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evidence of the cudgel-wielding patrols hired by the merchants to discourage them.
    There were those, the wiser among us, who said that the relative peace Borgia had brought to the city would not last, that inevitably it would be crushed under the weight of his insatiable ambitions. As it turned out, they were right, but I was blind to that at the time.
    Indeed, I was sufficiently preoccupied making certain that I had not been followed that I passed by the streets of the cloth merchants, goldsmiths, leather workers, scriveners, and the like with scant notice until I came finally to the Via dei Vertrarari, the street of the glassmakers. There I slowed and took a moment to smooth my hastily donned garments and touch a hand to the braid encircling the crown of my head. It was a practical hairstyle, as I was forever reminding Lucrezia when she urged me to wear my hair down on the absurd claim that it was one of my best features. I am no slave to vanity but I confess to caring how I looked to the man who, had I been a normal woman, would have been my husband.
    From this you will, no doubt, conclude that I am a contrary creature, and there is some truth to that. Drawn to Cesare as I was, I was still entirely capable of longing for Rocco—for the man himself, for the life I might have had with him, for the woman I could not be.
    As I approached the modest timbered building that, unlike its neighbors to either side, offered little to draw interest, the thought pierced me that had I been free to accept Rocco’s proposal two years before, I could be sitting in front of that shop with a baby on my knee. It was not the first time that I was tormented by the vision of what might have been, nor would it be the last. I took a swift breath against the pain in my heart and proceeded, only to stop abruptly when a small bundle of spitting fury launched itself at me.
    Several things happened all at once: the kitten, for such it was, dug its claws into my skirt and proceeded to climb up me, all the while mewing fiercely; two large dogs of the foolish sort who always look as though they are about to tumble over their own paws loped after it, stopped only by my stern look; and a small boy of seven years with a mop of dark hair, a sprinkling of freckles, and an engaging grin burst from the shop shouting, “Don’t let her go, Donna Francesca, she’s already clawed their noses to ribbons and she’ll do worse!”
    By this time, the kitten had nestled into my arms while continuing to spit warnings at the dogs. She, for perhaps not surprisingly the animal turned out to be female, seemed to have no sense of her own size or the ease with which either of her victims could have made a meal of her. On the contrary, she appeared to be merely using me as a perch upon which to catch her breath before launching herself back at them.
    “Perhaps we should go inside,” I said, a little breathlessly myself, for just then a tall, powerfully built man in his late twenties with the same brown eyes and hair as his son stepped from the shop.
    What shall I say of Rocco? That he was a good man and my friend? Such should be self-evident. That the thought of what we might have shared had I been an entirely different person haunted me? I have told you that already. Shall I admit that his eyes were not merely brown but flecked with gold and that when he smiled, the world stopped? You will think me a giddy girl, a gross deception to inflict on so good a reader who has yet to recoil from the shocking revelations of my true nature.
    Unless, of course, you are secretly drawn to them, which is entirely your affair.
    Strictly speaking, Cesare was the more classically handsome of the two, not to mention having all the advantages of great wealth and social standing. But Rocco … he was the calm center of the storm that was my life, my place of refuge and, however tenuously, of hope I could not bring myself to abandon even as I believed it to be futile.
    “Francesca?” He