City of God by Cecelia Holland

said. He slouched against the wall, one hand on his hip.
    â€œHere,” Nicholas said. He poked the document into Ugo’s face. “This needs His Excellency’s approval, not mine. But you were right to bring it to me first.”
    â€œI assure you, Messer Dawson, I have every respect for your prerogatives in this office—”
    Nicholas ushered him, still talking, out to the corridor, and pulled the door shut between them. He turned to Stefano. “You have the courtesies of a peasant.”
    â€œOh Christ,” Stefano said.
    Nicholas stared at him, thinking that he was wrong: Stefano had the true manner of an aristocrat, the only people who could be wholly free with their feelings. There was that in Stefano, nothing so respectable as honor, really, but a kind of honesty. After all, he was a Baglione.
    â€œHow much do you want?” Nicholas asked.
    Stefano wheeled, all his attention intensely fixed on Nicholas. “One hundred crowns. I’ll pay you back every carlini—you may be sure of it.”
    Nicholas was not sure. He doubted Stefano’s honesty extended that far. Yet it was worth a hundred crowns to have him, a Baglione. Nicholas went to his desk to write out a bank draft.
    â€œI warn you,” Angela Borgia said, “my cousin does not care for those who try to reach her father through her. She has turned away far greater men than you, turned away magnificent gifts. She is very likely to listen to you and send you away.”
    â€œEven that would be more than I have been able to achieve elsewhere,” Nicholas said.
    Angela gave him a quizzical look. They were, walking up and down on the loggia of the palace of the Pope’s daughter, in and out of the sunlight; Angela had taken Nicholas’s arm and tucked it firmly around her own. She smelled heavily of Egyptian perfume. Nicholas turned his nose out of the mainstream.
    â€œWhat are you trying to achieve, anyway?” Angela asked.
    â€œA trifle.”
    â€œYou can tell me.”
    â€œI would not bore your beautiful ears.”
    A page appeared at the end of the loggia, at the doorway. Nicholas let go of Angela’s arm. Angela did not let go of him; she clung to him like an anchor.
    â€œYour secret’s safe with me, love. You can tell me.”
    â€œMadonna, you have done enough in procuring me the introduction.”
    She glowered at him. The page rescued him, coming to his side, and without a bow demanding, “Messer Niccolo Dawson?”
    Nicholas followed him out through the doorway to the waiting room beyond.
    Away from the sunlight, his eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness; he followed the page more by instinct than sight—by the sound of his feet on the marble floor. A door opened ahead of him and he was let into another room. Still half-blind, he bowed toward the hazy group of people before him. The page said his name.
    â€œMesser Dawson,” Lucrezia Borgia said coolly. “My cousin tells me that you desire some few moments’ speech with me?”
    He blinked; now he could make her out, seated before him, with a woman behind her arranging her fine-spun golden hair. The room was full of mirrors. What he had taken for a group were her repetitions in the glass wall behind her.
    â€œMadonna,” he said. “I know that men come before you as suppliants with precious gifts of fur and jewels to purchase your kindness, but I have no gifts, only an entreaty. Please hear me out in spite of my poverty.”
    â€œGo on,” she said. “I have little time.”
    â€œI come here to ask you to intercede for a prisoner in your dungeons, a woman like you yourself, a fabled beauty who has lost her beauty in the cellars of Sant’ Angelo, a woman like you yourself, of noble mind and courage, whose only court now are the rats and lice.”
    She was watching him intently now. She seemed paler than before. She said, “Who is this luckless