A Golden Web Read Online Free Page B

woken. Her curly hair looked even more untidy than usual, and her cap was askew. Nicco could sense rather than see the rapid beating of her heart beneath her shift, as if she were a rabbit in a trap.
    Ursula turned around, and Alessandra curtsied. “Forgive me, Mother”—she nodded at Ursula. “Father”—at Carlo. She had almost made it to her place at the table when Ursula grabbed her—altogether too hard—by the wrist, pulling her up short.
    Alessandra looked into her stepmother’s oddly amber-colored eyes, but couldn’t find even one drop of love for her there. She made herself remember her mother’s soft brown eyes and how they grew warmer and evendarker when they lit on her, smiling and filled with love. Alessandra looked at the amber eyes and said the words, slowly and softly, inside her heart: My mother loved me.
    “Your hands,” said Ursula, her voice perfectly calm.
    “Madame?”
    Ursula’s voice was a tad more urgent when she spoke again. “Show me your hands!”
    Disengaging herself from Ursula’s grasp, Alessandra shot a pleading look at her father.
    “ Amore ,” he said, “the fish is getting cold.”
    “Your hands!” Ursula repeated in a voice as cold as the river from which the fish had been hauled up in a net that morning.
    Alessandra raised her hands up and held them out, palms up. Ursula grabbed the candelabra and drew it closer to the edge of the table, dripping wax onto the white cloth.
    “Turn them over!”
    There was still dirt and mud and blackberry juice under Alessandra’s nails. A drop of hot wax fell on the back of her hand. Alessandra flinched but didn’t cry out. Another drop fell.
    She thought about Aristotle’s treatise on bees: how bright and shiny bees are idle—like women. (It pained her that Aristotle never had anything good to say about women!) How honey falls from the air when the stars are rising in the night sky or the rainbow rests upon the Earth. How bees produce their young from the flowers of honeysuckle, reed, and olives. She reflected on all this and wondered how the first candlemaker ever thought of embedding a wick inside a rod of beeswax to conquer the darkness of night.
    Nicco shot his own dirty hands out into the wavering circle of light. “Pierina told the truth, Madame—my hands are a fair match for Alessandra’s.”
    Pierina knelt down on the floor to gather the broken pieces of crockery.
    “Leave that!” Ursula looked from one child to the other. Alessandra, still lost in thought, was staring at the beeswax on her hand—thinking how, even in the candlelight, it wedded itself to the smallest subtlety of the surface of her skin. That is how the goldsmith plies his art, she remembered—making a ring or a brooch first in wax, and then filling the place inhabited by wax with gold.
    Ursula’s voice was quite shrill now. “What were you doing to get such dirty hands?”
    Nicco reached inside his doublet and brought out the mushroom they’d found in the forest. “We were going to give it to Cook, Madame, and it was to be a surprise for you.”
    Carlo Giliani’s face broke into a broad smile. “By the saints!” he swore. “I didn’t think I’d ever see another of those in my lifetime! Well done, Nic!”
    Ursula again looked from child to child, ending with Alessandra, whose face she caressed softly, so that the girl had to look up and meet her eyes. How, thought Alessandra, can the hands feel so soft when the eyes look so hard?
    “Clever girl!” Ursula said quietly, all the shrillness gone now from her voice. But her eyes bespoke mistrust of clever girls—mistrust and fear. She rang the little bell that sat at her place on the table.
    The servant stepped out of the shadows to clear away the cold fish and the pile of sodden bread in the middle that would be given away as alms the following day, outside the church.
    Alessandra slipped away and took her place at the longtable, between Nicco and Pierina, who wiped her saucy fingers on the