“One more thing.” I lowered my voice. “Will you lay this on the altar in my father’s memory?” And I passed her my father’s worn packet of ciphered recipes.

“What is it?”

“Just recipes. My father’s.” I didn’t need them anymore; I had them all long memorized. “Give them to your convent cook, after you take them off the altar,” I advised. “If she can unpick the cipher—there’s a note about how to read it in the back—then I promise you, the whole convent will eat better than queens. Even the lay sisters!”

“That would be something,” the young lay sister muttered, eyeing the packet with a bit more interest. Perhaps she would take it down to the convent kitchens. Or maybe she’d just toss the whole bundle on the fire. Either way, I’d send my father’s recipes out into the world and not really care where they ended up. I made my own recipes now, and they were better than my father’s.

“I’ll pray for your father,” the lay sister promised, pocketing my coin and the packet of paper. “At Vespers, after the Duke of Gandia passes by—I suppose I won’t get a good view when he goes by, but there’s always hoping.” Wistful. “They say he has a pearl in his helmet the size of an egg!”

“That’s also the size of his brain,” I told her, and took myself back to my kitchens. Enough pensive maundering for one afternoon. Juan Borgia would be gone soon, and Madonna Giulia would come back shivering from the afternoon’s ceremony even though she’d been wrapped in a lynx-lined cloak. She’d want a hot posset, and a good warming plate of stew.

“What do you mean the stew’s not ready?” I shouted at Bartolomeo back in the kitchens. No day off for him to see the parade, since he was still on restriction for the ferocious quarrel he’d picked with me. Not the quarrel about the saffron frittelle, but yet another quarrel, last week, over whether to cook a calf’s sweetbreads with a caul. Of course you cooked sweetbreads with a caul; absurd even to think otherwise, but Bartolomeo had some ridiculous idea about searing them on the spit with slabs of sausage. He had not been nearly as penitent as he should have been, even when I docked his free afternoons yet again in punishment, and now—