If it had been Marco in charge, he would have just flipped to the back of my father’s recipe collection (page 428, Chapter: Dolci) and churned off a list of the usual favorites at such banquets: sugared pears, candied cherries, sweet biscotti. Easy enough . . . but I didn’t want to settle for easy. I stayed up late in the kitchens, sprinkled with sugar and sticky-fingered with honey, experimenting with one idea after another in a fever of excitement. Miniature tourtes of caravella pears and sweet summer strawberries sliced thin as a holy wafer; blood orange segments layered and honeyed in pastry stars; violets and apple blossoms encased in shells of crystallized sugar; pale candied almonds feathered and slivered and layered together into little pastry swans; insubstantial crisps of burnt sugar that melted on the tongue; and Giulia Farnese’s favorite marzipan rolled out into fanciful shapes and dyed in the Borgia colors of mulberry and yellow. Tiny, beautiful, delicate, mouthwatering; everything a bride in the full bloom of youth was supposed to be. My wedding gift to the young Lucrezia Borgia, even if she never knew it.

Three hundred pounds of refreshments called for a great deal of sugar; the kitchens were now a rolling boil of luscious smells. After so many hours of nighttime experimentation I hardly smelled it anymore, but young Bartolomeo looked as if he were about to faint on the wave of sweetness. “What is that?” he breathed again.

“Sugar, cinnamon, candied pine nuts, rosewater, saffron, cloves, almond paste, and pepper,” I said briskly. “Among many other things.”

“You can’t put pepper on sweet things,” he objected.

“You most certainly can,” I sniffed. “Ground fresh over seared baby peaches with a dollop of rosewater-whipped cream—” Another of my late-night inventions.

He looked interested. “Can I try one, signorina?”

“Certainly not. See Maestro Santini safe to his bed, and then get back to your pots.” I turned back to the chattering scullions and undercooks with a clap of my hands. “I want to see mouths shut and hands moving! We’re running behind, you clods, and it’s not just Madonna Lucrezia who will be eating these sweets, it’s ambassadors from Milan and Mantua and Ferrara and who knows where else. Back to work!”

They all scattered, used to obeying me by now. The red-haired pot-boy was already shouldering Marco past the wine cellars, and I couldn’t help shaking my head in grudging affection as my cousin was hauled off with his curly head lolling. Normally it did no good for a kitchen’s state of mind, seeing their leader drunk and incapable. But there was something so endearing about Marco’s little-boy guilt when he lost his money, and his naked joy when he won it—there wasn’t a maid in my kitchens who could hold his lapses against him, or resist covering for his absences.