I knew I should try, but I was getting a touch light-headed as well as runny-nosed, and all in all it would be better if the Pope’s mistress didn’t fall over in front of the whole Neapolitan court like a drunken milkmaid at a harvest dance. “I fear I’m not up to it, Your Holiness,” I said in apology, and gave the best smile I had. But the best I had wasn’t much under watery eyes and a nose red as a pomegranate. Rodrigo looked impatient for a moment—the man who was never ill and never short of energy!—and turned with a shrug to watch the ladies dip and twirl. And I saw how his eyes tracked the buxom figure of Sancha of Aragon, then the slimmer fair-haired figure of goose-necked Caterina Gonzaga, then a pair of dark Neapolitan beauties who giggled and fluttered like peahens in the papal presence . . . then back to Caterina: wife of Count Ottaviano da Montevegio and a noted beauty of the papal court. Pale, beautiful, taller than me and nearly as blond—carrying on like an empress, and giving herself as many airs as the bride. Caterina Gonzaga dipped her head for Rodrigo’s gaze, spinning gracefully to show a flash of ankle, and he grinned.

I felt suddenly cold. Nearly two years now I had kept my Pope’s love. Oh, I wasn’t fool enough to think he was entirely faithful to me. Lusty men like that are never faithful, are they? My mother always said that a straying husband could always be endured with a little extra prayer and a great deal of patience. Although I doubt she had a pope in mind when she recited that particular homily . . . In any case, I knew better than to fuss when Rodrigo strayed now and then with some courtesan at a private party, or some eager beauty who came to his bed on the nights I was indisposed with my monthly courses. But however his flesh sometimes wandered, his eyes never did—his eyes were full of me alone. A year ago he’d have applauded only for me in the dancing, then pulled me onto his knee afterward and whispered that there was no woman in Naples who could match me. A year ago he would not have been watching Caterina Gonzaga incline her queenly head under his hunter’s eye as he politicked with the Neapolitan King and only gave me an absent token smile.

But a year ago I had not yet given him the child he wasn’t sure was his—had not defied him openly in the matter of his daughter’s marriage—didn’t have a red nose and squinchy little eyes . . . I sneezed helplessly into my sleeve again.