“Besides, you’ll lose your looks someday, and the Pope’s favor with them, and then where will we all be? But if you’ve managed to betroth Laura to an Este or a Gonzaga, well, that’s something we can all fall back on.”

“I am touched by your concern for your niece,” I said tartly.

“I only want her properly married,” Gerolama retorted. “A countess or a duchess, think of it! Or are you going to groom her to take your path instead?”

My voice slid from tart to freezing. “My daughter will never be an old man’s plaything.”

The words startled me, coming out so fast and unthinking. Perhaps because it wasn’t quite the fate I had pictured for myself, when I was a little girl who also loved sparkles and swirling skirts.

Laura soon slid off my lap and bounced away to go play with the new litter of kittens in the kitchens—“Can I have one, Mamma? Can I, can I?”—and Gerolama was soon complaining of the insolence of her maidservants and the difficulties of keeping dust off her carpets. Eternal topics among respectable women, and perhaps there were more benefits to being a harlot than I’d previously thought, like the fact that most respectable women refused to talk to me. They rushed to copy any item of clothing I wore on my sinful body, but my sinful conversation was entirely shunned.

Still, I was glad I’d come to Florence, even if my sister did grate against me. I could play with Laura all day long now, brush her curls and tell her stories and applaud her as she took up her miniature lute with great seriousness and fumbled through her first simple song with every bit as little musical talent as her mother. All the time with my daughter that I wanted, without being interrupted by some obsequious archbishop murmuring about how much he would appreciate a new benefice from the Pope. In Florence I could relax my morning routine, leave off dressing my hair in those elaborate plaits and curls that took hours and left my neck rigid, without having the Tart of Aragon make some pointed comment about how sad it was when a woman stopped taking trouble with her looks. I could rise early to watch the dawn if I liked without being exhausted from some endless banquet the evening before; I could throw on any gown I liked for Mass because nobody cared if I had worn the same thing to Mass two weeks ago; I could go riding without Lucrezia always trying to make sure her riding dress was just a little finer than mine. I could spend an entire morning in my shift if I wanted, savoring my way through Avernus’s sonnets and reading bits out loud just to annoy Leonello. “Listen to Sonnet VIII; surely even you have to admit it’s marvelous. He compares his Aurora to Helen of Troy—”