But it wouldn’t be that same life, would it? Not the life I’d had with Leonello at my side, with Adriana and Carmelina and Pantisilea, with Lucrezia still innocent and chattering and young. My friends were gone. And here in Carbognano I had a castello filled with a growing band of new friends, and a lake where my Laura was free to run and play as a child should rather than sit still like a doll on display . . . and just like that, the flash of temptation when I opened Rodrigo’s letters was gone. I’d sat down a fortnight ago and written him a brief note avowing my future fidelity to my lord husband Orsino Orsini, whose child (I lied smoothly to the Holy Father) I was now carrying. And my prayers went always with His Holiness and the great reforms he had planned after the death of the Duke of Gandia, may God rest his soul.

I knew Rodrigo. That should have been the end of it.

“What is it?” Orsino peered at the lines in Rodrigo’s hand. “You said he’s not recalling you to Rome.”

“No.” I passed him the letter, nudging the goat away before it could eat the tassels off Orsino’s boots. My husband avoided my pet goat just as he avoided my daughter—yet another thing I’d brought from my former life in Rome. “The Pope is recalling Laura,” I said, and my mouth was dry.

Orsino read, and Laura looked up at the sound of her name. My beautiful fair-haired girl, looking the part of a country child now in a linen dress fit for grubbing in the garden and pebble-gathering by the lake. My Laura, who had learned to ride a pony this summer by scrambling on and off its broad back rather than being led formally about by grooms; who had a scattering of freckles across her little nose and no one to admonish her that freckles weren’t proper; who ran races and played hoodman-blind with the other children in the castello rather than being passed about at parties by giggling ladies who urged her to perform for their amusement. “The Holy Father wishes to arrange a betrothal for Laura,” I said through a throat suddenly turned sticky with fear.

“But she’s only seven.” Orsino was still reading.

Laura was not even five, but I didn’t press the point. “Lucrezia had a betrothal at seven,” I said instead. And Lucrezia was now sighing her days away in a convent, waiting for a divorce at the age of seventeen. Lucrezia, who had been almost as sweet-natured and pretty as my Laura when she was a child.

And my daughter was so pretty, so tall and quick and laughing with such dark mischievous eyes. She’d abandoned her book now, and plopped herself in the grass to weave a flower chain around my pet goat’s neck . . . A daughter for any man to be proud of, especially a man who adored his family. A man who had lost one child and might be feeling newly possessive of the rest.