Luna grew hot sitting in the sunshine. She felt the wooden bench burning against the cloth of her skirts. Her forehead burned too and her chest throbbed. ‘What else would you have me do, friar—think on the past?’ She turned away from his watery eyes.

He sighed. ‘How can you control your future? You are but a girl.’

‘But I must and I will.’

Friar Bartolomeo rose and walked about the garden in the way he always did, his fingers pressed to his chin in contemplation. Eventually he came back and stood before her. His footprints in the grass marked a circle around the bench.

‘I know your father had a place set aside for you at the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri,’ he told her.

‘We spoke of this,’ Luna said, ignoring the memory of her angry words.

‘Yours would be a secure future as a sister of St Clare, though you would live frugally and dedicate your life to Christ.’

‘You speak as though there is any other choice open to me.’

The friar didn’t respond.

‘Very well,’ she said a little too quickly. ‘Let it be so.’

‘I thought I would need to convince you of this life, but it seems you are closer to the light of our Saviour’s forgiveness than I’d realised.’ He pressed a small bottle of holy water into her hands, then made the Sign of the Cross upon her forehead. His fingers moved as if upon another.

Is this what Isotta Nogarola felt when she chose the convent as her home?

Chapter Nineteen

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Estate of Professor Domenico di Novara

October 1496

The carriage travelled slowly through the Tuscan countryside. It had begun to rain on the day that Luna left Florence and now great sheets of water fell unremittingly and so hard they created dangerous potholes in the road. The sky was grey and there was no hope of finding even a corner of blue, smothered as it was by so much bulging cloud. Luna braced herself against the jolts. There did not seem to be any end to the drenching, but she peeled off her cloak, for the rain brought with it a humidity that clung to her skin uncomfortably. The insistent pounding was like a Greek chorus singing her gone.

Luna looked back one last time upon the rainy blur of her home as they passed beneath the Porta San Gallo. She kept the shape of the cathedral’s dome in her sights as the carriage trundled on and with each turn, that symbol of the city’s ingenuity grew smaller. Cloud hung right against the top of the rounded arc. God had pressed His hand upon the sky so that where the cathedral ended and His world began diminished. The days would soon be short as the winter’s sky was low.