The Lion and the Rose by Kate Quinn

that? Fortunately. Golden hair is all very well, but I do prefer dark suitors.” She reached up to twine a strand of his hair about her finger, and Sandro looked faintly startled . “Lucrezia, I won’t allow you to keep this luscious fellow all to yourself!” Sancha went on. “Cardinal Farnese, perhaps you will take a turn about the gardens with me?”
    “I fear I must steal him,” I said firmly, and led my brother away. “Sandro, come see these roses over here, don’t they look just like those little yellow ramblers our mother used to grow in Capodimonte . . . ?”
    As soon as I had my brother out of earshot, I plucked one of those little yellow roses off its bush and pointed it at him thorns first. “The Tart of Aragon is fair game, Sandro, but
don’t
flirt with Lucrezia. I know you’ve never been happy with the idea of the Holy Father and me, but don’t think to even the score by seducing his daughter!”
    “What do you take me for,
sorellina
?” Sandro gave a great show of mock outrage. “Besides, please note who was flirting with whom.” He peered over my shoulder at Sancha and Lucrezia, giggling softly with their heads together. My brother had been away these past months, on business for the College of Cardinals, and as usual he had managed to find time to dally in the country with his little mistress. He hadn’t seen much of either Lucrezia or the Tart of Aragon this summer, not the way I had. “Are they always like that?”
    “Sancha’s always been a cat in heat.” I plucked another pair of roses, making a little nosegay. “I do wish Lucrezia wouldn’t imitate her so much.”
    “Better than having them at each other’s throats, surely.” Sandro tugged me companionably against his side, leading me through the clipped hedges away from the crowd gathering rapidly round Lucrezia and Sancha like bees round their queens. “You thought the fur was going to fly when they first clapped eyes on each other!”
    There had been a certain period of scrutiny between the Pope’s daughter and daughter-in-law when they first met this spring. A certain covert amount of measuring dark hair against blond, a fuller bosom against a slimmer waist, a collection of Roman gowns against a chest full of Neapolitan dresses. Now they had nothing but giggles and gossip for each other, and that disquieted me sometimes as I saw Lucrezia drinking every salacious whisper from her new sister-in-law.
    “I heard Cardinal Michiel say it’s all to be expected, Sancha acting like a tart, because she’s bastard-born!” I gave an indignant sniff of my sweet-scented little roses, watching Sancha wind her arm through a young bishop’s. “‘Born in lust means lust in the blood’—have you ever heard such rubbish? Lucrezia’s bastard-born too, and she’s always been such a sweet little thing.” At least, she
had
been. “And if anyone ever said my Laura had lust in the blood—”
    “Or my Costanza!” Sandro clapped an outraged hand to the place he would have been wearing a sword if he’d been a
condottiere
rather than a cardinal, with a flourish because even when he was being outraged he had more flourishes in him than a pantomime actor. Really, he should have been a pantomime actor rather than a cardinal. “Did you know Costanza’s learning to move about already? Not crawling, exactly; more like rotating herself across the floor like a little rolling pin—”
    I listened for a while to my brother’s recitations of Costanza’s latest achievements—his first child from his much-adored mistress, so naturally she was perfection embodied. She really was a little dear, if not quite the miracle that was my Laura, but proud fathers must be allowed to gush. I did wish sometimes that Rodrigo would gush a little more about Laura . . .
    My Pope made his appearance then, followed by a flock of bad-tempered cardinals. They must be fuming over the notion of Juan leading the papal armies as Gonfalonier, not that I blamed