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don’t be foolish. It’s just a brief unpleasantness.”
    â€œIt won’t be brief unless you do something.” I gave him a long, cold look. “You have some amends to make.”
    He looked shaken, and spread his hands out on the table. “I . . . I’ll arrange something.”

5
Sister Graziela
    P ietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi, Giovanni Stiattesi’s brother from Florence, counted the coin of my dowry on the tavern table in the Borgo across the Tiber where Papa thought we’d be less known. I felt like a bartered goat. This stranger who was soon to be my husband didn’t even look at me standing at the edge of the room, so I stole a few glances at him. His boot hose sagged and his codpiece cords were leather, not silk. I had never seen a codpiece except in paintings. They weren’t in fashion anymore. What was he doing wearing one? If these marriage clothes were his best, I understood immediately why Father had been able to arrange this marriage of convenience. The dowry.
    It was borrowed from the state dowry fund, he’d said, and from someone else. He wouldn’t tell me who. If it were anyone else, he’d tell me. Like creeping ice in my veins, I realized that the money for the dowry must have been part of the negotiations behind closed doors while I and the Roman rabble had waited for a verdict. To be married with Agostino’s money turned my stomach sour.
    â€œMy brother will be good to you. He is a painter,” Giovanni whispered next to me.
    â€œNo proof of goodness in that,” I whispered back, then felt shame for my rudeness. I knew better. I should be grateful.
    With a hand calloused by the resting of a palette, Giovanni’s brother swept the coins off the table into his pouch, and finally looked at me. His face was not unpleasant, slightly pocked and longer than his brother Giovanni’s, with dark eyes set deeply in his head. I liked his dark curls. His small mouth had a tendency to move sideways. Perhaps in the years ahead I could take joy in such a mouth. I felt a small measure of relief. Some daughters, unwanted daughters, were married off to disfigured men, or old, crippled widowers. He smiled at me and I quickly smiled back. It reassured me for the moment. In such marriages as this, was love ever possible?
    I thought of my marriage cassone , packed and waiting in the carriage. Father had given me his tacking hammer and had told me to choose a few of Mother’s things. I’d picked her yellow and blue faience pitcher and washing bowl, her bloodstone hair ornament mounted in gold with a pearl drop, her small onyx perfume bottle, her carved wooden memento box, one of a matched pair with Father’s, and a brass oil lamp shaped with the figure of Diana whom the Greeks call Artemis, goddess of chastity. As an afterthought, I had packed Mother’s dagger. She’d always kept it under her bed for protection when Father stayed out late at night. I didn’t know what kind of a man this Pietro Antonio was.
    A year ago when I’d assumed I would marry Agostino, I had painted on the cassone a scene of a wedding feast—a celebration I wouldn’t have now. The impalmamento , the Mass of the Union, and the nozze were all to happen on the same day. There would be no banquet with crab apples, capons in white sauce, no tarts or marzipan, no wine, no toasts in ourblushing honor, no music, no dancing, no happy friends bringing sweetmeats and wishing us well, laughing, teasing, saying pretty things, ushering us to the bedchamber and then reappearing at morning to learn that all was paradise. None of it. By noon my fate would be sealed.
    There was just enough time, if I took the carriage. I grabbed my cloak and sidled to the door. “I’ll meet you at the church. Santo Spirito.”
    â€œArtemisia! Where are you going? You can’t leave here,” Father said, but I was out the door.
    â€œThe convent of