Her eyes went to Madonna Giulia, alight with triumph, and I saw Lucrezia and Madonna Adriana give quick looks as well. My mistress never blinked; just lifted a hand from the pet goat sleeping in her lap and idly fingered the huge teardrop pearl about her neck. “I’ve never cared for rubies,” she murmured. “So easy to fake these days, with all those clever glass copies coming in from Venice. Why, I’ve heard one can fake a good ruby for a handful of ducats, and no woman would be any the wiser! Pearls, now, those are far harder to palm off on the ignorant . . . Goodness, is it my turn already?”

That shut the Gonzaga bitch up, and she flounced off behind the screens to change back into her dress—making plans, I was sure, to present her ruby to the nearest jeweler for inspection. I thought I saw Giulia blink rather hard as she shifted the goat from her lap to rise, and wondered if she was fighting back tears. Letters from His Holiness, I knew, had been rather few.

“I’m afraid the best of Maestro Botticelli’s work is taken already,” she said. “A pity he doesn’t seem to be painting anymore—I heard there was a mad monk preaching simplicity in Florence, and now half the artists in the city are renouncing paint as secular frivolity—”

“Fra Savonarola,” I murmured from my obscure wall bench. The name gave me no disquiet at the time, though it should have.

“Seems a great waste of a painter like Maestro Botticelli,” Giulia shrugged. “For tonight, anyway, I shall have to make do with Maestro Raphael.”

She turned her back and dropped to her knees, the yellow light from the tapers gleaming on her coiled hair. With slow grace she reached up to unlace her dress, and I felt the men in the room stop breathing. La Bella slid one arm from her sleeve, tugging her dress down on one side to reveal a naked pearly shoulder, and lifted her bare arm in supplication. Her head turned to profile and she froze, lashes down.

No one made a guess. They all seemed content to stare—except the Countess, who suddenly looked more peevish than queenly . . . and Lucrezia, I noticed suddenly, who began fiddling with her flowered skirts with an almost inaudible sigh.

Giulia held her pose a moment longer and then lifted her lashes and looked back at us over her shoulder. Somehow with the one bare shoulder and naked arm and half-exposed back, she looked far more nude than the Gonzaga bitch had in her transparent shift.