“Homeric hymns.” Leonello ran an appreciative hand over the finely tooled leather binding. “If I stay in this household much longer, I will be very spoiled for books.”

“I like poetry. Petrarch especially. In some moods anyway.”

“I’m never in the mood for Petrarch.”

“What’s wrong with Petrarch?”

“Inchoate longings in saccharine verse for a blond bore.”

“You do not have a poetic soul,” I started to say, but a cry came from Lucrezia, who had risen from crooning over the goat in my lap and flown back to the balcony.

“White smoke! It is white smoke this time, I see it!”

Madonna Adriana flew out of her chair so fast the chessboard overturned. Little Joffre woke with a start and tumbled to join his sister, tripping over a scatter of black and white pawns. Leonello looked up from his book and I hoisted my new pet under one arm and rushed to the rail, craning my neck toward the vast shadowy shape of the basilica.

The sky had gone from black to gray, the faintest line of pink showing in the east. Just enough light to see the plume of white smoke venting upward from the basilica.

Habemus Papam. We had a new pope.

“Deo gratias,” said Leonello. He sounded amused.

“Leonello.” Madonna Adriana’s voice was sick with tension. “Go to the guards and have them send someone to the square immediately.”

No one had to ask what for. As we spoke, the new Pope was being robed in the prepared papal vestments, readying himself for his first appearance at the window where he would give his first papal blessing.

What pope? The words pounded in my ears as I followed a squealing Lucrezia and a bouncing Joffre down the stairs toward the entrance hall to wait. What pope?

I had no idea what to hope for.

In the end, Rodrigo returned before Madonna Adriana’s messenger could fight his way back through the jubilant thousands who had flooded the streets of Rome. We waited in the anteroom, all of us. Joffre bounced so incessantly that Adriana slapped him; Lucrezia was alternately praying and bubbling. Leonello stood throwing his knives over and over into a wall, making star patterns and circle patterns and crucifix patterns with the blades. I put on my pearl and the scarlet gown I’d worn when I went to Rodrigo’s bed, and I paced nervously before the windows looking at that plume of white smoke. The goat trailed after me nibbling at my hem, and the servants clustered whispering, not even pretending to work.