The Second Woman

Two women were taken. The record names only one.

Rome, 1426. Funicella, a midwife of Trastevere, is brought before the court on a charge of witchcraft, and the court’s notary writes down all of it. This novel is his record: session after session, deposition after deposition, a charge of ten articles, and the same few Latin lines on the days when nothing happens.

The notary gives one of the two women page after page. The other he calls “the other woman,” and the line ends there.

The record says she confessed without torture. It lists a table, a stool, a bell and an hour. It does not say what filled them.

“What I said, I said. What I did not say, I did not say.”

A trial told only by the man paid to write it down.