The Lion and the Rose (10 page)

“You’re making talk, you know.” I tried to say it lightly. “All this flirting with my brother, and with Sancha’s pages, and now with papal envoys. Don’t you think—”

“You sound like my mother, Giulia Farnese. Are you getting old and prim?” And off rushed the Pope’s daughter—“My dear Perotto, you must sit beside
me
!”

Taking a deep breath, I claimed a seat of my own beside the last woman in the world who wanted me at her side. Claimed my seat and smiled, and gestured for the earnest little choir of boys to continue their singing, and said low-voiced, “Vannozza, perhaps we should talk about your daughter.”

She looked at me down the long, high-bridged nose that she’d also passed on to Cesare Borgia. Vannozza dei Cattanei: my well-preserved auburn-haired predecessor, still handsome in her russet velvets and many rings. Vannozza, who had stayed at Rodrigo’s side a full decade and given him four children. “La Bella,” she said, and smiled in that special way that both indicated her innate superiority
and
concealed those horse teeth. “What has my daughter to do with you?”

“I love her,” I said bluntly. “As much as my own daughter. But Lucrezia needs reining in.”

That surprised Vannozza; I could see from the peevish fold that suddenly appeared at the corner of her eyes. Because
blunt
wasn’t how we ever began things, Vannozza and me. Most of the time we managed to ignore each other altogether. If forced into conversation, there would first be polite noncommittals, then a few exchanges of edged courtesy punctuated by an oversweet bout of cooing, and then perhaps one of us would unsheathe claws. Usually Vannozza, because I could outcoo absolutely anyone, much less my spiteful, wasp-waisted, wasp-tongued predecessor.

This time, however, I had sidestepped all the pleasantries.

“Lucrezia is being talked about,” I went on under cover of the music, before Vannozza’s bright eyes could narrow any further. “It’s Sancha’s example—remember the incident at Pentecost? People whispered for weeks.”

At the Feast of Pentecost in May, Lucrezia and Sancha had traded jokes and whispers all through the long sermon in the Basilica San Pietro—and had finally abandoned their seats altogether to clamber into the choir stalls with all their ladies, bringing the service to a complete halt as they settled their skirts and called for refreshments. Johann Burchard, the beleaguered little German who had the thankless task of acting as Rodrigo’s master of ceremonies, had run about shrieking and tearing his hair afterward as he bemoaned the horrendous impropriety of it all, and even I had been surprised. Lucrezia was merry by nature, but she’d always been respectful.

“My daughter,” Vannozza stated as though bringing the Eleventh Commandment down from on high, “is merely high-spirited.”

“Rodrigo said that too,” I said, and her eyes flared at my use of her former lover’s name. Oh, Holy Virgin, would she just stop bristling? I hadn’t taken Rodrigo away from her; they’d already been long parted when he swooped me off my feet, but there was no use telling Vannozza that. One of those women who always finds an excuse to feel slighted; aren’t they tiresome? “His Holiness won’t listen to a word about Lucrezia,” I tried again. “You know how he is—‘Bah, Lucrezia’s just in high spirits! I like seeing a pretty young filly kick up her heels—’”

Vannozza gave an unwilling snort through her long nose. I leaned closer, lifting my nosegay of yellow roses to cover our conversation as the choir began a new tune. A good many eyes had flicked avidly in our direction, seeing the Pope’s current and former mistresses bend their heads so close together. “It’s not just about Lucrezia giggling and misbehaving during sermons,” I went on. “She listens far too much to Sancha, and Sancha is
not
a good influence.”

“That girl is a harlot,” Vannozza deigned to concede. Not the kind of girl a mother wants for any of her sons—and surely she had to know by now that Sancha was sleeping with all them (having recently added Juan to her collection to complete the trifecta of Borgia sons. I ask you). I pressed my advantage.

“Do you want Lucrezia to be a harlot too, Vannozza? She’s fluttering her lashes at that new papal envoy now,
and
my brother,
and
any other handsome man at court who crosses her path. And she used to be so in love with her husband; it floated off her like perfume.”

Maybe that was what truly troubled me. You could look about Rome and see any number of young wives who loved to flirt and giggle, and if you saw the fat or sour or graying men they were married to, you usually couldn’t blame them. But Lucrezia had always been different. Something of the maiden in the tower about her, surrounded by protective Spanish father and brothers as she was—and then Giovanni Sforza had come along and swept her away from the walls her family had put up around her, and I’d seen her blossom like one of these yellow roses in my hand.

I didn’t like seeing that glow of love turn into common, roving-eyed flirtation.

Vannozza dei Cattanei broke into my speculations. “Maybe it’s just as well my daughter is no longer so starry-eyed for Lord Sforza.”

I looked at Vannozza. My predecessor was looking smug, and that was hardly a good sign. “What have you heard about Lord Sforza?”

A deliberate shrug of those velvet-clad shoulders. “He isn’t the match my daughter could have had, certainly. His ties with the other Sforza in Milan aren’t anywhere near as strong as he made out when he presented himself for Lucrezia’s hand.”

“So?”

“You don’t know, then?” Vannozza gave a faint smile. “I see Rodrigo doesn’t tell you everything, Giulia Farnese.”

The choirboys sang on in piercing sweetness—the Avernus sonnets, starting with the first where Aurora was compared to Ulysses’s Calypso on her sea-washed isle. Leonello was muttering something under his breath that sounded like
Oh,
Dio
, not those damned sonnets again!
but I wasn’t listening to him
or
to that lovely music and its even lovelier words.

