“I’m afraid Leonello is no longer in my service,” I said briefly, and heard Orsino shift beside me in unstated relief. Even if Leonello hadn’t left of his own accord, Orsino wouldn’t have wanted to keep him on. My husband would never have been comfortable around my bodyguard’s sharp eyes and even sharper tongue, and it wouldn’t have been any use asking Leonello to keep his sarcasm to himself, either. Leonello regarded men like my husband as lions regard lambs—fit only for the sharpening of claws. If Orsino had ever addressed me as “my little rose” in Leonello’s hearing, my bodyguard would have let out a hoot, struck a lovelorn pose, and composed an extemporaneous sonnet on the spot: “Giulia Farnese, the Milk Thistle of Carbognano.” And then he would have followed me about for days saying, “Yes, my little milk thistle?” until I threatened to smack him, and then he’d have grinned his mocking tilted grin and demanded, “Why do women always prefer the trite to the witty? ‘My little rose?’ Dio!”

Oh, but I missed him.

“What a pity, what a pity,” said Vittorio, oblivious. “I thought that little lion was your shadow, m’dear! Well, now, you must be tired; I have had rooms prepared if you wish to bathe and change—”

I had thought Leonello my shadow, too. So selfish of me—you can’t suborn people to be shadows, can you, as if they have no lives of their own? I reminded myself of that, every time I turned to say something to Leonello and then felt the pang of remembering all over again that he was gone. I offered a brief smile to Vittorio and allowed Orsino to lead me toward the stairs.

“It wasn’t a suggestion, that little hint about bathing and changing,” I whispered to my husband as a matched pair of ebony-skinned slave girls whisked us up flights of shallow marble steps. “Vittorio was being very polite, but I could see his agony mounting every time our dusty clothes touched his beautiful carpets.”

“How did you make his acquaintance?” Orsino sounded suspicious. He sounded suspicious whenever I mentioned any man’s name.

“Vittorio Capece is one of Rome’s great collectors of art,” I said. “He said I was the most decorative woman he’d ever seen, and he begged to have my hands sculpted as an artistic study. They’re here somewhere, my marble hands—he stacks his rings on the fingers when he runs out of room on his own.”

Orsino’s voice sounded flat as we were ushered into a sumptuous little sala with an ornate velvet-hung bed and embroidered satin cushions along the wall benches. “He admires you, then.”

“Only as an ornament,” I said lightly, dismissing the little slave girls. “Everyone knows Vittorio will never marry.”

“Why?”