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marble suddenly sinister in the torchlight. I hurried up the stairs to the ballroom, rearranging my face to hide the chaos of feeling and lies.
    And not a moment too soon.
    My father reared up before me like a jagged mountain peak.
    “Where have you been!” he demanded, having to shout above the music and the mass of people dancing.
    “I’m sorry, Papa, I felt ill. I went to the garden for a breath of air. I’m better now.”
    His eyes were in line with the doorway and I thought suddenly that Romeo might enter just behind me—a dangerous coincidence. I took my father’s arm and brought him around, facing away from the door, then turned on my girlish charms, those he had always delighted in, in my younger years.
    “Did you dance with Mama?” I asked, smiling up at him. “You know how she loves a saltarello .”
    “No,” he growled, unamused, “I was too busy consoling Signor Strozzi, who was unable to find my daughter.”
    “Well, he mustn’t have tried very hard,” I answered with a flash of peevishness. “Perhaps a single flight of stairs was too hard on his poor old bandy legs.”
    “Juliet!” Papa swung me around to face him. His expression was as red and ragged as it had been while he’d talked of his sabotaged business. He did not seem to care that people were staring.
    But then neither did I.
    His voice was low and threatening. “I am taking you to speak with your betrothed.”
    “He is not my betrothed yet ,” was my rebellious retort.
    I thought my father’s face might explode with his fury, but now he was aware of the scene he was creating in the Medici ballroom, and he reined himself in. His voice remained threatening.
    “We will speak of your unruliness later. But now you will begin comporting yourself like the noblewoman you seem to have forgotten you are, and you will make your apologies to Signor Strozzi for your absence. Then you will satisfy him that he has chosen for himself a proper Florentine wife and not some wild, willful child that will bring him nothing but ill fortune in his life. Do you understand?”
    “Yes, Papa.”
    As he pulled me around the dance floor’s perimeter, I heard him muttering, “This is your mother’s fault.... Too permissive . . . the price of educating a girl . . .”
    I smiled to myself. Too late. Knowledge is inside me. It cannot be unlearned.
    Then I was standing before Jacopo Strozzi. He was not, as my father had indicated, waiting with bated breath to see me. Clearly he was straining to hear a conversation being carried on by two bankers nearby about the papal curia’s treasury deficit.
    “She was dizzy,” my father told Jacopo. “Needed some air. Please excuse me.” He disappeared into the crowd.
    “Good evening, signorina,” Jacopo said, hard-pressed to tear himself away from the financial gossip. He forced himself, however, and bowed to me with great formality.
    “Good evening, signor,” I answered in kind, and curtsied perfunctorily.
    “You’re looking lovely this evening.”
    “Thank you.”
    Suddenly he stiffened so sharply at the sight of something behind me that I turned to see what had alarmed him. It was his mother, her eyes fixed on the pair of us with such blatant interest that even I grew uncomfortable. I turned back to Jacopo, taking pity on the poor man.
    “A beautiful evening,” I said, striving for levity. “The night air was cool. It cleared my head.”
    “Why did it need clearing?” he asked, forcing himself to recover from the embarrassment.
    “Three dances without stopping. I was overheated.” I looked down at my gown. “The brocade is a bit heavy.”
    I caught him staring at my chest and imagined him enchanted with my bosom. But his next words disabused me of the thought.
    “That is a rare weave,” he said of my dusty rose bodice. “The warp, I would say, is the pink, the woof a soft gray, or perhaps tawny.” He seemed to be warming to his subject, his mother forgotten. “Whichever, the effect is soft