A Golden Web by Barbara Quick

Alessandra wasn’t mistaken.
    “Thank you, Emilio!” She could have kissed Emilia just then, but of course she didn’t dare.
     
    There were two other students lodging at Signora Isabella’s—one studying law and the other, like Alessandra, aspiring to gain admission to the medical school. Both were clerics, with their heads shaven in the tonsure, which made it hard to tell their age. They were, in any case, far older than Alessandra. They looked at her and Emilia with a great deal of curiosity. But Alessandra parried theirquestions with protestations of fatigue. She and Emilia ate and retired to their room as quickly as possible.
    There was a small bed for Alessandra and an even smaller one for Emilia, nothing more than a pallet on the floor. Despite her exhaustion, Emilia kissed Alessandra good night and tucked her in—and the sight of it would have amused anyone who saw them. But they were, as far as they knew, unobserved, and they fell asleep immediately.
     
    The Porta Nova—one of the twelve gates of the city, close by Alessandra and Emilia’s port of entry into Bologna—turned out to be the very place where the medical students gathered. This intelligence came to Alessandra at breakfast, over the bowl of hot milk and the hard roll that came as part of the cost of the room. She asked the other aspiring medico , whose name was Paolo, if he could show her where and how to enroll at the University.
    Paolo snorted and said there was no need. All she had to do was pay her dues to the students’ association and start attending lectures.
    Books, the two clerics told her, were the biggest problem. There were always several people in line to readevery book kept under lock and key in its carrel in the library or chained to its stand at the stationer’s. People weren’t shy about pushing and shoving, either, nor were they above taking and giving bribes for the privilege of sitting at the writing desk and making one’s own copy. Pecie —the official copies of books rented out in pieces—were hard to come by. Paolo boasted that he was maintaining a flirtation with the stationer’s daughter, who sometimes smuggled parts of books to him under her chemise. Alessandra nearly choked on her crescent roll at this piece of information.
    “I’ll introduce you to her, if you like,” said the generous Paolo. “She’s such a flirt that one man more is always welcome to ogle her boobies. Although,” he added, eyeing Alessandra, “you can hardly be called a man!”
    She froze.
    Paolo smiled at her, showing his rotten teeth. She wondered whether his tonsure was really a tonsure or only the natural retreat of the hair he once had. Also about how ugly the stationer’s daughter must be to want to flirt with the likes of him. She could hardly breathe. Of course he’d seen right through her!
    “Why, your voice hasn’t even changed yet! How old are you, Sandro? Thirteen? Fourteen?”
    Alessandra blinked a few times, taking this in. She said in a confidential tone of voice, “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
    Paolo thumped her on the back, so that the bite of roll she had just taken came flying out of her mouth. She was about to apologize to the people sitting across the table from her—a merchant and either his daughter or his very young wife—until she realized that they were both too drunk to notice.
    “You can depend on me!” said Paolo. “I’ll wager you must be a prodigious scholar to have been sent here by your parents to study”—he lowered his voice to a malodorous whisper—“at such a tender age.”
    “I’ve read—rather a lot. I was also—on intimate terms, in my parish, with the stationer’s daughter.”
    “By God!” Paolo slapped his thigh. “Boy or man, you’re my sort, you are! A fellow who knows how to get on in the world. This, for instance,” he said, laying a finger on the fringe of hair around his bald head, “and this,” taking a fistful of his black clerical robe. “God callsus