The apprentices just gaped. Useless, the lot of them. Piero and a few other bad apples from my first days in Marco’s kitchens had long since been weeded out, but I wasn’t impressed with the new batch: brains no bigger than capers, one and all. Madonna Adriana was cousin to the Pope, and now installed in an even more luxurious palazzo with the Pope’s daughter and mistress—but she still liked to hire on the cheap. Why pay for experienced servants when raw green apprentices and untrained youngsters could be had for half the price? She didn’t have to train all those young lummoxes, after all. I did. And they all just stood there slack-jawed as Marco nearly slithered to the ground and took me with him.

The only one to move was the red-haired pot-boy, the one I’d accidentally whacked with a ladle. He made a lunge and caught my cousin under the arm before he hit the floor like six and a half feet of drunken ox. “What’s your name again, boy?” I barked. One of the new boys; scullions came and went like stray cats.

“Bartolomeo, signorina.” He looked about fourteen, thin as a spit but tall for his age, with wide bony shoulders. A wooden crucifix showed through the lacing of his flour-sprinkled shirt.

“What are you doing up in the kitchens anyway?” I demanded. “I set all pot-boys to work in the scullery; there are more pots to scrub than fleas on a dog.”

He looked shame-faced, hitching a skinny shoulder under Marco’s limp arm. “I followed the smells.” A long rapturous sniff. “What is that, signorina?”

“That’s a decent start on three hundred pounds of wedding sweetmeats, that’s what that is.” Madonna Lucrezia Borgia would become the Countess of Pesaro and wife to Lord Sforza in just two days’ time, and the wedding celebrations at the Vatican would be like nothing Rome had ever seen. The papal kitchens would of course feed the vast crowd of wedding guests following the ceremony, and provide the private evening cena the Pope intended to give for his daughter and her new husband . . . but Giulia Farnese, may God bless her generous flighty heart, had batted her great dark eyes at the Pope and begged my services and mine alone to provide the sweets that would circulate among the guests after the ceremony. And since, after a year of passion, the Pope was still purring and arching for his mistress like a boy of sixteen, he’d granted her wish in a heartbeat.