“Have you seen Bartolomeo lately?” Carmelina yanked a bulb of garlic out of the half-frozen ground. Her voice was light, conversational, and I remembered speaking to her in just as soothing a tone when she had been clutching her bleeding hand in the wine cellar and trembling like a horse about to bolt. Did I look like a horse about to bolt? “Bartolomeo writes to me. Mostly just recipes, of course. Perfectly ordinary letters—”

“Of course,” I said. “Because you’re blushing, and recipes make you blush like poetry.”

More light words, coming out in white puffs on the cold air. Any words I could find to replace the images in my head—until Pantisilea came out into the gardens in a flat run, skirts flying about her knees and her face pale as bone.

“Carmelina,” she gasped. “Carmelina, he’s calling for us, he’s calling for us both, he’s gone mad—”

“Who’s gone mad?” Carmelina rose, basket of herbs over one arm.

“Cardinal Borgia!” Pantisilea wailed, just like the little countess. “He found out, Madonna Lucrezia tried so hard, but she felt sick again and had to run to the basin. He saw how she looks under all those blankets and cushions, he saw—”

“Saw what?” I began to say, but Carmelina dropped her basket on the ground and sprinted after Pantisilea to the gatehouse where the Pope’s daughter was ensconced.

Perhaps Cesare Borgia had been shouting before, but he was deadly hushed now as he summoned the two maidservants inside the chamber. I crept on the outsides of my boot soles along the stairs, barely breathing, because when he spoke in just that hue of quiet I did not want to be caught eavesdropping.

“Who was it?” he said in his near whisper. “Who was it, sister? If that swaggering bravo Perotto dared seduce you—”

“Of course not!” The little Countess of Pesaro was hiccuping and gasping and sobbing all at once; I could hear that very clearly down the stairwell. “I’m not a whore, Cesare, I didn’t have a lover, it was my husband!”

“We warned you,” he snapped. “Father warned you to keep out of Sforza’s bed, and so did I. Warned. You.”

“And I did! I did, but he came to see me and I—”

“Here? He was allowed in here, after all my instructions to the prioress?”

“No, no, it was just before I came here to the convent. He came alone from Pesaro in the night, very privately. He was on horseback and he brought me a poem like he did in the old days. He wanted one last chance to talk. Sancha has a pavilion on the Tiber she uses for meeting—well, you, for one. She lent it to me so I could meet Giovanni in secret. It was romantic!” Lucrezia wailed. “There was a moon! I felt sorry for him!”