“Coming, Madonna Lucrezia,” I called back leadenly, and as I trudged back to the dank and dismal kitchens that were my new domain, I heard the convent bells begin to toll again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

—DANTE

Leonello

Even without turning, I knew the moment my mistress stepped into my chamber. The scent of honeysuckle and gillyflower filled my nose, and I took a deep breath of it and kept stuffing shirts into my pack.

Silence built, but I would not be the one to break it. I imagined a dozen things she might say, but her first words were, “You’ve changed your clothes.”

“I think these will suit me better in future.” I pushed the sleeves back on my patched linen shirt with the ill-fitting doublet above it. I wasn’t certain I’d kept my old clothes, the ones I’d worn when I was first hired to act as bodyguard to a cardinal’s concubine, but upon returning from the Convent of San Sisto, I found them stuffed at the bottom of my chest. I put them on in place of the crisp blacks that Giulia had designed for me as my own personal livery, even down to the boots she’d had specially fitted for my twisted legs. Dio, but my feet already missed those supple black boots with the reinforced soles and supportive seams, now lying in an abandoned heap with the black doublet and the black hose that actually fit my misshapen legs, and everything else I was leaving behind. On top of the pile was my deck of cards—the new deck, beautifully painted and gilt-edged, that Giulia had given me to replace the cards that Savonarola’s Angels had confiscated in Florence.

I wasn’t leaving this palazzo with one single solitary thing that had come from her. Not so much as a shirt-lace.

“I haven’t seen your chamber since you were recovering from your wounds after our French adventure.” Her skirts rustled behind me as she turned, examining the four walls I’d called home for the past few years. “I’d forgotten how small it is.”

“A dwarf doesn’t need much in the way of space.” Except for the fact that it had a high-corniced ceiling and no rats, my chamber in the Palazzo Santa Maria was not so different from the bolt-hole I used to rent in the Borgo in my days as card player. A narrow bed, a chest of clothes, a small shelf of books, a candle to read them by. The difference was all in the details.