The apprentices goggled. Bartolomeo looked as if he were trying to decide whether to keep arguing with me or congratulate me, but I wasn’t having either. He shouldn’t be arguing with me or congratulating me; he shouldn’t dare say anything to me at all except “Yes, signorina” or “No, signorina.” After our frightening time with the French army when he’d seen me with all my defenses down, he’d forgotten that. So I shredded him and his pretensions and his recipes up and down with my tongue until he was sputtering and all the other apprentices were hooting, and then he shouted back at me, or tried to because I just shouted right over him, and in the end I’m sorry to say we ended up slinging ladles at each other. It was not dignified to fight with one’s own apprentices, especially before the others, and I probably should have demonstrated my new authority by sacking Bartolomeo altogether. But he really was quite a gifted young cook, or he would be as soon as his head deflated. So in the end I put him on pot duty, docked his free afternoons for the next two months, and stripped his wine ration for three, adding a new punishment every time he tried to argue. He should count himself lucky. My father would have taken him into the courtyard and beaten him bloody.

Bartolomeo was scarlet with humiliation by the time I was done, and part of me disliked doing it. Because it had been good, that touch of saffron in the frittelle. But public mutiny in any kitchens must be nipped just as publicly. And that goes double in any kitchens run by a woman.

“Well?” I glowered, hands on hips.

“Yes, signorina,” Bartolomeo mumbled, and whirling about, he plunged his hands with a tremendous splash into the nearest sink full of pots. “I mean, maestra.”

Maestra. I liked the sound of that!

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

People tend to believe the bad rather than the good.

—BOCCACCIO

Leonello

Do try not to fall on me,” I told her without lifting my eyes from my book.

“Oh!” Sancha of Aragon brought herself up short in a billow of blue Spanish brocade as she rounded the pew, looking down at me with black brows drawn. “You’re the dwarf, aren’t you?”

“Your perspicacity is as astounding as your beauty, madonna.”

“Are you insulting me?”

“Well, you are beautiful.” She had startling blue eyes, olive-skinned breasts on generous display, and a supple little mouth that, according to rumor, had sucked half the papal guards.