Lucrezia’s little face creased in sympathy at once, and she dropped down beside me on the wall bench in a sigh of French brocade. “I’m sorry,” she said remorsefully, and waved off her ladies. “I know you’re still sad, poor Giulia. I shouldn’t have insisted you come to my wedding banquet today—you haven’t been out to so much as a masque in months—but I couldn’t be married again without you. I just couldn’t.”

She flung her arms about me in a hug. I gave a brief squeeze and then eased her back. “Careful. You’ll crush your embroideries.”

“Straighten me, will you? I mustn’t go to Alfonso all rumpled. It’s his job to rumple me, but not until later.” She giggled again. “Such a handsome man, Giulia, you can’t imagine! My heart stopped when we exchanged rings; he has the biggest brown eyes, just like velvet—”

“My heart stopped too,” I said. “When I exchanged the rings with Orsino.”

“Of course you’re thinking of him today.” Lucrezia patted my cheek. “But you mustn’t grieve! When my Alfonso and I set up a household of our own, you’ll come as one of my ladies and I’ll find you a new husband. These Neapolitan lords are very handsome, though of course none are as handsome as my Alfonso.”

She looked pure, glowing, incandescent with love. Exactly as she’d looked as she gazed at Giovanni Sforza.

“Thank you,” I said in the remote voice I couldn’t seem to inflect with any feeling at all these past months. “But after the wedding I intend to return home to my daughter.”

Laura. My sweet Laura, all I had left.

“Of course you miss her.” Lucrezia lowered her voice, mindful of her ladies. “I miss my baby so much, you know. Such a dear little thing with those plump cheeks!”

I wondered how she even remembered the plump cheeks. To my knowledge Lucrezia had had only a day or two with her child before it was packed off to a discreet household in the country—a household staffed with servants and wet nurses well paid to keep quiet. The Pope’s daughter had spent far more hours squealing over her own restored slimness than squealing over her child.

“Cesare says maybe I can have my baby back in a few years, when rumors die down. We can tell everyone it’s Cesare’s bastard, or maybe Father’s.” A vague wave of her hand, and I noted how careful she was not to mention whether her child was a boy or a girl. More Borgia secrets, and my privilege to hear them had been revoked. I didn’t ask about the child’s sex, lest my curiosity be taken for a sign that I might wish to raise it after all.