IV. The Lord d'Aragona left not long after he'd returned, and would not come home until noon the next day. No one knew where he spent the night, although Ester speculated that he slept in the whorehouse "like they all do", because even the rich got tired of their villas and palazzi. Ippolita was inclined to believe Ester, who was almost thirty and who may or may not have seen such a whorehouse in her lifetime, whereas Ippolita herself was only thirteen and had seen nothing but her parents' single-room cottage in the countryside. That, and her Lady's great palazzo, of course, which she'd gotten used to more quickly than any of the other servants, despite its size and foreign territories.

This was one of the reasons Ester often asked her to carry things to the different floors; the other reason was that Ippolita was quicker, especially compared to Ester, who had been bitten by a dog in her left leg when she was ten and had had a slight limp since.

She supposed that, had she been less nimble or less familiar with the palazzo, she would have had a relatively uneventful evening.

After everyone had left, the Lady Lucrezia asked her to go down and bring a larger vase for the flowers, because the other one hadn't been large enough. Ippolita rushed down to ask Ester about a proper replacement, eager as she was to please her mistress, and almost ran into the Duke on her way down – not the Lady's husband but the Duke, or Il Valentino, as she'd heard some call him. The Lady's brother who had been a cardinal once, and who was a very handsome man (even Ester, who usually pruned her lips and wrinkled her nose when the Duke came by, had admitted his appearance was "striking").

On her way to the kitchen, Ippolita wondered what it would be like to have a brother like Il Valentino, but she concluded even before she'd reached her destination that she was lucky God had made a different plan for her, since she knew of very little clever things to say to a clever man like the Duke.

She found Ester sitting by the backdoor, from where she had a good view of the courtyard and the gate. She had a pile of linen lying on a chair beside her, which she was in the process of folding up and transferring to another chair. When asked about the vase, Ester said: 'There is one in the sitting room. But you best leave it. The Lord of Aragon just left on horseback, with Marco and Antonino. I saw them myself.' She wrinkled and unwrinkled her nose. 'You know how she is on these days,' she said, after a deep sigh. 'Mistress has no need for a vase. A faithful husband, however…'

Ester clacked her tongue.

'But the Duke is here,' Ippolita objected, a fact that she thought evened out, if not erased her mistress' misery, and might also warrant a different kind of vase.

Ester gave her a look, and clacked her tongue again when Ippolita rushed out of the room.

Ippolita got the vase – which turned out to be unfairly huge – out of the sitting room and lumbered it all the way up the stairs. She came to a halt before she reached the last floor: the Lord Borgia stood at the top of the staircase, unmoving.

Ippolita crouched by the railing so he wouldn't see her and waited for him to go inside. She also prayed he'd apologize to her mistress, who was generally very fond of the Duke and who surely did not deserve to be upset by her husband and by her brother both on the same evening.

God must have heard her, because she'd barely finished her prayer or the Duke resolutely stepped forward and went into the room.

Ippolita stood up to follow, but the Duke held still on the threshold and blocked the doorway, forcing her to stay where she was. She wasn't nearly bold enough to go up to him and announce her presence, especially not when he started talking.

'I did not mean it,' he said. 'Obviously, I did not mean it.'

Ippolita cradled the vase in her arms and bent her head so she would not miss the response. She heard nothing, though, so maybe her mistress did not know what to say.

'But I hoped you would go along with it,' the Duke said.

Ippolita looked at his back and wished she could see his face. Then he suddenly stepped into the room, and she couldn't see anything of him at all.

Now was the time to enter the room after him and offer the vase to her mistress… it still felt like interrupting, though.

She should have listened to Ester and stayed downstairs.

Before Ippolita could decide on what to do, either the Lord or the Lady Borgia closed the door to the antechamber, making it that much harder to go in there.

What was she going to do with the vase, carry it back?

