“Thank you,” I said calmly, and laid the letter unopened on the stone bench beneath the hazelnut tree. “Shall we read the story of Hades and Persephone together, Laura?” I asked, dismissing Fra Teseo, and did not look at the letter again until my husband came striding into the garden a little while later, his eyes lighting at the sight of me as they always did. I allowed mine to light up too, as I saw my lean and handsome Orsino in his riding boots and his fair wind-mussed hair.

“Good hunting today, my little rose,” he said, as he said every day, whether he had bagged a stag or a squirrel or nothing at all. And then his face fell as I placed the letter in his hand.

“For you,” I said, as was proper because a married woman got no letters that her husband did not read, and so I went back to Laura and looked over her shoulder as her lips moved along the lines of Leonello’s clear writing. “Pomegranate, Laura, sound it out. That’s the present Hades gives Persephone . . . ”

My husband had no glances for Laura—he rarely did. He could never help searching her face as though looking for signs of his rival, so mostly he avoided looking at her at all. He stood in the garden staring at the letter in his hand as though it were a snake. “I thought the last one was—well, the last one.”

“So did I,” I said, and ran my finger over Laura’s page for her. “Yes, Lauretta mia, you may have a pomegranate with your cena this evening, and you may eat all the seeds you want. No one will keep you in the underworld.”

Laura looked disappointed. “I want to see the underworld.”

“Oh, no you don’t!”

“Here—” Orsino pushed the letter back at me. “You read it.” He always did that, but I still left the letters unopened until he gave me leave to read them. I would give him no cause to think I was writing to Rodrigo behind his back.

“Well?” His hands clasped and unclasped at his sides, crumpling his fine hunting gloves as I broke the seal and read the familiar bold sloping scrawl. “Is it the usual sort of thing? He wishes you to return to Rome?”

“No,” I said slowly. “No, he seems to have given up. At least on that matter.”

“Good.” Orsino looked at me, gnawing his lip. “That is good, isn’t it? You wrote to him a fortnight ago, you were very firm . . .”

I’d let him read my letter before I dispatched it to the Holy Father. Rodrigo’s missives had begun coming for me not six weeks after I left Rome for Carbognano—just as Cesare had predicted. We would have you back at Our side, that letter came first, and when that went unanswered, You pain Us greatly by your absence, and when that went unanswered too there were a few furious rounds of Ungrateful, unfaithful Giulia! The usual sort of thing, in other words, and I won’t say I wasn’t tempted for a moment to return—return to Rodrigo, to the Palazzo Santa Maria, to the life I’d enjoyed in the Holy City.