At least you are not at the bottom of the Tiber, I reminded myself grimly. There is no escaping the bottom of the Tiber.

And at that thought, Suora Serafina would remove her pillow from her face and put her head down on it instead. Postponing, for just one more day, the thought of taking her belt from around her waist and hanging herself from the kitchen rafters.

Leonello

I have never enjoyed watching executions. I have no particular objection to hanging murderers or the rapers of virgins, but I’ve escaped the scaffold too many times myself to enjoy watching a man dangle from a noose with piss running down his jerking legs. Most of Rome would disagree with me; there is always a lively turnout for a hanging or a drawing-and-quartering or even just a branding.

Best of all, though, is a burning. And when the excommunicated Dominican Fra Savonarola was arrested in Florence and brought to Rome to burn for his heresy in condemning Pope Alexander VI, I went with the rest of Rome to watch him sizzle on the pyre. Why not? I didn’t sleep very well these days anyway. Perhaps I’d see a mad monk stalking through my dreams tonight with his face burned off, and not Giovanni Sforza looking at me in such horror as I staked his hand. I didn’t mind that part of the dream so much, but then he always turned into Anna looking at me in horror as I staked her hand, and then Perotto, asking if I would please just stake him through the hand and not kill him.

They did not build the great pyre in the Piazza San Pietro. The smoke would billow up into the windows of the Vatican, and Lucrezia Borgia—recovered now from the fever or the broken arm or whatever it was that had officially kept her to her bed, and looking rather slimmer too—had complained prettily that she could not bear such a stink of smoke and burning flesh. Her lightest word was law to the Pope; he was already showering her in gifts now that her new betrothal to Alfonso of Aragon had been sealed, so what was a relocated execution? The bonfire was built near the Ponte Sant’Angelo instead, where the bodies of common criminals hung on display. As I joined the eager press of the crowd, I passed under the crow-picked feet of a thief hanged a fortnight ago. The lad was mostly bones by now, though his hands, which had been chopped off and hung about his neck, still fared surprisingly intact.