He looked this way and that, all guilty like, then he shrugged and said, “Use a Florentine mix.”

“Oh? I should’ve guessed.” I tucked my hair behind my ears. “Thank you.”

His eyes landed on my poorly shaven neck. “Is that all?”

“Uh . . .” How could I ask him for a place to stay when he was trying to sabotage me with the same lie as everyone else? I shook my head. “No, that’s all. Buongiorno,” I said and felt him watch me walk away. He didn’t call after me, and even though for the first time in my life I didn’t know where I would sleep that night, I didn’t look back.

Outside, it was raining. I pulled my jacket over my head. Twenty-five years old, and I’d never been goat-broke before, not even a soldo for a cup of ale. Scuttling from eave to eave, I sidestepped sagging-mouthed men sleeping in corners perfumed with piss. One man—too young to be so balding—knelt under a portico of a locked church, singing a hymn I didn’t know in a language I didn’t understand. There was a woman—holding a child so young I didn’t know whether a boy or girl—huddled under a bridge at the Tiber. I hated that I didn’t have any food to give, so I gave her my jacket. Don’t look at me like that; you would’ve done the same. All would’ve worked out fine, except some ruffian claiming to be from the Colonna family demanded that I pay him “rent” for sleeping under the bridge. I didn’t believe he was a Colonna, but he did have a dagger, so I kept walking. This was late in the year, sometime after All Hallows, so it was cold. I knocked on a couple of doors, promising to repay innkeepers once I received payment from the pope, but would you have believed me, jacketless, poorly shaven, and drenched as a river rat?