“God be praised,” intoned one of the other Angels, a stringy fellow not yet old enough to shave. He cast a look at me, and I thought it wise to surrender my worn deck of cards. I’d had that deck for more than five years, since the days I’d made my money playing primiera and fleecing sailors out of their wages . . . the other two guardsmen were quick to follow my lead, contributing between them a set of bone-carved dice and a little good-luck charm on a silver chain. I tensed as the stringy Angel sniffed at our contributions. If he tried to take my knives . . .

The stocky leader still looked dissatisfied with Giulia. My mistress had listened to her sister’s warnings about the new austerity demanded of the women of Florence, and kept her silks and jewels for the privacy of the sala—venturing out today, she wore a gray wool dress under her fur-lined robe, and not even a ring for adornment. There was nothing the Angels could reproach—except the fact that even wrapped in gray wool, La Bella looked luscious and bewitching and tempting enough to inspire all kinds of sin.

“That hair,” the Angel finally said. “That’s false hair, that is. A hairpiece that might as well be woven of vanity!”

“Vanity and immodesty!” the stringy Angel thundered.

“It’s not false hair,” my mistress protested. “It all grows on my head, I assure you.”

“You’re lying, madonna. No woman has that much hair.”

“Oh, Holy Virgin save me,” Giulia said, and in an exasperated jerk she pulled off the net and shook her hair down around her. “Does that satisfy you?”

The Angels all insisted on giving it a good tug to make sure it was real, and I tensed at Giulia’s side but her gaze flicked at me in warning.

“You should cut that hair and add it to the fire,” the first Angel warned, pulling the long waves through his fingers just a bit more slowly than I thought strictly necessary. “A woman’s hair is her vanity. She adorns herself with it, she takes pride in it, and soon enough she is plucking and dyeing like a whore.”

“Or like that pack of Borgia sluts in Rome.” The stringy Angel spat into the street. “The Pope’s daughter, she suns her hair all day while drinking and dallying with lovers.”

Giulia’s chin jerked at that. “Madonna Lucrezia is the most pious of girls—”

“A slut,” the first Angel insisted, and thrust something into my mistress’s hands. “Read this if you want the truth of it. Lucrezia Borgia plays the whore for her own father and her brothers, and so does that harlot princess from Naples. They pleasure themselves on the altars of the holy Basilica itself, drunken and naked, and the Pope and his pack of corrupt cardinals like to watch—”