But it was a thriving place; for every vendor there must have been ten potential purchasers—and probably as many criminals, Francesca thought uneasily.

She knew she stood out from the crowd. Though she had eschewed the Order’s habitual white robes for a simple dress of brown-dyed wool, she wore a thick layer of cream and unguent on her face to protect her skin from the unaccustomed sun, and spectacles made of blue glass protected eyes used to candlelight and oil lamps. She looked different, and therefore was no doubt a target for beggars and thieves alike.

She had no fear, for with her was a Frangipani: a tall, imposing, well-dressed young man with a very visible sword at his waist, a scion of one of the city’s wealthier families. But to Francesca, used to the calm of the Crypt’s underground cloisters, this was a crowded, dirty, disturbing place.

And it was a place of madness, she thought suddenly, of a great plague of the mind: all these people drawn from across Europe to see shabby relics and to part with their wealth, all for the sake of an idea, the great rampaging mind-sickness of Christianity. Just as in ages past they had no doubt been drawn to the Colosseum, or the triumphs of the Caesars—other contagious ideas, all now vanished like the dew.

But she was pious, and the Order itself was of course deeply Christian; she felt dismayed to be formulating such doubts, and did her best to put them out of her mind.

As they climbed up out of the residential area toward the higher ground of the ancient hills, Francesca got a broader view of the city. She could see how small and cramped the densely populated area was, set within the area called the disabitato, the great expanse of scrubland and farms that occupied the rest of the space within the old walls. Here and there monuments of the imperial age loomed out of the green, but many of them had been badly damaged by time, demolished by siege weapons, or the marble broken up and burned for lime.

There had been centuries of conflict, with Rome a battleground between popes and antipopes, and between the popes and the Holy Roman Emperors. Rome had paid a terrible price. But now the papacy had thrown off the yoke of the German emperors, and Rome had begun slowly to recover. On the higher ground, the mansions and palaces of the rich loomed with their towers of burnt red brick. The Frangipani family, in fact, had built a series of towers all the way around the old Circus Maximus, the emperors’ racetrack.

Leo was watching her.

She could read what he was thinking. He was trying to make out her body through her ground-length dress, its hem and sleeves now stained by Roman dirt. He was a good-looking boy, and he was scarcely older than she was, at twenty-four.