“You wouldn’t believe how much trouble it is to comb,” I confided, but I did adore my hair. Dark blond, the color of crystallized honey, but I sunned it every day in the garden over the brim of an enormous straw hat, and the sun shot streaks of yellow-gold and apricot-gold and white-gold through the mass of it till it looked (a certain besotted page boy had told me once) like it had been mined out of the earth instead of grown on my head. And it was long hair, too—when I shook it out loose as I did now, it covered me in great slow ripples all the way to my feet. “Only because you’re so short,” Gerolama told me, but it wasn’t my fault I got the blond waves and she got the meager tufts. I’d spent hours when I was little massaging her scalp with chamomile paste so her hair would grow in faster, and what had I gotten for my pains? Slapped hands when it didn’t work. I ask you.

Surely Orsino would like my hair. I wished I could strip off this filmy shift and greet him in nothing but my hair, but I didn’t quite have the courage. “Tomorrow night,” I promised myself, and settled for tugging my shift off my shoulders again as soon as Gerolama and the other women left. What was the use of having nice firm white breasts like mine if no one saw them? Besides, they were Orsino’s breasts now just as much as they were mine.

My bed had a striped cover of black and white velvet, and the sheets were damp with crushed rose petals. The tapers threw flickering golden shadows around the chamber, striking glints off my hair, and I experimented with various poses. Reclining or sitting up? Hands folded, or arranged beneath my cheek? Hair pulled forward over one shoulder, or both? Oh, Holy Virgin, would he just get here? I’d had quite a lot of wine at the wedding feast, and if Orsino dawdled too long I’d be fast asleep.

I yawned. The candles had burned down halfway.

In the end, he caught me dozing. The creak of the door brought me bolt upright in bed, wiping frantically at the corners of my mouth (Holy Virgin, please don’t let my husband catch me drooling!) and biting my lips to give them color. Just think, tomorrow I’d be a married woman in her own right, and allowed to wear lip color if I wanted, instead of bite-bite-bite till my mouth was chapped.