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seemed to me to be thrillingly wicked. At synagogue, girls and boys only met after the services, under the watchful, calculating eyes of parents and matchmakers. The Christians, however, appeared to think nothing of the sexes mingling in church, so whole courtships of looks and gestures, of fans fluttered and kisses blown, could take place over the bowed heads of devout patriarchs and their pious spouses. If they thought Eve was the mother of all sin, they had only themselves to blame.
    I also could not help but notice Giulia Farnese. She was the loveliest woman I had ever seen, with her eyes as warm as roast sugar and her honey coloured hair twisted with ropes of huge pearls beneath a veil of gold tissue. She held the hand of a plump little boy about four years of age whom I presumed to be her son, Giovanni, known as the Child of Rome though less grandly presumed by most people to be the child of Pope Alexander. He was as plain as his mother was beautiful and his imposing title seemed to sit ill on his round little shoulders. La Bella Giulia inclined her head to me, which caused a flurry among a group of ladies standing behind her, mostly young, with watchful eyes. Only one of them seemed unconcerned with the social adjustments which needed to be made to admit me to the favour of the pope’s mistress. Covering her mouth with a sable muff, she yawned then winked at me. I thought I must be imagining it, but I soon found out I wasn’t.
    A reception was to be held for me at the palace. This makes me sound very important but, of course, I was not. That household needed little excuse to throw a party, and it was only a small party, a day meal followed by dancing, to introduce me to the rest of Donna Lucrezia’s ladies, with Giulia Farnese as guest of honour. On my arrival at the palace, the slave, Catherinella, whisked me away through a maze of corridors and showed me into a small room on one of the upper floors.
    “You change clothes,” she said, in her slow, precisely enunciated Italian, “I help you.”
    My travelling trunk stood at the foot of the bed which, along with a nightstand and a simple wooden chair, constituted all the furniture in the room. I saw that it had been opened and my best gown, of dark blue velvet, had been laid out on the bed. Next to it were a camorra of a bright, emerald green brocade, lined in silver silk, and a necklace of pearls with a sapphire pendant.
    “From my lady,” said Catherinella.
    I was as puffed up with pride as a courting dove that Madonna Lucrezia should give me such presents. Surely it was a sign of special favour. I did not realise, then, that among people whose wealth is as fabulous and careless as that of the Borgia family in those years, it is the small presents which count, not the lavish ones. A bracelet of plaited hair, an empty casket which once contained a poem. I was certain that, the moment I entered the salon where the meal was laid, every head would turn and all conversation cease as Donna Lucrezia’s ladies struggled to contain their envy of the new favourite, the rising star, Donata Spagnola arising like the phoenix from the ashes of Esther Sarfati. Oh how thoroughly she was erased, that girl from Toledo on the remote edges of the Christian world, and how thoroughly Roman was Donata in her velvet and pearls.
    As it was, only one person detached herself from the peacock throng milling about the room, the girl with the sable muff, a little older than me, I now saw, and unmistakably a Borgia, with the same high-bridged nose and large eyes, slightly too close together, as Donna Lucrezia.
    “I’m Angela,” she said, holding out her hand. She had a firm, dry grip and a candid stare. “Lucrezia’s cousin. Well, one of them. There’s Geronima too, but she’s terribly…Spanish. Wears black, always in church, you know the sort. Oh lord, I mean, I’m sorry, you’re Spanish. But then, Jews are Jews, aren’t they? So you’re not really Spanish.”
    Not really