The new Pope was not a man to waste time. Immediately after his ascension to the throne of San Pietro, he moved the papal seraglio containing Madonna Adriana and his daughter and his mistress to the exquisite Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, a stone’s throw from the Vatican itself. All Rome was abuzz at the scandal, and even I had raised an eyebrow; popes had kept mistresses and bastards before, and most cardinals maintained at least one unofficial household, but there was always the necessary shell of respectability: concubines passed off as cousins, illegitimate sons as nephews. But Pope Alexander VI cared not a fig for gossip and made no such pretense, moving his mistress openly to her new home, and I had been moved right along with the rest of her servants and belongings. We had all let out gasps and whistles at the sight of the Palazzo Santa Maria: the high-arched loggias framing the jewel-like gardens, the marble terraces and splashing fountains, the long flights of shallow steps leading to breathtaking vistas over Rome. An Eden fit for Dante’s Paradiso . . .

And just now, it could have doubled for the Inferno. Perhaps one of the livelier rings of hell, with a few of the more energetic sins. Despair; yes, I saw plenty of that as I descended into a throng of servants wringing their hands and wild-eyed stewards perusing fistfuls of increasingly frayed lists. Vanity, certainly; I saw that too—the bride’s attendants preening everywhere there was a reflective surface and trying to pretend they weren’t counting the pearls on the bodice of the girl beside them. Wrath; plenty of that too as maids got their ears violently boxed for not being fast enough with a cup of wine, and pages shouted at each other with voices gone shrill from strain.

Dio. Weddings.

“Where are you going, dwarf?” a rude voice demanded as I made my way through the throng to a certain tapestry-covered archway. My eyes traveled up a pair of absurd cloth-of-silver pantaloons, a gold robe with a dagged edge that trailed the floor, and a broad collar of pearls and balas rubies.

“I see one of the Sultan’s concubines has gone astray.”

Juan Borgia flushed under his absurd turban with its ceiling-scraping plume and huge ruby. A suave Turkish prince had arrived in Rome as a hostage not long ago, and his flamboyant robes and pantaloons had been adopted by all the young fops in Rome. One could look out over a sea of turbans at Mass and not be sure whether one was in a church or a mosque.

“I wouldn’t expect a dwarf to understand the fashions,” he said, giving an eye to my ill-fitting Borgia livery. A year in the Pope’s service and I still didn’t have a doublet that fit around my oddly proportioned body.