The assembly managed to reclaim enough order for the final vote. It unanimously condemned Vincenzio Fusili to death for heresy and treason. He scanned the room for those he knew best—the professor, Bernardo Rucellai, even Tommaso Palagio—and held each of their gazes with a smile he hoped conveyed his disbelief and strength to demand a challenge. This was some trickery aimed at shaming him. No one spoke, and Vincenzio knew this was the protocol of the Signoria: once a sentence was decreed it was final. Yet still he held that smile rigid on his lips.

He was returned to the prison, only this time the room was bare and the bed a straw pallet on the ground. Vincenzio longed for a cup of wine, a taste of his wife’s sugared citrons. He pictured his family enjoying the evening meal, sitting around the table, talking and laughing about Filippo’s antics or Maria’s sewing; even Lucrezia’s complaints of not enough coin in the household account became suddenly a sound to cherish. Yet he was not there to hear and his mind had never been so quiet as in this cell. That same evening he was given confession. Even as the executioner sharpened his blade, Vincenzio looked hopefully towards the quarter where his family awaited his return. A bright spark of fire shot up towards the heavens and he took this as an omen of great things still to come for the Fusili name.

Chapter Eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

September 1496

For the next month Luna did not leave the monastery. She slept in one of the novices’ cells, on a bed that Friar Bartolomeo tried to make more comfortable by adding blankets on top of the straw mattress that rested on the wood pallet. She kept to the bed, and when she could not sleep she hid beneath the cover that was musty with damp and smelt of years of burnt candle wax. After early-morning prayers, Friar Bartolomeo brought her food and stayed a while. She drank the draught he gave her because it made her sleep and for those hours she did not think. He returned again after vespers each evening and the candle he lit told Luna another day was ending. She thought his voice was a dream though she did not care to open her eyes and find out.

Outside the monastery walls, the burning colours of autumn flourished and the streets were noisy with families enjoying the cooler evenings. Luna heard their laughter as she lay, eyes closed. What reason had she to see the day? Her family, branded as heretics, was gone: her step-mamma and siblings burnt to death, her father executed. He came to her one night, as a ghost in a room full of strangers and only she recognised him, complete again though his features were dim. She shouted to the party that a ghost was amongst them, but no one took heed of her words and she alone said hello before he disappeared.