“She’ll always be your daughter first. She loves you. But she will come to love her husband, too—you will have to share her.”

“I don’t like to share, mi perla. You should know that.” He tweaked my breast, more fiercely than usual, but my heart warmed. Lucrezia was happy, and I was still her father’s pearl. As long as I was that, all was forgiven.

But was it?

* * *

My father seems irritable,” Lucrezia complained after the year turned. “Do you think he’s irritable?”

“This business with the French has him worried,” I said lightly.

“Oh, the French.” Lucrezia dismissed the French with a toss of her head, holding up the shirt she was still embroidering for her lord of Pesaro. It would be done long before he came to collect it; he was still with his soldiers, scrambling to assemble their pay. At least he found time to write to his wife now. Lucrezia was forever rhapsodizing over the letters, reading bits aloud so I could marvel at her lord’s perspicacity, his turn of phrase, his unsophisticated bluntness that was really so much more pleasing than the polished empty compliments of courtiers. “I don’t want the French to invade. Giovanni will never be able to take me back to Pesaro if he has to fight instead!”

“Perhaps it won’t come to that.” Though most of us knew it would. Old King Ferrente of Naples had died, mourned by no one—he had a nasty habit of keeping his enemies in cages and strolling among them like exhibits at a menagerie, or so I heard, which was not precisely a reassuring habit in a king. But mourned or not, he was gone and his throne vacant; my Pope had passed a few weeks in restless indecision and then bestowed the Neapolitan crown not on the French king but on King Ferrente’s son. France, we heard, was Not Pleased.

Still, I did not think it the only reason His Holiness was so irked lately. Or perhaps irked was not the word.

Distant? Well, no. Not with Lucrezia; he could never manage to stay angry with her for long. Not with Cesare, who brushed off his father’s displeasure and went on filling his duties as the Pope’s clerical deputy with panache. Not with Juan, who had begun sending petulant letters from Spain about when he would be allowed home; not to little Joffre . . .

Maybe just distant to me.