“Yes, madonna,” Leonello said with a bow, doubling back, and my heart caught in my throat. The broom clattered out of my hand, and before I knew what I was doing I gathered my habit skirts up and raced toward them. “Leonello,” I called, suddenly feeling the breeze in the warm summer twilight, the hovering drone of the flies, the flap of my veil against my back—feeling something again, rather than the drugged bemusement of that old bitch Suora Ursula’s state of grace. “Leonello,” I called again, pulse hammering in my throat. “Madonna Giulia!”

Giulia Farnese looked at me with a faint frown. “Yes?” she said without much interest, and moved on without waiting for an answer. “Have a foot-bath drawn for me at once, Leonello, my feet ache so abominably—”

“Yes, madonna,” he said, and scuttled past me without a second glance.

I stared after them. Was I invisible? Had I died and become a ghost, and never noticed? Perhaps I had already gone mad.

Or perhaps the memories of Carmelina Mangano had faded away outside these walls as fast as they were fading inside. Maybe there really was only Suora Serafina left in this world.

* * *

Nuns aren’t supposed to go roaming about at night, but they do. There are no bolts on any nun’s private cell; the authorities are far too afraid of what will happen inside those cells if we can lock ourselves inside with utter privacy. We were required to sleep with a candle burning and the door ajar, so the appointed night sister could check throughout the night that we were all safely tucked up in godly sleep. But no night sister ever gave more than a cursory yawning glance before going back to her own bed, and most of the time they didn’t even do that. As soon as the night bells rang, there was always quite a busy creaking of cell doors opening and shutting as the younger nuns visited each other to gossip and braid hair, the older nuns visited each other to gossip and drink wine from someone’s private stores, and the occasional pious nun actually felt moved to go to the chapel in the dead of night and pray. And yes, a few daring sisters did manage to visit a lover in some remote part of the convent, bribing the portress to allow a man inside for an hour or supply him with a rope to scale the walls. It happened, though it didn’t happen as often as men liked to think it did.

As for me, I went to the kitchens. It was warmer there than in my cell, and in the face of Leonello’s rejection I felt particularly cold tonight.