I clutched the saddle horn and slapped, stiff with dread, against the donkey’s saddle. Too late today for a public execution; it would have to wait until morning—unless a quick and private death awaited.
The streets grew narrower. The grand estates gave way to shops and tradesmen’s houses.
As we turned onto a broader avenue, our caravan slowed. In the near distance, black forms blocked the street. They had been waiting silently in the dark.
“Damn you,” the commander cursed his men. “Before God, if one of you is the traitor, I’ll send you to Hell myself …”
Death to the Medici, someone in the darkness said uncertainly.
The cry erupted with fervor: Abaso le palle! Down with the balls!
A hail of stones followed.
Beside me, the commander reined in his stamping horse and bellowed, “This prisoner is being transported at the command of the Republic! Anyone who interferes is a traitor!”
“You are the traitors,” a woman’s voice cried.
She stepped forward into the torchlight, a starving wraith wrapped in filthy rags. Beneath her jutting collarbones, her torn bodice had been rolled down to expose one breast, where a weakly wailing infant refused to suckle. She glared at me, her eyes two wild black holes.
“Medici bitch!” she roared. “You kill me, you kill my child! Your soldiers starve us, while you grow fat! You should die! You!”
You, the crowd echoed. Death to the Medici!
Two youths ran out of the dark to accost the soldier on my left. One grabbed his heel in the stirrup and pulled him down; the other struck him with a club. He fell sideways in the saddle, grappling with the first youth.
“Get his sword!” someone shouted, and the crowd rushed forward.
The commander barked orders and reined his horse in until his leg pressed against mine. The fallen soldier had managed to unsheathe his sword and held the youths at bay.
A grizzled beggar dashed into the light, gripped the skirt of my habit, and tugged mightily; the donkey brayed and I screamed. My saddle slipped, and the world canted sideways in a frightening whirl of animal hide and swords and filthy limbs.
My legs became tangled in the stirrups; my shoulder struck bone and flesh. I looked up in midfall and saw the beggar’s yawning grin, studded with cracked and rotting teeth, maggots in a putrid hole. I felt his hands on me and screamed again.
Suddenly he disappeared; I kicked free from the stirrups and was guided up by strong hands onto my feet. The commander’s right arm pressed me close; his left hand brandished his sword. On the stones before us, the beggar lay bleeding. The soldiers encircled us, holding back the now-quiet crowd.
The commander pointed the tip of his sword at the beggar’s head and thundered, “The next one who touches her, I’ll kill.” He lowered his voice. “She’s just a girl. A girl at the mercy of the same politics you poor bastards are.”
He mounted his stallion, then gestured at his second in command, who lifted me so that the commander could pull me up into his saddle. We began to move again. The commander’s arms were on either side of me as he held the reins, and momentum pushed me back against his chest, warm and hard.
Now and then, I caught a whiff of raw meat left too long in the sun. The commander pulled out a square of linen and handed it to me.
“Put it over your nose and mouth,” he said. “There’s plague in this neighborhood.”
I put it over my nose and breathed in the antiseptic fragrance of rosemary.
“You’re still trembling,” he said. “It’s all right now. The street rabble, I won’t let them harm you.”
I lowered the kerchief. “That’s not what I fear.”
He grew quiet, then said softly, “We don’t know what to do with you. Were it my choice, I’d free you now. It’s only a matter of time.”
Eager, wistful, I half turned in the saddle. “You really think I’ll be freed?”
The same muscle in his cheek twitched. “A cruel thing for a child,” he said. “You’ve been our prisoner—how long now? Three years? With luck, you’ll outlive me, Duchessa. Me and every one of these poor bastards here.” He indicated his troops with a jerk of his chin. “Your friends outnumber ours now.”
Hope tugged at me. “Don’t lie,” I said.
His mouth stretched in a cynical grin. “I’ll lay you a wager that, within two months’ time, you and I will see our fortunes reversed.”
“And what are the stakes?” I asked.
“My life.”
I didn’t properly understand his reply then, but I said, “Done.”
“Done it is,” he said.
I settled against him. Whether he had lied or not, he had put my mind at ease.
“For our wager,” I said lightly, looking out at the shopfronts and walls as the torches’ yellow glow swept over them, “if you lose, whose head shall I ask for?”
The instant he opened his mouth, I knew what he would say.
“Silvestro,” he said. “Silvestro Aldobrandini, a humble soldier of the Republic.”
I thought of my mother’s letter, lying beneath my pillow at Le Murate, forever lost.
Our party encountered no more challenges, and we made our way quickly to the northern quarter of San Giovanni. Once there, we turned onto the narrow Via San Gallo and came to a cloister wall, behind which Sister Violetta was waiting to receive me.
It was the convent of Santa-Caterina, where I had spent the first months of my captivity. Ser Silvestro had seen me safely returned.
As she closed the wooden gate on Ser Silvestro, Sister Violetta received me as she had before, finger to lips. Her lantern revealed the toll the past three years had taken; she was even gaunter now. She turned and led me upstairs to my old cell. A young woman with pale golden hair sat on the straw mattress; when the glow of the lantern found her, she lifted a thin arm and squinted at the light. Like Violetta’s, her face bore the pinched look of the hungry, but hers was growing into womanly beauty.
“Tommasa?” I asked.
She let go a gasp of recognition and embraced me as Sister Violetta again signaled for silence, then turned and disappeared down the corridor.
Tommasa broke the silence as soon as Violetta’s footsteps faded. “Caterina!” she hissed. “Why did they bring you back? Where have you been?”
I took in the filthy straw mattress, the stink of the sewer, and slowly sat down on the edge of the bed. Back at Le Murate, Sister Niccoletta was surely weeping, and I wanted to weep, too. I shook my head, too heavyhearted to speak.
Tommasa was too lonely to be silent. Most of the sisters and all of the boarders had succumbed to plague, she told me, and because of the siege, the convent’s larders were almost bare.
I lay awake all that night on the hard, lumpy straw, listening to Tommasa’s soft snores. All the while, I thought of Sister Niccoletta and Mother Giustina, and the life I had lost at Le Murate.
When morning came, I learned the new terms of my imprisonment: I was not to do chores, nor eat in the refectory, nor attend chapel. I was to remain day and night in my cell.
A miserable