Carmelina looked up from her ciphered pages of recipes, hearing the drift of verse from the little Countess of Pesaro. “What’s that poetry Madonna Lucrezia keeps going on about?”

“Don’t ask, or she’ll recite the whole sonnet,” I said absently. “Love has turned Lord Sforza into a poet to rival Dante, to hear his little wife tell it. I could write better verse hung up by my thumbs.”

“Poetry.” Carmelina snorted, turning another page in her packet of recipes. “Thanks be to Santa Marta that nobody writes verses to common girls.”

“Poetry doesn’t move your heart?” I made big eyes at her, distracted for a moment.

“I’d be more moved if a man made me cena,” she said. “No one ever cooks for the cook.”

I looked at her thoughtfully as the wagon jolted beneath us. I could hear the clatter of pots in the boxes and sacks in the wagon—the kitchen equipment needed for any journey—and Carmelina turned to secure a knot on a box piled inside the wagon that had not been tightened to her standards. She was frowning, the familiar line showing between her straight black brows, but I judged she was as pleased as I to be out under the sky on a journey to places unknown. “May I ask you a question?” I asked.

“I came to Rome for the work, Leonello. Not because I’m a witch or a Jew or an exiled courtesan!”

“No, not that.” I tried a smile on her, but our spiky-natured cook just got suspicious whenever I started being charming. Caught on to that, had she? “The maids in the Palazzo Santa Maria—I know they’ve had their, ah, difficulties with the Duke of Gandia—”

“Not now that he’s in Spain,” Carmelina snorted. “Every maid in the palazzo went about singing for a week.”

“I can imagine.” Juan Borgia regarded the papal seraglio as very much his own personal harem when it came to the maids. I wondered from time to time if he might be my masked man; he certainly had a taste for both low women and unwilling women, and he was certainly hot-blooded. But he didn’t have the patience to hunt, kill, and butcher a deer properly, much less a woman. Idly putting his sword through stray dogs in alleys; that was about as much effort as he was willing to expend on violence. And though he might rape a girl, I didn’t see him cutting her throat afterward. He’d toss her a coin and think himself magnanimous for honoring her with his attentions. “Have the maids had difficulties with Cesare Borgia?” I asked instead.

If anything, Carmelina looked even more suspicious. “Why do you want to know?”