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“Hello, so nice to see you!” he said.

“He is strange, cheerful,” whispered Lady Girolami, “since the deaths of his father and siblings.”

“It is the shock of grief,” said Ginevra. “He will return to himself.”

“Mama—Papa would not want us to leave—this is going to be MY tower.”

“Go back to bed, child. I am master of this house now.” But the boy did not move.

“Mama, this lady said she can find Zenobio, I just heard her! I am named for him,” he said to Ginevra. “Can you help about Santo Stefano, too? He is my dead brother’s saint.”

“Yes, I will try,” she answered. “I know he is missing, too, since...” she pulled out the inquisitor’s list of thefts “...since the Rogazione procession in the spring.”

Lady Girolami sat down on a painted chest and put her head in her hands. “We donated a whole foot of Santo Stefano. It went right up to the knee joint! Acquired at great expense. The whole city knew it was gone except for us.”

“I’m sorry, Dama,” said Ginevra.

“After the fiasco at the Feast of San Zenobio, my husband fell into a very deep depression. He had been so sure that if we held the procession correctly, our ancestor saint would intervene, would make the city lively again. But after—he forbade us all from leaving the tower. So we heard no news, we did not know for weeks that the sacred foot was missing, that we had sealed ourselves up in a dead parish...”

“Santo Stefano is my brother’s church!” said Zenobio.

“It’s not his church, my darling. My only darling. We have a chapel there is what he means. Several days ago, my husband went there. Left our tower for the first time in weeks. He knew, suddenly—it struck him in his bones—that the relic of that church would be taken as well. He went to check, though I begged him not to. He brought death home with him.”

“Did he see anything in the chapel? From where the foot was taken. Did he tell you anything?”

Here, the lady looked up at Ginevra with red-rimmed eyes. “He said—it could only be dark magic. We kept the foot in a gilded cupboard, studded with lapis and colored enamels, and it was fit with an ingenious iron lock, commissioned at great expense. He said the lock was all taken over by rust. It crumbled at his touch. Who could make such a thing happen?”

Ginevra nodded, but she did not think it took magic to rust a lock. She thought of the doors at Santa Trinita, falling off their hinges, the inside covered with mold. Even the Girolami could not stop mists of the Arno dampening their church, corroding metals and warping wood.

“Monna Ginevra, I repeat my request, for you to go. I am tired, so, so tired.”

“Not me,” said Zenobio.

Ginevra bowed her head. “I take my leave, and pray for the souls of your family.”

The lady said nothing, but went back to her packing. Zenobio waved goodbye as she made her way down the stairs.

Outside she walked out of sight of the tower and then sat down in the street against a building and tried to cry for Zenobia. But she could not cry anymore. She took out the small flask of elixir she had salvaged from the exploded jar. It was probably useless anyhow, even if she had arrived in time. If she was ever to break out of these cycles of death and fear, she must complete her task. She made her way, determined, to the inquisitor’s palazzo.

But at the inquisitor’s residence, the shutters were closed, the door was locked, and no amount of her shouting and banging brought anyone to let her in.

“Have you seen the inquisitor?” she asked the dead mason on the scaffold. He did not answer. She sat down on the doorstep to wait for his return. She sat there until the shadows grew long, and realized with a jolt that she had never picked up the heliodor from Lucia’s kitchen, after her friend’s night at Alle Panche. Without the gem, she would have no way of finding her way home after dark—she could wait no longer. She tore a corner from the inquisitor’s list of thefts, and scrawled a note saying she would try him again tomorrow and stuck it into the door frame.

Ginevra arrived, disheartened, at Lucia’s palazzo, thinking that at least now she would have the chance to make amends with her friend. But when she got back, there was nobody home but the kitten mewing for her supper. In the kitchen, she saw the heliodor and amethyst were both gone from the place she left them. Her anger redoubled, and brought with it worry for Lucia’s safety. She had an hour of daylight left, at most. Ginevra ran back out, as fast as she could, to the tavern Alle Panche. But as with the inquisitor’s home, as with Lucia’s palazzo, the place was dark and empty. Was she the only living person left on the earth? Fretting, she hurried on to Santa Maria Novella, thinking that Lucia might have gone to her favorite church if she was not at the tavern.

Into the vast and empty sanctuary, she ran, watched by the stone eyes of those whose graves paved the floor and lined the walls. From chapel to chapel, she went, peeking in at the effigies and reliquaries that sparkled and winked out from the darkness pooled in their niches. Not one saint had a candle lit before them, when it should have been many hundreds.

At last, she found the shrine of San Tommaso D’Aquino, but Lucia was not there. She examined the wrought iron gate that separated the shrine from the sanctuary. It was shut up again, but there was no lock hooked through. She stepped up close to the gate, and jumped at a quiet crunch beneath her shoes. A smattering of brick-colored flakes dusted the floor. Rust. She knelt down and crushed them beneath her fingers. Ginevra looked around for a leak, but the space was as dry as a bone. She shivered. It was as the Lady Girolami had described at Santo Stefano, a lock ruined prematurely with rust. She thought again, of how the hinges gave way at Santa Trinita, remembered how Lucia had complained of dirtying her dress at Santa Reparata, and how the altar at San Paolino was rusted through.

A low whistling hummed in the striped stone arches of the church—the wind of a coming storm, making its way through the open doors. A man who could turn iron to dust. Who stank and made a room cold. Who announced his crimes as they were committed. Oh, where was Lucia?? She yelled out her friend’s name, and got only the echoes of her own voice for an answer. There was nothing to do but to return to the palazzo and hope Lucia had returned already. It was a new moon, the darkest night of the month was fast approaching. Without the heliodor, it would soon be impossible for Ginevra to find her way. She walked back out into the dusk, the growing wind whipping up her skirt and blowing unpleasant trash at her ankles.

PART III

THE PLAGUE SAINT

It is a matter of humanity,

to show compassion for those who suffer...