Free A Lady of Good Family by Jeanne Mackin

green, more sense of the presence of soil beneath the bricks. Rome, the eternal city, felt of artifice, contrivance, a kind of architectural stubbornness. We have always been here. We will always be here, the stones seemed to say.
    The gray, rubble-strewn church of San Sebastiano on the Via Appia Antica was one of the smaller and older churches in the city. The facade had three arches supported by slender columns on the ground level and three large windows on the second level. It was in particularly bad repair in a city full of monuments inbad repair, large cracks zigzagging over it like frozen lightning bolts.
    “Not auspicious,” said Teddy. “However did you choose this place, Minnie?”
    “The crypt has a Bernini I thought we might find interesting.”
    The robin of spring simplicity sang in Beatrix’s imagination, a song of rising and falling chirps, so distinct it seemed strange to know they were sounding only in her memory. They seemed so real.
    “And you will, I assure you.” Their guide stepped out of the shadows to greet them, a brown-robed, tonsured monk of indeterminate age. Cistercian. The order that brought the Inquisition to Rome. Beatrix felt both intrigued and slightly repulsed.
    The monk greeted them in heavily accented English. “I am Brother Tommaso. I speak your language well. There is nothing worse than seeing a wonder and not being able to comprehend it because the words are a barrier. Is this not correct?” the monk asked.
    “Absolutely correct,” Minnie agreed. “Are we to see wonders?”
    The monk was tall and lean, with deep furrows in his face running from nose to chin. He had been handsome once in the way of Latin men, dark and intense with a springy walk suggestive of power. Beatrix wondered why he took vows, what he gave up, if he had regrets. Had there been a girl in his village, one who still mourned him? Perhaps another man’s wife who thought of him at night as her husband snored heavily at her side?
    Beatrix had a thought, as fast as birdsong, an image of Amerigo in his home, a woman at his side, pressing her hands on his shoulders, and a thrust of jealousy made her gasp in surprise.
    Foolishness, she told herself. Stop it.
    “The wonder of the ages, of the earth itself,” the monk promised. “We will walk in single file. I will lead. Signor”—he nodded at Teddy Wharton—“will be last in file. Yes?” He addressed the question to Beatrix, not Mr. Wharton, as if he sensed her curiosity about him, her wandering thoughts.
    “Agreed. Let’s get on with it.” Beatrix braced herself with a deep breath, dreading the closed, small places she was certain they would encounter.
    Brother Tommaso pulled open the heavy wooden door and signaled them through. Inside, he gave each of them a candle and lit it.
    “By the third level, we will be in darkness,” he said. “But there will be drafts, so guard your candle.”
    Again, that odor of cat piss permeating everything. Rome was a city of cats; they slunk through the ruins in furry hordes, more sure of themselves than even the monk guide. We are outsiders, Beatrix thought for the hundredth time. They don’t like us, but they need us. We are yet one more invasion in their eternal city.
    “These catacombs are the easiest to access, so there is much damage to them,” Brother Tommaso apologized. “Graffiti, stones carried away, sarcophagi smashed. As you see.” He held his candle higher, the better to illuminate the ravages of centuries of vandalism. The first level of the catacomb looked like a rubbishpile. They kicked loosened stones out of their way as they walked, following the beacon of the monk’s candle.
    Down stone steps, slippery with damp, hollowed in their centers from millennia of footsteps. Beatrix already longed for the light, for openness. The passage was so narrow she would have touched both walls had she spread her arms.
    “The catacombs are carved from tufa,” Brother Tommaso said in a practiced voice.