‘Praise God you and Nicolaus were there to help,’ he said, his words carrying up to the beams above them. A dove fluttered out and then back in to hide amongst the shadows. Nicolaus’s head was bowed. ‘I would be lost without Elisabetta,’ he continued. ‘She has kept me whole these long years. I’m too often distracted by my books and astronomy.’

‘You are fortunate to have each other,’ Luna said softly.

‘It might be different if our children had lived.’

She’d long wondered on this subject, but did not say anything.

‘Our two boys died in the last outbreak of il segno.’ He rubbed a hand across his brow. ‘Their darling sister was taken only a year later; all now with God.’ His eyes were clouded and Luna saw how he shook. ‘My wife’s companionship is the reason I can still laugh in the face of such grim realities. I would not be able to live if my Elisabetta was taken from me too.’

Nicolaus lifted his head then and caught her eye. Luna looked away. She’d never heard a man speak with such candour about the love between a husband and wife. The professor’s honesty was astounding to her and she felt an urge to comfort him. Instead she stood slowly and crossed herself, then went to the side altar where a row of thin candles flickered and smoked. She took a new taper and held it against another’s flame till it sparked and flared, then placed it into one of the slots. Luna understood the depth of loss of which the professor spoke. She carried the heaviness of grief within her too.

*

More rain fell later that day and continued for the rest of the week. The cobblestones of the courtyard were reduced to silt-filled rivulets and the sky was a constant blur of slate grey. Luna stayed by Elisabetta’s bedside and looked on the older woman’s sleeping face with a new tenderness, seeing the sun-worn lines as markers of a suffering she understood. Nicolaus visited the sick room each day and Luna was pleased to see him. The doctor had left an amulet that Luna laid on the wounded leg at the hour of the Moon’s first rising. It was embedded with a bezoar stone from the belly of a snake-eating goat. The doctor said the bezoar contained a small remnant of toxin that served as an antidote to the poison. Luna prayed as she pressed the amulet against her friend’s cold flesh.