Ava asked for no payment, other than food and shelter, and it was true the baker had run off, taking a pair of silver candlesticks with her. Ava was taken on as the baker’s replacement, who, as it turned out, had disappeared with the cook. Ava would take on both positions. She was brought to the huge stone kitchen, where there was an enormous woodstove and the stone sinks were large enough to bathe in. There she was given a cot in the scullery, along with two black dresses and a white apron. She was taller than any of the nuns, and because there were no shoes to fit her, she kept the rabbi’s boots. She was comfortable in them by now, and they fitted her perfectly. Ava said she was an excellent cook and she wasn’t in the least bit daunted by the baking. She came upon a pile of cookbooks in the pantry in which some of the recipes were three hundred years old and no longer practical. Blackbird pie, trout stuffed with pine and minced dove, hearts of ducks sautéed in brown butter and spice. She kept to simple fare for the nuns and their students, potato soup with leeks and what little butter they had, cheese pie, chicken stew that could feed fifty, with a gravy that tasted of chestnuts, rice fragrant with wild mint and fennel, apple tarte made with fruit she had collected in the woods, the crust formed from day-old bread.

Twice a month there was a delivery of wheat from a local shop owner. Ava’s first order of business each morning was to bake the baguettes served at breakfast and dinner, a chore that soon became a pleasure. She hoped to learn more about human beings through the process of baking, for their hunger was a mystery to her. She loved to knead the dough, which she set out in tin bowls to rise under white dishtowels. She was quick in forming baguettes, and her loaves were perfectly even. Sonya, the old woman who had been the housemaid at the convent for two decades, came in on Ava’s first morning in the kitchen and was dumbstruck by the new woman’s abilities. The housemaid asked if Ava was a baker’s daughter, but no, such things came naturally to her, she said.

In truth, she felt a kinship with bread and the way it was made, the damp weight kneaded and shaped into proper form, heated until it was set. When she worked in the kitchen she kept her long dark hair swept up with pins, with a white cap on her head. In the afternoons, when Lea was in class, she went walking in the forest beyond the convent to the marshes alongside the river. She carried a basket and often found marvelous things to bring back to the kitchen: mushrooms, hazelnuts, wild blackberries, chervil, water cabbages.