She was so dazzled by the beauty of it that she went one step after another, deeper into the warehouse, hardly aware of where she was going; until the last stone panel gave way to a collection of what she took to be more statues, wrapped in packing material. They were stiff still figures, without spreading arms or angel wings, feet bound together, not proudly astride, but rolled in cloth or loosely wrapped, some white with dust and some discolored. Sarah looked closer, took one of the heads in her hand to gaze into the wrapped face, took the end of a sheet of packing cloth to lift and see the carving beneath and then froze. It was the smell that alerted her that there was something wrong, terribly wrong. It was not the scent of stone, clean stone, but of earth, of decay.

Sarah froze and gently replaced the head that she had thought was stone back in its place, at the top of a line of white vertebrae, dropped the winding cloth that she held in her hand. Convulsively she wiped her palm down her nightgown again and again. Staring, her eyes widened in horror, she could now make out the jumbled goods piled on the open shelves. They were bodies, human bodies, some long dead, some more recent, pulled from their stone coffins and thrown into the shelves, like so much waste. Some were stiff from death, locked rigid into the coffin shape, bandaged arms strapped over their chests, hair growing grotesquely through the bandages which bound their heads; others had been broken by being dragged from the ground, heaved from their last resting place, with arms hanging limp and the shrouds torn to show gray decaying toes and lolling blackened heads. Some were even older and the flesh had rotted away and gray bones of toes protruded from worm-eaten feet.

Sarah’s sharp gasp of horror frightened her, as if it were them panting at her, and she clamped her hand over her mouth. But she still heard her little whimper of fear. She could not take her eyes from the horror before her, and she could not press past corpses to get to the safety of the inner stair.

She could hear her breath rasping against her throat as she fought not to retch in disgust at the smell, at the sight of the rotting limbs. She knew she must move but it was as if she were frozen, as still as they, whose bodies were piled one on top of another like the dead in a plague pit. At the thought of plague she heard herself give another little moan, her feverish mind thinking that the smell of decay was the stink of infection and that she too would become a tumbled corpse, piled up here with the others.

She could not take her eyes off the bodies, she was too horrified to turn her head, fearful that if she once turned away from them, turned her back to them, that they would rise up behind her and follow her down the long workshop, that she would look back to see them stiffly approaching, their bandaged eyes staring, their desiccated hands reaching out bony fingers, extending towards her. Instead of turning and running—and she knew her legs could not run, it would be like a nightmarish dream of slowness—Sarah stepped backwards towards the far end of the room, the water gate, one hand holding her steady on the shelves that held the sarcophagi of the tumbled dead, her eyes never leaving the awkward reaching hands, the pathetic bony feet.

The soft touch of the sacking curtain behind her made her jump and shudder, but then she realized she was at last at the door. She parted the curtain, and stepped out over the floodguard onto the narrow quay, reached inside, and slammed the storehouse door on the secret charnel house inside. As soon as the door was closed she heard her own whimper turn into frightened sobs, tears of terror cold on her face. She turned to the brightening water gate, the light of dawn reflecting on the lapping water, and there, on the opposite side, on the grand marble staircase, was Felipe Russo in a red velvet cape, with a candle in a gold candlestick, watching her.

* * *

Sarah did not hesitate for a moment. Crying hysterically, she ran around the narrow quayside at the back of the water gate, and Felipe dumped his candlestick on the steps, and received her into his arms.

“You know! You must know!” she gabbled, her teeth chattering so that she could hardly speak. “You know what’s in there.”

“Hush,” he said. “You’ve had a fright. Yes, I know. Come.”

“You know!” she cried.

“Yes, yes.” Skillfully he drew her up the stairs, one step after another as her knees buckled beneath her, until they reached the beautiful hall, where she shook with horror and could not release her convulsive grip on his velvet sleeve. She turned her face into his shoulder and breathed in the smell of warm fabric, the scent of vanilla and bay, the smell of his skin, so warm and alive, so safe.

“My God,” she whispered. “You know? But you must know!”

“Come,” he said again, and led her up the inner marble stairs to the dining room, holding her firmly under the elbow so her knees did not give way beneath her. “Come in,” he repeated gently, and led her into his private study beside the dining room.

“I did… I did… I went…”

“Hush,” he ordered her, and turned to the sideboard and poured her a large glass of deep red wine. “Drink this, before you say anything.” He pressed her into a chair and took a stool to sit beside her. In the room, watched by the sightless statues on the walls, she sipped until he saw the color come back into her white face.

“Now, you can tell me,” he said quietly.

“I have nothing to tell you! It is for you to explain! You must know what I have seen!” She was trembling, the wineglass shaking in her hand. “You must know what is down there!”

He bowed. “I am sorry that you had such a shock.”

“What are they? They are dead, aren’t they? They have been pulled from their graves?”

He spread his hands as if in apology. “Alas, if you want antiquities you have to seek them with the ancients.”

She put down her glass and gripped her hands under the table to stop herself from crying out. She felt so far from home, and so incapable of understanding what was happening. “What d’you mean? What d’you mean?”

He went to the sideboard and poured a glass of wine for himself, and poured more in her glass. “Drink. You have had a fright.”

Obediently, she took another sip and still felt the terrible tremor inside her belly as if she were going to vomit.

“Did you see the beautiful panels?” he asked her. “The stone panels?”

She nodded.

“They were carved by artists, craftsmen—you agree?”

Silently, she assented.

“They should be seen, don’t you think? Works of such beauty should not be hidden?”

“I don’t kn—”

“They are stone coffins, coffins of pagans, not Christians. There is no reason that they should not be taken up, and shown to people who will love them, collectors. Connoisseurs. Cognoscenti!”

“But the bodies!” was all she could whisper.

“Of course there are bodies! These are coffins, they were each one carrying a body. But they are all so very old. It is not as if they were family! They were not Christians, they are not from a churchyard. And I make sure that we rebury them, reverently, respectfully.”

She did not have the voice to argue but she could still see, behind her closed eyelids, the tumbled heap of corpses, the rotting flesh.

“Just thrown in…” was all she could whisper.