Next they’d all worked to cut and bundle the drying stalks from the cornfield, then they’d lifted the potatoes, then they’d gathered the last of the carrots and onions, turnips and cabbages, apples and pears and pumpkins, all to be stored in the cantina beneath the house. And still there were vineyards to be weeded and bare fields to be turned and sown. Nor was there any respite from their everyday chores, with Nico and Aldo rising at four o’clock every morning to milk the cows, feed the animals, and muck out the stalls and pens. When they and the older boys came home after sunset each night, all four were silent and hollow-eyed with exhaustion.

Each day brought new lessons for Nina and new mistakes, too, some of them costly: dropping a pan of shelled beans in the mud, tripping on the stairs while carrying down the chamber pot from the boys’ room, letting the milk scorch when Rosa had asked her to mind it.

She wasn’t usually so clumsy or forgetful. Before, she had taken pride in how quickly she learned, how easily she managed tasks that others found difficult. Hadn’t Papà told her that she was as bright as any of his students? Hadn’t his patients complimented her again and again on how kind and helpful she was during her father’s visits?

Niccolò and the others made allowances, and they explained away her mistakes by telling her the beans could be rinsed, the stairs could be scrubbed clean, the ruined milk could still feed the animals. But with every new failure she grew more nervous, and less certain of herself, and Rosa’s silent disapproval grew ever more glacial.

AFTER LUNCH NINA told the girls she would gather the plates and scrape the scraps into the pail for the chickens. There wasn’t much, only some stalks of escarole that Carlo could not be induced to eat. She’d gone to the shelf by the sink where Rosa kept the pail, and was about to push Carlo’s leavings in, when the plate was abruptly snatched from her hands.

“You’re not wasting that on the chickens—how many times have I told you already? Give it to me.”

Rosa went to scrape the scraps into the pot of soup already simmering away, but in turning she bumped against Nina and dropped the plate on the tiled floor.

“That was one of my mother’s good plates,” she fumed, dropping to her knees and scrabbling for the scattered pieces. “How could you?”

“I’m sorry—”

“Did you ever do a decent day’s work before coming here? Didn’t your mother teach you anything? And now we have to feed you, and clean up your messes, and—”