Georgiana bought a red rose.
Of course, one had to bring a gift when visiting someone's home. It was basic courtesy. Besides wine, flowers were also a fine choice.
Holding the flower, she walked across the street.
Severus had taken her to Venice for their honeymoon. They arrived on March 1. If they stayed until April 25, it would be Saint Mark's Day. Legend had it that a doge's daughter fell in love with an unknown commoner. The doge opposed the marriage, so he sent the young man to Spain to join Charlemagne's army against the Arabs. If he could win glory as a hero, he would be allowed to marry the doge's daughter.
Yet the young commoner fell upon the battlefield. His blood stained the bud of a white rose red. Before he died, he plucked it and placed it over his heart. The following day was Saint Mark's Day.
A servant entered the doge's daughter's chamber and found that she had died as well, the bloodstained rose resting upon her chest. Thus, giving one's wife or sweetheart a red rose on Saint Mark's Day became a Venetian tradition. Not ninety-nine roses, nor nine hundred and ninety-nine—just one, like a person's life, which came only once.
She carried the rose into Margaret of Austria's abandoned palace. In just two days, it had acquired the air of a place left vacant for years.
Nine years before alum was discovered within the Papal States, in 1453, the Eastern Roman Empire was destroyed. The Byzantine Empire vanished from history, replaced by the Ottoman Empire, which was nothing like the weakened Eastern Roman Empire.
At the time, in the villa in Venice where they had lived, which had originally belonged to Spaniards, a line had been carved into the bathroom lintel:
Caelum non