“You’re not so old as that.” I motioned the maids back out of earshot. “Go on.”

“Well, that Sancha. She made one of her little jokes—oh, what a nasty piece she is, Joffre deserved better! She joked about lending me that expensive cream she rubs into her face. Not that it would do me any good, she said, because I had wrinkled old skin like a lizard.” Adriana’s hand crept up to touch her own cheek.

“Sancha’s a tart,” I comforted. “A thoughtless little tart who probably has the French disease by now. We’ll see how much she pokes fun at other people’s looks when she starts coming out in pustules.”

“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.”