She glanced around, then descended the stairs. Instead of going back to Ester, she went to the staircase that the servants sometimes used, and that gave access to some of the corner rooms, like the kitchen and the wash room. There was a narrow passageway behind the wash room, Ippolita knew, that led to the balcony of the master bedroom. She could easily sneak in and put the vase on the dresser top, like her mistress had asked her to do, and sneak out again.

Ippolita carried out this plan successfully, and had entered the master bedroom within ten minutes. She deposited the heavy vase before the broken mirror of the vanity and turned to leave.

'I promised to make you happy,' the Duke's voice resounded suddenly, and Ippolita halted and turned back. She saw that she or the Lady Lucrezia had left the door to the antechamber partially open. It gave a narrow view of the Lady and the Duke in the next chamber.

Ester would flay her if she found out, but…

Ippolita turned back and snuck to the door opening. Her Lady was sitting on the chair that the Duke had occupied earlier in the night, before they'd fought. She had her hands in her lap and was looking up at the Duke, who was pacing the area in front of the table. He must have been planning to leave again, because he had put his cloak and gloves back on.

Ippolita was afraid that they'd fought again, but she couldn't quite determine what the situation was and why it seemed to have changed so much since she'd left the main staircase.

'I promised to make you happy, and I've tried everything but lie to you,' the Duke said.

He also sounded different than he had before. Sad, and something else.

'Almost everything,' the Lady Lucrezia said, causing the Duke to snap his head up and then let it hang down again.

''Crezia,' he said.

Ippolita almost shivered at the slow, drawn-out way in which that word fell from his mouth. The Duke turned his back to her mistress as if it were more than he himself could bear.

Ippolita squeezed in the fabric of her dress and hoped, for the sake of her mistress, that he'd stay and do a little better. Her heart dropped when he turned around again and she got a good look at his face.

She routinely admired his features and the smooth way he rearranged them to form a range of arresting expressions, but she had never, on any man's face, seen such singular devotion.

'I have to leave,' he said, and even though Ippolita didn't see how he possibly could with a face like that, he went to her Lady's chair to take up her hand and bid her goodbye. Her hand looked small against his leather glove, and perhaps it was cold, too, because he rubbed her fingers with his thumb and only then bent over to kiss her knuckles.

Ippolita watched with her mouth slightly open, for even that polite kiss on the hand was done with a sort of surrendershe did not recognize.

The Duke looked up at her Lady's face. Ippolita sucked in her breath when he leaned his head closer to hers, very slowly. He lifted his lips to her forehead at first, then reconsidered and slid his lips further down, past her brow and her eyelashes and her nose, until he reached her lips.

He paused just an instant, then crossed the final inch and gave her the softest kiss in all creation.

Only half an hour earlier he'd angled a piece of mirror against his cheek and threatened to cut himself before her Lady's eyes, only to scare her (if Ester had seen, she would call him a brute), but there was no evidence of that roughness, or even the potential for it, in that first, gentle kiss, nor, in fact, in the kiss that followed, or the one that followed right after that.

Ester would never believe it, if Ippolita were to describe the delicate way those lips hovered over their Lady's lips and lightly brushed the delicate, pink skin, before applying any kind of serious pressure. How he would let his mouth linger against hers and then move an inch back, only to press his mouth down in the same, careful manner as before, with maybe a slightly different angle to his head or tilt to his chin.

Lady Lucrezia seemed to have trouble believing it, too, for she pulled away after he'd repeated the ritual four or five times and took a deep breath.

He raised himself up and stood silently before her, waiting. After five heartbeats, she stood up from her chair and reached her arms out to him. He took her in his embrace without further hesitation and buried his face in her neck.

They stayed like that for a while, swaying slightly as if they were dancing.

Up until this point, Ippolita had watched knowing that she was indulging her curiosity and that this was improper, but she had let herself be comforted by the idea that she might as well have been in the room, standing quiet and invisible to the side, waiting for a command to take the Duke's gloves or fetch a larger vase. She knew little about love, the intricacies of the Duke or Lady Lucrezia's lives, and she knew even less about upper class etiquette. She was a romantic, though, and an optimist, and therefore she could find no fault with all the tenderness that was displayed before her, or its quiet observation.

