So strange to be home—so very strange. Back in the drafty octagonal castello of my childhood, worn and just a little crumbling about the edges, washed by the lake on three sides so the sound of lapping water reached the ear from every room. The chilly chamber I had shared with Gerolama as a girl was the same: a curtained bed where I had wrestled her for my fair share of the blankets and dreamed about who my future husband would be. The smell of the lake was the same, and the dusty streets where old women in black gossiped on their steps and children ran shouting and clacking sticks together, and mules trudged past with loads of fish still flopping their death throes. An old dress I found in my girlhood clothes chest was the same, last worn when I was a virgin girl who had never even heard the names of Orsino Orsini or Rodrigo Borgia.

So strange.

“How long should we make preparations to stay?” Leonello asked me.

I looked at him oddly. He was foreign to me, a piece of one life entirely out of place among another very different existence. He stuck out like a harlot in a church, or an obscenity in a prayer, or a French army in Rome. “I don’t know,” I said in a blank voice, and moved to join my family.

I had never been close to Angelo, not as I was with Sandro. My older brother had been almost a man grown when I was born, too busy and important to take notice of another sister who would only have to be dowered and married off. He’d never had time for me, not until I became the Pope’s mistress and thus a person to be asked for favors. I’d never quite forgiven him for that, and I hadn’t wanted to come back to Capodimonte to visit him. Time enough to forgive him later, I’d thought—only now there wasn’t.

He’d gotten fatter in the past two years; the folds of a premature double chin pressed stiff and waxy behind his collar as he lay on his bier surrounded by candles. His wife wept softly, clutching her two little girls. My sister, Gerolama, sat beside her, red-eyed and exhausted, and she rose to give me an unexpected hug instead of her usual scolding.

So strange.

I sat vigil beside my brother as Sandro and our other brother greeted the guests of Capodimonte who came to pay their respects. Familiar faces, faces I had known since childhood, so why did they look at me so avidly? “They’ve all heard of you, you know,” Gerolama said with a touch of her old asperity.