“If you will excuse me, I am to fetch cloths for my mistress—” I took myself down to the kitchens in my ugly black habit that was too short, and flew back up with the wetted cloths. I was back and forth for hours with possets, reels of thread, more cloths, until the sun began its fall and a cold blue twilight fell over the convent.

That was when the gatehouse heard the angry cry of a newborn child.

“Put the little mite to the breast quickly, if you wish to stop those wails.” The midwife was already packing the soiled linens, the vials of herbal potions, the tools she had brought with her in her capacious basket. “I’ve administered a sleeping draught,” she told me. “Your mistress will sleep for a time. It’s best if she feeds the child herself the first few days, but do try to arrange a wet nurse out in the country as soon as the babe can travel. City air isn’t good for infants.”

I realized that after all these long hours the midwife had not asked any of our names or volunteered her own. She did not seem curious about the exhausted Lucrezia lying half swooned in the bed, or the tiny collection of swaddled, reddened limbs in the basket of linens that had been padded and prepared as a makeshift cradle. The midwife merely bestowed a twinkling smile on us all, collected a purse from Perotto, and disappeared as swiftly as she had come. A midwife who can be discreet will make herself a good living. There are always women who find a child inconvenient, usually silly girls who have managed to lose their virtue to a poet when they were supposed to be saving it for a husband. A speedy birth in a convent and a quiet payment to a midwife who can keep her mouth shut, no names of course, and everything restored to normal afterward with no one’s reputation the worse—I should not have been surprised Cesare Borgia would know how to arrange such a thing.

“What was it?” I asked Pantisilea as we trailed exhaustedly down the steps toward the convent courtyard. Lucrezia was sleeping sound under the midwife’s draught, and the baby appeared to be sleeping too in her arm. At least for the moment, and both of us lunged to get out of the chamber’s stuffy confines.

“What was what?” Pantisilea yawned.

“The child. Boy or girl?”

“You know, I don’t know. I didn’t even look.”