I shouldn’t have been able to pick her voice out in such a throng, but I could pick her voice out anywhere. Silently I slid down from my wall into the crowd, wending my way closer to the figure with the honey-gold cloak and honey-gold hair. I’d managed to avoid her for months in the festivals and ceremonies of the Vatican; just a glimpse of that gold hair and I disappeared into the nearest throng before she could lay eyes on me.

“It’s no wonder he looks smaller.” Giulia’s companion shaded his eyes with his hand as the friar was hoisted up onto the pyre. Not her pretty young husband, but an older man with a Neapolitan drawl. I remembered him; a minor lord from Bozzuto. “They racked our good friar for days, you know. He recanted his confession twice, but the strappado has a way of proving persuasive.”

“Would you confess, Signore Capece?”

“M’dear, they would not even have to hoist me up to the irons. One look at the rack, and I would thrust my hand out to sign whatever they wished.”

The crowd let out a howl when it was announced that Fra Savonarola was to be hanged before burning. The writhing and screaming as the flames began to lick at the feet; that was the part everyone wanted to see. But they quieted again as he was noosed with a length of chain. Such a thick, eager silence. I saw the man tremble, the man who had been mad enough to burn a stack of Botticelli paintings and challenge a Borgia pope.

Giulia’s voice was very quiet—she stood so close, I could have reached out and run a finger down the length of her sleeve. “I wonder if Fra Savonarola will speak.”

“Wouldn’t be allowed, m’dear. If I were His Holiness, I would have made a bargain with our good Dominican beforehand: he’ll be spared the flames, but only if he refrains from stirring up the crowd with a gallows sermon. Who wouldn’t prefer quick strangulation to slow roasting?”

For a hanging, it was a distinct anticlimax. The prayers, the condemnations read out in ringing voices. The ritual shaving of what remained of the victim’s hair, so the flames could consume his face unobscured. Then the length of chain snapped taut, and Fra Savonarola’s feet jerked once, and that was all.

Giulia had turned her face away. “I think I will go,” she said to her escort as the crowd gave a satisfied murmur and the executioners began heaping brushwood about the friar’s dangling feet for the fire. “I’ve no wish to smell burning flesh on such a beautiful day.”

She half-turned, gathering her skirts, and I didn’t slide away swiftly enough. Fool to get so close, dwarf, I cursed myself. But Giulia showed no surprise at seeing me. “Leonello,” she said, as calmly as though we had planned to meet each other here. “What luck. Perhaps you will be good enough to escort me back to the palazzo of Vittorio Capece?” A light touch to her companion’s shoulder. “I believe my host wishes to stay a while longer, and I do not.”