My kitchens—sweet Santa Marta save me, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them over the past six months when I’d been traveling the countryside with Madonna Giulia’s household. Now quite empty for the night, my cousin Marco doubtless having gone to play primiera with sailors and thieves in the Borgo, and even the last of the scullions having long trailed off to bed. Everything was empty and clean, welcoming me home. The chief kitchen with its enormous hearth and revolving spit, fire banked to a soft glow for the night . . . the scullery next door, all silvery with fish scales and why hadn’t the pot-boys been scrubbing down the floors better in my absence . . . the cold room after that, where I’d stood so many hours whipping up cream tops for milk-snow, or sorting game for plucking and storing . . . the courtyard outside, silent and black now, but in a few hours it would be full of dawn bustle when the daily procession of wagons began to arrive with wood for my ovens and carcasses for my spits and herbs fresh-plucked and dew-wet for my sauces. Even the kitchen cat with his tattered ear, useless greedy beast that he was, looked up at me with an insolent mrow. “No one’s turned you into sausage yet, you useless thing?” I asked, and he stalked off with contempt across my kitchen. My kitchen, and I felt a great thrum of peace just looking around me. Most looked for that thrum in the recitations of Mass or the velvet enclosed spaces of the confessional, but a kitchen was my church. I was probably hell-bound for thinking anything so blasphemous, but I had greater sins than blasphemy on my conscience, sins like theft and fornication and altar desecration, so I was undoubtedly hell-bound anyway. Easy, quiet faith like Bartolomeo’s wasn’t for me.

“Home indeed,” I said, and took a certain small pouch from under my overskirt. “Aren’t you glad?”