“You can wipe down the upholstery with a damp cloth, but make sure it’s almost dry or it will mark the fabric. Then you can scrub the floor.”

“No one has set a single toe in the parlor since last Saturday,” Niccolò observed. “Wouldn’t it be enough for Nina to wipe down the floor?”

“I suppose that’s fine.”

The parlor was absolutely crammed with furniture, all of it old but shining with polish and in pristine condition. In the middle of the room was a large oval table, an intricate doily at its center. An ornately carved settee stood before the single lace-curtained window, its upholstery a lowering but practical shade of dark brown. Half a dozen high-backed chairs ringed the room’s perimeter, and upon the walls were a similar number of religious prints and photographs of frowning people with weathered features and serious eyes. There was a crucifix, too, and, on a tall pillar in the corner, a statue of a woman in blue robes. The Virgin Mary, she supposed.

It took her three hours to dust the room, every square centimeter of it, and then a further hour to wipe away a week’s worth of dust from the terra-cotta-tiled floor, though much of that time was spent in moving around pieces of furniture and then in ensuring she’d restored them to the exact position they’d occupied before.

And then, just as she was stumbling to her feet, Niccolò appeared at the door.

“Finished? It looks perfect. Rosa will be pleased.”

“Good.” She didn’t have the energy to say more than that.

“We’ll have supper in a few minutes—just some soup and bread. Then baths for everyone.”

Nina told herself she’d feel better after a bath, but then the manner and nature of how she’d take her bath became horribly clear.

There was a wooden tub, only just big enough for a single adult if they didn’t mind pulling their knees right to their chest, and it was rolled out from under the sink and set in front of the hearth, and then—she had a feeling this was for her benefit, as there was a good deal of fussing over where exactly it should go—Niccolò and his father set a wooden clothes dryer draped with towels around the tub.

The boys set to filling the tub with buckets of cold water from the tap at the sink, Rosa added a kettle’s worth of boiling water, and then the bath was ready.

“You go first,” Aldo told his son. “I’m covered in dust from the stables. I’ll only muddy the water.”