Perhaps it was brave of me to write to my papal lover and tell him I was thinking of paying a visit to Orsino before I came back to Rome. “He’s written to request that I come see him before he departs Bassanello with his troops.” Once such a letter would have taken me hours to write; I would have agonized over every word, and whether it would upset Rodrigo or not. Now I just wrote the bald truth, because I didn’t feel like lying. Though I did feel a little guilty when I got his reply, because I think my honesty nearly killed my Pope. I could hear the apoplectic roar all the way from Rome.

We could not believe you would act with such ingratitude! he wrote in letters almost riven into the page of his next letter. After all your repeated promises that you would be faithful to Our command, and not go near Orsino! But now you are doing the opposite! Risking your life going to Bassanello—and with the purpose, no doubt, of giving yourself to that stallion again!

“Stallion.” I ask you. I should have started trying to please myself instead of Rodrigo a long time ago. Even if he was angry, he was certainly a great deal more attentive now than he’d been when I was last in Rome!

In the end, I didn’t go to Bassanello. Orsino came to me instead.

Leonello

Careful, now,” I called after little Laura Orsini. Giulia Farnese’s daughter flitted about the edge of Lake Bolsena, brown and naked as a tiny water nymph, her little shift lying in a discarded heap beside me where I sat under the shade of a tall oak keeping a vigilant eye on my small charge. It was November now, but the winter cold had yet to really settle in—still warm enough for naked frolicking by the lake, as far as Laura was concerned.

“You shouldn’t let her run about like that,” Madonna Giulia’s sisters-in-law scolded, shocked. “It’s not decent!”

“I swam naked in that lake too when I was her age,” Giulia said. “And I didn’t come to any harm. Let her run, there’s plenty of time to teach her to be a lady.”