The loft is empty when she wakes up.

A musty light. Petulant rain spits through a hole in the roof, flattening the carpet of straw. In clouds her breath rises to the rough underside of the tiles. To the front of the loft is the beam where she struck her forehead: an ugly stretch of cracked knots just waiting to hit someone with the force of their own blindness. Laundered undershirts drip from an upright post; a scuffed leather shoe with a missing strap hangs wearily from a nail.

Her marked cheek was pressed into the pallet when she woke. She hopes they have not seen it. Whoever they are.

She has some of the blanket over her now, a coarse serge bearing the stains of a sumptuous incontinence. Flavia throws it off. Sitting on the edge of the pallet, she roots through her little sack, more for comfort than anything else. Careful not to crack her head again, she goes over to the drying post and uses one of the undershirts to wipe the mud stains from her dress. A washing bowl is on the floor and she plunges her hands into its oily water. Cold droplets run down her forearms as she smooths it over her face, tracing the seams from her nose to the corners of her mouth, pinched with distaste. She rewinds her plaits.

‘Did you see her Madalena?’

A voice, down in the barn. The one who called her a clay brain last night. A bucket thuds to the floor and Flavia’s hand closes tight around the end of her plait.

‘Looked horrible.’

The second voice is like the first, full and thick as ripe cream.

‘And that dress. If that’s what northerners wear they’re as mad as a bucket of frogs.’

‘What can you expect from people who build houses on a lake?’

Laughter, and the spurt of milk hitting the side of a pail. Flavia creeps over to the edge of the loft and peers down. Below, two heads press into two cow bellies, the nearest one eclipsing a low-backed undershirt and semicircle of bronzed flesh mottled with dark moles. Flavia leans forward until a groan in the loft floorboards sends her darting back to the pallet.

‘Clay brain, that you?’

The ripe voice of the servant called Madalena is followed by a twofold snigger as the wind whips through the broken tiles.

Flavia keeps quiet.

‘Must’ve been a rat then. Skinny one, with freckles.’

More laughter and renewed spurting.

Flavia crawls further into the eaves. After a few more sneers the girls carry on talking as if she is not there. She leans stiffly against one arm until they have finished and the spurting sound is replaced by the scraping of barrels outside.

At the back of the pallet is her straw hat. The brim is bent and the veil has come partly loose. She picks it up, pulls the outlying threads through her fingers. Then she remembers Mona Grazia pushing the paper package into her hands while the milk grew cold. She rummages around her skirt pocket and pulls it out. On the front, two lines intersect in charcoal. Flavia’s heart beats faster as she unfolds the paper, wondering what Mona Grazia has given her to guard against fear and doubt in her new life.

The paper flattens out to reveal a pinch of grey altar dust.

She begins to cry. Not prettily like Pia does, dipping her head as her shoulders tremble. When Flavia cries it is like a pig with a knife in its throat, loosening such streams of mucus that Maestro Bartofolo says it is a pity the alchemists cannot spin it into gold, for he would then be as wealthy as the Duke of Spoleto. She wails so loudly she does not notice when a woman’s head pops over the top of the ladder.

‘Good God child. Is it your wish to bring a flood onto the poor beasts below?’

Startled, Flavia wipes her nose on her sleeve and looks into a pair of eyes even more bloodshot than her own must be. A frayed knot of hair perches on a face worn like Mona Grazia’s though not perhaps rubbed up against the same bitterness.

‘Suora Benedetta wants you working.’

‘Suora Benedetta?’ Flavia speaks down at her hands, sensing the woman’s eyes on her mark.

‘The gatekeeper nun. She says your father is a dyer. Handy with a pestle?’

Flavia stares at the indigo stains around her knuckles and shrugs a nod.

The sky is paler now the rain has stopped. Flavia keeps her cloth cap pulled well forward so only her swollen nose can be seen. She keeps pace with the worn-faced woman, who gives her name plainly and does not call herself Suora. Susanna is not dressed in the rich black robes of Suora Benedetta. She wears a short jacket and a blue striped skirt, patched around the hem, which is short like Flavia’s and shows her ankles as she moves.

They leave the rough ground around the barn, their clogs clipping in unison through the archway to a large courtyard. Flavia steals glances at the patchwork stones, bigger than the Casa Nascosta but less tightly knit, the gaps between them sprouting ryegrass. An open shutter reveals a dust-covered floor and the flicker of a rat’s tail disappearing behind a sack of grain. Further along, a staircase leads to a covered walkway looking over the courtyard, its ledge lined with potted flowers. Small windows are cut into the upper wall and several voices float through them, clear and precise, as though the speaker has given thought to both content and delivery before setting their tongues in motion.

‘You won’t see much of the choir nuns at this time of year,’ Susanna glances up at the windows. ‘They play games in their cells, or warm their slippers in the parlour. You will not tend them either, they have their own servant nuns.’

They round the edge of the building, away from the flowers and the clean floating voices. Flavia moves more freely as they leave the courtyard and pass once more into open ground. Shy glances to the left and right yield layers of information: the crumpled vegetables and string beans limp on their canes; browning fruit trees in a stony orchard. Pictures of a new world, each one margined by the edge of her own cap. Another boundary, beyond everything else, is the wall around the convent. It meanders alone or joins the surrounding buildings before coursing doggedly onwards, a seam of moss at its lower edge like the hem of a skirt dragged through a swamp.

At a place where two corners meet is a single-storey building whose sagging shutters lend it a sleepy, demoralised look. Susanna leads her inside and Flavia’s nostrils are immediately stung by a mustardy heat. A tall nun comes towards them and she lifts a cautious glance to a sweat-soaked face as crumpled as her robes.

*  *  *

The dispensary is a stuffy room, crammed with thick-bottomed jars and glass vials smeared with different coloured oils. It is like a smaller, much messier version of Maestro Bartofolo’s storeroom.

