“He’s not a man, madonna,” one of the other maids objected.

“But at least he’s impartial,” I said from my wall. “What you need is a pair of eyes that does not notice your beauty.”

“You don’t think I’m beautiful, Leonello?” Giulia peeked over the top of the screen, giving me the benefit of her big wounded eyes before being yanked down again by the maids.

“Certainly you are.” I turned a page absently. “But I have worked in your company near a year now, madonna, and no matter how beautiful the frescoes on one’s wall, eventually one ceases to notice them.”

“You’re horrid,” Giulia complained. “His Holiness says he’s as struck as he was when he first laid eyes on me.”

“Which is why you want my opinion instead of His Holiness the Pope’s.”

Giulia flew out behind the screen again, this time arrayed in embroidered yellow-green silk. “Well?”

“Better,” I said. Not really—even unjeweled and swathed in a dress the color of cat vomit, Giulia Farnese would still draw all eyes. The virtuous women of Rome could be divided fairly evenly into two camps: those who drew their skirts aside from the Bride of Christ and her scandalous reputation, and those who fawned on her because their husbands hoped for some favor from His Holiness. But every woman in Rome, whether scornful or sycophantic, craned their necks to see every detail of what Giulia Farnese wore. If she appeared at Mass in the Basilica San Pietro in a blue velvet gown, every cloth merchant in the city began hawking “papal blue.” If she wore a dashing little furred cap tilted over one eye when she went to confession, every woman in Rome with a claim to high fashion was sporting a “Farnese biretta” within a fortnight. Doubtless by tomorrow morning, there would be a storm of women racing off to their robe makers for dresses in cat-vomit silk.

“Better,” I said again as my mistress twirled. “You’ll be the least ostentatious woman at the Gilded Excrescence.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call Lucrezia’s wedding that.” Giulia made a face at me as her maids tied her sleeves. “It’s sure to be a beautiful occasion.”

“Certainly it will be a sumptuous one.” His Holiness the Pope was sparing no expense in the wedding of his bastard daughter. I looked down into the cradle beside my wall bench at the bride’s little sister. “Will you be having a wedding like this in thirteen years or so, little one?”

The baby gnawed on her own fist in her nest of crested linens: the latest addition to the papal seraglio, born almost nine months to the week that Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and there wasn’t a soul in Rome who hadn’t done their sums on hearing that.