“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.”

Evasion was one thing, but not open flight. Not a second time. “Madonna,” I said, and bowed.

Vittorio Capece and I had played chess a few times, but he did not seem to notice my presence; merely sent a pair of his guards with Giulia in a distracted wave. The first flickers of flame were rising under Fra Savonarola’s limp feet, and the crowd was cheering and laying wagers on when his robes would catch. Giulia’s companion did not cheer or wager, only stood with folded arms and a hard face.

“Signore Capece is very grim,” I couldn’t help noting as the guards cleared a path for Giulia back through the crowd. “Why is he your escort to the most fashionable execution of the year, and not your pretty husband?”

“Orsino gets sick at the sight of blood.”

“‘My little rose,’” I mimicked. “What does he say when he pricks himself on your thorns?”

“He doesn’t know I have any thorns.”

But she couldn’t help a faint smile at my mockery. And I mocked myself, silently, for how her smile still made my heart stop. “Evidently your host doesn’t object to seeing a little blood,” I said instead, waving a hand back at Vittorio Capece.

“Men like Fra Savonarola make life very difficult for men like Vittorio.”

“You mean sodomites?”