Free The Garden of Letters by Alyson Richman Page B

the mercy of God, but now he hung a crucifix over their bed and lit candles at church. He begged for his wife and child to be spared.
    Five days later, Orsina’s fever broke. She shot straight up in bed with her eyes suddenly alight with a completely different pain.
    Pietro rushed into the room at the first sound of her cries. The linen in their bed was covered with blood.
    He pulled the sheets away from her and saw her nightgown soaked in red.
    She was hysterical, her hands pushing into her stomach. Her pain was excruciating.
    “I’m going to get the doctor,” Pietro told her as he lifted her in his arms and brought her into the bathroom. She did not answer. She did not need him to tell her what she already knew: The river of blood that flowed out of her no longer contained any life.

    Orsina survived, but they had lost the baby. The tragedy hit them both so hard they could hardly speak.
    Grief washed over Orsina like a dam breaking. There had been too much death to comprehend. World War I had just come to an end, and suddenly she found herself orphaned and having lost her first child, too. She hadn’t even properly grieved for her parents, and now she struggled to come to terms with her miscarriage.
    “We will try again,” Pietro said, trying to soothe her. “When you feel ready.”
    She could not utter a single word, only the faintest sound. A whimper.
    He looked at his violin case in the corner. The piano with its cover closed over the keyboard, the viola that rested in the corner near the window.
    He had absolutely no desire to play.

    That spring, he returned to Venice with Orsina to pack up her parents’ belongings and place flowers on their graves.
    The hat shop had been shuttered closed. Several months were owed on the rent, but the landlord had also died in the epidemic, and his wife, a longtime admirer of Orsina’s mother’s hats, had shown them some mercy. They had to clear out the shop by May.
    A girl by the name of Valentina had assisted her mother in the shop for years. She had been caring for her own mother when Orsina’s parents had fallen ill, so they hadn’t seen each other for close to a year. But now that the sickness had left the city, Valentina had returned to help Orsina pack up the shop and sell off the remaining inventory.
    The women spoke little at first between themselves, though Orsina did try and express her gratitude for the help. But slowly, as the days progressed, they became closer.
    “What will you do now?” Orsina had asked.
    “I hope to open my own shop.”
    The girl took one of Orsina’s mother’s hats and lifted it to the light.
    “I will never have your mother’s vision. But she taught me how to sew. To use judgment and proportion with the materials.” She stroked a feather on one of the hats with her finger.
    “I never saw an egret or ostrich feather in my life before I came to work here.”
    Orsina smiled.
    “My mother loved to give a little flight to all her clients.”
    “Yes, she did.” Valentina smiled.
    “I wish I could give you everything. But take this and consider it my mother’s blessing.”
    Orsina lifted a large box filled with spools of velvet and trimmings and brimming with silk flowers and feathers.
    Valentina turned scarlet, embarrassed by the gesture.
    “I can’t take the feathers. They’re too expensive.”
    “Yes, you can,” Orsina insisted. “Use them like my mother would have. That will make me happy.”
    Pietro and Orsina left Venice the following week. They used the proceeds from the inventory to pay off her parents’ debt. And before leaving, they visited her favorite church, Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Cannareggio, to pray for another child.
    “I’ve managed to arrange a fellow musician to take over their lease,” Pietro said. “Valentina will pack up the rest of your parents’ belongings and store them until you’re ready to go through them.”
    But by the next year, Orsina was pregnant again and neither of them, after