“Let’s find her a stall,” I told the grooms, who had gathered in a semicircle of admiring silence around the mare. They began dashing into the stable with rakes and armloads of hay, while I took hold of the mare’s red leather reins and led her after them. “Persephone,” I said. “Should I call you that? I don’t suppose you eat pomegranates, do you? Not good for horses.” I still had the pomegranate in my room, not knowing quite what to do with it. I hadn’t laid eyes on Cardinal Borgia since the day he pressed it into my hand—he was busy at the Vatican, Madonna Adriana said, since there didn’t seem to be any doubt now that the Pope had finally made up his mind to die. “You’ll not see my cousin for a few weeks, I imagine,” she told me this morning. Lucrezia had already flitted off to her lessons—language tutors that morning, to improve her French, and a music tutor to teach her the lute—but little Joffre still dawdled and yawned over his morning cup of sweetened lemon water, and Madonna Adriana ruffled his hair affectionately. “The children will miss their father, won’t you, my love? And perhaps you will miss him too, Giulia dear.”

I’d given her a long look. A stout woman, perhaps, but well preserved for forty-six years; her bosom still high and handsome, her perpetually smiling face unlined; well-suited to her maroon and violet velvets and elaborate headdresses and heavy gold rings. “How can you do this?” I asked her at last. “Act the pander for your own son’s wife? How can you?”

She hesitated, and her smile faded to something kinder than I was used to seeing. Something more than her usual professional charm. “It’s a hard world for women, Giulia.” She spoke as baldly as I. “I wasn’t born with your beauty, but I still had to make my way somehow. And if the world’s hard for young women, just wait and see how cruel it can be to widows and orphans. My husband was a good-for-nothing, and Orsino—well, he’s a great comfort and the light of my eye, but he’s no firebrand to make a swath in the world.” Her eyes rested on little Joffre. “My boy will need help if he’s to get on as he should.”

“This is your way of helping him?”