Madonna Adriana stayed in her carriage, but the other ladies took to the saddle: Lucrezia on a little white jennet, which she raced back and forth between the carriage and the head of the procession where her lord Count rode with his soldiers. Madonna Giulia ambled more slowly on her gray mare, stray bits of hair blowing about her face like golden ribbons in the warm breeze. I had my perch on a pack mule, jammed between the beast’s panniers, looking ahead at a line of three more pack mules tied nose to tail and being driven along by a bored guardsman. The mules stank like rancid manure piles and the dust rose off the road to tickle my nose, but the sun was warm on my back, and if I lifted my eyes from the swaying procession of mule arses, I could see the long stretches of countryside rolling golden-green and endless around us.

“Why are you gaping, Leonello?” Giulia asked, slowing her mare from its trot. “It’s just countryside, you know. Sheep and shepherds and shrubs. Surely you’ve been riding in the country before!”

I hesitated, keeping my eyes on the dusty horizon of grass and goats. I had not been entirely easy with La Bella these past few months, ever since the night I’d so stupidly told her the story of my birth and seen the pity in her eyes. I had no desire to be pitied, not by anyone, and I’d been pierced with resentment afterward every time I looked at her. But I felt strangely happy now in the warm June sunshine, my feet swinging freely on either side of the mule. A boy on holiday, even though I’d never been a boy on holiday in all my life. “I’ve never been so far from Rome before,” I confessed, feeling oddly giddy. “This is all very strange to a city lad.”

“I grew up not so far from here.” Giulia pointed west, or what I thought was west. How did an urban sort like me tell direction, except by the nearest church or piazza or shrine? I didn’t know how these country people did it. “In Capodimonte, that way. It’s got more trees than here,” she said a little wistfully. “And a huge lake, Lake Bolsena. It’s beautiful.” She wrinkled her nose up at the sky, heedless of the freckles she’d already collected in a scatter of gold flakes across her cheeks. “I didn’t realize it, but I miss the country.”