“Is it not obvious?” His voice was very dry.

“You’re learned and clever and you have a wonderful voice. If you’d just read poetry instead of mocking it, you’d have women positively swooning.” I looked him over critically. “You could dress better, though. That Borgia mulberry color doesn’t do anything for you. Green, perhaps, or black. You could look very sinister and dashing in black.”

“Dashing,” he said, making another horrible face at Laura.

“Maybe a turban in the Turkish style,” I giggled. “You could hide a half-dozen more knives in a turban, I’m sure. And lace cuffs—”

“Lace? Lace? Dio. You have a baby and a goat to dress in frills, woman; leave me in peace!”

A frigid voice interrupted our laughter. “Is there no one awake in this palazzo except dwarves and goats and giggling maidservants?”

“No,” said Leonello, looking up to our visitor. “We are all locked fast in enchanted slumber, like a princess in her thorn-bound tower. Victims not of a witch’s enchantment, but of that gilded excrescence of a wedding. Welcome to the seraglio. Whom do you seek, fair lady?”

I followed his gaze to see a woman in the arches of the loggia just above me. Perhaps forty-five; auburn-haired, tall, and trim-waisted in russet velvet with a pair of plum silk sleeves; beautiful in her powdered and preserved fashion. I’d never met her before, but she gazed at me down the length of her high-bridged nose in a way that was acutely familiar.

“Ah,” she said, scrutinizing me top to toe. “You are La Bella, I take it?”

“I am Giulia Farnese.” I rose with as much poise as I could summon while brushing bits of grass from my crumpled shift. “And you are—?”

Of course I knew exactly who she was.

“Vannozza dei Cattanei.” Her voice was cold. “Your predecessor.”

“Indeed,” I said, as though unimpressed, and repressed the urge to pat at my hair.

Rodrigo had told me something of his past mistresses, with a certain deprecating amusement—“Why is it women always have to know?” There had been a Valencian courtesan who had given him his first son, a son who had died in Spain along with the courtesan herself—there had been a complaisant vintner’s wife in Madrid, who had given him two daughters. But most of all there had been the woman he had kept at his side for a decade; the woman by whom he had fathered Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Joffre. “Though I always had my doubts about Joffre,” Rodrigo had told me, circling the point of my bare shoulder with his thumb. “Vannozza was growing bored with me by then.”

I’d laughed. “How could anyone get bored with you?” My Pope was exasperating at times, stubborn, self-willed, prone to the occasional rage, but boring? Never.