“I understand one can buy a few luxuries even in a convent.” She smiled. “And the Convent of San Sisto, Lucrezia tells me, can be rather worldly. Silk petticoats and strawberry crostate for all the nuns, from what I hear!”

My smile thinned. My convent in Venice had been worldly too, at least for the well-born Brides of Christ. Not so much for the lay sisters.

“I shall miss you, Carmelina,” my mistress told me, wistful. “I’ve been relying on you and your marzipan tourtes since my wedding day, you know. I shall never forgive that lout Juan for forcing you out.”

It had been Leonello’s idea to enlist our mistress in my retreat from the Palazzo Santa Maria. I’d protested. “Since when does the lady of the house involve herself in a cook’s doings?”

“La Bella does,” he’d retorted. “Don’t you know her at all by now?”

“Well, what do we tell her?”

“The truth. A portion of it, anyway.”

And Madonna Giulia’s warm sympathy had rushed out at once when Leonello dropped into her ear the news that Juan Borgia had been pressing me ever since seeing me in my costume at the masquerade. “It’s all my fault,” she’d fretted, summoning me at once. “I should never have dragged you along that night. If you wish to drop from sight for a while, I don’t blame you. Juan’s a brute; you aren’t the first maid I’ve had to—well, never mind. Where shall we send you?” The Duke of Gandia was immured in the Vatican today, dancing attendance upon his father for various formal audiences, but I had no illusions that he wouldn’t come back. “Let’s see,” Madonna Giulia mused, and in the end she hit on the perfect solution.

It wasn’t her fault that her solution made my skin crawl.

“The Convent of San Sisto,” La Bella said triumphantly. “It’s perfect. Lucrezia leaves tomorrow anyway, and she’s taking a retinue—her maids, her chests of clothes. She’s even stole my Pantisilea away from me, lured her away with promises of higher wages and handsome men at the papal court after she leaves the convent—well, why not let Lucrezia take you, too? You can keep Lucrezia fed during her convent rest, and you’ll be safe doing it. Even Juan can’t get past a nunnery’s walls!”

Back to a convent. Back to black-and-white habits and suspicious eyes under veils, prayers and Masses and stale convent bread that was half sawdust. Surely not, I told myself. No stale bread for the Countess of Pesaro, not if she was taking me and not if I were to cook for her. I would still be Carmelina Mangano. Not Suora Serafina, as I’d been in my convent in Venice.