Cesare Borgia came from the room an hour later with a brow blacker than midnight, slapping his embroidered riding gloves against his hand, and by that point I was installed well below, making the passing sisters in their black and white flow around me as I sat on my stool over a copy of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. “Did you hear?” my new master said without preamble. “Did you hear, little lion man?”

“Hear what?” I asked, chin in hand over my book. “Pliny claims amber will take on a charge when it is rubbed, did you know that? I shall have to test it out.”

I do not know if Cesare Borgia believed me, any more than I knew if he suspected my stubby hands were covered in his brother’s blood. But he said nothing more of it, and a few weeks later I stood in the Vatican with his retinue, craning my neck to see in the crowd of curious ambassadors and prelates as Lucrezia Borgia was brought from the Convent of San Sisto by sealed coach to give her testimony before the canonical judges. It was just days before Christmas, the breath puffing white in the air even inside the sealed chamber, and Lucrezia stood well-wrapped in her heavy winter velvets and enveloping sable cloak. She flushed prettily as she was called to speak, her sweet grave face a little fuller than usual, giving her the look of an angelic child. She spoke in solemn, perfect Latin (like a Cicero, they gushed afterward), and she testified that her lord husband had not bedded her once in three years of marriage, and she was thus virgo intacta.

How Rome rocked with laughter.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lucrezia . . . daughter, wife, and daughter-in-law of Alexander VI.

—SCURRILOUS ELEGY ABOUT LUCREZIA BORGIA

Carmelina

I was used to blood. I could cut a pig’s throat in one double slice, and scrape the blood off my hands afterward without a thought. I’d killed woolly little lambs and big-eared baby goats for my table without a drop of sentimentality. Man’s work, and perhaps that was the trouble. A woman’s work of breeding babies and bearing them, well, that had passed me by.

Lucrezia Borgia was screaming, bleeding, writhing in her birthing bed, and she terrified me.

“Oh, Jesu, it hurts!” Her matted hair stuck to her sweating face, she clung to Pantisilea’s white-knuckled hand, and she was sobbing and praying around her gulps for breath. “Where is Cesare, he said he’d be with me—” She lapsed into Catalan for a few whimpering seconds, and then into Latin. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum—”

“We should fetch the prioress,” Pantisilea said nervously.