“It will have to be.” All through the past fortnight, Savonarola’s Angels had been swaggering up and down the streets of Florence, collecting “donations” for the great bonfire that was to come. Anyone who found themselves unwilling to part with their Murano glass goblets and their statues of a naked David might just find that the Angels had tipped the statue over on the way out the door, or broken the goblets with a misplaced elbow, so really it was better just to give and have done with it. Madonna Giulia’s sister and her sticklike husband had contributed a few ugly vases, one truly hideous credenza in gilt-edged oak, and a pile of silk gowns and velvet doublets that were not only outlawed under the new sumptuary laws, but also thoroughly out of fashion. “Let the men agonize about luxury and sin,” Giulia had said, winking at me as we peeked through the shutters to watch those gawky young Angels staggering away under the weight of Gerolama’s unwanted junk. “The women will just see an opportunity to clean house!”

I tossed my mistress’s copy of the Avernus sonnets into the pile for the bonfire when everyone’s back was turned. But Giulia rescued it before the Angels arrived, giving me a look. “Damn,” I sighed, and she replied demurely, “Good try, Leonello.”

“I do wish I could hear Fra Savonarola preach,” my mistress was saying now as we turned back across a narrow piazza in the direction of her sister’s house. “He’s supposed to be thrilling—my sister says you can really feel the fires of hell when he’s on a good rant. Gerolama does enjoy that sort of thing. She must have been crushed when he started forbidding women to attend his sermons. Really, I don’t see why we can’t go. It’s mostly us he’s preaching about, after all. Why don’t you go, Leonello, and have a listen for me the next time he gives a sermon?”

“I have no intention of being trampled by the fervent masses,” I informed her, and I must have been shielding my face from a gust of freezing February wind because I didn’t see the white-clad figures until the rough voice hailed us.

“Ho there! Madonna, you’d better have a good reason to be wandering these streets! A virtuous woman keeps to her household.”