“Then leave us,” Cesare Borgia said carelessly. “We have no need of you, Sforza. Not now.” And putting his serpent’s arm about Lucrezia’s shoulders, he walked her away as guardsmen tossed the free end of the rope up to the high rail of the loggia overhead, and the bear-headed lordling just shrieked.

I did not watch him hang. I turned away, half blind in my mask, and pushed through the crowd back to the servants’ door. I tore off my giraffe’s face, feeling the gorge rise in my throat. “What’s happened?” Marco greeted me, holding a wad of cloth to his bleeding lip, but I shoved past him and fled to my tiny chamber, ripping the dappled hose and doublet away with shaking fingers. The next day it was whispered everywhere in Rome that the masquerade had continued its merriment after the man hanged—that the Pope and his concubine trod a happy basse-danse under the jerking boots. Lies, all lies. The guests trailed out uncertainly, hiding their masks under their cloaks like shameful things. Giulia turned away from her bull before he could approach her, fleeing upstairs, and her brother Cardinal Farnese barred the Pope from following. I saw her later at the window of her chamber, still clutching Leonello’s lion mask, looking ghastly sick as she stared out over the city.

No one ate my sugar subtleties. The spun-sugar unicorn, the swan and the peacock, the bull with its molded horns I had painstakingly applied with gold leaf; none of them were even carried up to the garden. I stood down in the kitchens long after the stewards and undercooks and the rest of my uneasy scullions had gone to bed, staring at the sugar unicorn. Its horn still lay broken off beside its prancing gilded hooves; no one had mended it with egg white and a brush, and that was when I realized Bartolomeo was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER SEVEN

A greedy youth, self-important, proud, vicious, and irrational.

—A CONTEMPORARY’S DESCRIPTION OF JUAN BORGIA

Giulia

Everyone dislikes their mother-in-law, and at the beginning of my marriage, I was no exception.

Adriana da Mila had brokered the arrangement between Orsino and the Pope—the arrangement that had turned her son’s wife into the Borgia concubine—and as a bewildered new bride I had found that very hard indeed to swallow. Complain all you like about your mother-in-law; mine was a procuress.