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  The nun continued, “This last week I have seen a man in Firenze I knew from my former life. This man has only one business: to bring death to enemies of his powerful patrons. He did not recognize me under the veil and I kept myself hidden from him, fearing for my own safety.”

  Diana shook her head, absorbing what the nun told her. “You’re saying this man is a hired assassin?”

  The nun nodded. “I thought he might have been sent by the Borgia pope to assassinate the mad friar Savonarola. Yet Savonarola lives and your mother has died. Hers has been the only death of a person of note since my former colleague has come to Firenze. That she is said to have died of marsh fever when it is too cold for the disease to take hold in the body has led to my suspicion.”

  Diana looked away. “Is there more than that?”

  The nun nodded. “Just one thing more, although what to make of it I am unsure.” She reached into the folds of her habit and produced a parchment. She extended her arm, passing the parchment to Diana. The rough paper flapped in the draft, threatening to be taken away forever if Diana hesitated.

  Diana took the proffered parchment. A seal on one side had already broken open. Diana opened it, but between the encroaching darkness and the wind, found she could not read it.

  “Keep it safe,” advised the nun, “and read it when you can. Perhaps it will make some sense to you.”

  Diana did as she was told, putting the parchment safely into the folds of her dress. “Who is this man you claim has killed my mother?”

  The nun looked down again. Diana sensed her discomfort, although in her urgency to get to the bottom of the nun’s claim, it mattered very little. At last the nun said, “He goes by the name of Giuseppe Mancini di Milano.”

  “Where can I find this man?”

  The nun’s eyes went wide. “Surely you must understand that approaching such a man is extremely dangerous. I must warn you away from such a course of action.”

  “I want to know where I can find him!”

  “So be it, although you should heed my warning. He was staying at the inn called the Romancier. If his business in Firenze is concluded, he may have moved on from here.”

  Diana absorbed it, memorized the name. She realized, too, she had been wrong about her guess regarding the nun’s former life. “You were in this business with him, weren’t you?” she cried. “You murdered people for money.”

  The nun fell to her knees, hands held out in supplication. “Please do not say such things out loud. I have repented my former life and wish nothing more than to live out the remainder of my days in penance. But when I saw him—” A glint shone in her eyes when she said this, and Diana guessed the two had once been lovers. “—when I learned your mother, always known as a good and generous lady, died suddenly, I could not stand by. In approaching you, I sought only to give your mother an opportunity for justice, but I fear I may have only brought you to danger. Promise me you will not use what I have said to bring trouble onto yourself!”

  “Why didn’t you go to my father with this?” Diana demanded, as it was the most logical course.

  The nun looked tearful and shook her head as if begging forgiveness. She opened her mouth to speak, but she was startled by the sound of grinding metal as the latch on the cupola door worked open. Someone was coming out onto the cupola landing with them.

  The nun’s eyes glinted in the last rays of the sun. “Quickly, you must get away!” The nun grabbed Diana’s arm, and pushed her from the door. “There is another door on the other side of the cupola. The stairway will lead you back down inside. I will stay here so you may escape!”

  Escape, Diana wondered. Surely it would only be her father or one of the other funeral attendees coming to check on her after witnessing her sudden flight. The nun remained insistent though, and her fear became infectious. The cupola door squeaked on its rusty hinges. With a flash of panic, Diana picked her way along the landing, careful not to lose her balance. After only a few steps she slinked around the corner and out of sight. Her fear, no longer fueled by the nun, began to ebb. Here she stood, a lady of Firenze, skulking about like a thief on the cupola dome. She still had none of the answers she wanted, only some vague insinuations her mother had been assassinated. Feeling fury welling up inside her, Diana turned back, coming around the corner and back into view of the nun.

  What she saw gave her pause. The figure that had emerged onto the landing had its back to Diana. The entity wore a loose fitting cape with hood, not unlike a Dominican monk’s robe. The cape flittered in the strong winds like a specter. The figure loomed over the nun, who gestured frantically and spoke rapidly, although Diana could hear little of what she said.

  The caped form spoke in return, and Diana could only pick up pieces of it. It was a man’s voice, deep and resonant. Although it must have been a trick of the wind, the voice seemed to harmonize with itself as if two people were speaking at once. Diana had never heard anything quite like it. It was not a pleasant combination such as from a choir, but something that was unnatural and dissonant. The few words Diana could distinguish over the wind were Latin, but she could not hear enough to understand the conversation.

  The nun raised her hands, in one of them a small metal cross she held up toward the cloaked figure. The gesture was unmistakable, a rebuke of the unholy. Diana wondered for a moment if the dark figure might dissipate before the power of Christ like the vapors of a ghost.

  Either the specter was of a wholly more material nature, or the nun’s faith was weak. The figure put one dark hand on the cross and flung it away into the night. The nun screamed then, the sound piercing even from the distance, striking terror into Diana’s heart. Diana wished to run forward, to come to the assistance of the nun, but she stood paralyzed with fear and uncertainty. There would be little a young woman such as herself could do against such an imposing figure.

