Though I did almost come to tears that evening when I saw the torchlit procession that took Juan from the Castel Sant’Angelo to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where (Joffre had told me, through tears that made him look ten years old again) their weeping mother Vannozza had already made arrangements for Juan’s burial. Juan in his gaudy Gonfalonier’s finery, borne along on a bier surrounded by two hundred torchbearers, his household guards and his military officers, and his crowd of swaggering young Spanish bravos who trailed along now with their fine tail feathers draggled in the dust. I saw one of Juan’s little Spanish dwarves trotting along in the jam of the household that followed the bier. Juan had brought a great many dwarf jesters with him from Spain, liking to dress them in motley and set them beating each other with blunted clubs for the amusement of his soldiers after dinner. But this dwarf was toddling after the bier now, scrubbing at his eyes, and I wondered if he was crying for his master or for the position he’d lost. Somehow I doubted it was Juan. . . . The whole procession was ringed by Spanish guards, staring out murderously into the Roman crowd with their blades drawn, but there was no violence—only wailing, and a great unease.

I could see Juan’s profile, wax-pale in the light of the torches held over his bier, and his still face had a beauty that stabbed me. A beauty it had never had in life, when any good looks he possessed were gilded by arrogance and vanity and fatuous pride. I could not help but wonder if he could ever have looked as pure and peaceful in life as he did on his bier.

Maybe if he had not been born a Borgia, I thought, and shivered.

Nine knife wounds, to the limbs and body and throat. Nine, and the money not even taken from his pouch. A purse full of gold ducats, far more than a laboring man could earn in a year. Whoever had killed him . . .

“My carriage is arranged for dawn?” I checked with the stewards when I arrived back at the Palazzo Santa Maria. “Good. Can you send Leonello to me, please?” He hadn’t accompanied me to the Vatican to wait with Rodrigo; he often didn’t, as there were papal guards there to see to my protection. But he always came bounding up as soon as I returned to the palazzo, tapping his latest book against the outside of his leg, one finger marking the page where he’d left off—and tonight, I didn’t see him. “I want to speak with him at once,” I said, and suppressed a shudder. If I could speak the terrible suspicions that lurked somewhere in the base of my throat.