Still, he could not lay the blame for his mood entirely at his wife’s feet; he was monstrously distracted by his business. His studiolo had become like a prison of ledgers and accountability. However long he spent massaging the numbers, he could not make the books come out positive. The truth was that wool cloth no longer commanded the prices he’d budgeted for nor did he have the coin to invest in the more expensive silks. He should sell the property in Prato and probably one of his shopfronts in Florence too, but he refused to be forced back to being just one of the weavers. He’d be rejected from the company of all those gentlemen whose favour he’d fostered, rejected from the Platonic Academy, a failure as a businessman and no better than his father. His pace slowed.

Vincenzio remembered his father as a tired and unhappy man, who never ventured beyond the district of his wool guild, praying at the local church each dawn on his way to the shop from their home in rented rooms in one of the older houses, returning each night as the curfew bells rang out. The sourness of potential failure dampened Vincenzio’s tongue. His father had been content as a weaver, but he’d always needed more, and he still did. He determined to return to the days when his business was one of Florence’s most successful, when he produced two hundred bolts of highest quality cloth a year at a cost in excess of nine thousand florins. He would not give up the life he’d worked so hard to establish.

Damn Piero for sending Roberto to the city and adding to his stress, and damn the preacher’s puritans for clamping down on his easiest form of relief; he could really do with a stop at the whorehouse on Via Maggio. He stood and forced himself to swallow through the tightness in his throat. He must not forget to gather his most valuable books to give to Friar Bartolomeo for safekeeping in the monastery crypt. How had it come to this? Others passed Vincenzio and stared curiously at the well-dressed gentleman tugging on his collar. There’d be no relief this day. The preacher’s boys were worse than the old gangs who used to hawk their little backsides to any pot-bellied banker for a few grossi. Friar Savonarola made sure there was drabness where there used to be colour; no poetry safe, no great art, none of the joyful lusts of spring.