“She had better be, with a name like Laura. Did you really have to name her after the most famous blond bore in the world’s history of bad poetry?” Leonello complained. “She’ll go brunette as she gets older, you wait, and then she’ll spend her life gritting her teeth when people ask why she isn’t golden like Petrarch’s Laura.”

“Nonsense. She’s going to have lovely fair hair just like mine, and I’ll show her how to rinse it with a saffron cinnabar decoction.” I drew Laura down on my breast, kissing her downy head and basking in the warmth of the sun. The grass of the palazzo garden was soft beneath me; the fountain splashed somewhere to my right; the sun was summer-warm above, and a breeze blew delightfully over my bare arms and bare neck and bare feet. I’d come downstairs in my sleeveless filmy shift without even a robe, reveling in the joy of free limbs after all those long hours at the wedding yesterday laced into a stiff bodice and tight sleeves.

“You’ll get freckled,” Leonello observed from his wall bench in the shade, his boots propped up on a padded stool and a book facedown in his lap. My pet goat lay asleep beside him, periodically stirring himself with a flap of silky ears to nibble the buds off the vines that flowered over the walls. “Freckled and sunburned, and you won’t be anybody’s mistress then.”

“I don’t care.” All I cared about was that the wedding was over; all the frantic fuss and frenzy of it finally done. Madonna Adriana had yet to appear from her chamber though it was past noon, and of course dear Lucrezia had still been fast asleep when I poked my head in on rising from my own bed. I’d been the one to tuck her into her bed at dawn this morning, helping the maids unhook her sleepy body from the stiff jeweled dress and smooth her between the silk sheets. Until she was old enough to consummate her marriage, she would continue to reside with me at the Palazzo Santa Maria rather than with her new husband, and I was glad of it. “Beautiful,” she’d whispered, sliding into sleep, and I loved her almost as much as Laura.

“She’s exhausted,” I’d whispered to Rodrigo, who had come through the passage to the Palazzo Santa Maria to see his daughter back safe to her bed after the last wedding festivities.