“He was ever so brave,” Sancha cooed in her milky-sweet voice, tossing her gleaming dark head. She and Joffre had been recalled from their official seat in Naples to Rome that May, and it hadn’t taken me more than a week to start despising that velvety purr of hers. I’d only met Sancha once, at her wedding to little Joffre when he was twelve and Sancha four years older, and that occasion had been quite enough to make me think we weren’t destined to be the best of friends. And when Sancha took an idle look at my companion and bodyguard Leonello the first time she laid eyes on him, and told me, “Your dwarf is a fine specimen; have you ever considered breeding him? I have the most cunning little juggling woman—” Well, after that I’d started calling her the Tart of Aragon, and I knew I’d happily watch her choke to death on a fish bone. “Try the carp, Sancha,” I suggested, but she was talking over me and toying with the pearl pendant about her neck to draw attention to her breasts.

“Cesare left all his baggage behind, you know.” She left off the pendant long enough to hold her wine-cup to be refilled again—she certainly could put it away! “And when King Charles went to look he saw that all those chests that were supposed to be filled with coin and silver plate had nothing but stones under a top layer of ducats! You could hear the scream all the way in Rome.”

Juan gave Sancha’s breasts an automatic glance, but his attention was all for his brother. “I expect I’ll do better than run when I see the French, brother.”

Cesare toyed with his table knife.

“You’ll send the French packing, boy!” my Pope said warmly. He’d left off his ecclesiastical robes, and in his embroidered doublet and linen shirt-sleeves he could have been any merchant father or ducal paterfamilias: the proud and swarthy Spaniard surrounded by children who all looked like him. “We taught them a lesson at Fornovo; now you’ll finish them off.”

Really, after all that fuss the French had made declaring they would annex all Naples and the Papal territories too before they were done, everything had petered out so embarrassingly. Well, embarrassing if you were French. After they got their poxy noses bloodied at Fornovo and had to flee back north, my Pope made me a present straight from the French king’s own abandoned baggage: a certain diary in execrable handwriting, detailing the ladies who had shared the royal bed on campaign, with descriptions of their skills. “No, thank you,” I’d said, wrinkling my nose.

“Are you sure?” Rodrigo had turned the pages with great interest. “There are a few ideas here. Requiring a bit more flexibility than I’m capable of at my age, to be sure . . .”