She felt a welcome flush. She was, after all, a woman. Which was, indirectly, the reason she was here.

“We’re here to talk business,” she reminded Leo gently.

“That’s so.” He stepped back, his smile apologetic, and averted his eyes.

“You have secured your interests in the land in Venice?”

“In principle.” He smiled. “All I need is the deposit . . .”

Times were changing—and it was Francesca’s instinct that the Order must change to suit.

Over the centuries the Order had continued to develop its charitable work. But it was a business, after a fashion. For every hundred of the poor or unfortunate whom the Order helped—so had been learned—there was always one who became rich enough later to make a significant donation to the Order’s coffers, wishing to show his gratitude to those who had saved him when he was at his lowest. It was a long game, but the amounts doled out to the poor were actually so small that the gamble was more than worth taking. It was a business, like Rome’s pilgrim-fleecing industry—but if it served a pious end it was surely a business worth carrying out.

But now there were new opportunities. After the death of the last Emperor in Rome, the cities and towns across western Europe had shrunk back, to be replaced by small hamlets and migrants, with few communities numbering more than a thousand. Now agricultural innovations were seeping across Europe from Germany. Major communities were developing again—Venice, it was said, had more than a hundred thousand inhabitants—and with this revival had come new opportunities for profit.

Young Leo’s scheme was simple: to buy marshland close to Venice, drain it, and then farm it until such time as he could sell it off in the face of the expected expansion of the city. Francesca could see the sense of it. For a small initial outlay he could multiply his holdings many times within a few years, and thus make his name within his family.

Francesca was prepared to make the loan to enable him to do this. But she had asked something in return. Now she outlined her latest plans: she needed soldiers.

As it spread out relentlessly, deep beneath the old Appian Way, the Order had broken through into another set of underground chambers, occupied by a group of Aryan Christians with a way of life strangely similar to the Order’s: run by a small group of women with massive extended families, served by a network of childless nieces and daughters . . . It seemed that similar pressures, surrounding the collapse of Rome, had induced similar solutions. It said a great deal for the secrecy of the Crypt and its dark twin that the two groups had remained unaware of each other for so long.