“Drink,” I advised, wrapping her uninjured fingers through the handle. “And keep drinking while I bandage that hand. Let’s have a look, now . . . it’s not so bad, really. The blade went straight through, between the bones. It should heal clean if you can keep it out of the food for a few weeks. You shouldn’t need a surgeon.” I was no expert, but it seemed the right thing to tell her. “If you ever decide to go back to your nunnery, you can pass the scar off as the stigmata, eh?”

“Why are you being kind to me?” Carmelina took a deep drink of wine as I began blotting and wrapping, and I heard her teeth chatter against the rim of the jug. “You don’t like me. You lost a finger to the French because of me—”

“My dear lady,” I said quietly, “I believe we can overlook that at the moment.”

She swallowed more wine.

I tied off the ends of the bandage and tried, for the first time in all my conversations with this lanky girl, to be tactful. “Our good Gonfalonier, did he . . . take you?”

“N-no. That was—next.” She gave me a watery smile. “You were very timely. I don’t like to think what would have happened after he’d staked me down.”

“Something much worse than you imagine.” I’d seen for myself the feral glitter of his eyes, the tremble of anticipation in his moist lips. Perhaps he hadn’t come here with the intention of killing her—perhaps he only wanted to see those long legs again, and wrapped around him this time. An adventure, lying in wait for an unwilling girl. But somewhere, maybe when she’d scratched him, things had gone bad. As they had for Anna, who had probably been his first.

“What do you mean, worse than I imagine?” Carmelina’s voice still wobbled, but the shakes in her hands were subsiding. “What’s worse than this?”

“Never mind.” I took the wine jug from her hand, downing a healthy swallow myself. “You will have to leave here, you know.”

She curled her good hand about the bandaged one, looking away from me. The light from the remaining tapers sank into the black hair knotted at her neck, danced merrily over the bruises I could see rising dark and puffy on her cheeks and throat.

“Madonna Giulia would gladly make a fuss on your behalf, of course,” I continued. “But even for Giulia, the Pope will never punish his favorite son merely for assaulting a maidservant.”