“I’ll take the apples too.” She took the dish out of my hand, turning in a swirl of silk wrapper and hair. “Thank you.”

“I wish you every happiness in your marriage, madonna,” I called after her with another curtsy. “Enjoy the marzipan.”

“There’s not much else to enjoy,” she said, exiting with another sigh. I stared after her for a moment before shrugging and sinking down at the table I’d just wiped down. I was too tired to worry about moody brides. She’d liked my food—that was all the cook ever needed to know.

Sweet Santa Marta, but I was tired. Even after the last of the guests had wobbled home, tipsy but replete—even after the last table had been cleared in the sala, the last dish covered and stored, the last scraping swept up in the kitchens—even after I’d sent the maidservants and apprentices to their beds, I hadn’t been able to rest. They trailed off far too tired to question my orders anymore, yawning and giddy from hard work (and the gulps of wine they’d been able to steal from the flagons before they went out to the guests). I was far too exhausted and nervous even to doze in a chair by the kitchen fire—and besides, Marco might come home at any moment, and if someone spoke to him before I did, then this frail concoction of a plan I’d constructed like a soap bubble in a sink might go pop.

In the end, I might as well have gotten a good night’s sleep. The household rose before dawn, servants and pot-boys first, and now they were starting to look at me oddly again and wonder why I’d appeared from nowhere and why they were following my orders at all. So I didn’t give them time to think. “Basta,” I called, stamping my foot on the flagstones to get their attention. “We’re to pack all Madonna Adriana’s supplies into the wagons by dawn, down to the last kitchen pot and sack of sugar. She’ll want everything back at the Palazzo Montegiordano by the time it comes to eat in her own sala tonight, and I’ve only met the woman once but I know she’ll count every last spoon and dock it from your wages if it’s missing.”

That started a grudging ripple of laughter. “So start carting everything out into the courtyard,” I called over the ripple. “The mouths are shut and the hands are moving; that’s how it works in my kitchens. And if so much as one packet of saffron goes missing from what I spent all night counting . . .”