“I can’t leave him in this grief!” The howls from the chapel tore at me like claws. “I’ll wait here outside the doors all night if I must, but surely I should be here when he needs me—”

“I’ll tell him you’ve gone to Lucrezia; he’ll understand that. And besides, better to leave him for a time than to let him realize you are not particularly sorry Juan is gone.”

“I don’t—”

“Speak truth. It’s my father you grieve for, not my brother.”

I looked at Cesare, holding himself as calmly as ever. “I don’t think you’re terribly sorry about Juan either,” I heard myself remarking with a ludicrous numb candor. I felt as though I were floating above the ground, wrapped in wool away from anything that was real. “How long will it be before you start angling to put away your cardinal’s hat and help yourself to all Juan’s military posts?”

“A month or two,” Cesare returned, unruffled, and I shivered at his calm. “But until then, I can pretend sadness for my father. You aren’t very good at pretending, Giulia, and I don’t want him to remember your lack of any real grief later, and resent you. Better you come rushing back in a few days to console him, once he realizes he needs consolation, and he will welcome you as a balm and not a reminder. I will be counting on you, then, to help put him back together.”

“How clever,” I said. I didn’t like Cesare, but I could see the sense of what he said. Besides, I had no energy to refuse him. “I’ll go to Lucrezia at once.”

“Set off tomorrow at dawn,” Cesare said. “The streets will be too wild to travel tonight. Now, she’ll want to come back with you, but see she stays where she is. If murderers struck down Juan, I want Lucrezia kept safe behind convent walls.”

I turned to take myself home, wincing again as I heard the weeping from behind the chapel door. My poor Pope, I thought, and Cesare was right. Juan’s death grieved me only for the sorrow it gave Rodrigo. And I thought there would be a good many in Rome to echo that sentiment, no matter what pious platitudes were uttered in the days to come.