“That means the steward gets a bribe from the vendor who sells sturgeon. I’ll see for myself what’s on offer, thank you.” Madonna Lucrezia was used to eating the best, and I’d make sure she kept getting it now that she was settling into her new home. A young bride should at least have a well-filled stomach as she learned how to manage her husband’s household. Roast pigeon with blackberry sauce, perhaps, and flat crisp Roman pizze to remind her of home . . .

“It’s a fine day, signorina.” Bartolomeo ventured. He was fifteen now and had grown a good hand-span taller than he’d been when I first tossed him an apprentice’s apron. He was still so milky pale that his freckles stood out across his face and neck like a dark sprinkle of cinnamon, but his arms had a layer of wiry muscle from so many hours of whipping egg whites and hefting sides of beef ribs. Ever since poor Eleonora the fruit seller had died so gruesomely in her own market stall, I’d seen the wisdom of taking a strong young apprentice with me to market when I did my shopping. Far better tall, alert Bartolomeo than the useless Sforza cook with his potbelly and his stale wine breath. “Looks like we’ll have a sunny morning,” my apprentice went on.

“Looks like fog to me.” We had just passed the town’s central piazza, where a few beggars and drunks huddled against buildings sleeping off a night’s despair or drink. Not even a third the size of the Piazza Navona in Rome, but everything in Pesaro was small to a Roman’s eyes. I’d seen Madonna Lucrezia’s face fall just a little when she first laid eyes on her new home. “Oh!” she’d exclaimed. “It’s very . . .” To a girl accustomed to all the glories of the Holy City, the clamor and the pomp and the spectacle, Pesaro might have seemed just a bit provincial. Nor did it help that we arrived in another storm of summer rain, winds buffeting flat both Madonna Lucrezia’s careful confection of curls and all the banners that had been brought out to welcome her. Still, the skies cleared as the days passed, and Madonna Giulia waxed staunch enthusiasm in favor of Pesaro’s beauties: the blue bay and winding river mouth, the heavy Romanesque cathedral with its altar dedicated to some gloomy and mustachioed saint, the Palazzo Ducale. We’ll see if their fish market measures up, I thought, and quickened my steps through the piazza.