The sound of hooves on the wet gravel. Torchlight through the rain.
English Tutor. Smuggler of fire.
He kissed each boy on the forehead, then walked out the side door into the storm. The last they saw of him was a tall figure disappearing into the black cypress trees, the lightning illuminating him for a single, frozen second—a man made of old rebellions and forgotten alphabets.
“No,” Domenico whispered. “Worse. You would have remained safe .”
“Raul Korso Leo Domenico,” he said, his voice a low, precise baritone. No accent. Or rather, every accent. A ghost of Rome in the vowels, a shadow of Vienna in the consonants, and the cold, hard logic of London in the grammar. “Your servant, my lady.”
Korso (the elder) swallowed. “If you had not come, we would have remained ignorant.”
She opened the door herself, the servants having fled to the kitchens at the first crack of thunder. The man on the step was not what she expected. He was tall, lean as a rapier, with eyes the color of tarnished silver. His coat was soaked through, but he wore it like a military uniform.
“Correct,” he said. “Raul was a printer in Lyon who refused to recant. Burned in ’53. Korso was a ship captain who smuggled banned books into Venice. Drowned in chains. Leo was a poet who wrote one sonnet against a pope. Stabbed in a Roman alley. And Domenico was a priest who taught peasants to read the Bible in their own tongue. They hanged him from a fig tree.”
Domenico (for he insisted on being called by his fourth name, the most Italian, the most disarming) simply smiled. He cleaned the ink from his collar with a handkerchief. He found the Horace behind the fourth stone in the east tower. And he replied to their dialect in flawless, aristocratic Latin.
