The Pope’s concubine lounged comfortably on a pile of velvet cushions in the grass of the central garden, wrapped in a series of towels with her little white feet bared under the sun. The top of her head protruded from a crownless straw hat the size of a wheel, her wet hair draped out over the vast brim to dry under the noon heat. Her face had been frozen into complete immobility behind a stiff white mask of some mysterious claylike substance, and she was buffing her nails with a piece of soft leather, occasionally leaning over to blow kisses at the baby who gurgled at her side in a little basket rigged with its own sunshade. Maidservants bustled back and forth, bees around their queen: one maid working at the soles of her mistress’s little feet with a pumice stone, another maid plucking at her hairline with a pair of tweezers to heighten the smooth white forehead, a third maid hunching witchlike over a jar of bubbling hair potion and shooing away that wretched pet goat. What a lot of bother it is to be a beauty, I thought. Myself, I would rather devote the passing hours to a complex sauce than to my own hairline and cuticles.

“Carmelina!” Behind the stiff mask, Madonna Giulia’s lively dark eyes lit up as though she’d been yearning all day to see me and only now could her life be called complete. I’d seen other women with that trick of worshipful welcome—my sister used to practice it before a mirror—but Giulia Farnese’s was too spontaneous and all-encompassing to be anything but sincere. “Have you brought my saffron?” she asked. “You won’t believe what it does for my hair—I put together a rinse of saffron, cinnabar, and sulfur, or rather Pia here does, and it gives me handfuls of pale gold streaks. Little red-gold ones too, which looks very well.” She gave a little bounce of pleasure. “I’m sorry I keep using your supplies, though. It would be very sad if you had to stop making those little saffron biscotti. I adore those biscotti. Did you bring any?”

“I’m afraid not, Madonna Giulia.”

“Good. I’m getting plump again. Sit down, sit down!”

“I should return to my kitchens, Madonna Giulia—”

“Oh, nonsense, you can take an hour.” She passed the packet of saffron threads back to the maid with the pot of hair potion. “I always eat when I’m sunning my hair, after all, and since I can’t eat until I take a bit of weight off, you might as well keep me company.” She tilted her little head on one side, assessing me as I sat. “No sense putting saffron in beautiful dark hair like yours, though. What shall we try instead . . .”

“A tincture of quicklime and lead,” the maid named Pia contributed, giving the hair rinse another good stir. “Good for dark hair, madonna.”