The woman on the bed did not look up from her book. She was very old, Lucia saw. Her face looked as if it had dried out and imploded, like a sun-dried tomato, her skin leathery and marked with liver spots. Wisps of gray hair lay scattered on the cushion behind her head. On a metal stand beside her bed a plastic bag fed some pale fluid into her arm. A blanket lay over her legs, and she wore a heavy, warm-looking bed jacket, although the room seemed hot to Lucia.

This was Maria Ludovica, then, one of the legendary matres. She looked terribly old, tired, ill—and yet she was pregnant; the swelling in her belly, under the blanket, was unmistakable.

The stink was powerful here, a stink like urine. Lucia felt drawn, repelled at the same time.

Rosa leaned forward and said softly, “Mamma—Mamma—”

Maria looked up blearily, her eyes rheumy gray pebbles. “What, what? Who’s that? Oh, it’s you, Rosa Poole.” She glanced down at her book irritably, tried to focus, then closed the book with a sigh. “Oh, never mind. I always thought old age would at least give me time to read. But by the time I’ve got to the bottom of the page I’ve forgotten what was at the top . . .” She leered at Lucia, showing a toothless mouth. “What an irony—eh? So, Rosa Poole, who is this you’ve brought to see me? One of mine?”

“One of yours, Mamma. She is Lucia. Fifteen years old.”

“And you’ve reached your menarche.” Maria reached out with one clawlike hand; she compressed Lucia’s breast, not unkindly. Lucia forced herself not to flinch. “Well, perhaps she’ll do. Is she to be your champion, Rosa?”

“Mamma, you shouldn’t talk that way—”

Maria winked, hideously, at Lucia. “I’m too old not to speak the truth. Too old and sick and tired. And Rosa doesn’t like it. Well, I’ve stirred you all up—haven’t I? At least I can still do that. It’s just as when I’m ready to pup. I can see how it agitates them, all these slim breastless sisters. Their little nipples ache, and their dry bellies cramp—isn’t that true, Cecilia?” She snapped the question at her patient nurse, who merely smiled. “Well, I’m pregnant again—and I’m dying, and that’s stirred them up even more. Hasn’t it, Rosa Poole?” Maria cackled. “I feel like the pope, by God. White smoke, white smoke . . .”

Lucia remembered what Pina had said, about a disturbance in the Crypt going back years, of more girls like her—more freaks, she thought gloomily—coming into their menarche, instead of staying young, like everybody else, everybody normal. Perhaps the illness of this strange old woman really was having some kind of effect—perhaps it had somehow affected her.

If so, she resented it.