“Do you even have the money to support yourselves in Milan?” Leonello was asking Bartolomeo. “Of course Giulia never thinks of money—”

“We’re the best cooks in Rome,” my Bartolomeo said with the arrogance I was glad I hadn’t managed to smack out of him as an apprentice. “We won’t lack work for long.”

“Then here’s something to fund a new career,” Giulia said, and unhooked her huge teardrop pearl from around her neck.

My mouth dropped open like a fish. “Madonna Giulia, I can’t possibly—”

She was already shaking her head, brushing biscotti crumbs off her skirts. “I don’t want it. The rest of my jewels I’m saving for Laura, but that—” She looped it carelessly about the cat’s furry neck when I refused to let her put it into my hand. “That was the Holy Father’s first gift to me. It feels like a noose, now.”

We all looked at each other for a moment. I had half an impulse to put my head out the window of the coach and look back on Rome. The Holy City had been a haven to me once, an escape from all my troubles, and now it seemed more cesspool than salvation: a blood-drenched pit with the Borgia dream of power swelling black and hungry overhead, like some great ravenous snake. Their emblem should have been a serpent. Something poisonous and devious. Not a blunt and straightforward bull.

But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t ever going to lay eyes on a Borgia again, and I didn’t think anyone else in this coach would either.

“You all look like masks of tragedy.” Giulia looked around at our momentarily grave faces. “Especially you,” she said to Leonello, and I very definitely saw her fingers stroke against his for a moment behind the spread of her skirts. He smiled, which I hardly thought I’d ever seen on his cynical face, and Giulia twinkled back at him before looking to me where I sat with my head leaned against Bartolomeo’s shoulder and the cat purring on my lap in his pearl necklace. “Of course, there is one thing to be sad about,” she added. “Very sad, in fact.”

“What’s that, Madonna Giulia?”

She leaned forward, looking at me very seriously. “We’ve eaten all the marzipan tourtes.”

Historical Note

HISTORICAL NOTE

Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, died five years later without realizing his dream of founding a lasting Borgia dynasty. Despite his lurid reputation, he was in many ways an effective pontiff: energetic, intelligent, hardworking, with great toleration for free speech, homosexuality, and Judaism. But his Achilles heel was his adoration of his children, who in his eyes could do no wrong. In their defense he committed his most shocking acts, such as the impromptu hanging of a party guest who dared offer his favorite son a mild insult.