Then, came the day when I received a note from Margherita, scrawled in a fast hand: “Meet me on via Flaminia as soon as possible.” I found her outside the gates of Rome, pacing up and down the pilgrimage route as a line of citizens, merchants, and pilgrims fled the city. She said, “We have to get out of Rome. Now.”

“I can’t leave, I have to work.” I turned to march back through the gates, but I couldn’t reenter the city without a proper dose of luck, now could I? Not at this precarious moment. So, I started to go through my latest routine: tuck my hair behind both ears, wipe dust from each shoulder . . .

She grabbed my arm. “You’re not coming with me? Not even with the latest from Ravenna?” her voice was shrill.

I thought of Sodoma’s strange tales of earthquakes and red moons and: “Are you worried about the monster, too?”

“What monster?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m talking about Easter.”

“What about Easter?” Was she talking about the pope’s strange Easter service?

“The streets are full of stories,” she said. “How have you not heard about Easter?”

“I’ve been working.”

“Inside the Vatican,” she snapped. “You should know more than I do. The siege has ended. The French attacked. There was a great battle on Easter Sunday.” The tremor in her voice compelled me to stop and listen. “They killed each other. On Easter. Over ten thousand dead. The French fired their cannons for hours. Helmets, heads, severed limbs all flying; the ground dyed red with blood; ditches overflowing with carnage; Ravenna fallen . . .”

I’d been to Ravenna: a city of tan, orange, and sienna with hills of emerald green and sky of clear blue. Had the city’s trove of Byzantine mosaics survived the attack? Would I ever again be able to ride up the coast of the Adriatic to copy those mosaicked scenes of Jesus presiding over his flock as the Good Shepherd or the Byzantine Emperor and his wife cavorting at court? My heart squeezed with the fear that, perhaps, those thousand-year-old mosaics had already fallen alongside the other corpses of war. I shook my head. “There’s nothing I can do, but paint.” Tuck hair behind both ears, dust off each shoulder . . .

“The worst battle in history, they say.” Margherita took my hands in hers, stopping my progress. “The papal army was destroyed. The French won. Now, nothing stands between them and Rome. And when Gaston de Foix and his murderous men arrive here, they’ll spare none of us. We have to leave.”

“If we leave, war will only chase us.”

“We can’t stay here!”