Leonello

Ipassed my imprisonment calculating the mathematical odds of imminent death. Frankly, my gift for analysis was proving not at all helpful. The odds of survival were decidedly against me.

Murder is a small enough sin, providing the victim is no one of great value. No one had fussed about searching for Anna’s killers, after all. Who cared for the death of one common tavern maid? A cardinal’s steward, that was a more serious matter, but not insurmountable. In the end, most courts of law prefer money to blood. Had I been a rich man, I would have laid a judicious bet that my punishment for knifing a man through the throat would be a hefty fine and a sentence of banishment from Rome. One could live with such a punishment; there were other cities besides Rome to make a living, and they all had drunken men waiting to be relieved of their money by a man who knew what to do with a deck of cards.

But I had no money for such a bribe, no assets worth seizing. And a dwarf could hardly be sentenced to the galleys to pull an oar or exiled to some ragtag army to fight Turks. Besides, if there was anything a court of law liked better than coin, it was a spectacle of public punishment to give the mob. The hanging of a dwarf, now that was an event to draw a crowd. Better than a play any day.

I looked around my dank little cell. Not much bigger than the room I rented in the Borgo. The difference was all in the details. My rented room was meticulously clean, the floor swept and polished instead of riddled with rat droppings; the bed an impeccable square of clean linens instead of this pallet of moldy straw. My room had a window with a tiny sliver of a view out onto the domes and spires of the Vatican, a bracket for tapers that gave cheerful yellow light when I stayed up too late reading as I always did. My room had a modest chest of clothes and my even more precious cache of books, mostly purchased from the printing shop downstairs. That printing shop survived chiefly on cheap smeary broadsides and scurrilous pamphlets, but over the years I’d culled a fair collection out of their shelves: Marcus Aurelius, even though I thought him a poxy bore; some plays by Sophocles; Dante and Boccaccio and Ovid. My books. For my days I had cards, but at night I had books. And now I was stuck in a cell darkened to perpetual twilight, and I doubted I would ever read a book again.

My eyes stung.