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"Now, if you will excuse me, I have an important matter to discuss with Lady Saint John. The palazzo is closed to visitors for the remainder of the afternoon."

"Even the Bonapartes?"

"Especially the Bonapartes."

Rodrick continued down the gallery. Behind him, James muttered that it had been considerably easier to abduct women from London theaters than to keep one Bonaparte family out of a Roman palazzo.

The sound of steel reached him before he found the armory. Rodrick opened the door and discovered his wife in fencing whites, the jacket fitted close and open at the throat, her dark hair pinned out of her face. Her instructor was a retired captain of the Piedmontese cavalry who had the slightly haunted expression of a man who had taken on a pupil more talented than himself and was managing it with dignity.

Louise drove him backward three steps with a sequence Rodrick recognized as her own invention. It was fast, effective, and illegal in any bout administered by civilized men, which meant she had grown extremely fond of it.

The captain recovered his guard. Rodrick held out his hand.

"Allow me."

The man surrendered the foil with gratitude.

Louise watched Rodrick come onto the floor. The small curve at the corner of her mouth suggested his arrival hadn't surprised her nearly enough for his liking.

Rodrick raised the blade. "En garde, Lou."

She attacked immediately, because Louise had always considered reconnaissance an unnecessary delay when one could simply invade.

Rodrick caught the first thrust, turned the second, and gave ground on the third. For three exchanges he permitted her the pleasant fiction that she had his measure. Then, when satisfaction had begun to appear in those gray eyes, he changed tempo, caught her blade, and sent the foil spinning neatly from her hand.

He inclined his head with the modesty appropriate to a man who had fenced considerably longer than his wife and saw no moral virtue in concealing it.

"Come, wife," he said, offering his arm. "I have an important matter to discuss with you."

She looked at the foil on the floor. She looked at him. She took his arm.

Their footsteps carried across the marble, while afternoon light fell through the high windows in long golden shafts and the scent of oranges drifted in from the garden.

Louise walked beside him with the alert suspicion of a woman who had been married to Rodrick for almost two years and had learned that important matter might mean something of actual consequence or breaking into the Vatican dressed as a bishop.

"The Swiss Guard uniforms arrived yesterday, and I was thinking—"

"As much as I would love to see you in a medieval halberd," he said, "this particular matter will not require disguises, Lou."

She frowned. "That narrows it considerably."

"Does this concern you?"

"It concerns me that you are being mysterious in a corridor when you could simply tell me."

"I could," he agreed. "But then I should lose the pleasure of watching you attempt to deduce it."

Rodrick opened the bedroom door.

The white curtains billowed slightly in the garden breeze. The bed was vast, the headboard carved with Renaissance grandeur, large enough to stage a minor battle.

Above them, Annibale Carracci's gods frolicked across the barrel vault. Jupiter descended on Ganymede in a shower of gold. Diana bent over the sleeping Endymion. Bacchus and Ariadne reclined in the upper left corner with the comfortable familiarity of two people who had sorted themselves out.

A cupid perched above a pedestal. His gaze was perpetually turned toward the bed, and he smiled with the mischief of a creature who had watched the proceedings in this room for two centuries and found them both predictable and entertaining.

Rodrick winked at the statue and reached for his wife. The white jacket first. He unlaced the fastenings while she leaned into his touch. A smile lifted her lips, as if she had been waiting to see where this was going but had already decided the going was acceptable.

Once he had undressed her, Rodrick attended to his own clothes. Soon they were only dressed in the afternoon sun. Rome, he was discovering, possessed a scandalous understanding of presentation. Sunlight lay across Louise's pale skin while the curtains moved lazily in the garden breeze. In some cities, such a scene might have seemed indecent. In Rome, it looked devotional.