That evening, Luna walked in the garden. She needed to clear her mind. She’d spent the afternoon reading the Sacrobosco when she should have been sewing and now her head was full of mathematical calculations and diagrams of the alignment of eclipses. After she’d returned home, Mamma Lucrezia had given her a roll of white cloth to begin on the robes that Filippo would wear when he joined the preacher’s choir of boys. But all Luna could think about as she’d measured the cloth was how bright the dog’s blood had looked on the boy’s knife. So she’d set aside her sewing and turned to the Sacrobosco instead. The friar had been right, there was much she did not understand in the text. It was frustrating and disappointing but she wouldn’t shy away from the work.

She turned her face to the heavens, closed her eyes and breathed the evening air. Diagrams of planets swirled in her mind beside white robes and a bloodied knife. The dog’s dying yelp rang in her ears as though she were in the street beside him. Luna shivered. Better to move about. She walked along the path and stopped by the pond. There was peace in the stars. The night sky blinked. There was Venus, so bright. ‘Hello, wandering star,’ Luna whispered and wished she were up there, afloat in her own perfect sphere in that more perfect world.

She held to the low wall to steady herself and stared into the pond’s inky black surface. It flickered and danced with a film of starry, glistening spots. The true beauty was above, but it was here too, clear in the reflection. We are all God’s people, she thought, though some cannot hide their darkness.

Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

Vincenzio made ready to ride out at first light. He’d been grateful for the softness of his pillow after the brutal attack in the alley but he’d not slept well and now, only several hours later, he’d had to rise, his thudding head a painful reminder of last night’s misadventure. The day ahead was already laden with commitments; now he must find time to meet with the Medici agent. All this with a face disfigured by bruising. Luna had surprised and impressed him with her bravery and quick thinking. Thank God it had been his own daughter who’d found him in the alley and brought him back to the sanctuary of their garden—anyone else and he’d have had to come up with a better reason for being outside the gate at that hour.