He wasn’t the only one. By the time the wedding approached on leaden wings, my nose was huge and red and running. Even before the Bishop made us stand about outside in the rain while he droned a blessing and sprinkled us with holy water—as if there weren’t enough water already!—I was sneezing more or less constantly into my brocade sleeve. Giulia la Bella, I thought morosely as the wedding guests trailed muddy-hemmed and determinedly cheerful into the barren chapel of the Castel Nuovo. I didn’t feel at all like the Venus of the Vatican today. I felt damp, draggled, spotty, and sniveling; not at all at my best in a rose-pink dress whose hem I had not been able to keep out of the mud. And it was a morning I would have liked to shine, because Sancha of Aragon was undeniably a beauty.

She was also, unless I was very much mistaken, trouble. A dark-haired, olive-skinned, blue-eyed little thing of sixteen, buxom and sashaying in a blue brocade gown, and even the roar of the rain outside couldn’t dampen the bright glances she was casting all through the chapel. She dimpled at the Bishop; she dropped her lashes at Cesare, who stood saturnine and silent in his cardinal reds; she flashed her pearly teeth at my Pope, who looked amused. She didn’t have a glance for poor little Joffre, kneeling at her side before the altar on a golden cushion, pop-eyed and sincere and a good head shorter than she was. A well-behaved boy of twelve years old, good-looking enough with his auburn hair and doublet of slashed velvet, but he looked nervous and twitchy beside his self-possessed bride—beside his brothers and sister too, truth be told. Joffre somehow looked like he’d been made up out of all the leftover bits after inscrutable Cesare and swaggering Juan and charming Lucrezia were finished. Rodrigo wasn’t as fond of Joffre as he was of the others—I remembered what he’d once said, that Joffre perhaps wasn’t of his getting at all. As if it were Joffre’s fault that snippy, long-nosed Vannozza dei Cattanei had a wandering eye!

“Poor Joffre,” I couldn’t help murmuring, and sneezed into my sleeve.

“Yes,” Madonna Adriana agreed unexpectedly at my side, keeping her voice low. “That’s a little harlot if I ever saw one. Let’s hope the help she brings from Naples against the French is worth it.”

Sancha of Aragon cast another sparkling glance up at my Pope as her new title of Princess of Squillace was read out, and bent her head ceremonially to kiss Rodrigo’s shoe. “Leonello,” I whispered to my bodyguard as he craned for a look at the bridal breasts. “No ogling!”