“Yes, Cardinal Borgia.” I swept him an elaborate curtsy, then turned my back on his slit-eyed frustration and glided from the room, back through the papal apartments where my own face looked down from a Madonna’s veil, back through the passage to the Palazzo Santa Maria.

“Leonello?” I called in the entrance hall, hoping against hope, but only silence met my ears. I looked about the empty room with its checkered marble floors, its coffered ceiling and elaborate tapestries, and it seemed empty of anything but echoes.

It was empty of anything but echoes, I realized. I’d come here full of jubilation just a few short weeks after Rodrigo became pope, and I’d come with a cloud of friends. Adriana da Mila, watching over me even while she irked me; Carmelina feeding me endless sweets and shaking her head in despair when I could not even learn how to whip cream; Pantisilea giggling over her lovers and begging for tidbits about mine. Lucrezia who had been such a sweet-natured child; Joffre blinking at me shyly when I offered him a hug—and Leonello, my little lion, eternally at my back. The papal seraglio, Leonello had called it. Now every one of those friends had gone.

I thought of the blue lake again, and the castello beside it.

“Yes, Madonna Giulia?” A maid answered my summons with a curtsy.

“Go to my daughter’s chamber, please, and see her nursemaids pack all her things.” I was already on my way to my own chamber. “We are leaving on a journey tomorrow morning.”

How strange. I’d always feared this moment’s arrival, but now that it was here, I felt nothing but serenity. And sorrow, but that was not for my Pope.

I wrote a brief letter, giving it to the captain of the palazzo guards when I departed the following morning. “Give that to Messer Leonello should he return,” I said, tethering Laura by the back of her little traveling dress while she in turn held the gilt-leather leash of my pet goat.

“And what should I say to His Holiness?” the captain said curiously, watching the procession of my chests and maids. “Or to Cardinal Borgia, if he asks?”

“You may say,” I told him over my shoulder, walking to my carriage, “that the Bride of Christ is no more.”

PART THREE

PART THREE

September 1497–June 1498

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER TWELVE

He has the Pope in his fist.

—ENVOY, WRITING OF CESARE BORGIA

Leonello

Chorus,” I said, laying four cards down across the wine-sticky table. “All spades. The pot is mine.”

“Wait,” the Genoese sailor across from me protested. “You haven’t seen my cards yet!”

“Doesn’t matter. You have nothing to beat a chorus hand.” I leaned forward and began to scoop coins from the center of the table.

The sailor stared at me, suspicious. “How do you know what cards I’ve got?”