“Oh, bother the canon lawyers. A batch of dried-up old spiders, what do they know? Ah,” Lucrezia greeted us, and gestured the wine toward Perotto with a gracious wave. “You may go, Pantisilea. Carmelina, you stay and comb out my hair; the pins are hurting my head and you’ve got a far lighter touch.”

I didn’t have a lighter touch, and the pins weren’t aching her head either. Madonna Lucrezia just wanted the papal envoy to admire her hair, and she knew I’d comb it out for her without making eyes at Perotto as Pantisilea always did. I began pulling pins and arranging the long blond locks, which had gotten darker since they no longer had their daily sunning, and Perotto paid a few graceful and unoriginal compliments about Venus in her bower. Lucrezia preened herself, but soon she was pouting again.

“Well, you might as well tell me. What did the canon lawyers say?”

“They could find nothing in your past betrothals, Madonna Lucrezia, that would invalidate your current marriage.” Perotto had the envoy’s gift of presenting bad news as though it were good, but even he sounded a little worn at all the back-and-forth legal wrangling that had been going on these past months. “Your past betrothals were formally concluded before your vows to Lord Sforza, so . . .”

“So the Holy Father will have to find some other excuse for annulment.” Madonna Lucrezia’s rosy little face had gone hard. She’d had a certain guilty sympathy for her husband at first—“Oh, my poor Giovanni, his pride must be hurting him to lose me like this. He does love me so!” But after the rumors he’d lately begun spreading, well . . .

Perotto, who had had to dry a good many of Lucrezia’s tears after she’d heard of those foul rumors, changed the subject with alacrity. “Perhaps you have heard, madonna? Your eminent brother has returned from Naples.”

“Oh, Cesare is back! You must tell him to visit me immediately.” She shook her loose hair forward over one shoulder in a gesture exactly copied from Giulia Farnese, and flicked a finger at me. “Carmelina, go make some more of those little pastry things with the blood-orange slices in honey. Now, my dear Perotto . . .”

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Pantisilea sighed down in the convent kitchens when I entered with the empty plate. “He’s even prettier with his doublet off, let me tell you. I had him in Madonna Lucrezia’s sala last week, up against the wall with his hose around his feet. There’s nothing as funny-looking as a man with hose around his feet, is there? But he was very pretty, and lovely for kissing. I do like a man with no rotted teeth.”