She became instantly aware of the error in her judgment when, right beneath her eyes, the swaying of those fitted bodies became more like writhing, and the soft hum of contentment about them started to sound more like the murmurings of lust and satisfaction.

His mouth abandoned its gentle approach and instead responded rapidly, wetly to hers. Ippolita saw his tongue, or hers, flicking into the other mouth, and noticed there was something almost obscene about the way his hands, which were still gloved, touched upon her light satin robe.

That thought had barely occurred to Ippolita or the robe was sliding off her mistress' shoulders. It got stuck at her wrists because of the cords (you had to put your finger below it and work it loose from there, Ippolita knew), but the Duke, after taking off his gloves, gave the cord a rough yank and left her Lady in her thin, yellow shift.

As if that wasn't enough, he unclasped his cloak and she then started untying his doublet, both of which were cast aside blindly.

Ippolita covered her mouth with her hand when the Duke's left hand moved to her mistress' breasts and caressed them through the fabric of her gown, and her mistress, rather than reprimand the Duke, gave out a curious sigh and ran her hands through his dark curls.

The Duke, meaning not her Lord husband but her Lord brother, who had been cardinal once.

Ippolita did not want to divert her gaze, but there was a clear moral incentive to do so now.

She made herself turn away from the door opening and pressed her back to the wall in between the door and the dresser. She stared at the vase she'd brought and listened to the drumming in her ears, which was interrupted sometimes by the sound of feet shuffling and skin sticking and unsticking.

She had kissed the boy who tended the horses here andthe boy who sold milk on the market, the one who had been a great deal older than she had been at the time. She had seen her parents have sex, beneath a blanket on the other side of the room, her father on top and her mother stretched out and silent. Slow start and a less slow ending. She'd seen a prostitute bent over before a rugged-looking man in an alleyway, the time her parents' mule had gone lame and she'd had to walk home. She'd been nine. The man had asked her if she'd liked what she was seeing and she'd wondered if the prostitute didn't get tired in the position she was in.

Ippolita squeezed her eyes shut and tried to picture her mistress in any of those places. That was all very wrong, clearly, so she pictured her mistress right here, sitting in the antechamber to the master bedroom as her handsome brother kissed her hand.

Ippolita leaned against the wall and traced every movement that had flowed forth from that initial one, and then she banished the images from her mind and listened.

Something creaked, and for a frightening moment, she thought it had been one of the floorboards beneath her feet.

She opened her eyes and turned back to the door opening to see if she'd drawn attention.

The Duke (the brother), now stood with his back to the table, endangering the vase of flowers that stood near the rim. The Lady (the sister), was leaning against him.

His hands were roaming her back, and then untied the velvet band in her hair to release her strawberry curls. He brushed through her hair and whispered something to her that made her laugh. He smiled in response, kissed her ear, then her brow and then her laughing mouth. Ippolita, who was so nervous that she could feel her heart beating in her throat, felt herself grinning, too.

Her grin dissipated when the brother tilted his head back, closed his eyes and groaned. She felt blood rush to her cheeks when she noticed that the sister had her hands near his pants.

That was enough- that was the final warning, Ippolita knew, and she rushed to the other side of the bedroom, before realizing that she had to take the vase if she didn't want anybody to know she had been there.

She rushed back to pick up the ungainly object, and was first intrigued and then mortified when she peeked into the other room and saw her Lady wrapped around the now bare-chested Duke. The Duke, very terribly, was dividing his attention between showering his sister with wordless affection and carrying her in Ippolita's direction.

Ippolita squeezed the vase against her chest and sprinted towards the door that led to the balcony, only realizing once she got there that she couldn't hold the vase and open the door at the same time. But in the absence of an alternative, she put down the vase as quickly and as quietly as she could, opened the door, and collected her burden again. She nearly dropped it when behind her, the door to the bedchamber swung open and the Duke appeared with his sister still smartly attached to his torso.

