“The ceiling came down.” There were tears in his eyes. “Only part of it, the arch over the doorway to your sala, but—Giulia, be brave.”

I was already running up the stairs, screaming my daughter’s name.

Carmelina

Your cousin is here to see you,” Suora Teresa came to tell me, and I thought I was dead for certain. My skin crawled and for a moment I thought it was Marco waiting for me down in the convent parlor, Marco dead and stabbed through half a dozen times, staring at me accusingly in a cook’s apron all stained with red, because he’d never have gone to work for Juan Borgia and thus met his death if I hadn’t taken his post. It wasn’t fair, but ghosts didn’t care for fairness, and ghosts seemed much closer in a convent than they ever seemed in a busy kitchen. Maybe because the sisters all seemed like ghosts from a distance, gliding along the stone halls in their anonymous black and white. Who was to know if the veiled figure preceding me to Mass was really Suora Teresa or Suora Cherubina or Suora Paolina? Maybe it was some long-dead nun who was still tramping off to Mass every day because she didn’t realize she was dead. Within these walls, I couldn’t see much difference between being dead and being alive. Ghosts seemed entirely possible, especially at midnight prayers.

But it wasn’t midnight now, it was bright afternoon and I was elbow deep in almond paste making little biscotti for the choir nuns who were ensconced in the visiting parlors with their noble mothers or sisters or aunts who came to visit, and who of course would expect sweetmeats to be passed through the grilles along with the gossip. Almond paste. I never wanted to see an almond again, and I blew a short curl of hair out of my face with a vicious muttered oath as Suora Teresa came bouncing into the kitchens and told me my cousin had arrived.

“Cousin, eh?” She winked as my skin crawled. “Come all the way from Venice, he says, and he’s a handsome one. Doesn’t look like you, not with that hair, but I won’t tell if he’s not really your cousin. Not if you sneak me some of those biscotti before you take the plate up—”

“As many as you want.” The frightened squeeze of my heart as I thought of bloodied Marco coming to accuse me had eased, only to squeeze up again in an entirely different way. I stripped off my apron and crammed a few frizzy tendrils of hair back under my wimple, emptying half the plate of biscotti into Suora Teresa’s greedy hands and flying up the worn stone steps into the parlor.