He felt he could have watched her all day, so enchanted was he by her simple elegance. And when she moved around the stove the sunlight, by chance, lit up her robes from behind, and he caught a glimpse of her figure, which —

Somebody was speaking to him. Startled, he came back to himself.

One of the workers was facing him — like the beauteous one, yes, not unattractive, but older, and with a sterner face. But her mouth twitched with humor.

He stammered, in English, “I’m sorry?”

She replied in careful Italian, “I asked you if you are hungry. You are evidently drawn to the scent of tripe.”

“I — ah. No. I mean, no thank you. I just—”

“Sir, we have work to do here,” she said, reasonably gently. “Important work — vital for those we serve. I fear you will distract us.”

And, he saw, she had indeed noticed him. She responded to his stares with hooded, nervous glances, but looked away.

The older woman said dryly, “Yes, she is beautiful. She can’t help it.”

“What is her name?”

“Minerva. But she is not on the menu, I’m afraid. Now if you will excuse me—” She turned, with a last, not unkind glance, and went back to her work at the stoves.

Edmund couldn’t simply stand there. Besides, some of the hapless poor were beginning to notice him, and were sniggering. He walked away, to find a place where he could sit and watch the women at work. Perhaps later he could engineer some opportunity to talk to the girl.

But to his shock, when he turned back, he saw they had gone, stoves and all, as if they had never existed. The poor, some still devouring their plates of cabbage and tripe, were dispersing.

He ran back and grabbed the shoulder of one man, though he quickly let go when he felt greasy filth under his palm. “Sir, please — the women here—”

The man could have been any age, so crusted was his face with dirt. Bits of cabbage clung to his ragged beard. He would say nothing until Edmund produced a few coins.

“The Virgins, yes.”

“Where do they come from? Where did they go? How can I find them?”

“Who cares? I’m here for cabbage, not questions.” But he said: “Tomorrow. They’ll come to the Colosseum. That’s what they told us.”

That evening Edmund felt restless in James’s company. Their usual circuit of the piazzas and taverns did not distract him. It did not help when he heard one rotund innkeeper mutter that English gentlemen on the Grand Tour were famously “milordi pelabili clienti” — a soft touch as customers.

For Edmund, the night was only an interval until he could find Minerva again among her stoves and cabbages.

A part of him warned him of his foolishness. But, though he had been in love before, he had never felt anything like the drowning desire he had experienced when he had gazed on Minerva’s perfect face, and the pale shadow of her slim body.

The next day he hurried to the Colosseum long before midday.

Edmund had to pass through a hermitage as he entered the great crater of marble and stone, with its mute circles of seats. Squalid huts of mud and scavenged brick sheltered in the great archways where senators had once passed; on the arena floor trees had grown tall and animals grazed.

There was no little row of charcoal stoves, no women in their white robes, no moist smell of cooked cabbage rising to compete with the stink of dung. There were beggars, though, milling about listlessly. They looked as disappointed as he felt, though it was hard to tell through their masks of grimy misery. None of them could answer his questions about Minerva or the Virgins.

He spent a week combing the city. But he found no sign of the Virgins, nor anybody who knew anything about them. It was as if they had just disappeared, as evanescent as the mist off the Tiber.

Chapter 45

Trying to track down what had become of Lucia at the hospital, Peter and I got nowhere fast.

We established that a woman called Pina Natalini had come in a small private ambulance to sign her out and take her away, showing valid signed certificates from a family doctor. Lucia herself, it seemed, had wanted to check out, claiming Pina as a cousin. It was all aboveboard, and I had no reason to believe the staff of the American Hospital were telling any lies about what had happened.

Surely it wasn’t the whole truth. I had no idea how much control this Pina and whoever else had come along — perhaps even Rosa — might have had over Lucia’s vulnerable mental state.

But what could we do? To the hospital staff — and indeed in my eyes — Peter, Daniel, and I had no claim over the girl. We barely knew her.

Daniel found all this hard to accept. He hung around, agitating for us to do something. Maybe you have to be that way when you’re young — you have to believe you can change the shitty state of the world, or else we’d all slit our wrists before reaching majority. But he became a pain in the arse. In the end I winkled his father’s number out of him and had him picked up and sent back to school. It was a lousy trick, but I believed it was for the best for him.

That just left Peter, who likewise, in fact, wouldn’t accept that we could go no farther. But his motives — and I still wasn’t sure what they were — were, unlike Daniel’s, murky, complexifying, entangling. I even had the feeling he was beginning to fit the mysteries of the Order into his wider worldview. I actually resented that. This was my issue — my sister — and I didn’t want to become just another sideshow in his paranoia.

Still, I thought he was right that I should go back into the Crypt again. I had unfinished business with Rosa, after all, regardless of Lucia.

But I felt frightened. Not of the Crypt, or Rosa, or even of the business surrounding Lucia. I was frightened of myself. I found the memory of how I had responded to the Crypt more disturbing the more I thought about it. So I put off the visit, hoping to gather a little mental strength.

While I was stalling, Peter initiated a new inquiry of his own. He tried to get access to the Vatican Secret Archives, to try to trace some of the Order’s complicated history between the days of Regina and the present.

At first he drew blanks. When he applied for a pass to the archives, the Vatican clerks trawled through his and my recent contacts concerning the Order, including the head of Rosa’s old school, and even my sister in the States. The testimonials were hardly ringing, and no passes were forthcoming.

“It’s a fucking conspiracy,” Peter groused. “I’m not exaggerating — I wouldn’t use that word lightly. And it’s all connected to the Order. These bastards are working together to keep us out. We’ve hit an outer ring of defense, and we’ve barely started …”

After a few days of that he leaned on me to go see my “tame Jesuit” again. A couple of days after that, Claudio called me up and offered me a tourist trip around the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, the secret archives themselves.

“I hate to disappoint you,” Claudio said, grinning. “But in this context secret just means ‘private’ …” He met me at the Vatican’s Porta Sant’ Anna entrance. We had to pick up visitor passes at the Vigilanza office; there was an awful lot of form filling.

The entrance to the archives themselves was off a courtyard called the Cortile del Belvedere, within the Vatican complex.

Claudio, it turned out, regularly researched here, and he briskly showed me the areas to which visiting scholars were allowed access: a ground-floor room called the sala di studio, and the Index Room, which actually contained a thousand indices, many themselves very old.