His eyes had lit up when I showed him the letter I had first written Rodrigo, saying I could not return to him because I was carrying the child of Orsino Orsini. “You are?” my husband breathed.

“No,” I said, wincing because he looked so crestfallen. “But if I say it, he will not want me,” I placated. “And it will be true soon enough, surely!”

We’d managed to delay bringing Laura to Rome until November—and I know Orsino had been hoping to get me with child in that time. It was not just to make my lie a truth, or even because he wanted a son as all men do. Orsino wanted to parade me about Rome with a swollen belly, so that no man would look lustfully at me anymore.

He moved over me, gasping into my shoulder, and I folded my arms about his neck and murmured sweet bits of nonsense. I knew what pleased him by now: soft arms, loving looks, delicate shivers of pleasure. Nothing too bold, because boldness is for harlots, not good and decent wives. I had not always been a good wife to him, but I was now. He deserved that.

I didn’t know what I deserved. Maybe just to do my duty—it was what I’d been born and reared for, after all.

“Husband,” I scolded softly afterward. “We shall be late.”

The Sala del Pappagallo in the Vatican was clustered with ambassadors, envoys, petitioners, flatterers; lords bearing gifts and lords begging favors. How many papal audiences had I witnessed here? The hall of parrots, named for the once-brightly-colored birds painted about the walls in fading splendor. You’d wonder why parrots on a wall instead of something a trifle more grand: saints or martyrs, or, if one must follow an animal motif, at least pick a grander animal like the splendid Borgia bull. I think whoever painted those parrots must have had himself quite a chuckle, because a cacophony of cardinals all bickering and backstabbing away in that sala could make more noise than any gaggle of birds. And what a great lot of chirping and fluttering went up as Orsino and Laura and I were announced.

I had expected to feel nervous—I had not been so stared at since my arrival in Carbognano, when the villagers looked as though they’d expected their lord’s notorious wife to have demon horns and a forked tongue. But it was Orsino’s arm that trembled, and I gave his elbow a reassuring squeeze as we approached the glittering figure in the sweeping robes. Rodrigo.

I fixed my eyes instead on a parrot on the wall, a faded green parrot with a cross expression, and I had a wild urge to laugh when I remembered the sulky parrot that had once belonged to little Lucrezia, and how I’d privately named it Vannozza.