What is there to say about an execution? I found a wall on which to sit, boots dangling over the cheerful chatter of the crowd, who had brought mugs of beer to drink and apples to gnaw as they waited, and children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders. A great roar went up when Fra Savonarola himself appeared, flanked by two of his most fervent supporters who had also been sentenced to die, all of them shrinking inside in their vestments. I had seen the mad monk only once, from a distance, in Florence as he stood with arms spread over the roaring Bonfire of the Vanities, but I remembered him as taller. The great hooked nose seemed pathetic as a bird’s beak now, not a fierce beacon to sniff out sin, and the curved red lips looked dry and gray as ash.

“I only saw him once,” I heard a woman’s voice say as the friar was led trembling toward his pyre. “But I remember him as taller.”

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.”