“Oh, not all of it,” I shrugged, hanging up her damp cloak. Servants were approaching with trays and cups of warmed wine, but I waved them back for the moment. “Your Pope is no marrano, and we both know Lucrezia does not pleasure her brothers or her father, and I doubt our good Cardinal Cesare practices dark magic. But for the rest of it, well, Juan Borgia has raped more than one virgin who had to be packed off to a convent, and Cesare is certainly capable of murder, and since our departed Pope Innocent VIII left us with empty coffers, his successor has filled them by means of selling benefices. And I believe a rather hefty sum changed hands when King Louis XII wished to divorce his queen and indicated he was willing to pay for the required dispensation.”

“How do you know these things?” my mistress whispered.

“It’s common knowledge, Madonna Giulia.”

“But the rest of it.” She shook her head a little. “What that stalk-necked boy said about drunken orgies and incest—”

“Half-truths.” I spread my hands. “Cesare Borgia sleeps with his sister-in-law, after all—why not his sister too? The Pope dotes so much upon his daughter that he called her away from her husband to visit him—so surely she shares his bed as well as his table. As for naked women in the Vatican, stripped for the Pope’s pleasure while he watches with his friends—well, it might not have been an orgy, but I think you can recall a recent event along those lines.”

Giulia stared at me as though I had horns. “This is how people see him? All of them?”

I thought of Cesare, who knew where to find a murderer of innocent women and didn’t care a fig about it except to find my silent burning frustration amusing. I thought of the Pope, who in the early days would not ever have exposed his pearl to the world’s greedy eyes. I thought of Lucrezia with her rouged cheeks, and Sancha arching greedily against me. I shrugged again.

“But it’s not fair!” Giulia burst out. “There have been other popes with bastard children—Pope Innocent had sixteen! And Rodrigo is hardly the first to sell a benefice or two, or hand out red hats and bishoprics among his family. So why does he incite them to all this hatred”—waving the pamphlet—“and not the others?”

I paused, leaning against the doorjamb and reflecting. A good question, that. “Perhaps because unlike the others, this pope hides nothing,” I offered. “In the past, a pope passed his bastard daughters off as nieces rather than marrying them off openly in the Vatican in huge weddings. Popes promoted a few family members—not all of them. Popes at least pretended virtue—smuggled their mistresses in through discreet passageways, rather than installing them openly in luxurious seraglios.”