Excerpt from The Everlasting by Katy Simpson Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"And what will do you in?" she asked. The cake was a wet, melty cloud. Some cook had left the savoiardi too long in the liqueur. She thought of sending a box of the miniature almondy apples to the Tuscan nuns with a note: This is what a treat tastes like, you monsters.

"The withholding of your beauty," he said.

The fork was still in her mouth. She never had to share a bed with Francesco, old Ciccio, because he had a mistress of thirty years who would nuzzle him just the way he liked—she once came upon them tangled in the yews, the half-toothless woman with a hand in his pants, her husband pressed against her neck like a child. For the second engagement, her cousin Cosimo swore to her innocence, and both families applauded. White as snow.

As a Medici, Giulia believed happiness was having to surrender nothing. She ran a finger across the smear of icing on her plate. "What's the latest with the pope, il diavolo?"

"May His Holiness live eternally," he said, cocking a head toward the servants.

"May His Holiness fast himself unto death," she said, "and be buried under a pile of outlawed books." She dropped her fork. "If you'd given me time to unpack, I might have found my skirts."

"You had them on in the carriage. Did you check there?"

"I don't recall anything in the carriage troubling them in the least."

He stood up and bowed to his lady. "You're a witch, and I'll send you back."


FIRST a letter to the duke, with all the appropriate details of travel (the poor meals, the night at the house of the minor noble, the first view of the ancient city, described as any traveler has ever described it, as a marble rug under which a child had hidden various lumpish toys), and then the letter to the duchess, with all the rest: the layer of dust on the horses, the fly in the carriage, the snores of Bernardetto, her clockwork courses still not coming, so she'd worn the linen rags for nothing. The way the handle of the door knocked against her face whenever she tried to sleep, the terraces of passing grapes that begged for a hungry girl to fly through them. A porcupine that reared up in front of the horses and shook its quills like a Spanish dancer. And Rome! Its clutter, its stink, the hodgepodge of stone and brick, the vines turning the ruins into gardens, stage sets. Leonor had given her poems from Laura Battiferri before she left; they'd seemed exaggerated. But the Tiber really did look like a drowned woman.

The light was beginning to fall, and she didn't know where the candles were kept in this rented house. The savoiardi were attempting to climb back up her gullet. The bustle out her window hadn't ceased. At home, a merchant couldn't get within two hundred feet of the Palazzo Pitti; the duke even wanted to build a floating tunnel so he wouldn't have to brush against anyone's homespun wool.

Maybe it was the wool, maybe it was the chance of assassination. Cosimo's own nonna once sent an envelope filled with arsenic to the pope, Christ bless her memory. Giulia needed to remember to jam a chair under the door handle before she slept.

For twenty-four years she'd been the lady-in- waiting; the bastard princess; a chess piece; too dark to be opinionated. And now that she was cut loose, her lungs filling with Roman brightness, an insect had built a house in her nethers.

A tap at the door. "Is it time for undressing?"

"Take your own clothes off, Paola," she said. "We're in the city now."

Paola would not be deterred. She clucked as she unknotted the laces on Giulia's bodice, sighed as she rubbed her swollen ankles, rolled her eyes to the ceiling when the princess said she'd wash her own monthly linens.

"I heard you had a letter today from Florence."

Giulia didn't reply.

"My lady thinks herself motherless. But if you should ever—"

Excerpted from The Everlasting by Katy Simpson Smith. Copyright © 2020 by Katy Simpson Smith. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.