“Money won at a very lucky hand of primiera,” I told Anna’s still body when the tavernkeeper had tramped heavily out. “A chorus, four cards of the same kind! A rare hand, that one. I bought a book with it, but I’ll take it back. Should be enough to see you properly buried in a churchyard. Maybe even a Mass or two for your soul . . .”

Anna lay still. A thick drop of congealing blood collected at the tip of her finger. Just an ordinary tavern maid, I thought. Plain-faced, limp hair a little grimy; illiterate, hard-used, and old at twenty-five. A hundred like her in every piazza in Rome. Nothing to set her apart from any of the others—except maybe that sweet dent of a dimple at the corner of her mouth when she gave her kind smile.

“‘Around him stood his comrades mourning.’” I quoted Achilles’s lines of grief when he lost his friend Patroclus at Troy. “‘With them, Peleus’s son, shedding hot tears as on his friend he gazed—’” Yanking the remaining knife out of Anna’s still-staked hand. “‘Laid on the bier, and pierced with deadly wounds . . .’”

“Who’re you talking to?”

I turned to see two of the maidservants standing in the doorway, peering with nervous swollen eyes. “She’s not talkin’ back, is she? They say ghosts hover around the bodies of them who died violent—”

“Just saying a prayer for her.” I saw their eyes dart away from Anna’s, which had reflexively slid open again to stare glassily at the ceiling. I smoothed down her eyelids, weighting them closed this time with the last two scudi from my purse.

“God rest her soul,” one of the maidservants quavered, crossing herself. A girl not so different from Anna, but lacking that dimple and the streak of kindness that had gone with it. This girl been known to bump me with her hip as she passed, just to see if she could knock the cards out of my hand, but now her eyes were bloodshot and her chin quavered. “God rot those who did this to her!”

“The tavernkeeper says you two saw them.” Casually I straightened the folds of Anna’s skirts. “Three men, wasn’t it? What did they look like?”

“What do any of them look like?” the other maidservant shrugged. An older woman, harder of face and tight about the mouth. “Men out for a good time, that’s what they looked like.”

“One had a mask.” The first girl gave a watery snort. “You know how these young bravos are. It’s all so terribly entertaining to dress up like it’s Carnival and go to the slums!”

“So he was young.” I took some care smoothing the hair back from Anna’s blood-mottled cheeks. “How young? A boy, or a young man?”