“I traveled to Rome alone,” I always replied coldly, “and to keep myself safe, I traveled in men’s disguise. As you already know, because I’ve told you Santa Marta knows how many times!” But little Messer Leonello always gave me a knowing grin. Ever since he’d sniffed out the fact that I’d fled Venice with my father’s recipes, he wanted the rest of my story. Santa Marta help me if he found out just what I was fleeing. He’d turn me in just for the pleasure of seeing if he was right, the horrid little man.

Well, serve me right for lowering my guard around him. Up in the loggia I’d been thinking he wasn’t so bad at all. Perhaps even likeable. And then he’d struck, biting me like a snake lying in wait.

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.