Wedding gifts: a credenza service of solid silver; lengths of Milanese brocade; two massive rings from the Duke of Milan. Giovanni Sforza took the pearl ring and slipped it over his bride’s finger, lifting her hand to show it off in a credible courtly gesture, and Lucrezia forgot her stiff dignity for a moment and giggled like the child she was. Giulia had slipped from her chair to sit openly on the Pope’s knee, one affectionate hand toying with the black locks of his hair, and Rodrigo Borgia deliberately dropped a candied cherry between her breasts. Giulia gazed at him in mock outrage, but he bent his head and teased the cherry out between his teeth. She laughed a little, cheeks brightening, and every man in the room stared on in envy. I pushed off from my place against the tapestried wall and swung away for the stairs leading outside, craving fresh air. No assassins in this crowd, and if there were they would soon be too drunk to stab anyone.

The vast Piazza San Pietro outside was quite dark, but still busy enough with dawdling citizens. Women clustered, whispering and squealing, as wedding guests trailed out in their grand silks, some pausing to toss a few coins into the crowd, and children hopped and scrabbled under the brightly lit windows of the Vatican. I saw a tall figure standing in the shadows, a little distance from the papal guards who kept their vigilance by torchlight, and raised a hand to her. “Signorina Cuoca!” I felt a twinge of pain in my twisted thigh muscles as I crossed the stones toward her. It had been a very long day for my malformed legs. “Why aren’t you eavesdropping on the festivities with the rest of the servants?”

She didn’t answer me, just looked out over the piazza with a bitter twist to her mouth and her arms folded across her small breasts. “Look at that,” she said, and jerked her chin.

I saw nothing but a shadowy expanse of stones thronged with beggars and idlers. “What?”

The cook took a few angry strides into the piazza, bent and retrieved something, then stamped back. “Look!” she exclaimed, and thrust her hand under my nose. I saw something small and flattened in her palm, and it took me a moment to recognize it: one of her tiny bite-size strawberry tourtes, the ones she had shaped into minuscule roses with thin sugared slices of strawberry curving and overlapping like rose petals about flower stamens fashioned of saffron threads. Half the petals were gone now, the tourte squashed almost flat and the saffron center missing.

“They threw my sweets out the windows,” she growled. “Near half of them, judging from the mess stamped flat on these stones! Just ate their fill and tossed the rest away like trash!”