The truth was she would miss these visits to the monastery. They’d given her days an order she’d not felt since her regular lessons with Friar Bartolomeo. She wished they had kept going beyond her fourteenth year, but when her womanhood arrived, Mamma Lucrezia had gone to Papa in a blaze of horror and shame for her, and he could not refuse her request that Luna stop her unseemly education. She patted the hard cover of the Sacrobosco sitting in her lap. Her return to learning was about to begin with this book. The friar’s commendation of it echoed in her head and she thought of how much purpose his guidance had given her. She missed that.

A lone cloud moved swiftly across the broad expanse of sky. It was shaped like a hand reaching out to another. As Luna watched it she felt a surge of affection for Friar Bartolomeo and his library. The cloud drifted and before long it was just a blur of milky white against the blue but the image stayed with her. Friar Bartolomeo had led her into his world of books and from that first day as a little girl she’d felt a thrill at her own capacity to understand his teachings. She smiled and nodded, and anyone looking at the young woman with the walking stick sitting on the bench would have said she was a simpleton, but Luna was too busy with her thoughts to care. She’d never felt anything as powerful as that sense of her own capability from discovering that she was at last better at something than other children. Learning under the tutelage of the friar had been the first time she’d ever experienced such accomplishment and she craved it still.

More clouds swelled to form an opaque mass that bullied the sun into hiding. She pulled the hood of her cloak forward as she hurried for home, hugging the book. She didn’t see the trail of horse droppings until her walking stick skidded through the sludge. The smell of sewer water was rank but she had to stop. She’d nearly fallen. It was close to midday and the street was noisy with men and animals. Peasants pulled their wagons for home, already emptied of produce at the early markets, whilst some sat in a cart drawn by a mule. She muttered under her breath as she leant against a building. Young boys employed by the cloth factories scurried back and forth, delivering consignments of wool or yarn or dyestuffs from one shop to another.