It had been every bit as bad cooking in the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice, but I’d forgotten how thoroughly, wretchedly soul-flattening it could be when it went on day after day. The murky olive oil and the warped pans and the ovens that didn’t heat properly. If I’d seen Lord Sforza in the flesh, I’d have bound him to a spit and cooked him, because he’d done for me as well as his little wife with all those rumors, whether he’d started them in ignorance or in malice. If Lucrezia was bound to stay at the Convent of San Sisto until her annulment could be finalized, then I was bound to stay too. For the past three months, until the end of the year or maybe all the way into the new year, depending on how long it took the Count of Pesaro to give up his wife.

“If I’m to stay here I’ll at least be well fed,” Madonna Lucrezia had sighed when I ventured to say that my services were required outside convent walls. “You’ll stay as long as I do, Carmelina. And who else is needing you, anyway? Not Giulia Farnese, because she’s gone back to that dull husband of hers, and broken my poor father’s heart, so if you think I’m going to listen to any letters she sends—”

Three months. Three months already, and I knew the convent now. I knew the bells were about to toll before they made a sound, I knew the clang of the gates and the rusty squeak of the grilles when they swung shut, and I knew the anonymous black-and-white-garbed sisters who had now become familiar faces: the sleek-faced prioress who visited the Pope’s daughter daily with an unctuous smile; Suora Paolina, who came from the illustrious Colonna family and was mad for candied cherries; Suora Cherubina, who had a merry laugh and a liking for figs in honey, and all the rest of them. And I did not want to know any of it.

I found myself praying again inside convent walls, and not my usual quick entreaties to Santa Marta so that my bread would rise or my tourtes brown evenly. Santa Marta was cross with me right now anyway, because I never dared take her out of my pouch anymore in the cell I shared with Pantisilea. But when Pantisilea dropped off to sleep I’d look up into the stuffy dark and make my prayers—not to Santa Marta or even the Holy Virgin, but to the Count of Pesaro. Sign your wife away, I prayed. If he could see his wife here, whining and wailing the hours as they passed, he’d have given her up in a heartbeat. Sign and do it quickly, because I want to go home.