For the first time Flavia feels the knot in her stomach loosen a little. Though her shoulders ache from scrubbing at years of grime it is good to feel the yoke of work again. She can hear Susanna and the dispensary nun in the next room. Sometimes they come in to rattle among the shelves. Suora Dorotea is haphazard and constantly drops things but Susanna is calm and quick, her hands moving deftly among the curing herbs. When she sees Flavia unafraid to scour her hands with sand and stone she gives her a faint smile. Flavia is almost sorry when she tells her to go and get her supper.

Alone now, she finds her way over to the kitchen. She eases herself quietly through the doorway, trying to keep as far as possible from the grey figures of the servant nuns who dart between tabletops and steaming hearths with fretful lines on their foreheads.

A bowl of something thick and inelegant is thrust into her hands by one of the nuns. Flavia finds herself a stool near the waste bin. She dangles her feet and watches the sisters work. Occasionally one of them shoots her a look before turning away quickly, as though she has seen something by accident. These looks are worse than the village games at San Fortunato, when the boys chased the girls with muddy sticks and tried to prod their arms and necks. If she was hit then, a splinter might jab and break loose but that could be pulled out. The eyes of the grey nuns are harder to get rid of.

She takes her bowl and wanders outside.

The light is beginning to fade. Behind the kitchen a shallow incline leads up to a section of the wall where the roots of a poplar tree make little steps in the soil. Folding over the back of her skirts to make a cushion, Flavia perches on the thickest one and spoons the rest of her supper into her mouth. At the bottom of the bowl is a chicken bone which she snatches up. Sucking hard on the joint, she draws her knees up to her chin and looks to where the branches of the poplar arch over the wall. She runs her teeth around the bulb of the joint. From the dining hall come the sounds of a gathering over warm plates and laughter that is not like that of the village, where peasants wheeze and spit out their mirth.

Flavia’s ears are usually covered by her cap. Pia says it is better that way because they twist at the tips and poke between her plaits when her hair is greasy. She would not be without them though. Sitting on the poplar root in the evening light they are open to everything. The noises of the grey nuns from the kitchen, the voices in the dining hall, the creak of the miller’s wheel behind the wall …

The sound of a door clicking open.

She peers into the gloom. To a place where the back wall of the cloister makes way for a small door.

A sly turn and the slap of an iron catch, swiftly muffled as though a hand has been pressed against it. Not the way the gatekeeper nun opens and closes things.

There is nothing for a minute or so, and Flavia wonders if her ears are playing wanton tricks on her because she opened them too much. Then, very slowly, the panels of the door shimmer and narrow as it swings open.

*  *  *

A solitary figure. Slow like a night hunter, slender shoulders moving side to side. A cloak of dark blue trails behind slippered feet. The hood is drawn forward and rucked in places, outlining the shape of piled hair.

Glued to the shadows, Flavia holds her breath as the figure walks to the outer wall and takes a small object from its pocket. A flicker of light strikes the blade before it plunges into the stones, scraping from side to side. The crut-crut sound of a woodland bird at mating time.

The knife comes out of the wall and gloved fingers take its place, slowly easing a square block of stone out of the wall.

Flavia does not move. There is a belch of food and fear working its way up her throat, and she is not well hidden in the poplar roots. Her throat quivers and she burps quietly into her lap.

The figure leans into the place where the hole is made.

She is too far away to hear, and can only watch as the head disappears into the hole. Any words spoken through it are buried in the wall but she does not dare move except to shrink further into the roots as the head re-emerges.

The figure stands for a moment, both arms braced against the wall. The hood of her cape seems to tremble though the air is still.

A striking of bells from the chapel. The voices from the dining hall grow louder and somewhere above them a shutter is unlatched. Quickly the figure returns the stone to the wall then stoops to the ground, gathering a handful of dirt and pressing it around the edges.

The cloak swings back into the gloom.

*  *  *

The bells are for Vespers, but it is well past that hour when Flavia dares to move from the poplar roots.

Like the Casa Nascosta, it is easy to find it once you know it is there: a squarish block the size of a small dinner plate. The mortar round it is hollowed out, a deception of dirt squeezed into the cracks.

Still as winter rime, she presses an ear to the stone and listens for sounds from the other side.

Nothing.

She takes a twig from the ground and jabs it around the edges, loosening the dirt until the stone begins to shift. The moon is building by the time she takes the weight of it in her arms and sets it down.

She crouches, wary, knowing that a hole can work both ways.

Fingers scaling the stones like a thrifty abacus counter, she creeps up until she is level with the opening.

If there are eyes staring back from the other side there is no light to them.

She pushes her head further in. The edge of the hole peels at her cap and grazes her chin.

Through the gloom, an empty dirt road. It merges into cobbles that rise in an ambling see-saw, sprouting a row of small houses either side.

The beginning of the city. Rolling outwards and upwards.

Her eyes scale the rooflines, stopping here and there at houses bigger than the whole of San Fortunato. She had not realised that buildings could grow in layers, like olive trees on a sloping terrace. Great blocks of stone with flag-bearing towers cast a proud gaze on the houses below, as if to say that these smaller dwellings belong to the hedgerows and not their world.

There are lights too, the pallor of stars, far brighter than the sickly tallow of home. And over it all, the murmur of life coiling into the night sky: fervent and ceaseless.

*  *  *

It is almost dark. The edges of the hole press coldly into her cheeks but she does not want to go back to the loft and the girls with their tough words and fleshy backs. Her eyes bore through the gloom until they ache. She is shivering from something stronger than cold. Squeezing her hands under her armpits, Flavia keeps her face to the city and tries to imagine who among these black and grey nuns has cut her way through to the other side.