“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.”

“But I never like putting metal in my hair, do you? A rinse with rosemary and sage, that’s what we used in Capodimonte.” Madonna Giulia gestured at the maids, who bustled behind me with giggles and began unpinning my hair. “And you must have a mask—it feels very strange and stiff, but it whitens the skin no end.”

“I don’t need white skin,” I protested, trying to swat away the maids. I’d never had a maid to do my hair in my life; my sister had always been the one to yank a comb through my curls and complain about the tangles. “I’m no fine lady, Madonna Giulia, I don’t—”

“Here, hold still.” With her own hands, the Pope’s mistress began smoothing cream over my cheeks. “Don’t screw up your nose like that; I know it smells, but it’s just bean flour, egg white, goat’s milk, and one or two other things. Some people like to add a dove’s entrails to the mix, but I never like putting bird parts on my face, do you? Goodness, but beauty can be a disgusting business. Men think it’s all Venus-in-her-bower, dabbing lotions and sprinkling perfumes, but they have no idea.”

“Better to keep the masks and the smelly bits out of their sight, I always say,” another of the maids agreed. Madonna Giulia sat back, tilting her head as a maid began combing the new saffron and cinnabar mix through her damp hair, and one of the other maids was working something herbal-smelling through mine. My wiry curls had grown out to my shoulders again, long enough to plait. Leonello still made a point of offering outlandish theories about it whenever he saw me. “Let me guess,” he said yesterday when we crossed paths in the courtyard. “You’re a runaway nun fleeing the cloister!” Two days before that his guess had been, “A singer of plainchant, passing herself off as a boy to continue singing in a boys’ choir! You’re certainly flat enough for it.” A week before that: “Ah, I have it! You’re a Venetian courtesan who titillates her clients by dressing up like a man! The things one hears about Venetians . . .”