That evening Edmund felt restless in James’s company. Their usual circuit of the piazzas and taverns did not distract him. It did not help when he heard one rotund innkeeper mutter that English gentlemen on the Grand Tour were famously “milordi pelabili clienti”—a soft touch as customers.

For Edmund, the night was only an interval until he could find Minerva again among her stoves and cabbages.

A part of him warned him of his foolishness. But, though he had been in love before, he had never felt anything like the drowning desire he had experienced when he had gazed on Minerva’s perfect face, and the pale shadow of her slim body.

The next day he hurried to the Colosseum long before midday.

Edmund had to pass through a hermitage as he entered the great crater of marble and stone, with its mute circles of seats. Squalid huts of mud and scavenged brick sheltered in the great archways where senators had once passed; on the arena floor trees had grown tall and animals grazed.

There was no little row of charcoal stoves, no women in their white robes, no moist smell of cooked cabbage rising to compete with the stink of dung. There were beggars, though, milling about listlessly. They looked as disappointed as he felt, though it was hard to tell through their masks of grimy misery. None of them could answer his questions about Minerva or the Virgins.

He spent a week combing the city. But he found no sign of the Virgins, nor anybody who knew anything about them. It was as if they had just disappeared, as evanescent as the mist off the Tiber.

Chapter 45

Chapter 45

Trying to track down what had become of Lucia at the hospital, Peter and I got nowhere fast.

We established that a woman called Pina Natalini had come in a small private ambulance to sign her out and take her away, showing valid signed certificates from a family doctor. Lucia herself, it seemed, had wanted to check out, claiming Pina as a cousin. It was all aboveboard, and I had no reason to believe the staff of the American Hospital were telling any lies about what had happened.

Surely it wasn’t the whole truth. I had no idea how much control this Pina and whoever else had come along—perhaps even Rosa—might have had over Lucia’s vulnerable mental state.

But what could we do? To the hospital staff—and indeed in my eyes—Peter, Daniel, and I had no claim over the girl. We barely knew her.