Juan just beckoned in invitation, laughing. The two brothers should have looked alike—both tall and lean, both auburn-haired, both handsome—but they didn’t. Not at all, and Juan’s jittering overbright eyes met Cesare’s still, black-steel gaze like a cross of swords. Sancha looked between them with parted lips, and Lucrezia cast her eyes up to the ceiling and said, “Really, you’re both such children!” But I felt a twinge of disquiet.

“You’ll have seen the new frescoes, Juan,” I jumped in brightly. “But surely not examined them yet? Perhaps we can take a closer look, before the biscotti are brought in. Your figure shows to great advantage . . .”

I took my wine cup in one hand, tucking the other into Rodrigo’s broad arm, and we all rose from the cena table and flocked to the walls with our painted images. “I love me as Santa Caterina,” Lucrezia sighed over her own beseeching golden-haired figure. “I still have that dress . . .”

“I don’t see why Joffre and I were just figures in the crowd,” Sancha pouted. “I could have been a saint too, you know!”

“Or Salome,” Juan leered. “The Dance of the Seven Veils—we’d get to see what you look like under the last one, new sister—”

“Juan!” Joffre burst out, flushing, but Sancha laughed and struck Juan a playful blow with her fan. One of those tiresome girls who is always doing something flirtatious with her fan. How I longed to smack her with it.

“My likeness is to be in the Resurrection fresco,” my Pope was saying, oblivious. “When I have time to sit for it, that is—”

“And you really should make the time,” I scolded. “Poor Maestro Pinturicchio has already finished everything else!”

“I don’t like being painted,” Rodrigo complained. “An utter waste of time!”

“But part of a pope’s duty is to be preserved for posterity. You’ll look magnificent, just wait and see.” My pope was sixty-five now, and he had put on weight now that he had no more time for the hunting and riding that had long kept him lean. But his massive shoulders were imposing as ever, his swarthy hawk-nosed profile just as confident, his vigorous dark hair only threaded with gray. The papal bull at the height of his powers.

“This marks the beginning of everything.” My Pope beamed all about him: his children painted on the wall, his children clustered around him. “La familia reunited! Let’s drink to it again.”

His eyes were once more full of emotion, but I saw Cesare still glaring at Juan, saw Lucrezia biting her lips to make them redder, saw Sancha aiming hot looks at both her brothers-in-law, and Joffre staring vengefully at Sancha. I saw it all, and all I could think was a horribly, woefully inadequate Oh, dear.