At dawn I saw the wedding guests stumble tipsily into the dark. A bare-shouldered beauty whose companion was still fumbling candied cherries out of her bodice in imitation of the Pope . . . Madonna Adriana, asleep in a sedan chair with her mouth sagging open . . . and Cesare Borgia in his churchman’s robes, his little jeweled bride of his sister fast asleep in his arms as he carried her back to her virgin bed.

Chapter Eight

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue live together.

—PETRARCH

Giulia

I had the most perfect and beautiful baby in the world.

“She may be pretty, but she is far from perfect,” Leonello commented when I said as much, on the long lazy afternoon the day after the wedding. Most of the household was still asleep, and those few who were awake lay around the palazzo like felled oxen, moaning gently from the results of too much wine. Weddings are exhausting, aren’t they? “That baby yells louder than a Venetian fishwife when she’s hungry, and she’s usually hungry,” Leonello continued. “Why couldn’t you send her to live in the country with a wet nurse, like most mothers? The whole palazzo would get a good deal more sleep.”

“Send Laura away? Never.”

My daughter had just been a slimy collection of flailing limbs when they first laid her in my arms, a little red frog of a thing with one ear inexplicably folded down and stuck to itself. I’d been quite unreasonably worried about that ear. My daughter couldn’t grow up with a bent ear! She wasn’t one hour old before I was rocking her worriedly, loving her so much I could die and reassuring her that I’d fix her hair in knotted shell braids on each side of her head so no one would ever be able to laugh at her ear. I’d kill anybody who laughed at her; I already knew that before she was a day old. But the ear unfolded itself, the newborn redness gave way to poreless peach-soft skin, and she turned into the prettiest baby ever born. Not that it mattered to me because Laura was my daughter and I’d adore her whether she was pretty or plain.

Though I was glad about the ear. Those knotted shell braids on either side of the head don’t really look well on anybody, do they?

“Her hair’s growing,” I said as I turned on my back in the grass and hoisted my bright-eyed baby into the air above my head. “I think she’ll be as blond as me.”