Madonna Giulia’s voice, and even before I lifted my eyes from my book, I thought she sounded strange. Oddly stifled, and as I found her approaching figure picking its way along the lapping edge of the lake, I saw another figure behind her. A young man of perhaps twenty-one, fair-haired, blue-eyed, his youthful skinniness not quite done filling out into a man’s leanness. I fingered the little knife in my cuff, but more out of habit than fear. In my two years as bodyguard to La Bella, I’d never once been called upon to spring to her defense—and I didn’t think that first time would come now, not against a man she was willingly bringing toward her daughter.

“Laura,” she said, bending down, and the little girl hurled herself into her mother’s arms like a small brown monkey. Giulia lifted her up, smoothing the fair curls, and turned toward the young man with a smile that was . . . nervous? “Laura, may I present you to Orsino Orsini.”

Dio. I put my book down, looking at this unexpected guest with greater interest. I had never seen him either: the young husband who had been given cuckold’s horns by the Pope himself.

“This is she?” The boy had a pleasant tenor voice, stiffer than a board from nerves.

“Yes. Lauretta mia, this is your—that is, he’s my . . .”

It was a stopper as far as courtesies went. Your father; but Laura knew only the bluff merry-eyed figure of the Pope as far as fathers went. My husband; but Madonna Giulia had not to my knowledge laid eyes on him since before Laura was born. “Orsino Orsini,” La Bella said at last, curtsying with the little girl in her arms and avoiding the whole tangled mess.

Orsino Orsini’s blue eyes flicked over the little girl who bore his name. Looking, perhaps, for signs of his own face? Useless, I thought. One pretty little blond girl looked much like another—it’s the vanity in men that makes them insist their children are their image. Laura was simply a happy-faced child in her mother’s arms, nothing to declare her either an Orsini or a Borgia.

“She’s beautiful,” Orsino said at last. He reached a finger out toward Laura’s cheek, but she retreated into her mother’s neck, suddenly shy. Orsino looked shy too, looking at Giulia. “You’re beautiful, too. Just as beautiful as I remembered.”

“Thank you.” If he was expecting her to blush like a girl, he did not know how much poise his wife had acquired over the past few years. “You look well, Orsino. You’ve grown.”

“Yes. I’m a whole two inches taller.” He squared his shoulders. “It’s all the riding I do now, it’s made me much stronger. You know I have a condotta? I ride everywhere with my soldiers—”

Giulia cocked her head, inspecting his profile. “Did you break your nose?”