I smiled, hearing the deep voice behind me. I had plenty of nicknames in Rome by now—“La Bella,” which was really quite flattering, and “the Venus of the Vatican,” which was somewhat flattering, and “the Bride of Christ,” which I didn’t find flattering at all, though Leonello found it so sidesplittingly funny that I had a dark suspicion he might have been the one to come up with it in the first place. Only Rodrigo, however, called me his pearl. “Your Holiness,” I said softly, and blew out all the tapers but one. Padding across the woven carpet in my bare feet, I brought his hand up to my lips and kissed his ring. He nodded gravely, as he always did, then scooped me up in his burly arms and carried me to bed. He always did that too. There’s something about being small—men always seemed to want to pick you up and carry you somewhere, didn’t they? I was forever being toted about like a doll. “Oddly,” Leonello had told me once when I said as much to him, “I find my experience of being small somewhat different.”

Tonight, however, my Pope did not seem inclined for love. He put his head against my breast instead, absently kissing the base of my throat, and I leaned my cheek against his head and curled the locks of his black hair around my fingers. “You’re thinking of Juan,” I said at last.

“Juan.” Rodrigo was just a somber profile in the flickering half-dark of the single candle: an eagle nose, a bulky chest, a sad voice. “Gone, like Pedro Luis. Pedro, he was so young when . . .” Rodrigo’s voice trailed off, as it always did when he spoke of the firstborn son in Spain who had died after his first military command. “They said he was brave, very brave. I’ve told you that?”

“Many times.”

“Juan, he’s brave. Like Pedro Luis. He’ll be a great condottiere.”

I had my own doubts that a boy of seventeen who could hardly tear himself away from his hobbies of harassing the kitchen maids and killing cats in alleys was really poised to be the next Achilles, but I certainly wasn’t fool enough to say so. “Juan is gone, but he’s not dead, you know,” I said instead, smoothing Rodrigo’s hair. “He’ll be back.”

“I don’t like him going at all! Any of them. I like my family here, with me.”

“Says the man who wore my ear to a nub one night, telling me how his children were going to found a great web of interconnected dynasties throughout the world!” I bit Rodrigo’s earlobe, playful. “How are they supposed to make a great web of anything if they all stay here?”

“I’m still working on that,” he admitted.

I laughed. “So until you have the perfect solution, Your Holiness, leave Juan to Spain and Spain to Juan. Cesare—”