I felt Leonello go rigid at my side, and glanced at him.

“—My brother died, all because Leonello couldn’t bear to leave his precious Giulia even for an hour, and—and—” The little Countess’s chin quivered. “Oh, Juan!” She went off into another gale of weeping.

“Lucrezia, don’t be absurd!” Giulia exclaimed with a little smile. “Leonello certainly doesn’t—”

My eyes flicked down to her little bodyguard. I had never seen his face anything but guarded, quizzical, sometimes amused—but for one horrified instant all his defenses were gone.

Giulia looked puzzled, gazing at him as Lucrezia bawled into a cushion. “Leonello?”

Leonello’s gaze touched her for just a split second, touched her and then leaped away again like a drop of water leaping off a hot stove. His usual cool mask blinked back into place half a heartbeat later, but the agony in that one split-second glance sent a ribbon of ice crawling down my spine. I felt a great swell of pity.

Perhaps there were worse things, when it came to matters of the heart, than falling into the arms of your seven-years-younger apprentice after eating too many fried tubers.

“Madonna Giulia,” I heard myself saying as Lucrezia continued her oblivious wailing and Leonello stood expressionless and blank-eyed as a statue. “Perhaps Messer Leonello and I may be excused? We don’t wish to intrude . . .”

Leonello was gone the moment Giulia nodded, giving a wooden bow and disappearing through the door. I heard his boots retreating down the stone steps, almost running, and Giulia looked after him as if she wanted to follow.

“Don’t,” I heard myself saying. “Madonna Giulia . . . I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“Very well.” She sank back down onto the bed beside Lucrezia, who was now weeping more softly, and my mistress’s face was now stricken as well as puzzled as I bowed out. It took another hour to calm the Countess of Pesaro. I waited in the passage outside with a hovering Pantisilea, gnawing my thumbnail, Leonello nowhere in sight, until at last Madonna Lucrezia’s voice called for her maids again.

“You can’t stay, Giulia?” the little Countess was asking as we tiptoed back through the doors. Lucrezia sat up and wiped her face, limp and spent and more or less calm, her momentary flash of spite forgotten. “I’m going to weep all night if I don’t have someone to comfort me.”

“So will your father, if I’m not there.” Gently but firmly, Madonna Giulia disengaged her clinging hands. “I really must go back to the palazzo, Lucrezia—I shouldn’t have left them all, but I didn’t want you to hear the news from a stranger, and neither did Cesare.”