The Witch in the Lake Read Online Free Page A

to hospitals at night, with a lantern, and dissected corpses. He’d cut open the body, and draw what he saw inside.’
    Leo, listening to this in the flickering light, couldn’t help shuddering. He’d looked at his own leg, tracing the muscle under his skin.
    â€˜He even followed criminals on the day they were to be executed, to see their faces and how they looked at the point of death. But then,’ and Marco’s face darkened, ‘the Pope stopped him cutting up bodies. Leonardo wasn’t allowed to even set foot in a Roman hospital any more—or he’d be sentenced to death.’ Marco snorted. ‘Didn’t he just want to discover the truth? Who else ever had the courage to do it!’
    Marco kept his own notebooks in a locked box under his bed. He faithfully recorded conversations he’d had, word for word, with people in the city. He’d copy drawings, and compare them with others he’d made, trying to build up his own library of knowledge about anatomy.
    But on the night that Leo came home late, with the ghostly echo from the lake still throbbing in his head, Marco was perhaps the most excited that Leo had ever seen him.
    â€˜This is truly amazing,’ Marco was exclaiming to himself as he tried to copy from the sketches lying in front of him. ‘The human heart on the table.’
    Leo silently cheered. Wasn’t it lucky that Marco’s remarkable discovery had occurred on the very same night as his own? But as Leo built up a fire, and filled the pot with water and slices of turnip and onion, he felt a tug of anger that
his
discovery could never be discussed, whereas the next two hours would be devoted to Marco’s.
    â€˜See?’ Marco thrust a drawing into the lamplight. ‘This is a copy—but a person who I won’t name told me it’s a faithful copy of a sketch made by Leonardo some twenty-five years ago. It’s only just been found.’ Marco wiped his hand over his face. ‘If we know what’s inside us, we can find a cure when the sickness comes!’
    Leo peered at the drawing. There was a cluster of wiggly lines inside the heart, and lots of tiny arrows and writing that all looked like it was written backwards.
    Marco chuckled as he watched Leo’s puzzled face. ‘Mirror writing,’ he explained. ‘Leonardo wrote like that for secrecy.’ Marco picked up a small lady’s pocket mirror from the table, and held it close to the drawing.
    â€˜He’s done cross-sections of the heart,’ murmured Marco, ‘you can see all the cardiac vessels. Leonardo says it’s the heart that pumps the blood all around the body! What do you think of that?’
    Leo had a turn with the mirror, and was excited too when real words leaped out of the jumble of mirror writing. But even as he looked and admired, he wished he could talk about what went on
inside
his heart, and not just about the look of it.
    â€˜I think I’ll go to bed, Papà,’ he said at last, and got up wearily from the table. But Marco was still under the spell of the drawing. Leo was putting on his nightshirt when Marco finally looked up and answered him.
    â€˜What? You’re going to sleep already?’
    Leo pulled the curtain back.
    Marco looked like someone who has been underwater, coming up suddenly for air. ‘You’re not having any supper, Leo?
Is
there any supper?’
    Leo sighed. He watched Marco trying to remember something as his mind came slowly back into the room, into the present.
    â€˜
La minestra
,’ answered Leo. ‘You know, the soup—onion and turnip. But I’m not hungry.’
    â€˜Why? Don’t you feel well? What is it?’ Marco was alarmed. All at once he was on his feet, coming over to feel Leo’s forehead.
    Leo grinned. If he’d ever wanted his father’s whole attention, Leo had only to mention a slight headache, a sore throat, a stomach ache, and Marco