This pope pretended nothing, hid nothing, was ashamed of nothing. I supposed that was the most unforgivable sin of all.

The chill February wind gave a moaning gust outside the door, and I saw Giulia shiver. “What will they say of Laura?” she said in a low voice. “Just because she is a Borgia and can be painted with the same brush?”

“She was christened an Orsini.”

“She’s a Borgia. Rodrigo might doubt it, but no one else in Rome does, and isn’t that what matters? What people want to believe?” Giulia sounded bitter. “Will they say she’s the bastard get of a fallen woman, a little harlot in the cradle?”

“Probably,” I said.

Giulia shook her head and rose, the pamphlet still crumpled in her fist.

“Let’s get upstairs to the sala,” I said, and touched her arm. “You look cold.”

“I am cold,” she sighed. “Cold to the bone.”

A whole entourage of papal guards in the Borgia colors awaited us in sour Gerolama’s overheated little sala. A stolid captain stepped forward, offering Giulia a sealed missive stamped with the Pope’s own seal. “We are to escort you back to Rome at once, Madonna Giulia,” the captain intoned. “His Holiness will not have you caught in Fra Savonarola’s unrest. News of this coming bonfire disturbs him.”

Frankly, it disturbed me. I looked at my mistress, wondering if she would disobey him in her anger over being stripped before half the College of Cardinals. But she looked down at the Pope’s seal, and her free hand drifted up to touch her head, which must have been aching after all the yanking the Angels had done on her hair. “I will pack,” she said, and I let out a silent breath of relief. This was no city for the Bride of Christ, nor for anything beautiful. Fra Savonarola was a man of dust and pain; he wanted everything beautiful rendered to ash. The Borgias might have their sins, but I could not count their love of beauty as one of them.

* * *

In the end, however, we did see the great burning that would be known as the Bonfire of the Vanities. The fires were lit at noon, accompanied by a citywide clamor of church bells, and smoke was roiling up toward the sky when Madonna Giulia’s carriage with its envelope of papal guards rolled out into the streets of Florence. Even emptier streets—everyone in this city, it seemed, had flocked to watch the burning. Or else they stayed home and prayed.

“Stop the carriage,” Madonna Giulia called to her captain as we approached the Piazza della Signoria.

“Madonna—”

“I said stop!”