The Witch in the Lake Read Online Free

to the city. Only a few of the men from the village worked in Florence, in the busy workshops where they sold wool and silk, cut hair, made looms, built furniture. Most villagers thought it too far to venture, and preferred to stay within the slow secluded world of the village, working in the olive groves and vineyards, or curing pigs for the market.
    Marco was a wood carver and worked in the back of the shop owned by Signor Butteri. When he was younger, Signor Butteri did his own carving and selling, but now he suffered from gout—a disease that caused his legs to swell and his temper to sour. But he was fond of his assistant, because Marco often came to work with a new remedy to try for his illness, and was always interested in discussing his latest symptoms. Even though Marco was sometimes late to work, he was an excellent carver. The workshop specialised in wedding chests, where brides placed their linen, and Marco’s chests were very popular, with their smooth satin finish and careful decoration.
    Marco quite enjoyed wood-carving—it was a living, he told Leo—and it allowed him to roam about in the city he loved most.
    Marco finished work at three in the afternoon. But he never walked straight home. He lingered. He liked to talk with people—merchants, apothecaries, lawyers, labourers—and hear the heartbeat of the city. He’d drink a glass of wine at the markets, visit the other workshops where artists were painting or sculpting or inventing. The bustle of Florence was so different from the secretive stillness of the village. Marco liked to listen to people’s news, and news about medical discoveries was his favourite kind.
    Marco was like a detective, searching for clues that would help him solve the mystery of the human body. He wanted to know how it looked inside, how the blood flowed in the veins, how the bones stayed attached and didn’t float all about. If he’d had to remain in this small village all his life, he often said, he’d go to the grave believing that the arrangement of the planets above caused the plague down here on earth.
    â€˜In the city of Florence men are searching for truth,’ he’d sigh. ‘Here there is only superstition and fear.’ And that never saved anyone, he’d mutter to himself.
    When Marco came home late from work, he was often lit up, as if he were a lamp someone had kindled. He glowed with hope, talk, new information. ‘This is a wonderful time we’re living in,’ he’d beam to Leo, ‘we are discovering so much—it seems every day we know more about life, about
us!
’
    And Leo would beam back, knowing he was about to hear news that belonged only to a handful of people in the country.
    In Florence, only twenty years ago, there had lived Marco’s hero, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was best known for his art, but Marco was more interested in his investigations of the human body. The great man had kept private notebooks—no one knew how many, most people knew nothing about them at all—and he’d sketched drawings, made notes, scribbled ideas that had never been thought of before in the history of the world.
    Leo had stayed up with his father many nights until dawn, when Marco had just returned from the city. He’d tell Leo how he’d got talking with someone, a scholar who’d known another, whose father had assisted the great Leonardo.
    â€˜The man had a passion for truth,’ Marco would begin in a hushed, awed voice, ‘and he didn’t care what danger that put him in.’ Leonardo had opened up human bodies, Marco said, to study them.
    â€˜Ugh!’ cried Leo. ‘
Che schifo!
’
    â€˜Well, he wanted to get the anatomy right,’ Marco explained. ‘How can you draw a leg properly, with all its strength and power, if you don’t know how it looks inside? What’s under the skin, how does the muscle pull? So you know what? Leonardo went