, to prune.

It took me eight years to replenish not only my coffers but my confidence. I fended off marriage proposals from those who saw my precarious financial position as an opportunity to extract unfavorable terms. I managed to obtain loans when barter wasn’t enough. I prayed that France and the pope would keep their squabbles over territory in the North. I dug up barren trees and planted new ones. I culled unhealthy sheep and added new ewes and rams to rebuild the flock.

I survived.