“There’ll be no speaking to Messer Leonello tonight, Madonna Giulia.” The steward lowered his voice. “Dead drunk, he is. Staggered in an hour ago, and he’s still sleeping it off. Not like him, is it?”

“No,” I said, and went to my chamber where I lay down fully clothed and spent another sleepless night contemplating unspeakable things.

Carmelina

In a cook’s world, and indeed with much of the world, the day divides itself sensibly: that is to say, around meals. The morning, for market and preparation and planning the day’s menus. When the noon sun climbs, it’s the bustle of pranzo that marks the change. Then cena, marking the sun’s descent, then the scouring and cleaning of the kitchen, at which point the day is at an end.

For a nun, life is governed by bells. Bells at midnight, then at dawn, then regularly through the day, interrupting you the moment you get into a decent rhythm of work, all the way to Vespers and Compline after sunset when all you can do is look at the broken intervals of the day and the utter lack of any properly completed tasks, and stagger off to bed to do it all again in the morning. And the next morning, and the next and the next and the next, because a nun has nothing to look forward to for the rest of her life but bells.

At least I could ignore the bells now. I was no lay sister anymore who had to lay down my ladle and go hastening off to prayers. I had been brought to serve the Countess of Pesaro, who had a suite of rooms in the gatehouse and certainly required to be served. She did not have to attend prayers and neither did I; I could just keep chopping away in the kitchens as the lay sisters straightened veils and wimples and fluttered away like magpies. But the bells got into my head anyway, the placid silvery rhythm reverberating about the inside of my skull, and I don’t know how many times I bent over the chopping block once I was blessedly alone and clapped my hands over my ears, trying to persuade myself that the walls were not moving in on me, they were not. “I’m going mad,” I told Santa Marta, whose hand I once more carried about in a pouch beneath my skirt, because in a convent there was no bloody privacy. “Only ten days here, and I’m already going mad.”

Her gold ring seemed to gleam at me in sympathy.