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sight of me sitting in the big bed with my hair all around me, and then he just stared. He had a slight squint, I saw, but hardly noticeable when he dropped his eyes and blushed as he was doing now.
    I brushed my hair back away from my bare shoulders and smiled at him. “Orsino,” I started, and didn’t really know what to say next, so I just laughed softly. Look at the pair of us—I think he was more nervous than I was.
    Never mind. We’d figure it out together.
    I lifted my hand with a smile and held it out to him. “Come to bed, husband.”
    He stared at me a long moment. Just stared, and then he gave a resigned little sigh. “Excuse me,” he mumbled. “I wish—I’m very sorry, believe me, but I’m not allowed.” And he turned away with his candle and rushed out of the room. The click of the door closing seemed very loud.
    I gazed at the door, stupefied.
    Don’t expect too much
, Madonna Adriana had told me.
    Whatever I’d expected of my wedding night, it certainly wasn’t this.

CHAPTER TWO

    For those destined to dominate others, the rules of life are turned upside down.
    —RODRIGO BORGIA
    Carmelina
    I t’s a bit tricky, knowing what to send up to the bride’s chamber the morning after her wedding. If you don’t know the bride (and as busy as I’d been yesterday, I hadn’t gotten one glimpse of Madonna Giulia Farnese), then your best course is to deputize a maid to tiptoe up to the chamber door and have a nice long listen through the lock. If you hear weeping, then prepare a nice bracing hot posset with red wine and strong spices, something her mother-in-law can carry in to her along with a lot of soothing words about how marriage isn’t really so bad. If you hear giggling and whispering through the door, then you send up something light that can be eaten by two, preferably fed to each other with the fingers while making a great deal of mess that can be kissed away with more giggles. A hot sop with morello cherries works well—strips of butter-fried bread and a dipping sauce of cherries and sugared wine always goes down a treat with hungry young lovers, and the small joke of cherries plucked and eaten is sure to make them giggle.
    But I hadn’t even collared a maidservant yet to send up to the bride’s door when the bride herself came padding into the kitchens. The maidservants were all still asleep in the black hour just before dawn, as was the rest of the household. Except, apparently, for me and the bride.
    “Excuse me,” a voice said behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I’d been far too nervous and jittery to sleep after the wedding festivities; I’d spent the night in the empty kitchens restlessly poking at the banked fires, snatching up a broom to sweep the flagstones one more time, or flipping through my father’s collection of recipes and hearing his hectoring voice in my head. Hastily I dropped the cloth I’d been using to wipe down the tables, and offered a curtsy to the small silk-clad figure now hovering in the doorway.
    “Madonna Giulia?” I hazarded. I hadn’t had even a glimpse of the bride in all the frantic wedding preparations yesterday, but the carvers and maidservants who carried my dishes out to the guests had been all abuzz about the bride’s hair, which supposedly came all the way to the floor when loosed—and the girl now standing in the kitchen doorway had hair that cascaded all the way to the floor in a lustrous honey-blond curtain. I couldn’t say I envied it—if I had hair down to my feet it would just pick up all the stray chicken bones and dustings of sugar that seem to accumulate on every kitchen floor no matter how busy you’ve kept the scullions with their brooms. But it certainly looked lovely on her. “What can I do for you, Madonna Giulia?”
    “I don’t know.” Her eyes barely fastened on me; she stood in her blue silk wrapper in the dawn chill, tracing one bare toe over a crack in the stone floor. “Do you have any more of those