Choir nuns from illustrious families never really leave their noble relatives behind, you see. Every week a stream of velvet-clad visitors comes through those forbidding convent gates, and the nuns sit down with their married sisters and tickle their nieces under the chin and gossip about who will be next to marry and who will take the veil and what the Dogaressa wore at the last procession. The noble ladies who visit daughters in convents have feasts to plan at home; perhaps the celebration of a nephew’s marriage or a grandson’s christening. And hovering on the fringes of all those clusters of Venetian noblewomen, my father: falling into casual conversation at the grilles, ready with his book of recipes, leaving with yet another client. All with me standing there in the wimple that squeezed my face and the habit that was never long enough to cover my shins, doomed to peel onions and roll out marzipan forever.

That last day, I suppose, had been the seal. “Your fool cousin Marco got himself a patron at last,” my father deigned to tell me. “Adriana da Mila of Rome. Ha, she’ll realize that mistake soon enough.” Then he’d abandoned me midsentence in favor of a bejeweled Foscari matron reeling off advice to her postulant daughter, who looked like she’d very much been hoping to leave maternal advice behind by taking the veil, and I hadn’t known what I was doing until my hands were actually rifling the pouch my father had left at my feet and slipping his packet of recipes into my sleeve.

“Though I can’t really claim the rest was impulse,” I told Santa Marta. Taking Santa Marta’s reliquary, bribing a fisherman to smuggle me out in his boat—that had all been a half-formed plan I’d been turning over for some months, a plan I hadn’t put into action until I thought of a place I could flee and someone to give me work. Once I knew where I was going, well, the rest had fallen into place. Even if the addition to my belongings of a certain severed hand had not been part of the original scheme—she had gotten caught in the folds of my cloak somehow as I bundled up the crystal and silver reliquary, and I hadn’t discovered her until it was far too late to give her back.