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to my distinctive and refreshing odor. Now, listen to me. When your mother died, she died. Maybe the saints came and put her in a sack and took her to visit with Saint Peter. Or maybe the worms broke their Lenten fast to chew on her delicious lips. Nobody knows, but what’s done is done, and your job is to be clever and not to listen to nonsense. Do you understand me?”
    â€œHow do I know what is nonsense and what isn’t?”
    â€œIf you’re ever in doubt, throw a pepper up in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don’t trust in anything.”
    She made a supper out of peppers and broad beans, illustrating her point obscurely. Bianca ate heartily though she wasn’t sure she understood the lesson.
    She would ask her father, though, when he returned.
    When Don Vicente arrived home a few days later, some latest necessary negotiation with the Papal legates having broken off unsatisfactorily, Bianca greeted him with the question. But Papà, is Mamma an angel or is she a broad bean?
    For once Vicente was in no mood. “Who puts a notion like that in your mind?”
    He fired the corrupt old matron, but Primavera refused to leave the kitchen. “It would take me half a day to walk to the village, and you’d just have to send for me again when you changed your mind, and my hips aren’t what they were.”
    â€œThey never were anything much like hips,” sniffed Fra Ludovico in passing. But Primavera’s point carried the argument, and Vicente relented.
    Is Mamma dead? Is she really dead? Or is she an angel, or a bean, or something else?
    â€œI’m surrounded by simpletons,” said Vicente.
    But he remembered his daughter’s birth—in a nook in a tavern on the road from Rome, when María Inés’s water broke without warning. The baby came twisted and ought to have died, but themother died instead. For a payment of florins her corpse was allowed to share a churchyard grave with a local merchant who conveniently had died the same day. (The merchant had been a widower and his dead wife wouldn’t know he was buried with another woman until purgatory, when everything was too late to change anyway.)
    Whether Vicente began at once to love Bianca in place of her dead mother or whether he had to learn not to despise her for causing his wife to bleed to death, Bianca lived a lifetime without finding out. Fra Ludovico was wrong: Truth is as evanescent as lies, and dissolves in time. But as a father will, Vicente had taken Bianca in his arms, and he continued on the road through Spadina toward Spoleto.
    Except for that which pertained to the confusing and contradictory legend of her birth, Bianca de Nevada had been told little about María Inés de Castedo y Nevada. The flattering characteristics that memorialize the person who dies too young aren’t altogether convincing. María Inés had been a saint, an angel, a paragon. But Bianca had to wonder. Had her mother never thrown a stone at a cat, or peed in the vegetable garden, or stuck out her tongue at the Archbishop of Pamplona? On these matters neither Primavera nor Fra Ludovico would comment.
    So Bianca came to consider her mother something like the stark unsmiling icon of the Virgin that Fra Ludovico kept propped up on a shelf in his cell. In the severe older style, unpopular these days, the piece showed judging black eyes, lips pursed as if reserving a mother’s kiss for someone more worthy than Bianca.
    â€œPapà?” said Bianca, the question mark carried in the set of her small shoulders. “Where is Mamma now?”
    He couldn’t answer her inquiry. He held her instead and walked to the steeper side of the mount, where the wind raced up the east face of the slope with such speed that it could carry a piglet from a barnyard below and brain it against one of Montefiore’s protruding roof beams.
    Vicente regarded his Bianca. Of her beauty there was no