He watched Amel go thoughtfully, then turned to Lucy. The celestial goddess’s place had been usurped by a fragile creature in a hospital gown, and he played wardrobe mistress with the wonderful silk creation and a padded hanger he’d brought back with him specifically for the purpose. She looked exhausted; yet there was a radiant clarity in her face. As wise as Athena, maybe, he thought; but as vulnerable as any Florence Dombey or Catherine Morland, too; flung into a wider world without familial protection. This was certainly not a moment to desert her.

“I have some patient notes I need to finish. Would you be comfortable if I just sat here and got on with it?” He gestured at the chair beside her bed. “I’d be happier keeping half an eye on you myself.” Lucy ventured a curious smile at him. “It’s not that I don’t trust the housemen—some of whom will have been awake for thirty hours or more. But you’ll assuage my own sense of negligence.”

Lucy’s face relaxed for the first time in an hour. She nodded, not trusting her voice. Alex read what he believed her expression said, and returned her smile. “But you must try and sleep, Lucy; don’t let me prevent you from doing that.” So she immediately closed her eyes like an obedient child and drifted fast into a sleep—so fast it came upon her—initially peopled by richly dressed men on a great barge, melting thereafter into an icy dreamscape.

A scantily dressed man kneeled opposite another who was seated, this second man dressed all in thick, splendid red robes trimmed with brocade. The man on the ground was not at all prepossessing, Lucy saw; he was rather small and dark, wearing a coarse, woolen gown that might once have been a monk’s habit. She felt he was about to receive some kind of judgment from his adversary. But the kneeling man was perversely distracted, not paying enough attention to his judge. He was squinting in pale wintry light through the narrow slits of the windowed chamber they were in, out onto a bridge. “The Ponte Sant’Angelo, Lucina,” she heard him say to her; and he looked deeply into her eyes as he had before—earlier, on this very night. She tried to smile some solace at him. It was her robed man from the barge, the monk. “This bridge is where Beatrice Cenci, just twenty-five years in this world, was beheaded for murdering her father,” he was telling Lucy quietly, “after he repeatedly raped her. Her older brother was drawn and quartered here, too—just one year ago. His Holiness wished to make an example of them to other unruly families.”