“Who are you talking to, signorina?” Bartolomeo’s voice sounded behind me as he reached for an apron. The rest of the household had gone brown under the blazing summer sun of Capodimonte, but Bartolomeo just pinkened and peeled and pinkened again even though it was now fall.

“No one. Start chopping those onions over there.”

“You’re talking to that little bag again, aren’t you?” My apprentice grinned, testing the edge of his knife and then halving the first onion with an easy flourish. With so little to do out here in Capodimonte, we’d passed the summer days improving his knife skills. He had a way to go before he matched my speed, but his knife was a blur in his freckled hands as it reduced the onion to a minced heap. “What’s in that bag, anyway? Ottaviano always swore it held the withered balls of all the apprentices you’ve killed and eaten.”

“None of your business. And keep chopping,” I added as Bartolomeo flipped his knife behind his back and gave another grin at me when he caught it. “Move the mouth less, please, and the hands more!” I reached for an apple that I began peeling in one long strip, just to show him he didn’t know everything yet. “We’ll prepare smoked onion bread, red mullet in a salt crust, and a good thick zuppa of asparagus in meat broth. That should do for cena.”

“Yes, signorina.” His eyes tracked the lengthening curl of apple peel ribboning evenly from my knife. “How many at table tonight?”

“Madonna Giulia, her sister, her brother and his wife—” The other brother, not Cardinal Farnese, who had gone back to Rome again what with the French approaching so near. I’d miss the young Cardinal, a jokester with a refined palate and as healthy an appreciation for my food as his sister. “I’m not too proud to have a woman managing my kitchens,” he’d wheedled me last month with those dark eyes of his as merry as Madonna Giulia’s. “Think about it, Signorina Carmelina!”