I really don’t know why women bother so much with their gowns. We fuss so much over the cut of a headdress, the width of a neckline, the exact degree to which a shift can be pulled through the slits of a sleeve. I suppose we do it for ourselves, for the satisfaction we get looking in the glass and knowing we can sally out into the world looking our best. Or we do it for other women, hoping that there won’t be a single married matron or virgin girl at Mass paying attention to the sermon because they’ll all be taking down every detail of your new sleeves with French puffs. We certainly shouldn’t bother dressing for men. Because if a man approves of how you look in that new gown, the only thing he wants to do is get it off you.

“Rodrigo—” I could feel his mouth making its way down my neck, and I bumped him in reproof with the gilded unicorn horn of my mask. “We’ll be late!”

“Men are always willing to wait for beauty, and they are taught from the cradle to wait for God.” The white brocade gown with its sleeves and ribbons of rosy gauze slid from my shoulders under his hands. “You are Beauty and I am God, so they can damned well wait all night.”

“Blasphemer,” I accused, but smiled. My papal bull smiled back at me, a bull in truth tonight with a mulberry red doublet molding his heavy shoulders instead of his papal robes, a red bull mask with curving gilt horns crowning his head. He should have been worn to the bone after the panoply of ceremony and splendor that had consumed his days during Holy Week. There is nothing on earth more exhausting than Easter. I was so tired by the end of a week’s array of relics and parades and sermons that I dozed off in the Sistine Chapel during Tenebrae, right at the place in the Mass where my soul was supposed to be harrowed.