Lent

And maybe we could have a dog,” he says.

She laughs. He likes her laugh. “A dog?”

He shrugs, still blushing fiercely. “That doesn’t matter. I’ve virginity enough for both of us.”

And more pride, always pride.”

“Do you have the writings of Quintus Curtius?” he responds, and she writes back “I do. But you are the first person to offer them to me instead of telling me Alexander is no fit subject for a woman.” He has San Marco’s copy of Plutarch’s Life of Alexander copied for her.

This is Hell. All possible answers are wrong.

They are hung over the fire, and he falls, not forward on his face like good people, but on his back, like the damned.

She is wearing a dagger in a jewelled sheath. She has about her an air of danger. Then she wipes a crumb from her son’s cheek, and seems like any mother.

It is a long friendless way to Hungary.

Girolamo turns the stone in his hand and looks down on its green smoothness. Hope hurts.

“God and the Holy Virgin will send Santa Caterina a hundred women, before I die, more than a hundred, because of you. In place of girls thrust into religion to be out of the way of their family, we will have women, grown women, coming of their own strong desire to be pure, to live as Wailers, to be closer to God.”