I could never tell when Leonello was joking. His educated monotone never varied no matter what he was saying. Only a certain gleam in his deep-set hazel eyes indicated when he was laughing on the inside. After six days of his company, I must admit, he mostly laughed at me, but I liked my new bodyguard too much to mind. He sat now with his feet propped on a small table, short fingers flicking through the pages of a volume of verse by the light of a branch of tapers. Someone had found him a clean shirt and a secondhand doublet with the Borgia bull, both hastily altered to fit his small body, but his boots were still disreputable.

“This Conclave had better not take two years.” I picked up the embroidery I was far too nervous to work on. “I can’t stand much more of this suspense.”

Leonello looked up at me over the edge of his book. “Do you want Cardinal Borgia to win?”

“Don’t we all?” I said lightly. Madonna Adriana did; she could hardly concentrate on her chess game what with all her glances at the black sky over the basilica. Lucrezia and her brothers certainly did; they could do nothing but whisper about how their papa would soon be Il Papa. Even now Lucrezia was hanging over the rail of the loggia again, scanning the sky.

“I doubt you want him to win,” said the dwarf. “Popes don’t have mistresses, do they?”

“They can have children!” I put my chin up. “Pope Innocent had sixteen.”

“Oh, youthful indiscretions are one thing. A young man is expected to keep a mistress or two when he’s first starting his way up the ladder. And further up the rungs, well, a cardinal can get away with keeping a seraglio like this.” Leonello waved a hand at the bower of women and children. “Installing that same seraglio in the Vatican, however . . .”

Rodrigo won’t give me up. Not after those hours we’d spent in his emptied palazzo on the black and white daybed . . . and on the floor beside it . . . and in the summer-warmed grass of the garden with bees stumbling drunkenly between blowsy heat-fried roses. Not after the way he’d coiled my hair around his hand and murmured to me in Spanish, telling me I was beautiful. How he’d made me feel beautiful, when his leisurely hands skimmed my naked shoulders or took their time exploring the tender skin on the very inside of my elbow.