My palms began to sweat. But I pushed the voice away, leading my stunned and frantic Pope back to his private chamber, where I disrobed him, soothed him, whispered hopeful nothings, listened to him fret, and finally coaxed him off to sleep with his head on my breast. Where I lay all through the night, as Cesare’s men and the papal guards tore the city apart looking for Juan, and I stared into the dark thinking unimaginable things.

It was afternoon the following day before we heard more.

“Your Holiness,” the man whispered, crashing to his knees the moment he laid eyes on my Pope. A common man in a dirty linen shirt and sturdy breeches, deeply tanned from a life spent under the sun, rough-voiced and rough-handed and plainly terrified. His wide eyes darted from the rich mosaics to the Moorish designs about the frescoes, the exquisite ornaments of silver and gilt and fragile glass to the papal guards standing huge and immobile at the doors. Cesare stood just as silent in his cardinal’s robes, impassive of face, glittering of eye, one long finger tapping his own elbow. Joffre and Sancha had arrived and stood pressed together in unaccustomed accord, Joffre frightened and trying not to show it, the Tart of Aragon looking almost tearful for her brother-in-law and sometime lover. I stood by my Pope, his hand closed in both of mine—and to a common man like the one staring up at us, the Pope with his magnificent robes and sunken-eyed fear would have been most terrifying of all.

Rodrigo’s voice was only a whisper. “Rise.”

The man rose, visibly trembling. “I’m Giorgio Schiavi, I am—I didn’t do no wrong—”

“Occupation?” Burchard interrupted, pen poised. Johann Burchard always looked relieved when the world slowed enough so he could take proper notes. I was glad to see someone here was soothed.

Giorgio Schiavi twisted his cloth cap between his hands. “Timber merchant.”

Wood seller, in other words. “You are safe here, poveruomo,” I said softly, and he threw me a startled grateful glance as he spoke again.

“I get my wood unloaded from boats in the Tiber,” he began, eyes flicking about the sala again. “By the hospital of San Girolamo degli Schiavoni. I keep watch over my wood at night—terrible rough it can be down there, thieves everywhere looking to rob an honest man. At midnight two nights back, I see two men come to the riverbank—checking to see that everything was clear, that nobody was watching. They didn’t see me, did they? I know how to get out of the way . . .”

My Pope looked on steadily, but his profile looked somehow shrunken to me. Gaunt.

“Two more men, they do another sweep—and then a man on a horse comes along. Big white horse, it was, and it’s got a body draped across the saddle. Feet on one side, the head dragging along the other.”