I wouldn’t be so careless again. Madonna Giulia might like her bodyguard, but I’d keep my lips sealed in his presence from now on. He was far too clever for his own good, and I didn’t need his cleverness focused on me.

All the maids were settling down now, creamed and painted with pilfered cosmetics and looking ready for a good gossip. “Is this usual?” I whispered to scrawny Pantisilea as she plopped beside me, unashamedly scraping out the remains of her mistress’s face mask from its pot and patting it over her own cheeks. I didn’t know Madonna Giulia’s maids near as well as I knew my kitchen girls and maidservants—in the strict hierarchy of servants in the palazzo, we inhabited an entirely different world than this perfumed and feminine one. But I’d never seen a noble-born lady of any household sharing her beauty supplies and her gossip with the maids before.

“You would not believe how the College of Cardinals is fussing,” Giulia Farnese was chattering. “You’d think we were about to be invaded by devils . . .”

No, I decided as the whispers began to fly, this was not usual, at least outside this enclosed world Leonello called the papal seraglio. My father had served a great many highborn Venetian ladies, and some might be willing to confide in their maids on occasion, but they were far less willing to hear any confessions in return. That was only for equals.

Then again, perhaps the Pope’s mistress didn’t really have equals. Women of her own birth and station never came calling on her now that she was the most notorious woman in Rome—the only people who called on her were petty lords and suave churchmen and their various functionaries, people who wanted to wheedle favors from the Pope, and they certainly didn’t bring their wives and daughters along. If she had been a courtesan she might have had friends among the other women of easy virtue, but such women would never be allowed into this house where the Pope’s virgin daughter dwelled. Giulia Farnese occupied a gray territory, I realized: too sinful for ladies and too virtuous for whores. No wonder she befriended her maids and came tripping down into my kitchens for tourtes and cooking instruction. Were there any other women she could talk to?

“So poor Francesca’s pregnant?” she was saying. The conversation had apparently moved from world gossip to household gossip. “I told her that guardsman was no good. I don’t suppose he’ll marry her?”

“No, and Madonna Adriana’s turned her out,” Pantisilea contributed, unashamedly rummaging among her mistress’s perfume vials. “No one keeps a maid on when her belly’s under her chin, we all know that.”

“How you keep yours flat with all the rutting you do—!”

“I have my ways,” Pantisilea said smugly. “You have to, if you want a man under the sheets and your post to go with it!”