Passion can fill a house like smoke. I felt it every time the Pope came through the passage to visit his pearl: the glance he’d give her over the cena dishes as he talked with Adriana da Mila and little Lucrezia, a glance so heavy with meaning that Giulia’s lashes dropped under the weight of it; the way his thumb caressed the inside of her wrist as he took her arm to escort her from the room, as though the lovemaking had already begun; the swift, teasing smile she’d give him as the door of her chamber swung shut. Later you might hear small sounds coming from under those bolted doors—a soft cry of passion or the low bubble of laughter, and those sounds seemed to drift through the palazzo like fire along the nerves. Those were the nights Lucrezia turned snappish and yearning, the nights Madonna Adriana tapped her foot to some unseen music and looked dreamy, as though reliving some memory from a time when she was young, heedless, and not at all concerned with how many ducats she had spent or saved that day. Those were the nights the maids giggled and flirted with the guardsmen; the nights when the solitary men took themselves in hand with a groan for the penances the priest would make them do in atonement.

But I’d never seen passion fill a house like this.

Lucrezia Borgia’s kindling was a sweeter, softer thing, a candle flame rather than the heady firestorm the Pope and his Venus could ignite through the palazzo, but no less insidious for all that. Giddy, happy, laughing love—it expanded outward from her, truffle-scented and oyster-fueled, a river like sparkling wine that intoxicated first her husband and then the guests, then the whole house.

“Leonello!” My mistress smiled as she opened the door of her chamber in answer to my knock. La Bella’s hair was still piled high in the intricate coils and braids she’d worn to entertain the Count of Pesaro and his entourage, but she’d discarded her tight-laced gown for a loose fur-lined Neapolitan robe, all the fashion since the recent alliance with Naples. “It’s late,” my mistress continued. “I dismissed you an hour ago—why haven’t you gone to bed?”

Because if I went to bed now I’d lie restless under the perfume of the passion little Lucrezia and her husband were spreading through the house, the passion that had already overcome a half-dozen other shadowy pairs of lovers I’d seen entwined behind pillars and flitting into shadowed places in the garden. Everyone was in love tonight, everyone but me, and if I went to bed I’d fall asleep to uneasy dreams of women staked to tables and black-clad men hovering over me in smiling masks.