  The specter raised one hand high over his head. Diana opened her mouth but her voice refused to come. The nun put up her arms defensively, but the dark form offered no mercy. The specter brought his hand down against the nun’s outstretched arms and he pushed her. Her legs went out from under her and she fell, down to the landing and then over it onto the edge of the cupola. The dark figure kicked the nun’s prone body and she went out over the edge of the dome and silently into the blackness below.

  Diana’s scream now came instinctively, her voice breaking through the barriers of fear. She barely realized the sound was her own until the cloaked figure turned to stare at her, the face lost in the darkness of the hood. To Diana it seemed as if the specter were the Angel of Death himself. Panic now unquenchable, Diana turned and ran for the door the nun told her of. Her dress threatened to get under her feet and trip her. The hands of that specter could only be moments from flinging her off the dome to join the nun below. Diana burst into a flurry of activity. Once she saw the door, she hastened to it, her hands fluttering over the latch. It seemed stuck at first, her terror growing with every second that slipped away futilely trying to work it. At last the rust gave way and the door came open. Without looking back she flung herself through the opening into the darkness beyond. There remained almost no light now, and she felt her way down the stairs as quickly as she could, taking only as much care as necessary not to doom herself to tumbling to certain death.

  It occurred to her even if the specter were not directly behind her, he could take the opposing stairway and cut her off at the interior ledge, or the interior landing with the maintenance supplies. There was nothing to be done about that, however. Diana could hardly lurk on the dome indefinitely. No safe hiding place offered itself. She had to trust in herself and in God that she would make it down safely.

  At each moment she expected cold hands to lay themselves upon her, to reach around her throat and snuff the life from her. The horror of these thoughts drove her on. She cursed the ridiculous dress that made flight so difficult. She made promise after promise to God, about good behavior, the frequency of her prayers, that she
would stop glancing lustily at the Abruzzi’s son when she saw him during mass. At last she came out on the interior rim of the dome. Below, far below, she could see her mother’s funerary party much as she had left them. They had not moved, evidently unaware of the nun’s death.

  “Papa!” she called out. From so far above she could not distinguish him from the rest, nor see if they looked up at her. Certainly they could not have failed to hear her voice as it echoed throughout the chamber. There were still so many stairs ahead of her. However, now if she were being followed by the specter at least he would be seen by the funerary party below. Knowing this gave her a measure of comfort. Still, he was nowhere in sight, and she began to suspect her pursuer had quit the chase.

  This supposition did not stop her from making haste in her descent down the remaining stone stairs, however many hundreds there must be. At last she emerged back in the nave, exhausted. She bent over her waist, hands on her knees and coughed loudly and violently as she struggled to suck in breath.

  Around her the funerary party clustered, anxious. She looked aloft and saw her father staring at her, disapproving. She ignored his look and told the assembled group, “Quickly, we must go outside. There’s been a death!”

  ****

  Cardinal Lajolo quickly took control of matters. Priests and church laborers formed a barricade around the body of the nun while several men fetched a bier to carry the corpse away. The funerary attendees added to the little cluster around the body, further obscuring it from view. The crowd served to draw the attention of some passersby however, and a few strangers drew into the circle out of curiosity. They reacted with horror, a few women screamed on seeing the body, although most remained nearby asking questions and discussing the matter solemnly.

  The nun’s body—Diana realized she had never gotten the woman’s name—splayed on the cobblestones, a pool of blood filling the little spaces between the bricks. Her eyes stared vacantly and her mouth held open in a skeletal grin, displaying the remains of a few rotten teeth. One arm bent back around behind her and both legs were twisted like dry twigs. A slimy loop of intestines emerged from within her robes like an umbilicus.

  Diana took deep breaths to retain her composure. She’d seen bodies at funerals before, and the relics of saints of course, but nothing like this. She’d been talking to the woman only moments before. Around her, the city of Firenze continued in ignorance. In the distance music played and revelers laughed. Only those few who passed by this street learned of what had happened. Soon the news would pass all over the city. What effect it might have, Diana could only wonder. The violent death of a nun, even in a modern city like Firenze, could inspire all kinds of superstitious talk. Particularly of late, with the mad friar Savonarola in power, giving wild sermons on witchcraft and heresy. And why shouldn’t people be superstitious? After all, Diana herself had seen what looked like a phantom with an inhuman voice. Perhaps evil spirits were at loose in the city.

  A gendarme arrived to investigate the disturbance. He asked questions, but from his voice, Diana guessed that he was not sure he had or wanted authority over something that had happened on church property.

  “Did she jump?” the gendarme asked, looking to the top of the dome.

  “It is a shame,” said a man in the crowd, a funerary attendee by the name of Orsini. A business partner of her father’s, he’d come with his wife all the way from Roma. Now he clucked his tongue. “Sometimes women don’t realize the convent is not the satisfying retreat from real life some think.” Beside him, his exquisitely dressed wife shook her head, agreeing with the shame of it all.

  “She did not jump. She was pushed,” Diana told them. The assembly murmured and the gendarme looked at her without speaking. “I saw it.”

  “Did you know who pushed the sister?” asked the gendarme.

