“Is Mother with you?” I asked inanely. All my fears, working in Rome, that someday my father or someone else who knew me might cross my path—all the hiding I’d done in storerooms whenever there were Venetian visitors to the Palazzo Santa Maria—and now my father was here, not in the vast city of pilgrims where so many travelers passed, but in the backwaters of the provinces.

“Your mother’s safe in Venice,” my father replied automatically, still staring at me as though I were a resurrected corpse. “His Excellency took me with him to Florence on an advisory to Fra Savonarola. We were delayed returning, and now the French army . . .”

He trailed off. Maestro Paolo Mangano, the best cook in Venice, who had set me chopping my first onion at three years old, who had shouted at me for being slow to fetch olive oil and clouted me on the ear for dropping an egg and tanned my back with a ladle for arguing with him about the best way to make a royal sauce. Maestro Paolo Mangano, a right and proper bastard, may Santa Marta and all the saints forgive me for speaking so of my father. A right and proper bastard who had never had a fond word for me but still made me into a cook. For that at least I owed him, and I felt a child’s urge to run to him, bow my head.

Instead, I picked up the nearest knife.

“Turn on your father now, girl?” His eyes narrowed, and I could see him collecting his thoughts. My father could be counted on never to be caught off guard for long. “I’d expect no less of a faithless, talentless slattern like you. I’d assumed you were dead in some whore’s flophouse by now.”

“I’ve missed you too, Father.” He’d spoken in the crystal-sharp Venetian street patois he always used in the kitchens, if not to his distinguished clients, and unthinkingly I answered in the same dialect. Somewhere in the back of my head I was howling in panic, but my voice came out even. The days of hanging my head under the lash of my father’s tongue were long done.

He took a step forward, unfolding his massive arms. “You’re coming with me, girl.”

“No.” I took a step back, still holding the knife at my side. “Come any closer and I’ll scream.”

“Scream, then. And I’ll tell this good household they’re sheltering a runaway whore still wanted in Venice for the robbing of the church of the blessed Santa Marta.” He took another step toward me, voice rising. “You’re a sorry excuse for a daughter, but you’re still mine. And if I say you’re coming with me, then you’ll obey. I’m your father—”