She rose to follow me, but she had heavy velvet skirts to weigh her down, and I’d dropped into that speedy undignified scuttle that I never used in her sight because I had to be tall for her, as tall as I could manage. I scuttled out of my chamber and slammed the door, and drawing the dagger at my belt, I wedged it fast between the door and the jamb. A few jolts would dislodge it, but that was all the time I needed to disappear from this palazzo.

“Leonello!” my mistress cried through the door, hammering on it, and I strode away without a second glance.

Giulia

For the very first time in my life I wanted to drink myself insensible. I wanted to sink my wretched body into a warm scented bath, I wanted to cuddle Laura tight and feel her arms about my neck, I wanted to curl up in my bed and weep for a very long time. What I did not want, at the very end of this agony-filled day, was Cesare Borgia striding into my sala with a curt “Come to my father at once.”

“No,” I said into my hands. I’d been sitting curled on my day bed with my head in my arms ever since my bodyguard vanished from the palazzo like a devil disappearing into a puff of smoke, and I saw no reason to change my plans just because my lover’s eldest son was being peremptory. “No, I am not going anywhere. I am not at your beck and call, Cesare, and all I want to do for the rest of this evening is curl up in a chair and weep.”

But Cesare was not inclined to take a woman’s tears seriously, or her wishes either for that matter, and striding across the sala, he took me by the arm and levered me up. “You will talk to my father, and you’ll do it now. He’s gone mad. Sweet Christ,” Cesare swore. “Three days and nights he refuses to eat or speak, and now he’s speaking again but he won’t speak sense!”

“What’s wrong?” Another terrible fear struck me. “Has he—harmed himself?”

“Worse.” Cesare sounded grim. “He wants to reform himself.”

I refused to believe him as he towed me out of the Palazzo Santa Maria, over the marble steps at the threshold where I’d stood for an hour waiting as one by one my guardsmen came back saying none of them had found or even glimpsed Leonello after he’d gone striding off into the teeming streets of Rome. I went on not believing what Cesare had told me, until he ushered me with great speed and none of his customary grace through the passages of the Vatican to the private papal apartments—and then I saw my Pope.