“And you were right.” She was quite calm. “I am a whore. I used to pretend I wasn’t, because I never asked for presents or payments, and I never asked to be anybody’s mistress in the first place. But after a while it doesn’t matter what you ask, does it?” She looked down at herself, all the gaudy jewels and the low-cut silver gown. “Don’t I look like the most expensive harlot in Rome?”

“Never,” I said.

“No need to defend my honor, Leonello.” Her tone was light, social. Talking of anything, I suppose, as long as she could distract me from the pain in my body. “I’m a whore now, and I’ll play the part for the French. But I won’t always be one. This summer with my family . . . it showed me something.”

“Which is?” I raised an eyebrow. Even that hurt. “The idyllic pleasures of Carbognano, as painted by your good lord husband?”

“Yes.” Giulia reached to a table behind the brazier and uncorked a flask of wine. “Someday I’ll have that. An ordinary life again.”

“Do you want such a life?”

“Someday. Even if it comes with Orsino.”

“He’s not so terrible,” I found myself saying.

“No,” Giulia acknowledged. “But he’s gutless. You were right about that.”

“He loves you,” I found myself saying. How had I found myself speaking of love with the most expensive harlot in Rome? Dio, but I wanted a drink.

“Orsino doesn’t love me.” She poured me a cup as though she had read my mind, helping lift my head so I could sip without spilling. “If he did, he’d spit in Rodrigo’s eye and say he’d rather be excommunicated and damned than give me up. He’d hear I was being held captive by the French, and he’d come riding to rescue me.” Giulia shook her head. “I don’t think I inspire much love in men. Just passion, and the passion isn’t really for me.” She made a matter-of-fact gesture at her own face, her golden hair, her perfumed breasts. “The passion is for this.”

“The Pope will harrow heaven and hell to get you back safely,” I said. “Isn’t that love?”

“More passion.” She held the cup to my lips again; rearranged my blankets. “One day it will fade, and he’ll tire of me, and I’ll go back to my gutless husband. I’m not so afraid of that happening as I used to be, oddly.” A shrug. “You know why silly women moon over Petrarch and Dante, Leonello?”

“Why?”

“Because we like to pretend that we’re Laura or Beatrice. Women who inspire both passion and love, and in verse too.” Giulia’s tone turned wry. “But women like me aren’t idols for poets. Laura and Beatrice were both chaste—no one writes poetry to harlots.”