“He just wanted a girl, you know? A common girl—common girls do things the courtesans won’t unless you pay double.” Niccolo’s words were pottage in his mouth. Next sentence he’d be weeping; soon after that he’d be snoring on the table. I’d have to work fast.

“What then?” I encouraged, soft as a priest in a confessional.

Niccolo blinked hard, blinked again. “So we took him out.”

I traced a circle around the top of my tankard. “‘We’?”

Niccolo’s unfocused eyes no longer saw me. He stared over the table, and whatever he saw was horror. “Me and Luis, he’s the Cardinal’s man from Valencia, one of the stewards, he—I used to like him.”

“Don’t you anymore?” Spaniard. Not a Venetian; a Spaniard after all.

A shudder. “Not after what he— God save me.” Niccolo made a bleary sign of the cross. “God save her. The poor girl. I paid, I had a Mass said for her soul—”

“Did you, now?” I said softly. The bloom in my chest rose toward my mouth: a bitter flood of triumph. “Did you indeed, my friend?”

But he didn’t hear me. His head rested on his folded arms; he mumbled something incoherent and a moment later began to snuffle and snore.

I didn’t bring my cards when I came to the Inn of the Fig the following night. I brought a book instead—a tattered volume of Cicero’s letters that I knew mostly by heart. I’d had to sell the Iliad to pay for Anna’s burial. A sad, shabby little burial presided over by a priest who didn’t even bother to hide the fact that he was drunk; attended only by me and a few of the maidservants at the tavern. No family, of course—girls with loving families do not end their days staked by the hands to tavern tables.

I was reading through Cicero’s Consolatio again, boots propped on the table, when Niccolo ducked into the inn’s common room. It was not far from midnight, but he hailed me when he saw me, and I let him wheedle me into a game of dice. He seemed to remember nothing of the previous evening’s slurred secrets, though he made rueful jests about guards who couldn’t hold their wine well enough to at least stay awake. I assured him I’d fallen asleep long before he did, and proceeded to lose another purse. He was just beginning to loosen from wine and winning when a thin, irritable-looking man in a sober gray doublet came and seized him by the shoulder.