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the bodies—” I started. Maria and Simonetta were pouring some flowery scented potion on me and rubbing it into my skin with coarse mitts. They had left lye soap caked in my hair to kill the lice, and my scalp tingled with heat, but I shivered. I remembered the corpse of a young woman, little more than a girl, that I’d seen floating out in the water. She had been famous, a beautiful and desirable courtesan. Everyone knew she had lived here. The ebbing water had exposed her slashed face, ribbons of skin floating out with her hair, and her horribly burnt hands with her arms reaching up out of the water to end in blackened nubs.
    “When someone’s displeased him, he makes a demonstration. It’s always bloody. Don’t displease him. Please, Luca Bastardo, take my advice. You seem like someone I could talk to, someone like me who could survive in here. Don’t make it worse for yourself.”
    I stared at Marco. His face was serious. With the single exception of the old man at the Piazza Santa Maria Novella telling me to use ingegno, no one had ever before told me to take care of myself. Now here was Marco pleading with me to do so. Massimo, my brother from the streets, hadn’t felt this way. I asked, with some suspicion, “Why do you care what happens to me?”
    “Because I care about myself,” Marco said, turning away and pacing. “I’ve been here for eight years. I’ve learned how to stay alive. Most children break into pieces; they wither and die. I stay alive by protecting what’s good inside me. That’s all we have in here, and if we’re not careful, what we’re forced to do makes it go away.”
    “I don’t think people have much goodness inside them,” I said, biting off the words.
    “Some people do. Not the patrons. That’s one of the reasons I’m nice to the other children. It makes me different from the patrons. It gives me something to live for.” He lifted his head as if he’d heard something. “Take care of yourself, Luca!” He waved and vanished back into the shadows.
    “Shush, we work,” Simonetta breathed. A frisson of fear coursed up the back of my neck, but when I looked around, I didn’t see anything. Her eyes flicked toward a window and I glanced there. Perhaps I sensed movement out of the corner of my eye, but the window was empty, like a mirror with no one behind it. The suggestive absence terrified me more than if Silvano had stood in front of me. I fought the urge to cover myself. If he knew that I knew he was watching, perhaps it wouldn’t please him.
             
    THE LAST PLUM CLOUDS HAD VANISHED into the stars when Simonetta and Maria finally stepped back to survey me. My hair fell in a straight red-blond sheet down my back to my shoulder blades, my skin was scrubbed pink and shiny all over, and a soft musky scent wafted out from me. I held the crook of my arm to my nose and sniffed, smelling myself, feeling myself. Was I still me? I’d never imagined I could look or smell this way. Simonetta licked her thumb and brushed it across my left eyebrow. The inner hairs of that brow bristled straight up; I’d seen that before, on a windless morning when the capricious Arno was flat and silver and showed my face to me. Simonetta scowled at my eyebrow, then shrugged. Maria held out a gauzy yellow
camicia
and I slipped it on, relieved not to be naked. They led me back through the palazzo.
    We took a different hall, just as opulent as the first, and came to a dining room. On the table was set a roast boar with an apple in its mouth, a plate of roast fowl, a bowl of steaming bean soup, a small round of bread, and a basket of figs and grapes. The savory smell of rosemary and crispy fat perfumed the air. I ran to the table and grabbed up the soup, gulping it down in loud slurps. It must have been delicious, because the food in that place always was, but all I cared about was assuaging the ache that beat in my blood and stomach. Then I tore into the fowl, ripping off a drumstick