How lucky Ippolita was that he was entirely too busy keeping ahold of his own physical burden to notice her, and that her mistress had her eyes closed. She closed the balcony door behind her just as the Duke leaned his sister back against the door, and bent his neck to kiss her somewhere below her neckline. Her mistress gasped and the door rattled behind her back – but the last clear image Ippolita had was not of the door or her mistress' upturned face, but of the exposed part of the Duke's abdomen, and below that the hairy base of his penis showing above his pants.

She didn't think about lingering on the balcony, but embraced the vase as if it were her child returned to her, and retraced her steps through the palazzo as quickly as she dared.

She didn't go into the kitchen immediately, but sat down on the servants' stairwell to catch her breath. She put the vase on the step next to her and closed her eyes like she'd done in the master bedroom. She tried to summon a prayer, but found herself thinking once again of the Duke's initial touch, that sweet kiss on his sister's hand. She traced that chaste kiss all the way to the last one like she had before, and then to the touches she hadn't seen.

Ippolita, quite shamelessly, sat there on the servants' stairwell with her eyes closed and her lips open, and thought of how his pants had sagged lower and revealed his erect member, a fact he hadn't noticed until he tried to move his legs; thought of how his sister' shift had become a useless garment, with the hem hoisted up above her thighs and the bodice fallen down to her waist. Her small, round breasts at the mercy of his hands and his lips and his devouring gaze.

Yes, Ippolita could picture the choreography of those two wrestling bodies with astounding ease, and in her private little place she freely indulged in the Lord and the Lady Borgia's frenziedtryst upstairs (both of them on the bed, but neither straight nor silent, and no sheets or clothes in sight; her back arched, proudly presenting his mouth with her navel and then her crotch, and just minutes later they're on their sides, he embracing her, his shoulders rolling and his nose in her hair as he slides into her. The soft moans that follow, safely deposited in a listening ear; the loud groans that are smothered in the mattrass; all the shivering limbs, the limbs that jerk, the slick skin and the sweat on the cushions and the saliva behind her kneecaps and the inside of his loins. A picture so vivid that someone undoubtedly must have thought of it before.).

When Ippolita came into the kitchen at last, her cheeks were red-hot, and her mind was set on that look of devotion she'd glimpsed on the Lord Borgia's face.

'She did not want it, then, like I said?' Ester noted, upon seeing the vase in Ippolita's hands.

Ippolita shook her head.

'I warned you,' Ester said, and stood up. 'I will go up myself and see if the Lady wants help readying herself for bed, I suppose you forgot to ask.' She eyed Ippolita's red cheeks.

'I already did. Help,' Ippolita said quickly. 'She's asleep now.'

'Then why didn't you say that,' Ester said impatiently, but she sat down again and smoothly directed her darts elsewhere. 'So, the Lord Borgia left already? He's so quiet, he gives me chills. To think that not even the Holy Church would have him! Not even his own father, just to think…'

'He seems nice,' Ippolita said.

'You say that because you do not look past that face of his,' Ester replied. 'Imagine if the Lady of Forlì reacts the way you do when he shows that face at her gate. They say he's going to try again, you know? These useless wars! Good people overrun in their own homes, and by the French. No one is going to thank him if his pretty face is at the front of those armies, dear 'Polita.'

Ester chuckled and followed that up with a discontented sound she made often. 'Wonder how his sister can even bear to touch him.'

Later in the evening, when the Lady Lucrezia asked for a jug of warm water to be brought to her private room on the first floor, Ippolita again passed by the Lord Borgia on the main staircase. He looked as unreachable as always, now that he had his black attire and his expression was again so blank that it was hard to imagine any sort of vulnerability in his features.

She cradled the jug of water as she had cradled the vase, and looked at the Duke only from the corner of her eye, knowing how imperative it was that she should not imagine him naked.

Her breath caught in her throat when, in passing her by, he turned his head and settled his dark eyes on her. She stared at him as he lifted a gloved finger and put it to his lips, then continued down the stairs as if he hadn't seen her.