She slipped inside. After the activity of walking, the church felt as still as the moment a wick is snuffed. She relished the cool. Then a woman shrouded in silk netting brushed past her on the way out and Luna stood aside respectfully, listening to her own laboured breath. She saw that there were a few early worshippers dotted about the tall columns and private chapels. The water in the font glinted as a beam of sunlight shone down from one of the stained-glass windows positioned like paintings along the walls on either side of the central arch. She dipped her finger into the shallow bowl and made the Sign of the Cross before moving through to the south side, past the grand chapels of Florence’s wealthy families, which the novices had to keep clean. She stopped briefly at the Peruzzi family chapel to admire the painter Giotto’s work. The women and men in the scenes seemed so real; they bowed towards John the Evangelist like she might do towards her father at a family dinner, and the women’s expressions of amazement might have been cast from her step-mamma’s face. In each of the six panels she could see a whole story. Luna thought him a most excellent painter.

She crossed the dusty flagstones and the reverberation of her footfall hung high in the wooden beams, up with all the secret, whispered prayers she imagined were struggling to escape from within that vaulted cover. She didn’t stop long, knowing the painter would be waiting, so she went out into the large cloister, dominated by the Pazzi chapel at one end, and made her way around the open gallery until she found the door that led along a corridor and out into the smaller cloister. Luna breathed in the clean garden smells, leaning against one of the columns. Were the oranges on the tree hanging a little heavier than yesterday?

She saw a group of monks in conversation on the opposite side of the quadrangle and for a moment thought she saw her father amongst them, but she could not be sure. She hastened to the room set aside for the painter and closed the door softly behind her. Friar Bartolomeo was seated at a desk, writing furiously. He looked up sharply.

‘Good morrow, friar.’

‘Leonarda!’

She laughed. ‘I did not mean to startle you.’ The painter’s easel was not in its usual place. ‘I’ve beaten Master Lippi this morning,’ she said with satisfaction.

‘Did no one tell you?’ He rose and came around from behind his desk. He seemed flustered. ‘Master Lippi does not need to see you again. He has only to finish the detail of your skirts and the painting is complete.’

‘So I have come all this way for naught?’ Luna sighed and took a seat without waiting to be asked.