She went on to address another matter brought up in his last letter, one of his feeble attempts at a joke in such dismal circumstances:

Now, thinking this over, as I said, when your letter came telling me that one of the reasons why I desired your return was that I wanted a present you had for me, oh then I can tell you I did get angry! But such an anger as King David speaks of in the psalm, Irascimini et nolite peccare—be angry, but do not sin. For it seemed to me that you thought I wanted to see the present more than to see you; which is as far from my thoughts as darkness is from light. Perhaps I did not quite understand your letter, and I try to keep quiet with that thought. But if indeed you meant that, I do not know what I should say or do. Do see if you cannot come back to your tower, which cannot bear to remain so desolate any longer! And now it is time to think about the wine casks as well. La Piera begs to be remembered to you, and says that if her wish to see you and your wish to return were put in the scales, her scale would go down to the ground and yours up to the ceiling.

So the women in his life had joked with him, teased him back when he teased them, sent their love in the rough buffa style that he liked best—Maria Celeste’s burst of temper like something out of Marina herself, back in the day. Question my love and I’ll beat the shit out of you! This amorevolezza had given him heart in a bad time.

Now, as he stood there before her in the convent, she collapsed in his arms and wept. Even Arcangela, looking down to the side, sidled up and touched him briefly on the arm. Galileo touched her back, on the shoulder, gently, then seized up Maria Celeste and lifted her in a hug, kissed away her tears of joy. She was like a bird in his hands, he too wept to feel her lightness. “My little Virginia,” he said into her ribs, shocked and afraid.

In the weeks following his homecoming, he devoted himself to the sisters at the convent. Arcangela reverted to her usual distance; she looked away whenever he spoke to her. She too was more gaunt and angular than ever. Uneasily Galileo tried yet again to befriend her, this time with bits of candied fruit, in the way you would tame a crow; and she would duck her head and snatch the food and drift away.

Meanwhile Maria Celeste talked incessantly, as if to make up for lost time; and though Galileo knew that time lost could never be regained, he indulged her happily. It was good to be home again, and responsible for real things—for physical objects, not only for the ovens and chimneys and windows and roofs of his own house, but also for the ramshackle convent of the Clares, which at this point was nearing a material collapse to match the mental collapse long since suffered.

So he spent many days inside the place, the old prohibition against men’s presence long forgotten. He measured beams for the servants to cut, and augured in the peg holes and hammered in the pegs himself. What joy to pop a dovetail into place like a key in a lock. Theorems you could hit with a hammer. With materials less prone to rot he could have made a roof that would hold off rain for a thousand years. But lead was expensive, and cedar too; pine shakes would have to do.

There weren’t so many chores to accomplish in his garden. It had been tended closely by La Piera, as being one of the things that kept them alive. Now there was little to do except decide on which varieties of cedros and lemons to put in the broken wine casks that had been cut in half for use as tubs.

Then San Matteo came into an agricultural inheritance. “First your prayer was answered and then mine!” Galileo said to Maria Celeste. The elder brother of Suor Clarice Burci had left the sisters a farm at Ambrogiana worth five thousand scudi. Maria Celeste estimated it would yield them annually 290 bushels of wheat, fifty barrels of wine, and seventy sacks of millet. “It was my prayer too, believe me,” she replied with a dark expression. “My ten thousand prayers.” Burci had attached a farm crew to the bequest, as well as an obligation to the nuns to say a mass for him every day for the next four hundred years, and to absolve him three times a year for the next two hundred years. That was fine, but the land had been neglected and was now nearly wild, crew or no.

It was something Galileo could do, and he threw himself into it. To be able to get one’s hands on a problem and strangle it was a very satisfying thing. Clever engineering could do a lot. Once he was pacing the floor of the dining hall, considering a difficult problem in counterbalancing, and a nun got in his way. He explained to her very firmly that she shouldn’t do that, that he was fixing the roof, and afterward she told all the other nuns, “He fixes things by thinking about them!” And indeed, when he was done thinking about the new farm, the nuns would have reliable sustenance at last. It was what he had been hoping for when he had asked Maria Celeste about a benefice from the new pope. He should not have asked her, he realized now, but merely requested the land grant he had been thinking of.

Now they had it, and he stumped across the neglected winter field, under low pewter skies, bark-ringing the midsized trees already overgrowing the pasture, then cutting down the smaller ones with hard awkward swipes of his ax, swinging as if taking off the heads of certain Dominicans, Jesuits, Benedictines, and professors. He was an executioner of trees. At age seventy, and despite his truss, he could still strike harder than most of the boys, and his shout on impact was the loudest by far. It was very satisfying. He would bring this farm into production and give them a sustenance. “Things occur in their own time,” he said.

He wished he could help Maria Celeste in the same kind of way. She had pulled her teeth out as they rotted, and now had nearly none, but was at least free from infections of the jaw. But the lack of teeth could not be good for her digestion. He contrived some rending devices for mashing meats, scavenging bits of an old framework of one of the inclined planes with a bitter smile. There was more than one way to chew on reality.

The workshop was much reduced. It was only a small room stuffed with tools and machinery and beams and metal rods and slats. Mazzoleni was ancient and shriveled and slept most of the time, even though he was in fact four years younger than Galileo himself. Of course Galileo was beyond ancient at this point. But Mazzoleni had perhaps been a bit baked in the head by his many hours in the Venetian sun, and next to the fumes of furnaces. His brains had dried out a little, though he still had his cracked cheery grin, the sight of which now sent a stab through Galileo, who recalled so clearly what it used to mean.

So, he did what he could to help Maria Celeste to eat, and worked on the convent, and their farm, and the garden of Il Gioièllo. When he was tired of the garden he went to the workshop and paged through his dusty old folios, making lists of propositions for the book he was now thinking of writing.

This was another good idea that Piccolomini had been inspired to recommend to Galileo: to go through his old experiments and write a book that had nothing to do with Copernicus or the heavens—a book that instead gave to the world what he had learned about local motion, and the strength of materials. He had started one dialogue while still in Siena, using Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio as his speaking characters again, in an obvious act of defiance, even insolence, as he himself recognized with some pleasure. He could decide to keep the names or not, if it ever came to the point of publishing. He would never be allowed to publish anything anyway, at least in Italy, or anywhere the pope held sway. But there were Protestant acquaintances who might be interested. In any case that was not the point. So sometimes he worked on adding new pages to the dialogue.