“We summon a consistory tomorrow.” Rodrigo turned to look at me again with his ghastly sunken eyes, and somehow the sweep of his plain robes was more regal than all his papal regalia. “There will be reforms made, and men of virtue rather than rank appointed to make them. The sacred offices will be carried out with rigor. Benefices will be conferred upon those who earn them, not those with coin. We shall renounce nepotism, simony.” His voice had its old energy now, the passion of planning, though I still heard the ocean of grief behind it. “And Our priests must change themselves as well, if they are to serve the Church as she deserves to be served. Cardinals must limit themselves in income, six thousand ducats—”

“They won’t like that,” Cesare spoke behind me. “Speaking as Cardinal Borgia, I do not like that.”

“Reforms will be made,” my Pope said, steely. “You will serve God in future, Cesare—not yourself. Give up your fine clothes and your bullfights and your concubines.”

Cesare’s gaze drifted to me.

“Or you will give up your red hat and give it to one more worthy.”

“As to that—” Cesare shrugged. “Throw the red hat in a bullring for all I care. What about the rest of our family? Or am I the only one to be reformed, Your Holiness?”

“Joffre and Sancha can return to Squillace.” My Pope’s tone was listless again; this man who adored his children above all else now sounded indifferent to them, his eyes dull again as he fingered the plain wooden rosary at his waist. “Lucrezia—she has already retreated to the Convent of San Sisto; perhaps she will be inspired to take the veil. A fitting calling.” He closed his eyes in a hard blink. “I must be father to my flock first, not to my bastards.”

Cesare turned to me. “Perhaps La Bella will talk some sense into you.”

The words came out of me before I was aware I was thinking them. “Perhaps I don’t wish to.”

“What?”

I studied my Pope, thinking of the vigorous black-haired suitor who had first ambushed me in a garden the day after my wedding. The lover who had claimed me in a half-empty palazzo, his dark eyes heavy with passion as he looked on me. The father of my daughter, who had come to my bedside after Laura’s birth with a beautifully painted birth tray piled high with candied cherries, and insisted on feeding me every one. The bull in his red horned mask, more cheerful pagan satyr than Holy Father.