“But Lucrezia laughed!” Adriana’s eyes flew up to mine, and I saw her chin quiver. “She laughed too, and there was a plate of biscotti they were sharing, and she said I wasn’t to have any because I was getting too plump.” Adriana plucked at the generous lacing over the bodice of her violet velvet gown. “That sweet girl I helped raise, mocking me. Not for the first time, either. A week back, she was twitting me about my hair; said I was too old to be using curling tongs . . .”

I could feel my teeth grit. “You know she didn’t mean it. Not really.”

“Oh, I know.” A gusty sigh. “But Lucrezia’s changed, you know—they’ve all changed. Rodrigo, well, you didn’t know him as a boy like I did, but the boy I knew wouldn’t have hanged a guest at a party for a few insults!”

My thoughts froze on that. A corpse at a masquerade, hanging from a railing like a dead chicken on the walls of Carmelina’s kitchens, and Rodrigo had treated it like nothing. As though the man were no more important than a dead chicken. “Bah!” he finally snapped when I’d railed at him too long. “Leave it, Giulia! People can say what they like of Us; We are God’s Vicar. But they will keep their tongues off Our family! We would have strung the man up for making any insult to you as well!”

Not five years ago, you wouldn’t have, I couldn’t help thinking.

Adriana was still talking, that quiver running through her voice. “They’re all different, you know. Juan brawling like a mad dog; he’s always been a wild boy, but the things I hear about his army outside Bracciano . . . not to mention his goings-on in Spain. Joffre getting sulky and bad-tempered, hitting the servants and kicking the dogs out of the way when he used to be so good-natured. And Cesare, well, what to say about him.”

“But you don’t have to leave.” Once I’d have been delighted to get rid of my mother-in-law’s watchful eye, but not like this. “They need you.”

“No, they don’t.” Her eyes met mine, tired and watery. “And whom they don’t need, they discard. I just never thought it would be me, after all I’ve—well, never mind.”

That silenced me. Adriana’s loyalty had always been to my Pope—something to do with the way he had protected her and the young Orsino when her husband died and the wolves began circling for Orsino’s inheritance. She’d been loyal to Rodrigo ever since, and that had been another thing that had once made me resentful, because who wants a mother-in-law who tattles to the Pope himself whenever she gets wind of misbehavior in the family?

And now she was to be tossed aside, after all that loyalty, with a few casual insults.

“Lucrezia will apologize,” I said. If I had to break every bone in her body, she’d apologize. “Surely then—”