  Diana faltered. “I saw only a figure cloaked in black. When he turned to me I could see no face under his hood.” Another excited murmur went through the onlookers. Diana closed her eyes, steeling herself. She knew half the throng spoke of demons loose in the city; the other half asked if she were mad.

  “What were you doing up on the dome?” the gendarme asked with a tone that suggested he identified with the latter, more skeptical half.

  It occurred to Diana that relaying the entirety of her conversation with the nun to a crowd that increasingly included strangers might not be in her best interest. Fortunately, she was diverted from answering the gendarme’s question by Signore Orsini. “The young woman has just lost her mother, with whom she was very close. I think the shock of it has influenced her sensibilities, quite naturally of course.” He looked at her with his eyebrows raised, his expression sympathetic and meaning no offense.

  “We saw no one go up to or down from the dome besides yourself and the nun,” added his bejeweled wife.

  “I am having the dome searched as we speak,” said Cardinal Lajolo. “There may be places a man could hide.” As he spoke several attendants arrived with a thick bier and rolled the nun’s body on to it. One used a small spade to move the coil of intestine on as well. This completed, they covered the body with a shroud and hoisted it waist high. The attendants hurried to get the body inside and out of view. The assembled multitude remained standing around the blood pool on the ground. “I wish I had a good sense of what has occurred,” Cardinal Lajolo implored. “The disposition of the body is at stake. If she has killed herself, then her soul is damned and she cannot be buried on consecrated ground.”

  Fury grew in Diana. They really weren’t going to take her at her word, preferring to believe instead that she had been stricken mad with grief.

  “If my daughter says she saw the nun pushed, then she was pushed,” her father said at last, his voice composed, yet commanding. “Is there anyone here who has known my daughter to be prone to lies or flights of imagination?” The chorus of onlookers remained silent. Even if they had thought such a thing, there were few here who would be keen on insulting her father. The Savrano family never enjoyed the kind of power and influence that the Medici family had possessed before being cast out of Firenze. Nonetheless, Signore Savrano conducted lucrative business with many of the assembled men and had their respect. None would want to risk that over the matter of a dead nun. “Very well then,” he said at last. To Cardinal Lajolo he suggested, “Given the circumstances, I think it best to offer the nun a consecrated burial. If there’s been an error, would not God understand?”

  Lajolo nodded. “A wise suggestion, Signore Savrano.” The cardinal moved off, intent on seeing the matter put to rest. The gendarme retired as well, without further comment, evidently concluding the nun’s death was the cardinal’s problem, not his own. The onlookers began murmuring in small clusters, although individuals and groups began breaking away, drifting back into the night.

  Diana felt her father’s eyes on her, but she could not meet them. She felt humiliated. Her reputation had been secured only because he had put his own on the line, and waited some time in order to do so. Many in the mob certainly still assumed she was delusional with grief over her mother’s death. They had only kept silent so as not to offend her father. She sucked in several deep breaths. She did not want to say anything to her father she would later regret. That left her with nothing to say at all. It took her some moments before she could bring her fury and humiliation under control and look at him. His eyes were still watching her, his gaze even and critical. His expression remained difficult to read as it often was.

  A moment of silence passed between them. At last he said only, “Come on, it is time to go home.”

  Chapter Three

  The Flame

  That night Diana slept horribly. Exhaustion made her eyes weep and her bones ache, but her mind insisted on going over again and again the sadness of her mother’s death. That she now had the question of her mother’s murder to go over in her mind as well only put sleep further from her grasp. She’d hidden away the parchment the nun had given her…she was too distur
bed as it was to try to read it now, and put herself to bed. As the hours went by she tossed and turned, sometimes weeping into her pillow. When she finally drifted off, her dreams turned to the phantom on the dome, who came for her with ghostly arms outstretched. These dreadful images startled her out of her sleep, and she began the cycle again.

  The coming of morning radiance brought a new perspective. Nothing could be done about the death of her mother, of course. Yet, if the nun told the truth about her mother’s murder, she could do whatever possible to be sure those murderers were brought to justice. As dawn flooded in through her windows, Diana retrieved the parchment and opened it. She recognized her mother’s handwriting at once. The parchment read:

  “…was a mistake. We must acknowledge now that we have been led astray by false witness. Certainly you must agree with me that the events of last night demonstrate this beyond all debate? I am concerned what would happen if my husband were to find out. As of yet he knows nothing of our secret. Yet I fear that continued secrecy will only make matters worse. My conscience is in turmoil about what must be done. I implore you to meet me soon as we must discuss what to do. Meet me at the church on the Piazza Madonna delle Grazie at dusk tomorrow.” It was signed merely, “Isabella Savrano.”

  Diana flipped the parchment over, then felt for pages stuck together. Nothing. It was the last page of a letter, but missing at least one other page. Diana did not know to whom the letter had been written, or what it was about. Still, she didn’t much like what she had read. Her mother had been involved in something she had not wanted her father to know about. The obvious explanation was that her mother indulged in a sordid affair with another man. Yet, the tone of the letter didn’t quite seem to match that explanation. And what did she mean about false witness?