Was he, Stanley, really an outsider? Maybe you didn’t have to blend in or be accepted to belong. You belonged because you made the decision to and if you truly believed it no one could knock it out of you. These visitations came from inside the body of history, turning its skin inside out and writing a new history upon it with a bone shaved down to a quill dripped in the ink of blood. Europe was not as it seemed, Stanley decided, and for him, at least, Europe would never be the same again.

‘Sounds like you deserved it,’ he said coldly to the snivelling Alessandro.

‘You are too cruel! You must restore the reputation of poor piccolo Alessandro so that I can sleep. I have not slept for … one … two … three … four … so many centuries.’ Crouching, he craned his neck up to the sky with an expression of childlike bliss. ‘O! To sleep, for ever.’ Frozen in this position, he then swung his eyes back to Stanley with a demonic glint. ‘It is my right. I am Medici.’

‘The city was a better place without you.’ Stanley was enjoying being self-righteous. His self-worth had just been raised a notch. ‘If you are dripping in your own shit in perpetuity, it must be your punishment. No?’

He stood up and strode straight through Alessandro, relieved to be bathed once more in the sunlight of the street outside. At least he was a decent man, a free man, a living man. Whatever bad things you do on earth will haunt you when you are dead. Evil com bak like boomerang, his mother used to say. Well, he’d never willingly hurt anyone, had he? Jessie couldn’t have been too devastated by his departure in Spain; otherwise she wouldn’t have welcomed him back so quickly. In fact, wasn’t he the one who was more upset by the whole scenario? And what did that Zaryab say? Know thyself. Well, he’d spent his entire life thinking there was something wrong with him and there wasn’t. He was all right, and he was getting better.

‘Arrivederci, Alessandro de’ Medici. Arrivederci, arsehole.’ He turned around, expecting to see a pathetic figure in chiaroscuro, a figure lifted from a religious oil painting: tragic, haunted, supplicatory. But the Alessandro who stood in the alleyway was removed from his dingy surroundings by a theatrical spotlight of sunshine that had broken through the narrow panel overhead between the high walls. He looked like the dashing lead actor in Shakespeare’s missing thirty-ninth play, The House of Medici.

Stanley’s spine crawled with ants.

Alessandro’s face would have been striking but for the dissolute glimmer in his eyes, which were damp with self-pity. The puffed sleeves of his red and purple doublet were sewn with luminous diamonds, rubies, pearls. He wore a gold codpiece and black knee-breeches over thin legs. From his boyish shoulders hung a lustrous silvery-green gown trimmed with fur.