Glancing back at her work table, Rachel noticed the time – nine p.m. Another evening spent alone. Why? She could be anywhere. She was moving in different circles, had studied theatrical design and contemporary playwrights, and was newly employed in a small London theatre. Assistant Stage Manager – maybe fully fledged, in time. But how much time? Did she really want ambition to dictate the way she lived? Did she want to be hanging about in dingy theatre wings while she waited for Michael’s texts, or his furtive, hurried phone calls?

And lately they had been so short-staffed at the theatre that Rachel had been asked to widen her scope. Already ASM, she was drafted in to help with the reading of all the plays submitted. She had never realised how many people wrote. Words, scenes, whole complete, fascinating existences captured on sheets of A4 paper. She had never realised how extraordinary some lives were, or could be. Some lives, even her life. If she had chosen differently.

The light was fading as she sat, fingering some papers and staring at the photograph of her lover. It was close to Christmas again. Close to the time when families came together, if only to fight. Close to the time when all the motorways, airports and shops would be blocked with activity and people getting busy for the holidays. But not her.

And she had only herself to blame.

So when the phone call came half an hour later to say that Michael would not be able to see her as arranged, Rachel was expecting it. Without rancour, she wished him a happy Christmas and rang off. For a while afterwards she stood looking around her, smiling bitterly at the decorations he would not see, the turkey he would not eat. The one she was going to have to put in the deep freeze for some other occasion he would dodge. Slamming the freezer door closed, Rachel walked into the bedroom and realised that nothing would make her spend another Christmas there. Not alone. Not again.

In less than an hour she had packed and hired a car, a small Renault she could easily drive. Rachel Pitt was going to take herself away for the holidays. Away from her lover, her mother, her phone, the television, internet and newspapers.

She needed time to think. And she needed to think alone.

Venice, 1555

Pomponio came to his father’s house around midnight on the 26th of December. He came with his shoulders rounded, wearing priest’s vestments, a hood over his head. It was raining heavily, so heavily the water skittled from the roofs and splattered into the bloated canals below. A moon, white and round as a milk penny, glowered in the icy sky.

The fog had been gone for several days. In its stead came a cold so punishing Venetians stayed in their homes, the sky crackling with stars, a comet flying low over the Doge’s Palace. It was an omen, they said. After three months, after three killings, there was always talk of omens. Of death, of weather that had already taken many of the old.

The cold came like another plague, but no fever this time; this was a sickness which sank into the bone, smothered all heat from the blood, bled down the flesh, and crept out through a hundred doors laden with souls too young for St Michael.

Terrified, fleeing for his safety, Pomponio had returned to his father’s house, to the place from which had exiled himself, scurrying like a poor rat in through the studio doors. I left them together, could not watch. I, who have watched so much, could not look upon this.

The previous night the mob had turned their footsteps away from Vespucci’s house. Instead they came, quiet, respectful but accusing, and stood at Titian’s gates. There were no shouts, no calls for blood: only a dreadful silence under that sickened moon.

They came as though beguiled, as though Aretino’s accusation had made a truth of it. As though the feckless Pomponio could become a devil overnight. He, who could barely bait a cat, was suspected as the killer. The Skin Hunter of Venice, the man who had made cowards of us all.

And inside, Pomponio hid like a child behind a studio screen, his monk’s shoes sodden with water, stained dark as blood.

He pleaded his innocence, which was what we knew. And those were the last words I heard as I left, making for a house on the Grand Canal. There I stood and watched the high barred windows of Aretino’s home, and knew he suffered. Not as a kindly man, but as one seen in his true colours. As one judged brutal in his arrogance. Terrible in his cowardice. A man who thought it fair to sacrifice another’s child, to barter an innocent for his own ends.

Titian has dismissed him. He has closed his doors to a man he once treasured, to a friend he once loved. His heart is shuttered against him. And the love he once bore for this most odious of men is curdled. In grace did Titian curse him. In defence of his son, he called the gods down on the writer’s head. He held his hands, palms up, and asked if there was anything he had ever refused to give. His purse, his home, his food, his name.

His name … On saying it, Titian seemed to pause, to count the wisdom of its loan. To wonder at his own naive and reckless trust.

And I had watched it all. Watched Aretino buckle like a lame donkey under its master’s whip. I saw him realise that all the lies were recognised and others suspected … He recoiled from the painter’s anger and lost his footing on the step, his bulk driving him backward to the floor. For a moment he had looked as though he thought a hand might be offered to help him. But none was.

Instead Titian turned and spoke no more.

I saw him broken, Pomponio following his father from the room. And struggling to his feet again was Aretino – cowed, humiliated, seen for the evil he was.

And this time he saw me. After so many years waiting, with so little power, so minute a chance of revenge, I faced him. I had been a nothing in his eyes, but I remained within the artist’s grace while he was banished. And I, who had waited so long on the moment, thrilled to the sight of his defeat.

He lumbered to the door, turned, and took long stock of me, as though to threaten. Then he left and made for Vespucci’s house. His power gone, the scapegoat failed, he went to the only person who would still receive him. As the doors closed behind Aretino, a cry went up from across the water. A woman’s cry, hardly more than the screech of an owl.

All night I sat beside the window, watching. The sick moon, weary of staring, ambled behind a covering of cloud. On the black surface of the water which surrounded us, waves curled and unfurled themselves, lurching inanely at an angry tide.

I am afraid of water and that night its darkness shivered within me. I thought what horrors there might lie beneath, what wrecks and bones of desperate men, what secrets, purses, weapons and close weeds shuddered within the depths. I wondered how the water would press down, how the cold might seep into the lungs, how someone quick and living would soon slide into that murky hollow.

It was seven in the morning when the church bell rang. It rang like a call to arms, and wakened me. Leaving the house, I ran to the sound, knowing before I arrived what I would find there.

Beautiful still. She had once been as wild and savage as an animal, but now she was quiet. Slowly the Contessa di Fattori was hauled out of the winnowing tide. Her face was ruined, her eyes fixed, her body still perfect in its shape, but flayed. And around her wrist a ribbon had been tied, a label fluttering in a bitter breeze.

It was the first day of January, 1556. And it came in with the tide and the body of a woman murdered only a little while before, in the dying hours of the dying year.