Chapter 3
That spring, Allegra, Lora, and their mother spent the long, warm days diving and swimming most mornings.
Afternoons passed with careful rinsing and drying of the byssus threads, a task that had to be repeated until every trace of salt and bit of sea life had been washed away.
After drying in the sun, the strange alchemy of the process transformed the limp amber threads into soft, fine strands of priceless sea silk.
Hung in the windows of their studio, the fibers caught the light of the Mediterranean sun and glinted pure gold.
Ella was conspicuously absent, endlessly busy with the demands of her new husband and household, or so she claimed. Allegra found herself growing impatient with her sister, disappointed in her wayward heart.
“Ella used to start the weaving,” she said, frustrated when her inexpert fingers fumbled at the loom. “She was going to teach me her trick of securing the first threads so they wouldn’t slip.”
Her mother nudged her to scoot over on the stool. “It’s not hard. Let me show you.” She took the comb from Allegra’s hand and placed it where the weave would start. “Lay it flat here with one hand and use the other to coax the threads down where you want them.”
Allegra rested her chin in her palm. “Can’t you tell her to come help us?”
“You and Lora do fine work.” Mamma’s answer was encouraging but firm.
“Don’t you care that she’s not here?” Allegra pressed.
Her mother drew her hands from the loom and turned to face her. “Ella has a lot to think about right now. I do miss her being here, but she must make her own decisions.”
Allegra protested, “A tradition of weavers for hundreds of years, as old as our first maestra, Queen Berenice, and Ella is too good for that?”
Mamma smiled, and Allegra felt a twinge of chagrin. Her mother was a maestra, the highest and most learned teacher of their craft. Did she think she could tell her mother something she didn’t already know?
“You’re here. And Lora’s here. And all the other women in all the other families.”
“You sound like Signora D’Ecco telling us to keep our eyes on our own work at school.”
“Something like that.” Mamma smiled. “Does it help you to worry about Ella? Your sister’s a wife and, you may as well know, will be a mother soon.
” Of course, her mother had known. “She’s got lots of time to make choices.
The sea doesn’t worry about tomorrow. The tides are for this day only.
” She handed the comb wound with byssus thread back to Allegra.
“Your turn,” she said, and nodded at the loom.
Not many months after that conversation, Allegra ran into Ella at the docks near the center of town.
It had been some time since they’d seen one another, and Allegra was surprised at how different she looked.
Ella carried a sack full of onions and garlic for a sauce she intended to make.
Her sister was an excellent cook, Allegra allowed.
The family had been invited to dinner at the newlyweds’ home six weeks or so after the wedding, and her seafood fregola had been delicious.
Proudly, Ella had shown off the saffron bulbs they’d planted in a corner of their garden, and the strands her husband had stored from the previous fall were still fragrant, the perfect ingredient for the dish.
“You know Papà would give you some of his catch,” she said, as Ella picked over the fresh-netted brill and bream at the fish market.
“Probably, but Gus and I can manage.”
Allegra thought about whether it occurred to Ella to wonder what she’d been up to, but why would it? Their days were governed by the byssus work, and that hadn’t changed since Allegra was a child.
“Do you miss home?” Allegra asked.
Ella glanced up from the silver pile of fish. “I miss you,” she said. “But we’re not that far away. You act like we’ve moved to Roma when we’re no more than a half hour’s walk from you here in town!”
“I guess.” Allegra tilted her head, sizing up her sister. Her face looked swollen and puffy, her cheeks flushed.
“You’re asking about the byssus, aren’t you?” Ella stepped past the stalls of fish toward the mussels and langoustines. “I do miss being together, but I have Gus.” She shrugged. “You don’t need me for the weaving.”
“But it’s your—”
“What?” Ella interrupted. “My duty? My calling?” She sighed. “You’re as good as the rabbis, Allegra, at piling on the guilt. I think it will survive without me.” Her ire was up, and she swiped at her brow in the heat. Was Allegra imagining it, or was her sister wheezing?
“So you’re not going to take the oath? You’re not going to weave?”
“When do I have time?” Allegra knew this was an excuse.
Water women had managed to do the work and take care of households and children for centuries.
Women balanced armloads, and when that got unwieldy, they learned to carry baskets atop their heads with an infant strapped to their torsos.
She started to say so, but Ella stopped her.
“I don’t want to take the oath,” she admitted, seeming suddenly weary.
Allegra was appalled. They were a community, a network. What one of them did affected them all in some way or other. What if everyone suddenly decided to abandon the byssus, to become . . . what, a teacher or sheepherder or miner?
“That’s selfish,” Allegra blurted. “How can you think that way?”
Ella paid for the small sack of langoustines she’d selected and fixed Allegra with flashing brown eyes as she stood with her hands on her belly.
They were the same height, with similar features and childhoods, but apparently opposite thoughts.
“Am I?” she challenged. “You want to weave because it suits you. You see the byssus as a thread, the unbroken line. That’s fine.
For you. For me, it feels like a chain, and I want to do something else. ”
“If the family needs you, it’s your duty—no, your honor—to be there. It’s more than just us. We put ourselves aside for something bigger.” She struggled to put words to all she felt.
“Allegra.” Ella softened and placed Allegra’s hand on her protruding belly. Something swam beneath her hand, rippling and turning. “This is bigger.”
A grin spread across Allegra’s face as she registered the movements. What did she know about becoming a mother? About anything in Ella’s life, really? She opened her mouth to voice a sheepish apology, but then Ella fell against her, the langoustines spilling out of her sack onto the market stones.
“Aiutami!” Allegra cried, catching Ella’s weight and sinking to her knees with her sister’s limp body.
Several women rushed to her side, one of them barking orders at a vendor to run for the doctor, another sending a young boy running for the midwife’s house. Allegra held Ella’s lolling head in her lap, unable to breathe as her heart pounded against her ribs.
“Someone get my mother,” she heard herself say. “We need my mother.”
Later, after she recounted how several of them had lifted Ella into the back of a fish vendor’s donkey cart and run for the doctor, Allegra recalled odd details of the scene.
Someone had gathered up the spilled langoustines and handed the bag to her, and she’d been confused.
Were these supposed to revive Ella? What was she to do with them?
Vendors’ donkeys usually spent the market day resting in the shade, and this one had resisted the unexpected labor.
Its loud bray rang in Allegra’s ears as she ran alongside the cart, her sister’s skirt having risen enough that Allegra was able to glimpse how tight the skin looked around her sister’s ankles.
“She didn’t wake up,” Allegra told her mother. “I tried to make her, but she wouldn’t.”
The midwife’s mouth was set in a grim line as she held Ella’s wrist for a pulse. When the seizures began, the doctor had not yet arrived, and the midwife did all she could to help Ella. Allegra remembered it as if she’d been underwater the whole time, sounds muffled and far away.
“She had fish scales in her hair from the market.” Allegra opened her palm, and there they were, five silver flakes crusted with salt. She’d plucked them from Ella’s braid when the seizures had stopped, when everything stopped.
The doctor, by the time he arrived, could do nothing.
Perhaps if he’d arrived sooner? Perhaps if she hadn’t goaded Ella and tried to make her feel guilty about not taking the water oath?
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Allegra would never know, and she’d never meet the niece or nephew she’d felt kicking under her hand that same day.
She couldn’t look at Gus when he came, his hat in his hands.
She couldn’t face her mother’s silent tears, or the way she pulled Allegra close to give her comfort, unaware that she may have been to blame.