If he had gone to heaven at all, that is. Surely that was his eventual destination—my father might have clouted me a good deal, and hated me when I ran away from the convent, but I could not in all fairness call him a wicked man. Nor was he exactly a saintly one. Perhaps he was in purgatory for a time, working off a batch of smaller sins like vanity and pride and his tendency to pad the accounts when it came to his wealthier clients. “You had all better be ready for him when he finally does arrive in heaven,” I told Santa Marta. “The way he schemed to cook for the Doge, well, that will be nothing to how he’ll scheme to cook for God Himself.”

A woman with a market basket gave me a startled look, and I realized I was talking aloud like a madwoman. I tugged my cloak closer about me, feeling the bite of the wind, and I decided against the Basilica San Pietro, setting off across the long stretch of the Ponte Sant’Angelo instead. Maybe I could find a shrine to Santa Marta, and just lay some flowers on it in my father’s memory . . . but I passed a churchyard first, some small distance from the busy Campo dei Fiori, and the sight stopped me.

Just a small church in this city of churches; no grand dome or expanse of gleaming windows to draw the pilgrims in their hordes. The churchyard was overgrown, the paving stones cracked in places. But this church must have had a little convent attached to it, because I saw two sisters in the weedy churchyard, spading at the wild grass as the wind tugged at their black-and-white habits. One was old and had a tight-drawn face under her veil; the other was young with a crop of pimples by her nose. Both had chapped hands and faces reddened from cold, and even though their lips were moving silently, I knew they weren’t muttering prayers. Lay sisters, both of them, because highborn choir nuns never spaded churchyards. The nobly born girls who brought illustrious family names and sizable dowries to the convent weren’t required to work. The lay sisters worked for them, cleaning their cells and ironing the silk shifts they wore under their habits and making their beds since the choir nuns were allowed to sleep through the endless dawn prayers if they felt like it. I’d spaded my share of herb gardens and churchyards, blowing on my cold hands as my higher-born sisters practiced their Josquin motets or sat in cozy parlors gossiping about the latest fashions with their illustrious visitors.