“Signorina?”
A boy’s voice sounded behind me, and a hand touched my elbow. “You should sleep,
signorina
. I’ll make Messer Leonello’s posset for him. Make one for you too—”
“You’re the one who’s going to bed, Bartolomeo.” I summoned all the briskness I had in me, which wasn’t much after two nights in the middle of the French army, Santa Marta save me. “Off with you, now.”
Bartolomeo looked dubious: fifteen years old, freckled and red-haired, long and lanky as a basting needle, with a near-miraculous nose for cooking. My favorite apprentice, not that I’d ever tell him that. “Begging your pardon,
signorina
, but you haven’t slept since all this began, or eaten more than a squirrel either. I could make you a nice filling rice
zuppa
with some good
provatura
cheese—”
I scowled. Bartolomeo had been with me in this whole ordeal with the French, and really he’d comported himself very well—helped me parcel out the food we were given, heated up mugs of wine over a brazier to keep everyone warmed on the inside, and kept his voice cheerful and steady through it all, too. But he’d gotten used to seeing me worn and frightened, and that was no good at all. The mistress of the kitchens must be Law Itself: eagle-eyed, all-seeing, fierce, and steely, not a weakness to be seen anywhere. Let your apprentices see you’re only human, and it’s the beginning of the end as far as discipline is concerned. “To
bed
, Bartolomeo!” I ordered. “Or I’ll toast your gizzard in a little good butter and have
that
for a midnight snack!” I must have had some steel left under all the exhaustion, because he bolted off at once.
Though he did stop at the door and give me a smile over his bony shoulder. “We’re home,
signorina
,” he said. “That’s a prayer answered, isn’t it? I don’t think I had a thought for days that wasn’t a prayer to get home. Or,” he added practically, “a prayer that the French wouldn’t split our heads open with those nasty pikes. Or start raping anybody—mostly I worried about that on your account, and the maids, but with the things you hear about the French . . .” He rumpled a hand through his red hair. “Well, I got a little perturbed for myself, too.”
“Bartolomeo—”
“But nobody’s head got split, and nobody got buggered either, and here we are.” He kissed his fist up to the ceiling. “Thank you, Heavenly Father!”
“To bed!” I thundered.
“You too,
signorina
,” he advised. “You look ready to drop.” And off he went.
I looked around my empty kitchens. Bartolomeo was right; there had been a great many prayers the last few days. The maids, gabbling hasty Acts of Contrition and whimpering that some unconfessed sin of theirs had brought the French down upon us all as a punishment from God. Giulia’s mother-in-law and
duenna
Adriana da Mila, lips moving silently as her fingers twitched over her ivory rosary beads. Bartolomeo, his hands clasped around the wooden cross he always wore about his neck, knuckles white and eyes shut as he sent a simpler kind of plea skyward. I didn’t have my apprentice’s easy faith, or his untroubled conscience. I just closed my eyes and prayed to see my kitchens again.
My kitchens—sweet Santa Marta save me, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them over the past six months when I’d been traveling the countryside with Madonna Giulia’s household. Now quite empty for the night, my cousin Marco doubtless having gone to play
primiera
with sailors and thieves in the Borgo, and even the last of the scullions having long trailed off to bed. Everything was empty and clean, welcoming me home. The chief kitchen with its enormous hearth and revolving spit, fire banked to a soft glow for the night . . . the scullery next door, all silvery with fish scales and why hadn’t the pot-boys been scrubbing down the floors better in my absence . . . the cold room after that, where I’d stood so many hours whipping up cream tops for milk-snow, or sorting game for plucking and storing . . . the courtyard outside, silent and black now, but in a few hours it would be full of dawn bustle when the daily procession of wagons began to arrive with wood for my ovens and carcasses for my spits and herbs fresh-plucked and dew-wet for my sauces. Even the kitchen cat with his tattered ear, useless greedy beast that he was, looked up at me with an insolent
mrow
. “No one’s turned you into sausage yet, you useless thing?” I asked, and he stalked off with contempt across my kitchen.
My
kitchen, and I felt a great thrum of peace just looking around me. Most looked for that thrum in the recitations of Mass or the velvet enclosed spaces of the confessional, but a kitchen was my church. I was probably hell-bound for thinking anything so blasphemous, but I had greater sins than blasphemy on my conscience, sins like theft and fornication and altar desecration, so I was undoubtedly hell-bound anyway. Easy, quiet faith like Bartolomeo’s wasn’t for me.
