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him? Better to befriend the enemy and hang on.Something worse might come along, which might be amusing or might not.”
    â€œSomething worse always comes along. That’s what I’m praying about.”
    Primavera left to supervise the preparation of the evening meal. Bianca followed her and mooned about the kitchen, getting underfoot and upsetting a pot of broth, till Primavera scolded her and sent her off.
    Fra Ludovico, to Bianca’s knock, replied yawnily, “I’m deep in prayer, child. Go away.”
    She threw stones in the well, but the well didn’t throw them back, and she went to the top of the back staircase, where the local girls had begun covering the offending images with lime wash.
    â€œWhat is that supposed to be?” she asked, pointing.
    The girls had no use for her. Had she been the sister of one of them, they might have been kind; but they were always serving, and had few advantages, and the pleasure of sisterhood among them was more luxurious than the appeal of being kind to a younger child. And the girls could see that as the lone child of the local landholder, Bianca was far more likely to attract a desirable husband than they, which made them less than sympathetic to her loneliness.
    So the drawings they were covering up were especially galling, and they had to choose their strategy of cruelty. In the end the puddle of soapy water on the top step did their work for them. Down she went, three steps at a time, while the girls laughed.
    â€œNobody pushed her,” they agreed, affronted, when Primavera arrived.
    Bianca bled a little and cried, but she cried less than she bled, and then she stopped bleeding, and went to wait for her father in the apple orchard.
    The orchard was gently terraced into four broad earthwork steps, each one lined with a double row of trees. The time of apples was nearly here; the first windfalls were jeweling the ground with carmine and green. Bianca knew her father, who was kind to his animals, would bring his mare here, once she’d been unsaddled and watered. He would let her take advantage of a few apples.
    Bianca didn’t fret but sat quietly in the verdant shade of the top level. She couldn’t see through the descending boughs, but she would hear the mare nicker and stamp, and she would run down with arms outstretched, gaining speed on each of the four slopes.
    It was closing on evening by the time he arrived. She ran to him. “ Papà, ” she cried, for more-than-a-week had seemed to her little-less-than-a-year. She didn’t mean to complain of her fall, only to show him who she was, in case he’d forgotten.
    But he turned and saw her, and shrugged away the mare’s nuzzling head. He didn’t notice his daughter’s bruise or the scab. Which seemed odd. He said merely, “What a fledge of your mother you are, and ever more so,” and he took her hand in his as he hurried her toward the house. He didn’t ask her about what had happened while he was gone. He had something on his mind.
    The sun was a stout ball of glowing blood in the haze of thin clouds, and then broke through. The stones of Montefiore were copper butter. The windows that had glass winked blindingly back at the sun. Everything in the world had an eye and could watch. From beyond, the hoofs of another horse rang out.
    She shuddered with a child’s pleasurable shiver of fear. She wanted her father to stop, hold her, attend to her. “Something is watching us,” she murmured. He thought she meant the moon, rising over the house on the other side, a silver sentinel, and she did. But she meant something dark as well as bright, and in that she was correct.

A pack of dirty thieves

    is what they called us. They had no better words for it, not knowing whether we were beasts or men. We knew no better than they did what we were, for we had little language of our own—no names, back then, few habits of civilized living. But we