Rosa had let me go gracefully enough when I asked to leave. It was only later, thinking over the day, that I understood that she had decided—during our very first meeting at that coffee bar, as I tried to come to terms with suddenly meeting my sister again for the first time since childhood—to try to recruit me into the Order. Her first instinct had been to exclude me; after meeting me she had decided I should somehow be inducted. And everything she had shown me, everything she had done and said from that moment on, had been designed with that intent in mind. It had nothing to do with me at all.

Chapter 40

Chapter 40

Francesca walked with her companion through the civitas Leonina.

Leo Frangipani wanted to tell Francesca about the Pope’s plans for a Holy Year, to be held in the forthcoming year 1300. “It’s going to be a marvel,” he said. “They are planning how to display the holy relics to maximize the revenue. It’s said that the priests are already practicing with the rakes they will use to drag in the money thrown by the crowds onto their altars . . .” He was watching her. “Ah, you disapprove! These fishers of the endless river of the gullible and faithful that washes through Rome—”

“Not at all,” she said. “Anybody would disapprove of thievery. But the pilgrims believe their money is well spent, and if it goes to preserve Rome, mother of the world, then surely they are right.”

“Perhaps so. I do know that you ladies in white prefer to give your money away . . . I’ll never understand how you survive.”

But survive the Order did, after more than eight centuries.

The civitas Leonina was a city within a city, centered on the Vatican Hill, where stood Constantine’s vast and crumbling basilica, the wheel hub of Christianity. The area was a huddle of monasteries, lodging houses, churches, oratories, taverns, cells for hermits, even an orphanage and a poorhouse, the latter of which was funded, discreetly, by the Order.

There were many services here for the pilgrims—or, depending which way you looked at it, plenty of people with ambitions to separate pilgrims from their money. The cobblers would repair soles worn out from walking, butchers, fishmongers, and fruiterers would feed your body, and farmers would sell you straw for your bedding, some of it still caked with dung. And then there were the vendors of linen strips that had been in contact with the tomb of one martyr, and dried flowers said to have grown over the grave of another, and you could buy candles, relics, rosaries, icons, and vials of holy water and oil. Guides and beggars wandered everywhere, looking for the gullible. Even under the walls of Constantine’s basilica itself moneylenders thronged and called, ringing coins on the tops of their tables.