the pomp, power and privilege, the title was a hellish burden and his near two decades as duke had been marked by fits of horrendous depression. Though he’d largely managed to keep Tuscany out of war, great violence had nonetheless been perpetrated against him. And over the course of two years (three months, thirteen days and seven hours) since the death of his courtesan, time dripped by like winter sap oozing from a dying chestnut tree, every moment a torment caught between the nostalgia of memory and the reality of her non-existence.

However, on this morning, as his speeding carriage blasted the grape-sweet air into his nostrils, Cosimo could feel the death-grip of melancholia recede and, for the first time in two years, he grinned. He was returning from Rome, where he had just successfully completed an official errand commissioned by his eminent second cousins, the King and Queen of France. By all appearances, his charge had been to travel to the Vatican and negotiate a series of religiously tolerant and economically inclusive papal decrees regarding the French-controlled Kingdom of Tuscany. However, the King and Queen of France were not so foolish as to leave the construction of important documents up to a mumbling, milk-hearted, whoremongering, bucolic dreamer like Cosimo. Cosimo was entirely aware that his real task was to play the part of official baby-sitter. He was the imperial pawn put in place by the King and Queen of France to undermine the Vatican and guarantee that the reluctant signature of his other cousin, Pope Leon XI, would grace the handful of documents.

Though Cosimo could have cared less, the stakes were rather high. The powers that controlled Europe were in flux. The Polish Empire was gaining strength and had begun to expand southward, encroaching into lands long controlled by the Turkish Empire. The Polacks wanted access and control over a southern port city, namely Venice, and they’d recently won a decisive victory over the Turks at Budapest, a major step in their march to the sea. This was not good for France, as it meant that Venice, an independent and important trading partner with France, could soon be under the sway of France’s most significant European rival, the dreaded Polacks. Along with strengthening the army and readying for war, France needed to make its own ports and markets more attractive to foreign investment, and the only way to do so was to guarantee, as in Venice, that every Moro, Greco, Turco, Ebreo, Gipsi, Africano, Indiano and Orientale banker, shipper, trader, merchant, mercenary, charlatan and scoundrel would be free to conduct commerce without religious-based restriction and taxation. So, in the name of self-preservation, spurred on by greed and rivalry, sponsored by a heartless king and queen and signed into law by a hate-mongering Pope, Tuscany had just passed its most liberal laws to date, granting commerce a divinity not even the Church could molest.

The morning’s dew cooked to vapor and carried the slight aroma of rosemary through the carriage windows, filling Cosimo’s nostrils with the musk of nostalgia. For rosemary was her scent. In the years since her death, the shape of her face and contour of her body had begun to slip from his mind’s grasp, but her aroma never left the tableau of Cosimo’s dreams. The sweet perfume eased away the eight days of tension and conjured up memories of his courtesan so acute that Cosimo could feel his flesh tingle beneath the caress of his reminiscence. Oh, lamented Cosimo, who had never had the courage to tell her how dearly he loved her, she would have been so pleased by the news he had to tell!

Cosimo undid the first few buttons of his trousers to allow the restorative breeze to better circulate about his body. He closed his eyes and, from the safety of his carriage, recalled with vivid detail the sweet irony of his unintended revenge. He had not meant nor planned to enact a vendetta upon his cousin, which was why he deemed the events that transpired to have been divinely inspired. Oh, it was a slight reprisal in relation to the bloody retributions that marked his family name, but his love had known well that Cosimo had little taste for blood or family tradition. It was a poetic revenge, the kind of which his mistress would have approved: a soul-stirring sign that the eyes of his angel were still upon him.

Cosimo could still hear the echo of his cousin’s footsteps as he approached the aft