“Home indeed,” I said, and took a certain small pouch from under my overskirt. “Aren’t you glad?”
She looked happy, if a shriveled and mummified hand enclosed in a bag could be said to have any expression. A rather dried-up and wrinkled thing, the fingers ancient and curled in on themselves, a single filigreed gold ring gleaming from one finger, the shrunken flesh over the ancient knuckles bearing the marks of old knife nicks and burn scars. The same kind of marks I had all over my hands, the same kind any cook had—and the severed hand I carried about with me for good luck was supposedly the hand of Santa Marta herself, patron saint of cooks everywhere. A most holy relic, and really she should not have been in the possession of someone as sinful as me, but there was that little incident of altar desecration in my past, and, well, accidents happen. And I must say, she seemed to enjoy getting out of a reliquary and into a kitchen again, because I’d never gotten actually
caught
, had I? Surely that was a sign of my patron saint’s approval.
Of course, someone finally had caught me now. That dwarf with his sharp knives and his even sharper eyes, threatening to ruin me. Unless—
“He wants a posset?” I told Santa Marta grimly, hanging her little pouch up on the drying rack alongside some sprigs of rosemary. “I’ll give him a posset.”
She didn’t approve, I could tell from the way her ring glinted at me in the banked glow of the fires, but I tied on an apron resolutely and began mulling some wine . . . and an hour or so later, long after Madonna Giulia would have settled her daughter and her bodyguard and gone rustling off through her private passage to the Vatican to see her Pope, I was tiptoeing up the stairs with a steaming cup in hand.
Leonello’s chamber was a tiny high-ceilinged nook wedged in at the very top of the
palazzo
. Madonna Giulia had seen him well settled on his narrow bed, his wounds rebandaged, the covers drawn up, his collection of books in easy reach and a branch of fine wax tapers lit and glowing if he felt like reading. The shadows danced over his face—a rather handsome face, despite the deep-set eyes and prominent forehead. His lids were closed, his dark hair rumpled and one arm pressed close against his bandaged side. I thought of leaving the mulled wine and skulking away like a coward. But then his eyes opened soundlessly, hazel eyes full of their usual bitter amusement, and he did not look one whit surprised to see me.
“Well, well,” he drawled, and managed to raise himself to one elbow even though a hiss of pain escaped through his teeth. “Come to ravish me,
Signorina Cuoca
? Pardon me, make that
Suora Carmelina
.”
Hearing my proper title in that smug voice made my teeth hurt. I thumped the cup down beside his books, so hard it splashed. “Mulled wine. Madonna Giulia’s orders.”
He reached for it. “Our lord Jesus Christ is the only man to be served by nuns. Maybe I’ve died and been resurrected, to earn such a privilege?”
I glowered. “Drink.”
“Something I’ve been wondering.” He swirled the wine, ruminating. “I know you cut your hair and traveled as a man, when you escaped your convent and made the journey to Rome. You’re tall enough, and flat as a marble slab in the bargain—you’d pass. But I’ve always wondered how you got over the convent wall in the first place. Bribery? Ladder? Grappling hook?”
I hesitated, but I wanted him complacent, and feeding his curiosity seemed the best way to accomplish that. “Bribery,” I said shortly. “I paid a fisherman to pick me up in the night with his boat. Now drink.”
Leonello chuckled, taking a long sniff of his mulled wine. “Smells cloying. Are you trying to sweeten me up?”
“I assure you, it’s delicious. Wine, honey, cloves, a pinch of pepper—” I watched him take a sip. “And a dash of hemlock.”
He froze, and I lunged. He was strong for a dwarf but the French had left him weak and blood-spent, and I slammed him flat to the pillows with my hand across his mouth. “Don’t swallow,” I said. “Just hold that wine in your mouth and listen.”
His hazel eyes regarded me calmly over my hand.
“You know what I am,” I said. “Mostly, anyway. I took the name Suora Serafina when I took my vows at the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice.
