“Drive on,” Giulia called to her captain, and the carriage jolted into motion again. Giulia stared into her own thoughts, stroking Laura’s hair, and I watched the enormous cloud of smoke rising into the sky as we pulled away from it. The paintings that would be going up in the engulfing flames, the statues, the works of art, the books. Dio, the books.

Just as much trash as art, I told myself. Would the world really be so deprived, losing a few cosmetics pots and pairs of dice and bad paintings of naked goddesses?

But the books, I couldn’t help thinking, and a twist of helpless anger curdled my stomach.

“I thought for a moment that I saw Maestro Botticelli in that crowd,” Giulia said perhaps an hour outside Florence. “He was tossing his own paintings on the fire. I suppose one of them was the sketch of me.”

“I suppose so,” I answered.

“Good,” said Giulia Farnese.

I wasn’t stupid enough to say so, but I couldn’t agree with her there. Because I’d seen that sketch take shape under Botticelli’s hand, during that one awkward sitting in the papal apartments, and even half formed in chalk lines with the colors just hinted at, it had the look of something breathtaking. He’d caught her expression, a fearful wonder I’d seen as I described the things they said of her Pope, and her hair would have been a marvel of a thing on canvas, picked out in gold leaf and contrasting with the white of her body and the darkness he’d scribbled about her with the half-formed serpents and monsters of the underworld. A canvas that might have rivaled his Birth of Venus, and now the world would never see it.

Savonarola’s great bonfire was only a smudge on the horizon behind us now, but the wind had caught the whirling cloud of ash and brought it down on the road like a strangely warm storm. Flakes of ash powdered Giulia’s hair like deathly snow as we made our way back to Rome.

PART TWO

PART TWO

April 1497–June 1497

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

O bawdy Church . . .

You have become a wanton whore with your lust.

You are lower than the beasts, a monster of depravity.

—FRA SAVONAROLA

Carmelina

Carmelina.” Madonna Giulia greeted me distractedly. “What do unicorns eat?”

“Um.” I blinked. “Virgins?”

“That’s dragons. Isn’t it? I thought unicorns only got captured by virgins.” Giulia rummaged in a box before her mirror, back to me. “And then there’s the question of what lions eat, and serpents and peacocks and swans. Goodness,” she sighed. “It’s going to be a disaster.”