I took her face in my hands and pulled her back so I could look in her eyes. “Isn’t there?” And yes, standing in that burned-out building with rioters screaming outside and her father’s body at our feet, I kissed her. I held her in my arms and rocked her, “Uno, due, tre, quattro, uno, due, tre . . .,” hoping my counting would calm her, too.

We buried him in the dirt of the little cellar under his shop. We didn’t have a coffin, so we filled his grave with loaves of bread. She knelt over that mound of dirt and murmured for a long time. I knelt and renewed my promise to finish painting the tondo of his daughter and make her—at least—immortal.

Chapter XLV

Chapter XLV

Are the riots over?” Felice asked when I returned to the Vatican two days later and found her standing in a doorway, watching her husband and the heads of the other Roman families gather around her father’s bed.

“The city’s as quiet as a cool morning after Michaelmas,” I replied. I’d waited to leave Margherita—at Imperia’s, surrounded by friends—until the violence had abated. The air still smelled of smoke, and there were piles of debris in piazzas, alleys, and intersections, but it had been a calm morning, with even a few birds chirping.

“Relieved to hear it,” Felice said with an unmistakable lilt of pride. “He’ll be pleased.” She jerked her chin at His Holiness sitting up in bed, cheeks warm with color, waving his walking stick, threatening to beat in skulls.

“I’m glad to see he’s feeling better.”

“He sat up for the first time right after I brought word that my bedroom diplomacy had succeeded once again. He stopped coughing that very night. Nothing like victory to heal a man.”

“So, you’ve ended the riots?”

She smoothed out her skirts and said, “They’re about to sign a peace agreement.” The Pax Romana, as it became known in the months to come, was a groundbreaking agreement between the papacy and the old warring families; they didn’t agree to stop hating each other, sì certo, but they did agree to stop killing each other. At least for a while. As I stood in the doorway watching Felice watch the head of each family sign that agreement and congratulate each other on a peace well-earned, I couldn’t help but think that “any man who pulls a woman out of the water” always gets the credit. Yet, Felice didn’t flinch when the men ordered her to leave and tend to her sewing. “Seamstresses and painters,” she’d said with a wink on her way out the door. “The true makers of miracles.”