I hardly heard him, looking down at my beautiful daughter. Rodrigo rarely gave more than a passing smile into her cradle, but men don’t really coo over babies, did they? It wasn’t to be expected. But he did love her; he did. She’d have a wedding someday in the papal apartments, just like her sister Lucrezia; a wedding with a jeweled dress and a noble husband and a dowry fit for a pope’s daughter. Because she was a pope’s daughter. She had Rodrigo’s nose!

But not his name. And I hated Vannozza dei Cattanei with a rush of sudden black bitterness for spoiling my happiness.

“If it’s any consolation”—Leonello wound his small hands through his belt, tilting his head back at me—“you made her look stale, powdered, bitter, and old.”

I rested my cheek against Laura’s downy head. “I’m afraid it’s no consolation at all.”

Carmelina

I gave a final glance over the row of little corpses. “They’ll do,” I decreed, and turned to my obedient row of aproned apprentices. “Take each bird down, and stuff the cavities with fennel and nettle—”

“Why nettle?” piped a boy’s voice, interrupting.

I turned a glare on a certain redheaded scullion named Bartolomeo, craning his freckled face over his shoulder at me when he should have been tackling the stack of oily pots at the cistern. “Nettle keeps the flies from settling,” I said. “And get back to those pots!”

“Sorry, signorina.” He sounded chastened, but he’d soon be asking questions again. He was quicker at his work than any of the other pot-boys, but oh, the questions! Why was chestnut flour sweeter than other flour? Why was there a hole bored in the bottom of the butter crock? Why did the best bacon come from male hogs fed in the woods rather than female hogs fed in farmyards? Questions that a pot-boy had no business asking in the first place. I was all in favor of a little enthusiasm for one’s work, but I had a busy kitchen to run. I couldn’t spend all day satisfying a pot-boy’s idle curiosity. Santa Marta, grant me patience!

“Stuff the cavities with nettle,” I continued in my lecture to the apprentices, whose business it very much was. “Then hang the birds to draw. And if I find you hanging them too close together, I’ll stuff you lot with nettle.”