Lollia was netted like a plunging doe in the Crutched Friars by St. Olave and dragged off to the gaols. She had been a child of the streets, a Byzantine Greek whom Miriam discovered in Ravenna in the Clothmakers Market near the Palace of the Emperor, working as a weaver of linen. How long ago that was! Nearly a millennium. Miriam had been staggered by her beauty, uplifted from her despondence at the loss of Eumenes. As Rome died they went to Constantinople but left when the old, familiar signs of imperial decline began to appear there as well: whole quarters deserted, palaces left to ruin, arson and corruption and wildly escalating prices.

London had been a good choice—populated, chaotic, growing. They had come with nothing but a single Venetian gold ducat and six Burgundian pennies.

The ducat bought them a year’s lodging. To obtain more money they scavenged the palaces of the aristocrats.

A hundred years of love and prosperity passed like a winking dream.

Then Lollia changed. Her youth evaporated. She ate weekly, then daily and of late every few hours. Recently, she had been going on night-long frenzies, giving herself up to the hunger until she becomes bloated. And her beauty, once so great that it made men bow their heads, has dissolved into memory. She has grown horrible, her voice shrilling through the house, her eyes agleam for blood. And now she has been captured, dragged gnashing and growling to the Assizes. Miriam raced down Eastcheap to Tower Street—just too late.

She waits for whatever they are going to bring home. She cannot look at the gowns, the street-worn slippers, the brown ringlets Lollia had bought for her hair. They lie now in a little paper box beside her wig fork. Miriam gathers handfuls of coins from their cache, pouring them into a leather pouch and lashing it under her breasts. She will take a boat from Ebgate down to the docks. Because of Lollia’s certain confession, all of this is lost, and Miriam also will be seized if she waits too long. Three days ago she placed her chests aboard a Genoese galley, all except Lollia’s. The ship sails tomorrow or the next day and she will be on it. But she will not leave without Lollia. To keep them safe has been her promise to all, and to herself.

The girl’s resting place is ready, a squat box of oak and iron sitting in the middle of the room, its newly rubbed wood smelling faintly of fish oil.

If Miriam cannot escape, she will be burned at the stake.

Now she counts her coins—fifty gold ducats, three gold pounds, eleven ecus d’or. It is enough to keep all of Cheapside for a year or support Cardinal Beaufort for a week.

They come.

She bites her tongue when she hears the blaring crumhorns of the Waits that precede the cortege. This must work, it must!