“Stop making sense,” I told him, and flopped back into my chair. Lucrezia blew out her breath, settling back into her perch. Madonna Adriana went back to her chess game, her curl knots bobbing, and little Joffre yawned hugely. The sky was still quite black, but between the sweltering heat of the summer night and the tension of the past week, not one of us in the household had been able to sleep. I was the first to leave my bed, throw a pale green silk robe over my night shift, and creep up to the loggia at the very top of the palazzo. But Lucrezia was soon creeping up after me, her hair still bound in its plait for sleeping, tugging sleepy little Joffre behind her, and Madonna Adriana in her billowing shift wasn’t far behind.

“You children should be in bed,” she reproved, but soon enough she was ordering tapers and wine and plates of soft-roasted chestnuts to keep us in comfort as we kept vigil over the view toward the Basilica San Pietro. I winced as the tray of chestnuts arrived, thinking of poor Carmelina the cook rousted from her bed downstairs just to feed us, but perhaps she was awake too. These past six days, with the Sistine Chapel and a college of twenty-three cardinals locked inside it in Conclave, the servants had been every bit as prone as I to hanging out the nearest window in search of that plume of white smoke. Three days in a row it had been black smoke, and a disappointed shout had gone up each time at the sign that yet another round of votes had been burned with no majority to show for it. White smoke, now—that meant we had a new pope.

More than ever, I worried just who that pope would be.

“Six days,” I fretted. “Is that usual, for a Conclave?” It had been eight years since the last papal election, and frankly I remembered nothing about it. What was a pope to a girl of ten growing up in sleepy little Capodimonte?

“The last Conclave took only four days.” My little bodyguard turned another page of his book. “And of course there was one that took two years, but that was seen as a trifle leisurely. The cardinals were finally locked in and the roof taken off the voting room, and they were told they would sit there in the open weather until they’d picked a pope. A few showers of rain concentrated their attention wonderfully.”