Yes, I could get used to cooking in a household like this. The kind of household where I could get the occasional hour of peace and quiet—put my peach crostata in the ovens and take time to update my father’s recipes, if that was what I felt like doing. And I rather did, this afternoon. Once I’d regarded my father’s recipes as just as sacred and unchangeable as the stone tablets handed down to Moses—but now I was starting to make a few changes of my own. A pinch of saffron to bring color and warmth to a sauce; a dash of salt for bite in a sweet tourte . . . what did my father have to say about a peach crostata, anyway? I turned the worn pages to page 261, Chapter: Pastry, savoring my own uninterrupted thoughts in the silence, but I should have known no cook ever gets an uninterrupted hour to do anything. Even in a household as luxurious and well appointed as this one.

“Oh, ho!” I heard a boy’s voice behind me. “I thought I knew all Madonna Adriana’s servant girls, but you’re new.”

“Out,” I said without turning. I had no intention of being interrupted by some page boy or manservant with fancies of kitchen girls brought to bloom too early by the heat of the kettle steam; girls with half-unlaced bodices sucking honey from the tip of one finger and just aching to be bent over a trestle table and rubbed with olive oil like a fresh-plucked duck. Santa Marta save me from the overheated male imagination! “Out of my kitchens at once,” I repeated, and turned a page.

“They aren’t your kitchens, my lovely. They’re Maestro Mantini’s, or whatever his name is.”

I turned and glowered, but my glower faded fast as I took in the auburn hair, the long lean body lounging against the door frame, the patchy wisps of reddish beard and the fine doublet carelessly unlaced over hose and fashionable shoes of tooled Spanish leather. Not a page boy or manservant, but Juan Borgia: second son of Cardinal Borgia, a boy of sixteen who was already Duke of Gandia and had his own household in the city but still spent a good deal of time at the Palazzo Montegiordano visiting his little sister, Lucrezia, and younger brother, Joffre. I had seen Juan Borgia from a distance now and then, swaggering with his friends or mussing his sister’s hair or ogling Madonna Giulia—and I had overheard quite a bit more about him from the maidservants.

Who had all, I noticed, abandoned their inventorying and silver polishing to disappear speedily into the storerooms the instant he appeared.