If you don’t know what lies ahead, make a good dramatic entrance and hope for the best. I swept down a series of steps with my chin high, through one vaulted chamber and then another, into the framing arches of the loggia lining the courtyard. I stopped there for a moment, blinded by the sudden glare of sunlight from the open sky above after the dimness of the palazzo, and when I blinked and shaded my eyes, I saw before me a man’s hand.

“Come,” said a man’s deep voice.

I’d prepared a pretty little speech of inquiry on my way down the stairs, meaning to ferret out my husband’s absence at once, but instead I found my hand resting on the broad ringed one before me. The hand of Madonna Adriana’s august cousin the Cardinal, who had so generously hosted my wedding feast. What was his name? I’d been introduced to him half a dozen times, but all cardinals looked alike to me: just a flock of unctuous scarlet bats.

“Your Eminence,” I managed, and sank into a curtsy on the marble step.

“No, no.” He raised me up. “Age must bow before beauty, and I see here a man thoroughly old and a girl thoroughly beautiful.”

He made a graceful bow, more suited to a man in doublet and hose than one in clerical robes. When he straightened I saw he was taller than I, even though I stood two steps above him. To match that majestic height he was built like the bull on the emblem above his door, a bull with an eagle’s nose and dark eyes that gleamed with some inward amusement. His words had a Spanish burr.

“Come,” he said again, and drew me down into the mossy space of garden. “I suppose you wonder why Madonna Adriana sent you to me?”

“To thank you for hosting my wedding feast,” I hazarded. He was leading me on a deliberate promenade, through banks of May-blooming flowers and marble statues in niches twined with vines. A fountain splashed in the garden’s center, a stone nymph pirouetting through the splash of water. “It was a beautiful banquet, Your Eminence,” I said truthfully enough. It was only what came after that had been so utterly unsatisfactory. Orsino and I should have been parading around this fountain right now, laughing a little, and I would have plucked one of the spicy gillyflowers growing from that marble urn and tucked it behind his ear, and if he’d had a drop of gallantry in his soul he’d have kissed it and given it back to me . . .

“I am glad you enjoyed yourself.” The Cardinal’s voice was deep, sonorous, made to reverberate around dimly lit cathedral vaults. No wonder he had gone into the Church. “I confess I had another motive for hosting your wedding banquet.”