It is too early for morning sounds. Still thick from dreaming, Flavia weaves to the water bowl then decides not to wash. Plucking at her undershirt where it sticks to her chest and back, she looks down at Pia’s dress crumpled in a heap where she tore it off the night before.

It was supposed to happen then, her wedding night. There was no priest, no feast. Just a small gathering of family and disbelief.

Alfeo turned up in a pair of yellow hose borrowed from Zio Anzolo, his hair flat with cooking oil and his hands clasping the last of the gifts: a string of green glass beads, mottled and misshapen. The blower’s rejects. Alfeo tied it around her wrist and Maestro Bartofolo tried to smile.

She was fidgeting with nerves that sent the embroidered sea monster on Pia’s wedding dress into strange convulsions. Pia had offered to help her, tying a bunch of violets to the little crucifix over Flavia’s bed. She had some rustic powders, berry grindings from the dyer’s workshop to brighten the cheeks. Flavia shook her head. She had not washed her hair nor combed it. It was so filthy she could pile it on top of her head and it would stay put, moulded by its own grease.

She sat at the table in a plain white cap, her eyes ringed with sleeplessness and a sore budding on her lower lip. Maestro Bartofolo looked at his hands a lot. Tommaso was quieter than usual, even Pia had little to say. Alfeo grinned from ear to ear; drank one cup of sloe wine, then another, then a flagon more. Sometime later he slipped quietly from his stool and began snoring under the table.

He is there still. The snores catch in his throat and wake him for a moment of mumbled nonsense before starting up again.

There is a dull ache in Flavia’s belly, a tickle of something running down her inner thigh. She parts her legs and sees a drop of blood splash into the floorboards, scoring a red eye on the largest of the old oricello birds.

It doesn’t have to be now. They could still wait for Fra Bernardino, make it right with words and wine. But really it will never be right, and no priests or feasts can make it anything other than horrible, so it may as well be now. Even though she’s bleeding today she will go downstairs to him and take him somewhere they can’t be seen, and someday soon she will puke and swell and then squat on the stool while Zia Caracosa pulls out her very own monster baby.

Would Ghostanza laugh or weep if she saw it?

She does not wipe herself. There will be enough blood afterwards to clean away. She shrugs on the wedding dress and goes barefoot downstairs.

*  *  *

He is curled sideways on the floor, his head cradled in a bowl half full of mutton stock.

Outside it is raining and there is a terrible stench coming from the workshop. Maestro Bartofolo has three vats of woad on the boil, enough sheep’s piss to fill a Roman bathhouse.

Flavia pulls the bowl free and shakes her uncle briskly by the shoulder. Alfeo grunts, coughs, and launches a wad of greyish bile onto a table leg. There are bits of gristle in his hair.

Without a word she beckons him. Not up the stairs, but outside, through the muddy courtyard, into the workshop.

It is the ugliest place. Next to the open vat and its violent stink; among the steam that cuts the eyes and throat.

She turns away from Alfeo and raises her skirts, the same as when she squats to take a piss in front of him. He has seen her all down there, front and back. It is nothing. She kneels on the flagstones, squeezing her kneecaps into the gaps where the edges are sharp. Her arse is facing him, just like Zio Anzolo’s goats when he lets the billy at them. It is quick for them, seconds really.

Two thumps as Alfeo drops to his knees behind her. There are noises from where he is, like someone searching through their purse for a coin. She presses her forehead to the side of the vat until it begins to scald, and wonders if she will vomit now or afterwards.

Alfeo reaches a hand around her side and squeezes the nearest breast, which is hanging and tender. She still has fingerprint bruises on her thigh but does not tell him to stop. He pulls on the breast with one hand as the other travels slowly up the back of her leg, the long nail of his little finger catching the skin.

A rush of nausea as the vat gives out a belch of steam.

There is more rustling through purses and the feel of a wet dog’s nose nudging between her buttocks. A knee-stagger against the flagstones as he steadies himself.

Flavia squeezes her eyes tight against a sudden burst of pain.

He is fully inside her. His hip bones digging against her cheeks. A gaping squeal of pleasure behind her.

