“Every time she washes her hair, there goes my saffron.” But I didn’t mind so much—I didn’t have to pay for the saffron, after all, and besides, I was fond of Madonna Giulia. The way she consumed entire basketfuls of my frittelle in one sitting would have melted the heart of any cook on earth. “I’ll take it to her myself,” I called, stripping off my dirty apron and seizing an unopened packet of saffron.

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—”