“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” he flared. “This is not Britain. This is Rome. Things are done differently here.”

“Then,” she said mildly, “no one will be disturbed when I tell them how you groomed me for your pleasure from the time of my menarche, and the way you used me on that night in Verulamium. I wonder now if that had something to do with your preference for boys. Perhaps on some level women disgust you, Amator? Perhaps you set out deliberately to hurt me? Oh, and of course I will tell them how you abandoned your obligations to your child all those years ago, and how you destroyed your father’s life with your theft—”

He leaned toward her, his depilated eyebrows flaring red. “You can’t harm me, little chicken.”

“Perhaps not. But it will be interesting to try.”

He held her gaze for long heartbeats. She kept still, refusing to show how her heart was hammering — for if he called her bluff she had no alternative plan.

But then he laughed. “I always did like you, Regina. You had a spark. It wasn’t just your boyish little body, you know.” He clapped his hands and ordered his perfumed boy to bring more wine.

Pina was no support.

Chapter 25

“You got what you wanted, didn’t you? You wanted your contadino. You wanted something nobody else has.”

“No, I—”

“Now you’re different. Congratulations.”

Lucia thought she saw something in Pina’s face as she said this, just a flicker of remorse or pity. But Pina turned her back, just like the rest.

Nobody would speak to her. No, it was worse than that. Nobody would even look at her. It was as if waves of disapproval spread out from Rosa and Pina, eventually engulfing everybody Lucia knew.

She was never physically isolated — that was impossible in the Crypt — but everywhere she went she was alone in a crowd. At work in the scrinium, her work assignments were left on her desk or as impersonal email messages. They were instructions that might have been sent to a robot, she thought, a thing without identity. In the dormitory, little knots of conversation would unravel as she approached. In the refectories people would turn away and talk as if she weren’t there. Cut out of the endless babble of gossip, it was as if a great story were moving on without her.

Listen to your sisters. That was another of the three great slogans of the Order’s short catechism, incised on every nursery wall, repeated endlessly. But how were you supposed to listen when nobody would speak to you?

Now she was excluded, it had never been so apparent how closely everybody in the Order lived. People walked together, talking endlessly, arms linked, hips bumping together, heads bowed closely, lips brushing in platonic kisses. Sometimes, in the refectories, you would see groups of ten or fifteen or even twenty girls, joined one to the next by linked arms or hands on shoulders, or bodies pressed together. At intense moments people would grab each other’s arms and shoulders, even kiss. At night, too, it wasn’t uncommon for two, three, or four to cluster together in a few pushed-together beds, whispering, kissing, at last sleeping in each other’s arms. There was nothing sexual in any of this, for there was nothing sexual about the sisters. As slim as seven-year-olds, they huddled together innocently for companionship and warmth.

But not Lucia, not anymore. Nobody came near Lucia, no nearer than a yard or two, never near enough to touch. It was as if she were trapped inside a big bubble of glass, around which people walked without even noticing what they were doing.

Or it was as if she smelled bad. And perhaps she did, she came to wonder. Sometimes, when she walked into a crowded room, she would detect a subtle scent, a kind of milky sweetness, gentle and welcoming. It was the smell of the sisters. By comparison her smell must be of blood and sweat, of a rutting animal, as if she was a beast in the field, not a human being like the others at all.

Once she was aware of it the scent of rut seemed to fill her head, day and night. She took to showering, two, three, four times a day, scrubbing at her skin until it was raw, and changing her clothes all the time. But still that stink gushed out of her body, a foulness that she couldn’t escape — for it was the essence of her.

It went on and on. Food seemed to lose its flavor; it was like trying to eat cardboard or grass. It got to the point where she couldn’t sleep. She would lie there alone in her bed, listening to the whispers and giggles and gentle snores that drifted around her. The lack of sleep and her poor diet soon wore her out. She dragged herself to work. But the work seemed as pointless as the rest of her weary days. In her spare time she would simply sit alone, silently loathing herself, aware of every pore in her skin oozing blood and dirt.

After a month of ostracism, she suffered violent stomach cramps. She staggered to a bathroom and endured half an hour of dry retching, bringing up nothing but acidic bile that burned her throat.

Rosa came to sit opposite her in the refectory. “I saw you in the bathroom.” Her tone was analytical, not sympathetic.

Lucia had been sitting alone, without touching the cooling plate of food before her. She tucked her hands between her thighs, head down. Over her head an elaborate mosaic design showed the Order’s kissing- fish logo.

“You know why you’re ill, don’t you? You’ve hardly eaten for a month. Or slept, by the look of you. The weight is falling off you.”

“I don’t care.” Lucia’s voice was scratchy. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to anybody, exchanged a single word. It must have been days, she thought.

“You feel like you don’t exist. As if you’re not really here. As if this is a dream.”

“A nightmare.”

“We aren’t meant to be alone, Lucia. We’re social creatures. Our minds evolved in the first place so we could figure out what is going on inside other people’s heads — so we could get to know them, help them, even manipulate them. Did you know that? We need other people to make us fully conscious. So if you’re alone, if nobody is looking at you or talking to you, it really is as if you don’t exist.”

“Everybody hates me.”

Rosa leaned forward. “Can you blame them? You let us down, Lucia. The Crypt is a calm pond. You threw a great big rock into that pond, making a huge splash, sending ripples back and forth. You upset everybody.”

Lucia dropped her head.

Rosa asked, “Do you remember what happened to Francesca?”

Lucia frowned. She had forgotten about Francesca.

Francesca had been a sister from Lucia’s dormitory, neither more or less popular than anybody else, never standing out from the crowd — but then nobody did. Then, one day, suddenly Francesca hadn’t been part of the group anymore. Everybody else, including Lucia, had simply stopped talking to her.

It was just as was happening to Lucia herself.

“Francesca was a thief,” Rosa said sternly. “She had an obsession for jewelry and accessories — sparkly, glittery things. She would steal from her sisters. She built up a cache under her bed. Of course she kept it all secret. When it was discovered — well, naturally, nobody wanted to talk to her again.”

Lucia had never known about the thefts, about why Francesca’s exclusion had come about. But then, you never asked questions like why. It had been easy, she thought wonderingly, easy just to ignore Francesca, to behave as if she didn’t exist — for in a way she didn’t anymore. As for Lucia, she had just gone along with what everybody else had been doing, as she always did, as she had been encouraged to do since she was a toddler, never questioning. She had scarcely noticed when Francesca had literally disappeared, when the pale solitary ghost in the refectory or the dorm had evaporated, never to return.