Taking a deep breath, I claimed a seat of my own beside the last woman in the world who wanted me at her side. Claimed my seat and smiled, and gestured for the earnest little choir of boys to continue their singing, and said low-voiced, “Vannozza, perhaps we should talk about your daughter.”

She looked at me down the long, high-bridged nose that she’d also passed on to Cesare Borgia. Vannozza dei Cattanei: my well-preserved auburn-haired predecessor, still handsome in her russet velvets and many rings. Vannozza, who had stayed at Rodrigo’s side a full decade and given him four children. “La Bella,” she said, and smiled in that special way that both indicated her innate superiority and concealed those horse teeth. “What has my daughter to do with you?”

“I love her,” I said bluntly. “As much as my own daughter. But Lucrezia needs reining in.”

That surprised Vannozza; I could see from the peevish fold that suddenly appeared at the corner of her eyes. Because blunt wasn’t how we ever began things, Vannozza and me. Most of the time we managed to ignore each other altogether. If forced into conversation, there would first be polite noncommittals, then a few exchanges of edged courtesy punctuated by an oversweet bout of cooing, and then perhaps one of us would unsheathe claws. Usually Vannozza, because I could outcoo absolutely anyone, much less my spiteful, wasp-waisted, wasp-tongued predecessor.

This time, however, I had sidestepped all the pleasantries.

“Lucrezia is being talked about,” I went on under cover of the music, before Vannozza’s bright eyes could narrow any further. “It’s Sancha’s example—remember the incident at Pentecost? People whispered for weeks.”

At the Feast of Pentecost in May, Lucrezia and Sancha had traded jokes and whispers all through the long sermon in the Basilica San Pietro—and had finally abandoned their seats altogether to clamber into the choir stalls with all their ladies, bringing the service to a complete halt as they settled their skirts and called for refreshments. Johann Burchard, the beleaguered little German who had the thankless task of acting as Rodrigo’s master of ceremonies, had run about shrieking and tearing his hair afterward as he bemoaned the horrendous impropriety of it all, and even I had been surprised. Lucrezia was merry by nature, but she’d always been respectful.

“My daughter,” Vannozza stated as though bringing the Eleventh Commandment down from on high, “is merely high-spirited.”