CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Love is when he gives you a piece of your soul, that you never knew was missing.

—TORQUATO TASSO

Giulia

Well?” Lucrezia Borgia twirled before me, flaring her skirts. “How do I look?”

Her ladies squealed and burst into applause for the Pope’s daughter, the former Countess of Pesaro arrayed in her bridal gown of gold French brocade worked all over with black silk embroidery and tucked scarlet velvet. Her waist circled by its girdle of grape-sized pearls might never have borne a child at all, and her sun-bleached hair flowed loose like any virgin bride’s under a little jeweled cap, which she tilted at a rakish angle. A girl of eighteen with bright eyes and rouged cheeks and powdered bosom, and for a moment I remembered her as she’d looked at her wedding to Lord Sforza five years ago. A tremulous little swan in jeweled chains, with all the world before her.

“You are beautiful,” I said, and managed a smile.

“I know,” Lucrezia giggled, and her ladies descended on her for one last tweak of the sleeves or dab of scent. I just sat with my hands in my lap on the wall bench: my old chamber in the Palazzo Santa Maria where I’d tried on gown after gown before Lucrezia’s first wedding, trying to find something that would make me pale and plain since no one should ever outshine the bride. But this was Lucrezia’s chamber now, and Lucrezia’s palazzo where she and her entire household of ladies and maids had come to wait for Alfonso of Aragon to arrive in Rome.

“I do wish you wouldn’t wear black, Giulia,” Lucrezia scolded me, peering into a hand mirror to arrange her little cap at a more dashing angle. “So gloomy! Even your complexion can’t carry off all that unrelieved black, you know.”

Caterina Gonzaga made sure to smile pityingly. She was piqued at me all over again because she had not been allowed to escort the Pope’s daughter in her wedding vows as I had escorted Lucrezia to the Count of Pesaro. Lucrezia’s vows with Alfonso of Aragon yesterday had been a mere formality, a private exchange of rings and a few words as confirmation to the proxy wedding that had already taken place in Naples. The real festivities would take place today with the wedding banquets, the feasts and gifts, and then the bedding of the bridal couple. But as the current papal mistress, Caterina clearly felt she had been slighted. It was the only highlight of my day so far.

“My pink silk,” Lucrezia was enthusing at me. “I’m sure we can lace it to fit you in a trice, if you will lay off that dreary black velvet—”

“I am still in mourning,” I said quietly. “It has been only three months, you know.”