‘I chose to spend my nights teaching you how to find the stars, my bed cold, my eyes wearied, yet it gave me pleasure to do so, daughter. Could those nights of star gazing not have been enough for you? No, indeed, you must beg to understand the science of it too! I see no inkling of my humble, kind-hearted little girl in the grown woman haranguing me at my table.’

‘You see?’ Mamma Lucrezia interrupted. ‘This is your own doing, Leonarda. That wilful tongue of yours—’

Luna laughed only the sound was harsh as a dog’s bark. She felt ablaze with the injustice of her father’s words. She turned to him, and only him. ‘Why speak to me like this now?’

‘For goodness’ sake! Do you think Papa has a choice?’ Mamma Lucrezia shouted in outrage. ‘The whole of Florence gossips about the Fusilis’ crippled daughter who goes about in public mimicking the manner of a boy—pretentious and vulgar behaviour, to be sure. Your brazen thinking is an insult to good society; it has been so since you reached womanhood, but your father would indulge you. You demand to learn astronomy, bold as any man, but you are not a man, Leonarda, you are only a woman.’ Her step-mamma was pointing at her with a long, slim finger as though she could cut Luna’s insolence from her breast. ‘An impudent and indecorous unmarried woman.’ She thrust her finger at Luna with each insult. ‘You will not shame this family any longer!’

Luna addressed her father. ‘If I have transgressed those rules of silence especially imposed on women, as you say, then better you’d cut out my tongue when I spoke my first word, for I will not stop now.’

‘Enough!’ Papa’s hand slammed on the tabletop. ‘I am the master of this family. I alone may take such a tone.’

‘You taught me this skill!’ Luna twisted towards him. ‘Now I beg you to indulge me with an explanation.’

‘You have my determination, that’s certain.’ He sighed. ‘There are matters at play that are too complicated for your female wit. In any case it is all immaterial, as Signore Spinelli had made up his mind to reject you even before the painting arrived at Pistoia. I could not convince him otherwise.’

‘The painting?’ Luna asked.

‘Bring it to me,’ her father shouted to a servant and Luna could only watch in surprise as a small wooden painting was handed to him. She recognised it immediately.

‘But that was to be a gift for you,’ she blurted, then saw from the knowing look that passed between her parents that she’d been misled. ‘I don’t understand. Mamma, did you know about this all along?’