Maybe after that I’d be strung upside-down on a gallows to die, or maybe I’d simply be returned to my convent, but it wouldn’t matter. If I had no hands to stir and chop, no nose to smell, I’d never cook again. I’d had a long time to consider that fate, after I fled my veil and my convent walls. Maybe it was foolish of me to think so, but I knew I’d rather be dead than a noseless, stump-fisted horror.

My eyes stung; I was shaking all over, and I didn’t protest when my apprentice put a hesitant arm about my shoulders.

“We’ll be all right, Carmelina,” Bartolomeo said, and I didn’t protest when he called me by name, either.

Pantisilea had gone into the vestry with a tray, and now she came back out shaking her head over the untouched food. “Leonello won’t eat,” she said. “And he’s spitting up blood again—I’ve got his wounds bandaged, but it’s inside where he’s bleeding.”

One of the guards said it, brutally. “He’s dying.”

Not fast enough, I thought. I’d never in my life prayed for a man to die, but I was praying now. Die, you spiteful little bastard. Just die and take my secret with you.

“If Madonna Giulia can just get him a surgeon—” Pantisilea gnawed her lip. “Do you really think she’ll have to—that nasty French general . . .”

Adriana da Mila spoke bleakly into little Laura’s curls. “If she does, the Pope will never hear about it from me.”

I flinched. The yammer of words in my head changed, from He knows to My fault. My fault, my fault, my fault.

“She’d better get that surgeon soon.” Pantisilea dashed at her eyes. “He’s trying so hard not to cry at the pain, he’s got me crying. That much pain for such a little man, it’s like to kill him.”

I hoped it did kill him. It was him or me—perhaps it had always been him or me, since the day we met.

We all lapsed into silence again. Bartolomeo’s arm still circled my shoulders, but I felt too frightened and exhausted to shrug it away. I wanted to howl and scream and hide, like a child afraid of the dark, but there was no hiding from this. He knows, he knows, he knows.

Bartolomeo kept trying to press food on me, rummaging in the hamper. Napkins piled up, cheeses and bread loaves, cold sliced meats, spoons, twists of dried herbs, the little stoppered vial of hemlock tincture that I kept to kill rats. My eyes fell on the vial.

“Have you got more wine, Bartolomeo?” Pantisilea joined my apprentice, rummaging in the hamper. “If we haven’t got a surgeon yet for poor Leonello, at least I can get him drunk and numb the pain a little.”