“No.” Another glower beneath the cloud of blond curls. “’Crezia wouldn’t make me learn letters. ’Crezia lets me do whatever I like!”

“I’ve noticed. But today you will practice your letters.” My daughter might only be four, but it was already time to consider her future education, and I found myself wanting more for her than the usual subjects that had been laid out for me at her age. All I had ever learned was dancing and prayers and embroidery stitches; how to keep a household’s books and twang very badly on a lute. I wanted more for my daughter.

Not that she appreciated it. Laura whined, and then she wailed, and then when I administered a brisk smack to her bottom through her skirts, she roared. But I marched her along to the pleasant sunny chamber where the balding tutor I’d engaged waited with some apprehension at the sound of his pupil’s yelling. “You will sit up straight for Signore Angelotti,” I said, cutting off her indignant howls with a little shake. “You will be courteous, and you will be obedient. Yes, Lauretta mia?”

Her lip still pushed out, but she gave a sulky bump of a curtsy for me. “Yes, Mamma.”

“Good girl.”

“You don’t speak Latin, Madonna Giulia,” Leonello pointed out as I shut the door on my daughter’s rebellious mumbling and set off down the loggia toward my own chamber again. “Or French, and you can’t translate Plato, either. So why do you want Laura to be a little scholar?”

“Because she’s getting spoiled, and the discipline will do her good. I don’t want her growing into some pouting featherbrain who thinks she can never do wrong.” Like Juan. I really did not like it at all, that petulant push of the lower lip Laura shared with my Pope’s favorite son. “Laura’s going to have every advantage to turn her into a fine woman,” I said, and it was a vow I intended to keep if it killed me. Or her. “She’ll learn dancing and music and embroidery, but she’ll have languages and philosophy too, and I’ll teach her to give to beggars and feed stray dogs and—and everything else I can think of. Everything that will make her thoughtful and kind—”

“The other Borgia children grew up with much the same advantages,” Leonello said. “And none of them are particularly thoughtful or kind, are they? I believe it takes more than a few tutors to instill good character, Madonna Giulia.”