Chapter 21

A week after her encounter with the mother-grandmother, Rosa sent Lucia out for a study day in a library in the Centro Storico area — not far from the Pantheon, in fact. Pina accompanied her.

The two of them had finished their day’s work by three. They decided to take a walk toward the Tiber, and perhaps make for the gardens of the Villa Borghese, across the river. They set off along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, heading west. It was a bright December afternoon, and they were walking into the sun.

The Centro Storico was the medieval heart of the city. It was enclosed by a great eastward bend of the Tiber. Rome’s ancient core had always been the seven hills, where the great forums and palaces had been built. But after the collapse of the Empire, the ancient aqueducts had broken down, and the dwindling population of Rome had gravitated toward the river, seeking drinking water. The ruins in the area had provided building materials for houses, churches, and papal complexes. Later, as Renaissance families competed for power and prestige, the area had become cluttered with grandiose monuments, and it grew into a center for craft guilds, filled with botteghe, workshops. To some extent that was still true, Lucia saw as they walked down the Via dei Cestari, filled with shops selling clothes and equipment for the Catholic priesthood.

In the low, dazzling light, the streets swarmed with cars and the pavement was crowded with chattering schoolchildren, slow-strolling tourists, and office workers yelling into their cell phones. The crowd was purposeful, agitated, and continually noisy, and Lucia felt out of place.

“You aren’t saying much.” Pina walked beside her, bag swinging at her shoulder, phone in her hand, sunglasses on her nose.

“I’m sorry. It’s just all these people. It’s the way they talk. Everybody is so intense — see the way their muscles are rigid — as if they are on the point of shouting the whole time. But what is it they are shouting about?”

Pina laughed. “You know, we’re spoiled in the Crypt. We emerge as helpless as nuns evicted from their convents.”

“I don’t know.” Lucia pointed to a group of three nuns in simple pale gray vestments. Chatting brightly in a small pavement cafй, they all wore sunglasses and expensive-looking trainers, their cell phones set among the cappuccinos before them. One wore a baseball cap over her wimple. Rome always seemed full of nuns, here to visit the Vatican, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of the pope, El Papa. “ They seem all right.”

Pina linked her arm through Lucia’s. “Come on. When we get to the Villa Borghese I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

Lucia remained unhappy. As usual when out of the Crypt, she longed for its calm and order, where every direction she looked she would see a face like her own. But she knew that even back in the Crypt, even in her dormitory, she would have trouble finding peace. She was layered with secrets now — the painful mystery of her menstruation, Rosa’s peculiar pursuit of her with her hints of an assignment to come — secrets, huge painful bewildering secrets, in a place where you weren’t supposed to hold any secrets from those around you, not even the smallest.

Still, she was relieved when they reached the river, and the crowd thinned a little.

They crossed over the Vittorio Emanuele bridge and walked northeast, following the great curve of the Tiber. There were houseboats moored to the banks; Lucia saw people sunbathing, laid out over the boats’ decks like drying fish.

The Villa Borghese was in an area where wealthy Romans had built their country estates since imperial times. It had been saved from the twentieth-century property developers when the state had bought it, and preserved it as a park. Lucia had always liked these gardens, with their winding paths and half- hidden flower beds; she and her sisters had been brought here when they were small. It was best to avoid the weekends, when the population of Rome moved in here en masse, overwhelming the place with yelling children, chatting mothers, fathers with radios clamped to their ears for soccer scores. Today, though there were plenty of children, brought here by their mothers after school, their shouting seemed remote and scattered.

Lucia and Pina found their way down to a little circular lake, bounded by a path. On the edge of the water stood a small temple, dedicated to the Greek god Aesculapius. They sat on a wooden bench that had seen better days. People were rowing on the lake, sending shimmering bow waves across the dense green water and disturbing the reflection of the god’s statue. It was always a calming place, Lucia thought; she had been disappointed to find that the temple was only a reproduction. Pina fulfilled her promise by buying an ice cream cone from a cart — not very reputable looking, but drawn by a patient horse, irresistible in his battered straw hat.

While they ate their ice cream, they watched a young woman in Lycra jogging gear sitting near them, earnestly peering into the tiny screen of her cell phone. She had a dog with her, a big, aged, slow- moving Labrador. He meandered happily through the dappled shade. But when he walked behind a set of railings he couldn’t figure out his way back, and peered through the bars at his owner, whining theatrically. His owner retrieved him, comforting him with strokes and tugging at his collar. But then, as she returned to her earnest texting, the dog would wander off into his conceptual prison and begin his whining once more, making Lucia and Pina laugh.

Lucia renewed the sunblock cream on her face, hands, and arms. It had been less than an hour since her last application, but even in the weak December afternoon sunlight her skin prickled. Pina, however -

cradling her phone in one hand — took off her sunglasses, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the dipping sun. It was unusual for a woman of the Order to have a skin able to tan. Lucia wondered how it would feel to relax, to enjoy the sunlight on her face, without the need to block it out.

Pina’s face showed no signs of aging, no wrinkles or lines. Her skin might have belonged to a seventeen- year-old. This would baffle the contadino males, she knew; she had heard young men whistle, or mutter, “Ciao, bella,” or “Bella figura,” after sisters of the Order old enough to be their mothers, and yet looking younger than they were. It was strange, Lucia supposed. But she had never thought about it before. There was much about life in the Order she hadn’t questioned, hadn’t even noticed, until the last few disruptive weeks. Perhaps it wasn’t the outsiders who were strange, but the Order. After all, she thought, there are very many more of them than us. Perhaps she had become a kind of outsider herself, and was learning to look back at the Order through the eyes of a contadino -

“Excuse me.”

She turned, peering into the sun. Pina snapped her sunglasses into place like a mask.

A man was standing before them — a young man, half silhouetted in the sun. He wore a blue Italy soccer shirt and jeans that looked as if they had been faded by time, not design. He carried a bundle of books under his arm. He was slim, and not tall, no taller than Lucia was. He had red hair, and his face had a weakish chin and a rounded profile, a smooth curve that proceeded from his long nose to his brow — which was high, she saw, and covered in freckles. He was young, perhaps not yet eighteen …

She was staring. She recognized him, of course. She dropped her gaze, hot.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just—”

Pina snapped, “Who are you?”

“My name is Daniel Stannard. I’m a student. I attend an expat college in the Trastevere. I’m studying for my bachelor’s degree. My father is American …” He had an accent, a slightly singsong American intonation to his Italian.