I did not even recognize the bent figure in humble homespun robes, kneeling in prayer not at the elaborately carved and gilded prie-dieu, but on the hard floor itself. Then he turned his head and I saw the hooked nose and gray grief-stricken face of Rodrigo Borgia. All at a stroke, in the days since Juan’s death, he had grown old.

I could not resist flying to him, putting my hands to his face. “Oh, Rodrigo,” I whispered, and he allowed me to embrace him, fold his head against my bosom. I felt tears drop from my eyes to his tonsured head, but I didn’t know if the tears were all for him or for—

“Giulia,” the Pope said, pulling away from me and rising. “You should not have come.”

“I only wish to comfort you—”

“My son is dead,” Rodrigo said simply. “If I had seven papal thrones instead of one, I would give them all to have Juan alive again. No one can comfort me.”

I felt rather than saw the Pope’s living son fold himself against the tapestries, inscrutable and silent as ever. “God is looking over Juan now,” I said, and wondered how many lies, how much blood, had swirled around that name—that vicious, prancing boy surely damned to hell.

Rodrigo was looking at Juan’s magnificently turbaned figure in Pinturicchio’s fresco. “I will have all this removed,” he said, waving a ringed hand that suddenly seemed shrunken to my eyes. “The gilt, the paint, the marble. Simplicity will become me better in future.”

“Your Holiness?” I said, cautious.

“God has seen fit to punish Us for Our sins.” Rodrigo turned from me, folding his hands into his homespun sleeves. “It is the only explanation. Juan did not deserve such a death.”

I bit my tongue at that.

“My son’s killers will be found,” Rodrigo said in his sonorous Spanish bass as though addressing the whole College of Cardinals, and I bit my tongue even harder. “They will be found and tried, but there must be more. There must be change. There will be change. We have prayed upon it; God has spoken to Us. His Holy Church has become a sinkhole, and We have allowed her to be fouled. No more.”

I looked at him even more cautiously.