“Then let’s try to sleep, and if you need to cry just go ahead. But maybe you could try to be quiet? I truly don’t mind, but if Zia Elisa hears, and she decides I’ve upset you, she’ll whip off one of her zoccoli and start hitting me with it. A shoe is bad enough—that’s what my mother used to hit us with—but a clog? She might as well use a hammer on me.”

The thought of Niccolò dodging blows from his aunt, whose head came up to his armpit, shouldn’t have made her smile—nothing should have seemed funny at the end of such a day. But she did smile, and it did make her feel as if she might be able to close her eyes, and when she opened them again it was dawn.

Chapter 5

You’re awake. Come downstairs when you’re ready.”

Nina was lying on an uncomfortable bed in a strange room, and the light coming in from the window was all wrong. It took her a moment to recall where she was, and who belonged to the lovely, low voice, and when she did remember she was tempted to bury her face in the pillow and have a good, long cry. Instead she got dressed and packed her bag and went downstairs to join the stranger who was pretending to be her husband.

Zia Elisa gave them polenta with warm milk for breakfast, and for Nina there was a soft-boiled egg as well—a true sign of his aunt’s affection, Niccolò whispered. “I could be lying on my deathbed and she still wouldn’t give me an egg for breakfast.”

Zia Elisa had prepared a basket of food to see them home, and only after listening to her itemize the contents, and accepting embraces and farewells and felicitations and blessings, were they able to clamber onto the wooden seat of Bello’s cart and continue on their journey to Mezzo Ciel.

Their second day of travel was even worse than the first, for Nina was sore from the endless jostling of the cart, and still weary, though she had slept well enough on the lumpy mattress, and before long she was hungry and thirsty and headachy and ready to scream from the misery of it all. She would have, except Niccolò was so unfailingly pleasant, and he insisted on giving her most of the food, and he didn’t seem to mind that she was too sad and wretched to do anything more than sit in Bello’s horrible cart and try not to faint from the heat and dust and awful stench of the mule’s very unclean and far too proximate backside.