But the name. No Englishman was named Raul Korso Leo Domenico.

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.

“Your gutter tongue is merely Latin’s grave-soil,” he said. “Let us dig for the bones.”

He slung the satchel over his shoulder. “They are all dead. But their lessons are not. I carry their names so I do not forget what a teacher truly is: a smuggler of fire.”

The four names sat at the top of the parchment, inked in a trembling, aristocratic hand. Lady Vittoria stared at them, her wine glass leaving a faint crimson ring on the ancient oak of her desk. The tutor was to arrive at dawn. She had hired him sight unseen—a scholar from London, recommended by a cardinal no less, to undo the damage of a decade of insular, Tuscan rusticity on her two grandsons.