In truth, my lord husband did not like to arbitrate any kind of decision. Whether it was a boundary dispute, a charge of theft, or the choice of an Annunciation or a Resurrection in stained glass for the church’s new window, Orsino would just blink a few times and say, “I will think on it.” Which meant putting the decision off until hopefully it solved itself. I hadn’t resided in Carbognano a month before people started bringing such matters direct to me. I did not put myself forward—that wouldn’t have been proper, or wifely—but the villagers murmured their concerns to Fra Teseo, he brought them to me in the garden where I sat with my sewing, and Orsino beamed contentment without seeming to wonder why he had so many fewer petitions.

“Mamma?” Laura skipped across the grass with her book. “What’s this word, Mamma?”

“You should curtsy to your mother, child,” Fra Teseo reproved. “And address her always as ‘Madam, my mother.’” But neither my daughter or I paid any attention to him.

“That word is a name,” I said, reading the word my daughter’s plump finger pointed out. “Aeneas. Remember, Laura, he founded Rome.”

“Founded? Was it losted?”

Ask Leonello, I almost said. Because Leonello had been my shadow so long, and I still wasn’t used to his absence. He was here, surely—I would only have to turn around to see him, boots propped up on the stone bench under the hazel tree as he put down his own book and explained to Laura who Aeneas was. He’d be declaiming the Aeneid any instant.

But he didn’t, because he wasn’t here. And I felt the usual keen ache in my chest as I realized it all over again.