“If I can’t go to Pesaro yet, then I wish Father would let me go to Joffre’s wedding,” Lucrezia fretted, yanking on her tangled embroidery thread. “Everyone will be there!” My Pope was to crown the new King of Naples in the Castel Nuovo, and in case the Neapolitans had any ideas about backing away from the papal alliance once they had what they wanted, the wedding of the Pope’s son to the new King’s bastard daughter was to commence immediately afterward.

“Your father doesn’t want you traveling as far as Naples.”

“You’re going, and Madonna Adriana.” Lucrezia pouted briefly.

“I’ll tell you every last detail about Sancha of Aragon and the other Neapolitan ladies,” I promised. “They’ll know they have an impossible task ahead of them if they try to put the two of us in the shade.”

Lucrezia’s pout disappeared in a flash of dimples. “Well, even if Sancha is a beauty, her wedding can’t possibly be as lovely as mine.”

It wasn’t.

* * *

Can it possibly be me?” I complained to Leonello. “Am I an utter blight on all weddings? Mine was farcical, Lucrezia’s was exhausting, and this one is just dismal.”

“It does seem to have begun under a cloud,” my bodyguard agreed. From the hour my Pope had sent me ahead to Naples with the rest of the entourage, it had poured sheets of rain. Four days and nights traveling, locked in a coach with Leonello and Madonna Adriana and that fussy little German master of ceremonies named Burchard who had been sent to coach the Neapolitans on every nuance of the complicated dual coronation-and-wedding ceremonies. Burchard spent four days moaning that the new King of Naples would be sure to drop the crucifix during the oath or wear the wrong cap with his crown, and Leonello amused himself first by baiting Madonna Adriana until even she lost her placid temper, and then by torturing Burchard by helpfully pointing out all the possible disasters Burchard hadn’t yet thought of. By the time we reached the Castel Nuovo in Naples, I was damp, sneezing, and ready to throttle them all. I’d looked forward to seeing the beauties of Naples—the famous shrines, the bustling harbor, the looming Castel Nuovo with its twin turrets linked by a white marble triumphal arch. But the city was still shrouded in gloom; the flowers in the niches of all those famous shrines had been sodden into gummy piles of stems, and the white marble arch was lost in the mist over my head as our coach rolled muddily into the Castel Nuovo on the fifth day. My Pope, when he arrived, had no time for me in the tense chaos of the approaching alliance against France; the coronation was endless; I could hardly understand the heavy Neapolitan dialect; and poor Burchard was moaning “Gott im Himmel” more or less without pause and looking ready to collapse.