“This is the end of my life,” she whispered to Giuliano.

He frowned. “We mustn’t talk.”

“The end of all choices—”

“I will be gentle.” He leaned down and kissed her on the lips. She smelled garlic and fish on his hot breath.

She still had Daniel’s business card, hidden in a corner of her bag.

When Giuliano entered her it hurt, terribly.

Once the ceremony was over, Rosa told Lucia that she would never see Giuliano Andreoli again. Love, it seemed, was over for her.

And it was only a few days after the ceremony that she found out she was pregnant.

Chapter 30

Chapter 30

In the morning of every seventh day, the Order’s governing Council would meet in the Crypt’s peristylium. Such meetings dated back to the difficult times after the Vandal incursion, already fifteen years ago, when the seniors, Julia, Helena, and Regina, had gathered with selected others to thrash out the priorities for the week.

Regina, now sixty-five years old and, since her mother’s death, the most senior survivor of the Order’s founding days, had deliberately developed a habit of being late for these meetings. This morning, instead of making for the peristylium, she began her day with a walk to the Crypt’s farthest reaches, where the tunnels were steadily being extended into the soft tufa rock.

These days the Order employed experienced miners for this work. They used socketed picks and axes, and carried out rubble in framed leather sacks. To crack harder rock faces they would set fires; water would be thrown on the heated rock, and the sudden cooling would shatter the face. All this used a lot of wood, and more wood was required for lumber to prop up the shafts they dug; there were generally more lumbermen at work, in fact, than miners.

The miners were working under much the same conditions as in mines of coal and metal ore across Europe. Their working lives in these dark, sulfurous, smoke-choked conditions were short—not that that mattered, as most were slaves. But here, of course, their legacy would not be what they extracted from the ground but the holes they left behind.

When the miners had roughly shaped out the new chambers and corridors, engineers followed to line and reinforce the walls with concrete, which they would later face with brick. The concrete was made from an aggregate of stone and tile set in mortar made with water, lime, and a particular volcanic sand called pozzolana. Making concrete like this took a toll on the slave labor used to ram it in place. But the use of that labor made it immensely durable.

The work was going ahead satisfactorily. After a curt talk with the foremen, Regina made her way back to the core of the Crypt, and, reluctantly, the Council meeting.