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He knocked.

“I told you to wait!”

The door opened. A neatly dressed servant stared at them.

Piero looked at Ginevra and then back at the servant. Neither adult said anything, so he announced their purpose. He made Ginevra take out the letter from Ludovico. The servant stepped aside to let them in. The knot inside Ginevra wound tighter. She’d so dearly wanted the letter to be genuine she had ignored her instincts. Now she’d walked into a trap she did not understand. Piero ran back toward the home of the bishop, stopping to wave goodbye before he disappeared around a corner. She moved to follow him, but the servant pulled her by the arm into the dark interior, then shut the door.

“Miasmas,” he said by way of apology. Her heart began to flump in ways it shouldn’t.

She found herself at the shorter end of a rectangular room, the interior wall pierced by three windows that showed a central stone courtyard. Narrow blocks of light shone through, giving just enough illumination for Ginevra to see the walls were painted with panel scenes of the apocalypse: towers toppled by earthquakes, famine riding fast on a skeletal horse, sinners packed into a flaming kiln tended by beasts.

“So, the boy, he actually found you, then?”

Ginevra jumped. Straining her eyes into the gloom, she saw a tall, slender figure pacing at the far end of the hall, his soft leather slippers making faint slaps on the green tile floors.

“He did. But he ran away, just now.”

“Incredible. Monna Ginevra, I am Fra Michele di Lapo Arnolfi, Inquisitor to His Holiness Pope Clement VI.” He paused briefly, awaiting platitudes, but Ginevra only studied him intently.

He was not so old, a few years more than herself, at most. But he had the pale skin and darkly circled eyes of one who spent too much time reading by lamplight, and his narrow frame was lost in the voluminous black-and-white robes of his order. A black niello pomander hung from his silk belt, the size and shape of a crab apple. If Ginevra had been closer, she’d have seen that silver letters spelled out prayers to San Sebastiano around its circumference. The trinket emitted a pervasive musky odor and he jerked it compulsorily up to his mouth and nose every minute or so.

Ginevra saw she was being observed just as closely. Automatically, she touched the scar on her nose, and then was annoyed she had pointed to the very thing this loathsome man was searching for. Her gesture broke his silence.

“Er, our deepest apologies, but Signore Ludovico died shortly after he wrote you.”

Ginevra’s heart panged, but she kept her face stony. This was why the pear tree had warned her. So she did not have to learn of her Ludo’s death from this sickly skeleton of a man.

“Ser Ludovico wrote that the bishop had particular need of my services, that I was to be welcomed back into the city.”

“Yes, well. Is it true that in the year 1340, when so many died from the water sickness, you went into infected houses and parishes and never became ill yourself?”

“It is true.”

“And is the same true with this new and vile plague?”

“It is, so far as I know it.”

“And I am also of the understanding that the nuns of Sant’Elisabetta taught you to read?”

“Sister Agnesa did, yes.” Ginevra realized she had not said that name aloud in years. Another pang of heart.

“And that with these skills, you became familiar with certain books on sorcery and unnatural arts?”

Ginevra stiffened. “I was accused of such familiarity, as you clearly know. But that does not make it true.”

The inquisitor took a nervous inhale from his pomander and spoke: “Well, it’s close enough,” he said. “What we require is a person impervious to the effects of the pestilence, who is also intimate with practices and writings of charlatans and sorcerers.” Another sniff.

Ginevra almost turned and fled right there. She expected to be asked about her healing skills, not interrogated about sorcery. Again.

But then she remembered the lone guard at the porta, the absent bishop, the empty streets. If ever there was a time a woman might rise above her born station, surely this was it. She must be steady, make her demands. If it did not work, she could leave whenever she wanted. There was nobody to stop her.

“So,” she said, “what would you have me do, then?”

The inquisitor left Ginevra’s question hanging in the air and called out to the lone servant, who was named Giuseppe. The fashionable young man reappeared carrying a small slant-top desk and set it in the center of the room. Atop he placed a ceramic beaker painted with green and purple grapevines pecked by golden chickens. Ginevra realized she was desperately thirsty, and began to say her thanks, but the inquisitor walked to the beaker and drank its entire contents himself.

He wiped his mouth delicately, then removed from the desk a little row of bottles, filled with liquids in varying shades of violet, sage, plum, and emerald. He placed them on top of the desk, then retreated to his far side. He indicated Ginevra should come forward and examine.

“In your work with necromancers and witches, have you ever seen anything like these?”