Madonna Giulia was still looking at the mask in her lap, and I tried to coax a smile from her. “It’s just a masquerade, Madonna Giulia. Harmless fun, you know—and I come from Venice; I know about masquerades.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Giulia smiled at me, and a thoughtful gleam lit her eye. Seizing my wrist, she pulled me up from the stool and looked me over. “Well, I may not particularly want to act the hostess in a horned mask for this affair, but if I’m to do it, I shall have some fun. What beast will we dress you up as, Carmelina?”

“Me?” I nearly blurted out that the last time I’d worn a mask, it had been fleeing a convent during Carnivale while dressed as a man in order to escape charges of altar desecration. “Madonna Giulia, I’m just the one making sugar subtleties and preparing the banquet. Not a guest.”

“Nonsense. Every one of my maids is going; we’re sneaking you all in for a lark.” She gave her enchanting grin. “In a mask and a costume, who’s to know? There will be hundreds of guests; no one will ever find out.”

“You’d have a costume and a mask made for me, when I’d never wear it but once?” I cast an incredulous eye about the swatches of fine-woven cloth, the fragile costly masks. “The expense—”

“Bother the expense,” said my mistress blithely. Of course, she never had to think about the cost of anything. Ten extra costumes so all her maids could attend the masquerade? Why not!

Very few noble ladies like Giulia Farnese bothered befriending their maidservants as she did, but I’d long since gotten used to the informality in the Palazzo Santa Maria. The plain truth was that La Bella had no women to talk to but the maidservants. The other highborn wives of Rome were far too virtuous to come calling on the Pope’s whore. They envied her looks, they copied everything she wore, they fawned on her at public functions if their husbands needed some favor from the Holy Father—but they were certainly too good to befriend her. So she befriended the palazzo’s maids instead, gossiping and giggling with them, lending them her perfumes and hair potions, drying their tears over failed love affairs or helping arrange marriages for them. I couldn’t count the number of times Madonna Giulia had come tripping into my kitchens for a plate of biscotti or a little cooking instruction (at least until I banned her from cooking instruction, because the woman could set cold water on fire just by walking past the pot).