“I doubt he’ll have any coin for me,” I told Santa Marta. “Likely he just wants to borrow more.”

Santa Marta agreed with me, and I hoped again that my cousin wouldn’t take up much of my precious free time this evening. A real cook hardly ever has any free time, and I’d had an idea scratching at the back of my mind for a while now, like that tattered-ear cat tickling my hem with his claws when he wanted another meal he hadn’t earned. I had a notion that I just might follow my father’s example and write up my recipes in a proper collection. Santa Marta had seemed to approve of that idea, too.

“Though you have to wonder why I should bother,” I added as I descended the stone steps toward the barred cellar doors. Leave a wine cellar unlocked, and every cask in it would be empty by morning. “The only point of noting down your recipes is so you can pass them on to someone worthy. And there isn’t anyone in these kitchens worth giving my secrets to.”

Bartolomeo, I thought immediately, but frowned. My red-haired apprentice was gone; he’d cleared out that tiny immaculate cubby in which he slept and taken himself off before the noosed and silent body of the murdered Sforza guest had even been taken down at the masquerade. And perhaps it was no bad thing he was gone: he’d had the temerity to both fall in love with me and tell me my recipes were wrong. I must have threatened to send him packing at least nine times over the past year of stormy shouted arguments . . . but just now, I had to admit as I paused at the cellar doors to light a taper, I missed him. I had a kitchen full of dullards who were happy if they could get the dishes cooked and out to the credenza in time, unambitious undercooks and pinheaded apprentices who looked at me blankly when I required anything more creative of them than boiling water. Bartolomeo might have been an arrogant young jolthead, but I’d somehow gotten used to exchanging a triumphant glance with him when a roast surpassed my expectations, to relying on his finely tuned nose when my own wasn’t sure if a game hen was quite fresh or not. If I stood frowning over a sauce, it was always Bartolomeo who took a taste and suggested a pinch of pepper or a dash of wild thyme. Half the time I scolded him for being presumptuous, of course, and said that if I wanted an apprentice’s opinion I’d damned well ask for it—but as soon as his back was turned, the pepper or the wild thyme usually went in anyway.