Totila lay in the stench of ordure and urine, unable to move. He kept his hands clamped over his belly, but he could feel the blood seeping through his fingers.

Somebody was here, standing before him. It was a woman in a white, purple-edged robe. She was one of those who tended the poor. She knelt in the dirt, pulled his hands away from his side, and inspected his wound. “Don’t try to move,” she said.

“This is a holy place to die, here in Rome.”

“There is no good place to die,” she murmured. “Not like this.” She had pale gray eyes, he saw, the gray of cloud.

Having bound him up, she managed to get him to his feet and took him to an inn. She left him money, in a new leather purse.

He stayed two nights.

When he was able to walk, he approached the innkeeper with some trepidation, for he wasn’t sure he had the funds to pay for his lodging. But he found that the account had already been settled.

Before he left Rome, Totila tried to find the woman who had helped him. But though everybody knew of the women in white, and of their charitable work for the helpless poor and victims of accident and crime—some called them angels, others virgins—nobody knew where they could be found. They seemed to melt out of the rubble of Rome by day, and disappear by night, like ghosts of a different past.

Chapter 39

Chapter 39

On the day I was due to meet Rosa I woke early, having passed a nervous, restless night.

Before breakfast I crept downstairs, tiptoed past the concierges, and walked along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. The dawn wasn’t far advanced, and the traffic was light. Around me was the old Roman Forum, nestling in the timeless safety of its valley, and the Palatine and Capitoline Hills bristled with the imperial palaces and other mighty buildings of later antiquity.

In my week in Rome, I’d walked and walked, from the Vatican in the west to the Appian Way in the south, along the banks of the Tiber, and around great stretches of the Aurelian Wall. Like Edinburgh or San Francisco, Rome was a city of hills—that was the first thing that struck you—you really couldn’t walk far without heading either uphill or down, and after a few days my thighs and calves felt as hard as a soccer player’s.

But what was unlike any city I’d visited before was the sense of time here.

This place had been in continuous occupation since the Iron Age. It was as if time were untethered here, and great reefs of history kept sticking up into modern times, mounds of past as enduring as the ancient hills themselves.

Rome was starting to intimidate me, just as Peter had warned. It wasn’t the right frame of mind to be in when meeting my long-lost sister.