and his easel were gone. A group of boys in plain beige gardening uniforms squatted on their hands and knees, trimming the grass with large shears.
“Excuse me,” Cass said. The boys all looked up at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. One of them gaped at her bizarre appearance. Cass ignored them. “I’m looking for Signor da Padova, the artist,” she said.
“He’s gone,” the tallest of the boys said. “The mistress called him away to do some work inside.”
Of course. Cass imagined Falco and his patroness holed up in her bedchamber working on something even more scandalous than a painting depicting Belladonna as a half-naked Roman goddess. She pushed the thought out of her mind, thanked the tall boy, and turned back toward the villa, feeling unaccountably frustrated.
Piero’s medicine had soothed her slightly, but now that she was up and moving, her arm was tingling and burning. Again, Cass was dying to see what was beneath the bandages. But she was too afraid to look. She realized that she might have died if Piero hadn’t helped her.
She realized, too, that she had neglected to thank him for saving her life.
She turned back to the boys, who were clipping small tufts of grass to an even height with an almost mathematical precision. “I’m sorry to bother you again,” she said. “But do you know where I might find Piero Basso, the house physician?”
“His lodgings are on the first floor.” Once again, it was the tallest boy who responded. “Next to the butler’s office.”
There was no entrance to the first floor from the back of the villa, so Cass would have to ascend the stone stairs leading away from the garden and travel through the house to the main spiral staircase. She paused at the top of the back stairs for a moment, watching as a bank of clouds rolled in from the west. The air felt cooler. A storm was coming. She ducked back into the villa and made her way to the main stairs.
Cass paused for a moment at the bottom of the staircase and reached out for the banister to steady herself. It looked as if the walls were moving. Not spinning or running away from her, but pulsing, almost as if the villa itself were breathing.
She closed her eyes and opened them again. The walls went still. She stood between the rectangles of sunlight that filtered through the front window for a moment, getting her bearings.
The main hallway ended in a T. There were arched doors on both sides of her. Tiny gargoyles were carved into the stone above them. She knocked gently on the door to her right. No one answered. She tried the knob. Locked. She repeated her soft knock on the door to her left. Again, no response. She placed her hand on the doorknob, expecting that this, too, would prove locked.
But the door swung open, and Cass peeked into the room. A small bed was nestled against the far wall, its covers disturbed, as if someone had risen from it quickly. Next to the bed was a teetering stack of leather-bound books. A candle burned on the washing table just inside the door; Piero, if indeed he was the one who lived here, would be back soon. Still, Cass crept forward into the chamber.
“Dottor Basso?” She cleared her throat. “Piero? It’s Cass.” She wasn’t sure why she said it. She didn’t really think the physician was hiding in the rumpled coverlet or behind the stack of books. Still, it didn’t seem right to creep into someone’s chambers unannounced.
She entered the room and closed the door behind her. Her eyes gravitated to the stack of books. She didn’t think the Book of the Eternal Rose would be lurking in a lowly physician’s room, even if he did wear the ring of the Order, but it wouldn’t hurt to give them a quick look.
Tiptoeing over to the bed, she knelt down to examine the leather-bound volumes. Gingerly, she lifted the top one from the stack. There was no name or title embossed into the deep brown cover. She peeked at the second volume. Also blank. A rustling sound from the shelf near her head made her jump, and the whole tower of books spilled onto the floor.
Except this wasn’t a dog. It was a girl, just like her.
Cass turned to the front of the book. Was Piero doing the same sort of research as Angelo de Gradi? She tried to remember if she had seen his name among those listed on the parchment she had found in her parents’ tomb. De Gradi, Dubois, da Peraga. She saw these names as if they were inked in blood. But Basso? She wasn’t sure. Falco had said most of the Order members were wealthy. Perhaps the tradesmen and physicians were engaging in experiments that the wealthier Order members were funding.
But to what end?
The first page was dominated by a drawing of a skeleton, whose bones were identified in the margin. The next page was just a leg, its three bones enlarged to show detail. Cass flipped again and again. She paused at the drawing of an arm. According to the sketch, there were three bones in the arm. Cass was lucky the dogs’ powerful jaws had not snapped them all like twigs.
Cass kept flipping pages. Interspersed among the diagrams were pages of foreign symbols and notations about illness and vitality.
She knew she should stop reading, that she shouldn’t be snooping through someone’s private notes. She knew how furious she would be if she caught anyone reading her journal. Her stomach clenched. Somewhere, Cristian still possessed a volume of her most personal thoughts. Cass slammed the book shut and reordered the crooked stack as she had found it.
She turned to a set of shelves next to the bed. Maybe she would find the ring he had worn to the Palazzo della Notte. Then she would know for certain he was a member of the Order. Among a jumble of medical equipment were a hairbrush, a vial of perfume, and a syringe. Cass eyed the silver syringe and attached long steel needle with curiosity. What sort of injection required a needle so thick?
The shelf below that one held a single sheet of lush vellum, with withered rose petals pinned to the page. There were scrawled notes next to some of them—strings of letters and numbers that Cass didn’t understand.
She turned to go back to the stack of journals when she heard the rustling sound again. At the back of the shelf, almost totally concealed beneath a silk pillow slip, was a rectangular container made of glass. Cass folded back the fabric and shrieked, stumbling back from the shelves and sending the stacks of journals tumbling to the floor again. She had uncovered a cage.
A cage filled with spiders.
“Careful, Signorina. I wouldn’t want you to faint right onto my bed. It would look bad for us both.”
Cass whirled around. Piero was standing in the doorway. How long had he been watching her? “I—I’m sorry,” she stuttered. “I didn’t mean to disturb—I came looking for you.”
“You came looking for me? I like that.” Piero crossed the room in a few strides, his thick-soled boots as quiet as slippers on the stone floor. “No need to be scared.” He draped the pillowcase back over the top of the cage. “Spiders are not nearly so frightening as the reputation that precedes them.” His dark eyes lingered on her.
“But why do you keep them?” She bit her lip. “Are they poisonous?”
“All spiders are venomous,” he said. “In most cases, however, their venom is weak, so it doesn’t make people ill. My colleagues and I have found it to be just the opposite, in fact. We believe spider venom may contain medicinal properties.”
“Really?” Cass couldn’t imagine anything good coming from the hairy-legged little beasts.
He nodded. “Many medicines come from plants. Is it so hard to believe they might also come from animals or insects?”
“And your . . . books?” She stopped herself at the last second from saying
“Believe me, don’t concern yourself with my books,” he said. “They don’t make good bedtime stories. Full of foul humors.”
“I know about humors,” Cass said, raising her chin. “My father studied medicine. But the texts he studied were very different.”