Serafina
,” I couldn’t help saying with a certain exasperation, “so you can stop all this Suora Carmelina business!” And I still couldn’t understand how he’d found out in the first place. Only my cousin Marco Santini knew where I’d fled from, and he was sworn to secrecy. To the rest of the household, I was just Marco’s orphaned cousin from Venice come to help in his kitchens now that she had no other place in the world. But somehow Leonello had put one fact with another, and then another—my hair, which had been chopped short when I first came to the household; my avoidance of churches and my knowledge of Latin prayers—who knows how many details he’d managed to sniff out? He was far too clever for his own good, or mine.
“You think you can ruin me, by telling the world who I am?” I went on. “Well, you can. Even worse, because I won’t just be hauled back to my convent if I’m found. I’ll have my hands and my tongue chopped off for desecration, because I stole a reliquary from my convent to get money to travel south.”
His eyes widened thoughtfully over my hand at that. God rot him, he had no right to look so cool, not when my whole inside was bubbling panic. I’d been nothing but a whirl of fear since he confronted me, just after the French attack. Throwing my secret in my face, just to make me cringe. Because according to him, his wounds were all my doing.
“You’ve no cause to blame me,” I hissed. “I don’t care what you say, it was not my fault the French found us. It wasn’t my fault you had to go throwing yourself into some useless fight and nearly get killed, either. None of it was my fault, Leonello, and you’ve got no right to destroy me just because you want someone to blame—”
I heard myself babbling and clamped my teeth on my tongue. For a second I could taste splinters, wood splinters and old blood—that would be the last thing I tasted, if an executioner ever drew my tongue out on the block to slice it off, with my hands to follow for the sin of robbing an altar.
Sweet Santa Marta save me.
Because Leonello was looking at me with no pity at all, no pity and no forgiveness either. I hadn’t known the French advance would be staking out the road we’d taken, but the only reason we’d taken that road at all was that I was desperate to avoid a fellow traveler in Capodimonte who had recognized me from my girlhood in Venice. I’d spun a web of lies to persuade Madonna Giulia to change course the next day, and we’d ridden straight into the French advance, and Leonello to his wounds and nearly his death.
Not my fault
, I told myself. I’d robbed a convent and broken my vows as a nun; those sins I was entirely guilty of committing—but it was not my fault Leonello was wrapped in all these bloodied bandages.
“So believe me,” I snarled, gulping down my fear, “I
know
you can ruin me, little man. You can see to it I lose my hands and my tongue, and I might as well be dead after that because a cook isn’t much good without hands and a tongue. But I can ruin you, too.”
A gamble. Sweet Santa Marta, it was a gamble, but it was the only one I had.
“Now you know what I am,” I went on. “And if you turn me in, I’ll tell them you knew from the beginning. Knew that I was a desecrator, knew it for
years
, and didn’t do anything—and that makes you as guilty as me. They’ll chop your hands and nose off, too, and I don’t see you making a living throwing your knives unless you’ve got hands to throw them with.”
His eyes widened over my hand again. Not quite so calmly this time, I thought. I dropped my voice to a whisper, leaning close to him. “Turn me in, Leonello, and I swear in the name of God and the Holy Virgin that I’ll drag you down with me. I
swear
.” I lifted my hand from his mouth. “So why don’t you keep my secrets?”
He spat out the mouthful of wine, making a splash on the floor like blood. Never taking his eyes from mine, he reached for a cup beside the branch of candles. Not the cup I’d brought; a mug of chilled lemon water Madonna Giulia must have placed for him. He drank a deliberate mouthful, rinsing it around his mouth, and spat it out in a neat stream, right onto the front of my apron.
“You know,” he said, “I loathe your mulled wine. You always add too much honey.”
“Writhe in hell,” I spat.
He tilted his head, eyes unreadable as he surveyed the cup I had brought. It sat steaming innocently. “Did you truly poison it?”
“I’ll leave you to wonder,” I said. “You go right on guessing, every time you take a dish from my hands. Because if I even get a
hint
you might be thinking about turning me in for arrest anyway, I won’t wait to find out. I’ll just drop a little hemlock in your broth, next midday meal.”
He looked at me. “No, you wouldn’t.”
“I’m a failed nun, Leonello.” I stretched my lips over my teeth, but you couldn’t call it a smile. “I’m a desecrator and a runaway and an adulteress against God, and I’m already bound for hellfire. What’s murder, added on top of all that?”
He regarded me silently.
“Think about it.” I turned for the door and added over my shoulder, “Hemlock.”