“Bathsheba,” I exhaled.

Sodoma’s eyes bulged even wider—if that’s possible—and he grabbed my collar. “Do. Not. Curse. Here.” He looked this way and that. “The accursed Spaniard buried beneath doesn’t like it. Does. Not. Like. It. Understood?”

“No. Who’s the accursed . . .”

Sodoma slapped his hand over my mouth and whispered, “If you want to keep your pretty little head, never speak of the ‘accursed Spaniard’ buried beneath ever again. Never. No one is allowed down there. No one.”

I nodded. He released me, and I slumped down on the scaffolding. I was exhausted, broke, and working alongside a paranoid painter spouting conspiracies. How was I supposed to impress anyone—much less a pope—using atrocious designs to paint nothing but a tiny tondo?

The remainder of my first week in the papal apartments didn’t go any better. Perugino turned the other painters against me. Lorenzo Lotto spit off the scaffolding every time I walked by— spit!—and one morning, the brushes I’d managed to borrow from Sodoma went missing, only the broken-handled and bristleless remained. (Stealing brushes? I felt like a twelve-year-old fending off fellow apprentices. At least, I kept my father’s old brush secured in my pocket.) I did manage to borrow an extra vest from Sodoma and trade drawings at the market for two more shirts and pairs of breeches, enough to cover me until my trunk from Evangelista arrived. I also traded sketches for turnips and pears down by the Tiber and supplemented this meager fare by scavenging for stale scraps of bread already picked over by the sparrows or asking Sodoma for a bite of his beans at the noontime meal—“I’m searching for the best recipe,” I would insist. I wasn’t exactly fed, but the snacks kept starvation at bay. For now. The Vatican provided us with basic supplies, but they had not given me an assistant—those were to come out of our own purses—so I didn’t have anyone to mix me a proper plaster.

When I asked Perugino for a plaster recipe, he said, “Use a Florentine mix.”

Thank the Virgin that my mother taught me how to swallow a laugh, right? A Florentine fresco mix? In Rome? How gullible did Perugino think I was? Yes, I’d spent most of my early career working in oil on wood, and this was my first fresco project to head up on my own, but even I knew that a Florentine recipe would be too watery for all that humidity. It would never dry firmly overnight. It would grow mold and have to be destroyed. I could lose days of work. I mustered a cheery tone and replied, “Ah yes, the Florentines always know best.” I laughed. Perugino laughed. We nodded our “good days” and went about our business.