“The Holy Father is more than forty years your elder. He has a short temper, an unfaithful heart, and a girth that will keep right on expanding until he looks like a sack of millet.” I reached up to the goat in her lap and gave its silky ear a flick. “So why do you fight to keep him?”

She shrugged. “He’s all I have.”

“That’s rot, my dear lady. You have a husband, you have a child, you have a family. You could let His Holiness’s wandering eye wander off to someone new, and retire to that quiet married life you always told me you grew up wanting. But you sit here campaigning like a French general to get your papal lover back, and I wonder why.” I cocked an eyebrow at her, wondering why I was talking like this, not caring enough to stop myself. “Is it the jewels? I doubt that young husband of yours could keep you in the kind of sparkly baubles you’re used to. Can’t bear the thought that another birthday might pass without a string of sapphires to mark the occasion? Or perhaps it’s the Holy Father himself you’ll miss—he may be aging and fattening, but that tongue of his must have some talent in it, judging from the sounds I hear you make behind your chamber doors. I assumed it was all performance and pretense, but perhaps not.”

Two bright spots of color flared high in La Bella’s cheeks, but I didn’t let her speak.

“Or perhaps you just aren’t suited for married life, even if you were raised to it.” I gave her goat’s ear another tweak. “The worst wives, one hears, make the best whores.”

“Are you finished?” she said quietly.

“Oh, you know me. I can talk forever.”

“You certainly can when it comes to being cruel. How good you are at it.” She regarded me, giving a faint shake of her head. “Why, Leonello?”

“Because you’re here,” I said baldly. “And I’m bored, and I have to follow you about all day in this provincial mud hole when I’d rather be—”

Finding a murderer. Lately I’d begun to think it couldn’t be Cesare Borgia at all. Surely a pope’s son had better things to do than chase down low women to murder? If there was anyone in the Borgia service to suspect of dark deeds, blank-faced Michelotto was a far more likely candidate. From everything I’d heard, the man snuffed out human lives as casually as a cat killed mice. But Michelotto was his master’s dog; he never said a word or made a move unless Cesare instructed it. Did he have the drive to commit murder at his own initiative rather than his master’s? Perhaps not . . .

“When you’d rather be what?” Madonna Giulia asked.