But if he had, would we be here now? He’d bought me time, a moment to collect myself, to announce my name and my status before the chaos and the madness drove the French beyond listening.

“I tended him in the wagon as best I could.” Madonna Adriana dropped to her knees beside me. “He was stabbed at least twice—if he doesn’t get a surgeon . . .”

“Oh, he’ll get one,” I said grimly, settling beside him. I was not going to let my bodyguard die, not after what he’d done. “In the meantime, Adriana, go soak a kerchief in that baptismal font over there for me, and wash his face. Pia, unpack one of my shifts and rip it up for bandaging. Carmelina, surely we have some wine in that hamper—”

We waited two hours before the French general came to call on me. General Yves d’Allegre: grave, bearded, iron-haired, moving with a horseman’s long stride at the head of a phalanx of officers. I felt a flutter at my stomach but lifted my chin and stared at them coolly from the top of the altar steps, where I had arranged myself for the advantage of a little more height. Adriana had chivvied the others into rows behind me: a phalanx of my own.

“A general?” I said before he had even finished introducing his officers. I wrinkled my nose as though he’d told me he was a stable boy. “Why am I not being received by King Charles himself? This is an insult to one of my rank, and I will not—”

“His Majesty is not here, madame.” General d’Allegre spoke in a grave and modulated bass, his Italian far better than the young captain’s. He looked far more imperturbable than the young captain, too. “King Charles marches with the bulk of our army, leaving the advance guard to me.”

I breathed a little easier at that. Everyone had heard the rumors of King Charles: his voracious appetite for women, willing or unwilling, and how he wrote them up in a book afterward with notes on their appearance and ratings of their skill between the sheets. I had no intention of being written up in a poxy Frenchman’s book of conquests.

“I have heard much of the beauty of Giulia la Bella,” General d’Allegre continued. His eyes went over me, slowly. “And I see nothing has been exaggerated.”

Behind him, two of his officers snickered. My pulse leaped, but I kept my cold expression. “Is it your custom to mix compliments with assaults, General? To attack helpless female travelers? Three of my guards were slain, my maids accosted, my mother-in-law and sister abused, and my bodyguard all but butchered! Not to mention the loss of my horses and anything else in my baggage your men decided to steal for themselves—”