Still, he always chuckled when Vannozza’s name was mentioned, shaking his head with unmistakable fondness, and it had made me wonder about my predecessor. I’d even been curious to meet her. Preferably not when I stood in nothing but a grass-stained shift with my hair hanging in a braid like a shepherdess.

She looked me up and down again, and I recognized the expression. Her eldest son Cesare had looked just the same upon meeting me for the first time. Another of my father’s whores—the words might as well have been engraved across his forehead.

“Madonna,” I said finally, repressing the urge to hide my bare arms behind my back. “May I offer you some lemon water? Or perhaps wine?”

“No, thank you, I am here to see my daughter.”

“Lucrezia is still asleep.” I smiled. “She made a beautiful bride yesterday, but I’m afraid all the excitement exhausted her terribly.”

“I wouldn’t know. I was not allowed to attend. But you know that.”

Of course I’d known, and I’d raised an eyebrow too—a mother not attending her own daughter’s wedding? I ask you. But Rodrigo had been quite casual about it all. “Those Sforza are prideful bastards. They don’t consider Vannozza’s bloodlines quite up to their standards! Mine either, but the papal tiara helps them overlook that. Vannozza understands these things; she won’t mind keeping her distance.”

Apparently not.

“I am sorry,” I said finally. “I understand it was a matter of politics.”

“Was it?” She raised her plucked brows. “I thought it was a matter of what suited Rodrigo. But of course, that is politics to him.”

My cheeks heated. I was not used to anyone referring to my lover as Rodrigo but—well, me. To the world he was Pope Alexander VI. To his children he was Father—or now, teasingly, Holy Father. To his clerics he was Your Holiness. Only to me was he Rodrigo, the name I whispered in the soft fullness of night as he wrapped his hands through my hair and drew me close.

“It was a beautiful wedding,” I said at last. “Lucrezia looked like a queen.”

But Vannozza dei Cattanei had shifted her auburn eyes away from me, fastening them on Leonello and the bundle of blankets he still held. “Your daughter?” she asked, coming down from the loggia into the garden. “Lucrezia told me you’d finally birthed.”

“Yes.” I reached for my daughter, feeling a wave of protectiveness, and Laura waved her plump baby fist as Leonello surrendered her. He had shifted on his wall bench, fading somehow from an abrasive little presence to a colorless shadow against the wall.

Vannozza’s eyes flicked over my child. “She’s small,” my predecessor said at last. “Lucrezia was much bigger at that age. Pinker, too—she was a beauty, even in the cradle.”