Breathing hard, the mute pedlar heaves the rack from his shoulders and leans it against the porch buttress. If he is unlucky the city marshals will order him to pick it up. Unluckier still, and they will kick it down the cathedral steps and all the pretty things he has for sale will be stamped into the dirt. He looks up to San Lorenzo, asks the saint to give him peace as the first customers wander over to sift through his tiered racks of ribbons and beads.

Sometimes it is men who buy things. Young boys in the first shiver of love spend their wages on a pair of brass buttons for their sweetheart. Old men caper among the paper fans and sparkling bracelets until their eyes light upon the perfect trinket for their brides. More often his customers are women. They smile at him as they wave their perfumed fingers for the value of the coins they will give him, and the mute pedlar holds up his own in reply. They continue to wave hands at one another like two friends at either end of a long bridge until a deal is struck.

The Jew Vitale sometimes sits by the mute pedlar on the steps of the cathedral. On days when the pedlar’s sales are poor, the physician buys him food from the marketplace and together they sit and watch the women in their tight bodices and wide skirts. The Jew will turn the tight silver ring on his finger, where the flesh has swallowed so much of it a narrow glint is all that catches the sun.

They seem to trouble him, these women with their wide skirts and silk smiles. When Il Sicofante’s new servant comes one morning to the pedlar and asks to buy two birds, the physician does not gaze longingly at her pretty face with its clear brown eyes. He does not smile or lean close to loop her sun-coloured hair between his fingers where it curls loose from her leather cap. When she opens her finely painted lips to speak he turns away.

‘I want two of them. These ones.’

She points to the bullfinches.

The pedlar pulls out a male and a female, then roots among his sack for a smaller cage to put them into.

‘No, I want pretty ones, two females with red breasts.’

The pedlar shakes his head but he knows better than to try and persuade this girl that the plainer birds are female.

‘How much?’

He holds up five fingers and waits for her to extend three or four in return, but her hand stays firmly on her basket.

‘I want them to fight. Will they fight?’ She takes the cage and rattles it sharply so the little birds tumble into one another. Their squawks appear to satisfy her, and she tosses the coins at the pedlar. Then she smiles at the physician, showing off a set of small even teeth.

The physician does not smile back. He looks at her sadly as she lifts her basket back into the crook of her arm and walks away.