For the second time since my arrival in Rome, he turned out to be a she. Only this woman wasn’t pregnant and menacing, but soft and beautiful and . . .

“As I predicted,” she said, voice of honey and sarcasm, “it was a puppy that needed saving.” Her jacket was made of dark green velvet—stylish cut with a high collar—and her eyebrows were fashionably plucked. She reached out—I thought she was going to touch my face, or heavens, brush my lips—but instead she picked my father’s long-handled paintbrush out of my vest pocket, slipped the end of the handle into the lock of the church door, and worked it around until the lock clicked open. “Dai,” she said. “The wolves will be back.”

And I didn’t hesitate to follow the lady inside.

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XVIII

The door dropped closed with an echoing thunk. We were inside a cavernous church. Rain splashed across the marble floor, falling down in a great column through an open oculus in the domed ceiling, also letting in a dim pillar of cloudy blue moonlight. “Santa Maria,” I whispered. “We’re in the Pantheon, aren’t we?” There’s so much on which to ruminate when standing in the Pantheon; you could spend all of eternity there and still not think through it all: its extraordinary age, first conceived before Mary met Joseph and completed before word of Christ’s resurrection spread beyond Judea; its polytheistic past, a great Christian monument that began life as a Roman temple dedicated to all gods; its role as witness to history, Emperor Hadrian holding court and Pope Boniface consecrating Christians; its architectural wonders, a dome so wide that a sphere fits inside without any internal columns or support, demonstrating one of Archimedes’s great mathematical theories. And yet, I thought of none of that, because I was too distracted by that lovely lady wringing out her long brown hair in a glint of moonlight.

She said, “Mouth open, head tilted back, classic courtier on holiday.” She took off her coat to reveal that she was wearing a long yellow dress. (She still claims that I gasped at that revelation, but I remember, in the moment, being impressed that I gave no reaction to it.)

Petrarch. Euripides. Sappho. Dante. Dante, Dante, and yet, when I needed my poets the most, not a single stanza or rhyme came to mind. I stood there stupidly, “Uh . . .”

“Even street mice can usually pull out a line from Virgil,” she said.