Nods among the maids. They were a young and silly lot, most of them—Santa Marta forbid Madonna Adriana hire trained maidservants when she could get raw country girls so much cheaper!—and this batch of gigglers might not know that maidservants weren’t really supposed to gossip with their mistress or help themselves to her perfumes . . . but even inexperienced girls like these knew that a maidservant kept her belly empty, or she lost her place.

“Francesca was taking a potion,” Pia whispered. “She got it from an old crone who swore if she drank it every Sunday and sang a little charm, it would keep her from conceiving—”

“None of those potions work, do they?”

I glanced behind me involuntarily, and I wasn’t the only one. If there’s anything priests love to thunder about, it’s the things women do to keep their bellies flat.

“Well, don’t ask me how it’s done,” the Pope’s mistress said. “I may be a wicked woman, but I don’t know a thing about how to stop babies from coming, except to keep nursing the one you have as long as possible. That’s what my mother-in-law says, anyway.” Madonna Giulia lifted her baby out of the basket, settling little Laura’s plump limbs into her own lap. “Of course the old trout had to tell me that the very first time I was nursing Laura. ‘Nothing grinds away a woman’s youth like a series of births, my dear, so you’d best avoid more babies if you want to keep your figure and your place.’”

We couldn’t help laughing at her flawless mimicry, though there were more sidelong glances.

“It’s a sin,” one of the maids said firmly, crossing herself. “It’s a sin, trying to limit the children you bear. You have to take what God sends!” But the other girls were already whispering. Maybe it was something about that stiff white mask most of us were wearing by now—we could hide our eagerness, hide our faces from the things we were saying. The things priests told us women were never supposed to say.

“If you can get your man not to seed you,” one of the maids whispered, “when he finishes, that is—then you won’t conceive. If he finishes elsewhere—”

“Oh, when can you ever get a man to do that!”

More giggles. I wondered if they were all blushing as hard as I was under the mask.

“It’s all to do with the moon,” Pantisilea said with authority. She was our resident harlot, after all, though a nicer harlot had never been born. “When we’re ripe to breed, I mean. You watch the moon and you chart your courses with it—”

“There are more reliable ways than that,” I heard myself saying. All those white-masked faces turned toward me, and I rubbed self-consciously at my cheek, which was beginning to flake. “Well, there are.”

“How would you know?” Pantisilea asked, offended. She was the harlot, after all; she couldn’t have a kitchen grubber like me infringing on her field of expertise.