I sent Bartolomeo on his way with another whack, and Leonello sauntered off whistling. I began whisking together the spices I’d need for the capons—perhaps a shoulder of wild boar too? No Venetian archbishop coming to my table would go away thinking the food provincial. Besides, if I had to share my kitchen with His Excellency’s private cook, I meant to show him right away that he wasn’t dealing with any jumped-up kitchen maid stirring a pot. Cooks sharing kitchens: never a good idea. You had to stake your territory right away or else they started laying claim to your spices. Or God forbid, touching your knives. Though there was always the possibility of sharing new recipes, once territory was staked and boundaries understood. A good heated argument on the Venetian versus the Roman sauce for a suckling pig was just the thing to liven up a long dull evening of chopping and stirring. Maybe this archbishop’s cook was Milanese; I’d heard such interesting things about that leavened bread they made in Milan . . .

That was when I heard an autocratic voice in my doorway, sharp and pinging with a glass-clear Venetian accent just like my own. “Are you what passes for a cook in this household, girl? His Excellency my good master will require hot sops to soothe his stomach after a long journey, so you will fetch me muscatel pears, sugar, whole cinnamon, and as decent a red wine as you have in your cellars. And at once.”

I put down the packet of cinnamon I had just been pinching closed. I put the bowl of mixed spices carefully to one side and automatically dusted a few grains of sugar from my fingertips. I turned slowly, sick in my soul, to face the man in the doorway. The man with a long face and a high-bridged nose like mine, imperious height and sharp all-seeing eyes to match mine. His arms in their rolled-up sleeves were singed smooth and hairless like mine, after so much reaching in and out of hot ovens. And his hands, like mine, were marked all over with the knife nicks and burn scars that told the world, I am a cook.

I stared at my father, and he gave a great start and stared at me.

I wondered if I looked so different after more than two years’ absence. He looked the same, though he had grown a belly that overlapped his belt. Inanely I remembered telling Madonna Giulia that no great cook ever had the time to get fat. I suppose this meant my father was doing well—he’d never had the leisure before to get himself a belly.

“Last I’d heard,” I found myself saying, “you were working for the Doge’s great-nephew, Father. Not an archbishop.”

“Carmelina,” he said, still looking stunned.