Maids descended on La Bella behind the screen with more armloads of brocade—“Madonna, have you considered the gray velvet with the gold embroidery?”—and I sat back more comfortably against the tapestried wall, feet dangling far above the floor, Giulia’s gold head bobbing above the edge of the screen in my peripheral vision. Her chamber looked as though a rainbow had exploded inside it: silk gowns and velvet gowns and brocade gowns lay strewn across the huge curtained bed; pairs of sleeves hung like dismembered arms over the cushioned footstools; the wall benches were six inches deep in tasseled gloves and embroidered caps and beaded veils. Madonna Giulia’s pet goat, now grown to full slothful maturity and forever paroled from the possibility of ending up in a crostata, lay curled in a corner placidly eating a velvet slipper. Maids bustled back and forth: linen maids, cosmetics maids, seamstresses, robe makers, the two maids assigned to keep La Bella’s skin white, the three maids whose sole job it was to tend her hair—all of them pink-faced with excitement. Lucrezia Borgia was to become the wife of Lord Giovanni Sforza, today, and none other than Giulia Farnese would lead her to the altar.

At which decision I had to wonder if the Pope had taken leave of his usually shrewd senses. Lucrezia at thirteen was a fetching little thing: blond, sweet-faced, tall enough to resemble a woman; conscious enough of her dignity to glide rather than bounce. But standing beside La Bella, she would be nothing but an afterthought.

“Not that one,” I heard my mistress say as the maids whisked her green and gold gown away and began holding up alternatives behind the dressing screen. Considering she was now the most notorious woman in Rome, Giulia Farnese was surprisingly modest—much to the great disappointment of all the male servants, there was no half-dressed parading about the palazzo for the Pope’s concubine. “No, not that dress either—or that—”

“The yellow-green dress,” I called out from behind my book. “It’s the color of cat vomit. You still won’t look ugly, but it’s a start.”

“Don’t see why we have to listen to him,” one of her maids said behind the screen—scrawny Pantisilea, who wasn’t so improbably named as I’d thought. Penthesilea the Amazon queen had dragged all the men she met off to captivity; Pantisilea the maid dragged all the men she met off to her bed. “I’ve never had a dwarf,” she’d told me cheerfully on first acquaintance. “Want to try me?” And we’d had a laugh or two between the sheets, but now she was looking at me over the screen with a dubious eye. “What does a bodyguard know about dresses?”

“We are in dire need of a man’s opinion,” Giulia informed her. “Oof, that’s tight, loosen those laces—”