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.

I’d missed that silent complicity, during the weeks when he’d been too furious to even look at me. And now he was gone altogether, and he never had told anyone about that frenzied, famished hour we’d spent coiled together on the lumpy pallet. The twinge of shame in my stomach had now quite eclipsed my panic over losing my position. Shame for thinking he ever would tell and wreck my reputation. I’d not only bedded him and then—what were his words? Kicked him out of his own bed like a stray dog?—I’d done him the insult of thinking he was a common braggart who would ruin me out of spite.

It did not sit at all well.

“Never mind,” I said to Santa Marta, who I think had liked Bartolomeo because she’d had a habit of falling out of her pouch when he was about. “He was too old to keep on as apprentice anyway. Time he made his own way in the world. If he has a grain of sense, he’ll find some cook with a plain daughter, make his way up the ladder, marry the daughter, and take over her father’s position.”