“Still, don’t tell me.” A few sad tendrils of tarragon joined the basil. “So is Madonna Lucrezia still weeping upstairs? She’s been weeping for weeks, even when she heard Lord Sforza agreed to have their marriage annulled.”

“She’s dried her tears enough to butcher the verbs on a very nice little Latin speech written by her brother.”

“Don’t tell me how nice it is. She’ll recite it to Pantisilea and me all week until she knows it. We’ll all have it by heart in the end.”

“Perhaps you can go to the Vatican in a few weeks and give her testimony for her, then. Swear before God, Pope, and all others assembled that the marriage between you and Lord Sforza was never consummated, not once, and that you are still virgo intacta.”

Carmelina snorted. “I haven’t been virgo intacta for a good many years.”

“Nor has Lucrezia Borgia, but who’s quibbling?”

“Apparently not Lord Sforza.” Carmelina shook her head, yanking out a few sorry-looking threads of chives. What a joke it all was. Consanguinity had not worked as a pretext to annul the marriage, and neither had the excuse of Lucrezia’s two previous betrothals. Cesare Borgia’s solution? Nonconsummation, due to the Count of Pesaro’s prevailing impotence. I’d laughed out loud when I first heard it, and so had most of Rome. The Count of Pesaro impotent, when his first wife had died in childbed?

“It will serve him right,” Cesare had said coolly. “If he wished for a less humiliating end to his marriage, he should have signed sooner under the betrothal excuse.”

But Lord Sforza had stuck his heels in, and for that he would not only lose his wife—he’d be mocked all about Rome as a eunuch. An exquisite revenge, and I was learning what a talent my new master had for that.

“Impotence.” Carmelina let out a short laugh. “I ask you, what kind of man would admit to that? Even if it were true, and we both know Madonna Lucrezia and that husband of hers consummated that marriage on every bed in the Palazzo Santa Maria!”

“But the Borgias say they didn’t. And they have the power to rewrite truth, didn’t you know?” My nails needed trimming, but I had no intention of getting my knife out. I wondered if it still had blood on it. I couldn’t remember cleaning the blade since that recent little task I had performed for my new master.

Carmelina pinched a few dead needles off a chilled-looking rosemary bush. “I wonder how they made him do it. Lord Sforza, I mean. How did they make him sign his own virility away?”

“They sent me,” I found myself saying.

She looked at me. “You?”