It feels wrong. Worse than something being pulled out: her hair plucked at the root, her rotten tooth plied loose in the Piazza Piccola. She tries to twist around to where the grunts and the shoves are coming from, but can only see as far as the workbench. At the far end there is an iron pestle stuck in a granite mortar.

Then she understands, and shouts at him to stop. But Alfeo is deaf and soon it does not matter. He pushes deeper and she feels her bowels begin to part until the smell of fresh shit mingles with the woad. A series of excitable squawks accompany the final jerks and Alfeo falls onto her back, his willowherb breath hot in her ear and his heart kicking against her spine.

They are like that for a while. Two battered halves joined by rough edges. Equal after all.

A grim pride in the gracelessness of it all. Fury too that it is not yet done.

Alfeo begins to cough afresh as he slides out. He wipes himself on his borrowed hose and Flavia pulls her skirts back down, unwedges her knees from the flagstones.

Neither of them hear the thud of horses’ hooves coming towards to the house.

*  *  *

Her first thought is Ghostanza. The stewing of a new punishment.

The rain patters against the mud. Somewhere inside the workshop Alfeo begins to cough again. The groom stays well back with a sleeve pressed to his nose but Ridolfo Alfani walks right up to her. His eyes are streaming but he does not seem to mind.

Flavia twists her neck to the door jam, looking at him from her right eye only. His mantle is incredibly stitched in a swirling pattern of peacock feathers, pearls studding the thread.

A gloved hand is pressed on hers.

‘Please,’ behind the woad tears Ridolfo’s eyes are wide and urgent and she can think of only one thing that would make him dead to this stench.

‘Ghostanza?’

He blushes when Flavia says her name, but he is not the colour of conspiracy. For all his urgency he is shy behind his black hair. He does not look like a man nosing through his lover’s traps to see what broken-necked thing he can bring her.

‘My aunt.’ He blushes again, more softly this time. ‘She will kill me if you do not come back.’

So it is Mona Selvaggia who wants her. Strutting her tower room, unbraided hair flying indignantly as she finds a crevice in her cheeks so deep she can poke her little finger through to her gums.

Alfeo is behind her now. One hand on her shoulder, squeezing a new set of thumbprint bruises.

‘They should release Il Sicofante,’ she says quietly.

Ridolfo’s eyes are red-rimmed from the smoke.

‘They did! The apothecary was sent home three weeks ago.’

A hint of Ghostanza in his voice, incredulous she should not know such a thing.

‘The Podestà had the happy misfortune to knock a candle onto certain charge sheets,’ he adds with a sheepish grin. ‘It was only a matter of time. After all, he has a wife too.’

Of course. The matrons of the city. Pimpled and vein-flushed at mass. Imploring their husbands to end the cerussa drought. The apothecary back with his mortars and minerals, smoothing his unctions onto patrician flesh with his gilt tongue firmly in his cheek.

‘It is solved then,’ she says. ‘Il Sicofante can do what is needed.’

Ridolfo looks grim.

‘The apothecary will open his door to no one except his maidservant.’

She can feel Alfeo’s breath on her neck. His fingers are still tight on her shoulder, the smallest one digging deeper than the others, pinching the flesh under her collar bone. For the first time she notices another horse, tied to the groom’s. Its saddle is empty.

‘How did you find me?’

She does not trust him yet. Vitale would not give her away but Ghostanza might well know about San Fortunato.

‘My aunt has more spies than the Pope,’ Ridolfo shrugs and she sees for the first time how beautiful he really is. Not just the shaping of his features but the way he inhabits them. No fanfare, just a quiet grace she has not seen in other nobles.

Behind her stands the gargoyle form of her husband. The pain of what they did by the woad vat is a dull repugnance inside her. Inside the house she can hear Pia slurring instructions to Tommaso; her father’s sluggish descent into the sala. She twists out of Alfeo’s grip, turns to face him. His willowherb breath brings last night’s supper to her throat: a decision-making bile.

She tells him very clearly that he must go into what is left of the woods and look for a small blue flower with pink tips, as the gentleman would like to see them.

‘They are called Eden flowers.’

Alfeo screws up his forehead and shakes his head.

They are very, very small. She smooths down a tuft of hair at the back of his head. He will find them if he looks hard enough.

‘For me,’ she says.

Not a proper goodbye, but it is more than she gives to anyone else.