“Calypso, smiling nymph of sanded isle—”

Vannozza examined her buffed nails. “Rodrigo still visits me, you know. He so values my advice, he’ll quite often come for a cup of wine or two before
cena
.”

“Holy Virgin, Vannozza, will you cease trying to make me jealous?” Though she had succeeded, just a little. I knew very well that Rodrigo had an old fondness for his former mistress—he even sometimes referred to her as his
wife
! And then couldn’t see why it exasperated me . . .

I put that aside, lowering my voice. “I don’t see why it matters, Rodrigo fretting to you about Lord Sforza’s shortcomings. Whether he is the ally that was hoped for or not, he is Lucrezia’s husband now. And he loves her, I have seen that with my own eyes, and he deserves better from her than flirtation when his back is turned. Even if flirtation is as far as it ever goes.” I did not truly believe Lucrezia would stray from her marital bed. She was surely just drunk on admiration and flattery.

“—In whose white arms Ulysses would not sleep—”

“You are hardly one to criticize
my
daughter’s behavior,” Vannozza snapped.

“Yes, yes, because I’m her father’s whore.” I brushed that aside impatiently. “Let’s not get stuck upon the obvious, Vannozza. I’m the great harlot of the Vatican, and no one expects decorum from me.” Which was precisely why I tried to give it. “But do you really want Lucrezia to take
my
path? She is Countess of Pesaro, and the Pope’s daughter. There are rules; there are expectations of her. High ones, considering her position, and she does herself no good by flouting them.”

“My daughter is the Pope’s child,” Vannozza dei Cattanei pronounced. The Twelfth Commandment, clearly. “Like her brothers. And they are
above
rules.”

“—Calypso’s arms, if yours, would surely keep—”

I looked at her a moment, hoping she might be jesting. But no, Vannozza dei Cattanei was utterly, appallingly serious. “You know, my brother Sandro just fathered his first child,” I said finally. “A girl, and a sweet little thing too. She has black hair, just like him, and he thinks she’s perfection. I thought my Laura was perfection too—I still do. But she’s not above
rules
, Vannozza, nor is Sandro’s daughter, nor is yours. Where do you get this idea, you and Rodrigo, that your children are above
rules
?”

She smiled at me pityingly. “If your Laura were of Rodrigo’s getting, Giulia Farnese, then you’d understand.”

“My Laura
is
of Rodrigo’s getting, Vannozza dei Cattanei. And I understand that she will soon be her father’s favorite daughter, if you allow her sister to turn into a spoiled little tart.”

“—Ulysses from the bed of home beguiled.”

The song ended, and a smattering of applause broke out. My Pope looked around for me and had a beam when he saw his old mistress sitting with the new. So amicably too, smiling at each other with such great sweetness. Rodrigo couldn’t see that I was gripping my roses so hard that my fingers welled blood from half a dozen thorn pricks. How I longed to cram those roses up Vannozza dei Cattanei’s nose. “My dears,” Rodrigo called, oblivious. “You must both come sit with me! Those new sonnets everyone’s talking of, which shall we hear next?”

“I prefer Sonnet VII,” Vannozza said, claiming her place at the Pope’s other side with great smugness. “The sonnet comparing the poet’s beloved to Leda. Such a
maternal
figure, Leda—she produced such beautiful sons, didn’t she, alongside Helen of Troy?”

“Of course, of course. And which do you prefer, Giulia?” A papal tweak to my cheek. “You’re my Persephone, surely you like Sonnet IX. Aurora as Persephone—”

“They both belong at the bottom of the Tiber,” Leonello muttered behind me.

“So does Vannozza dei Cattanei,” I muttered back at him, and settled for a grim afternoon of laughter, music, and grave doubts.

CHAPTER THREE

Nor can the father force his daughter to become a nun without the cooperation of her free will!

—SUORA ARCANGELA TARABOTTI, “L’INFERNO MONACALE”

Carmelina

A
ren’t you coming with us?” the maids asked me as we left the
palazzo
and I split left instead of right on reaching the street. “It’s bound to be splendid, all those handsome soldiers on parade!”

“And we can sing a great hymn of thanks, once
il Duche
is over the horizon,” Pantisilea said with relish. She was one of Madonna Giulia’s maids, far above the kitchen girls in the
palazzo
hierarchy of servants, but Pantisilea was cheerfully indiscriminate: she slept with all the male servants and befriended all the female, and that was as much distinction as she ever made as far as hierarchy was concerned. She paused now to cross herself and spit at the mention of the Duke of Gandia, and the other maids did the same. “I can’t wait to see him go, God rot him. He had me over a basket of laundry once, did I tell you? I like myself a nobleman now and then, don’t think I don’t, but he smelled like a brewery and lasted about three strokes! Are you sure you don’t want to watch him leave, Carmelina?”

“No,” I said, touching my purse and the crackle of paper inside that was the letter. “Bid the Duke of Gandia good-bye without me.”

Pantisilea made a face, and the cluster of maids headed off laughing toward the Piazza San Pietro, where most of the city had flocked to watch the Duke of Gandia receive the jeweled sword and white staff of Captain-General of the papal forces. He would be leading those same forces off against the remnants of the French, not to mention those branches of the Orsini family who had supported the French against the Pope. For Pantisilea and the rest of the maids it was a holiday; Bartolomeo had packed them one of his hampers as though they were off to a picnic. That boy couldn’t see anyone out the door without making sure they had enough food for an army; he was worse than a Sicilian grandmother. But I didn’t share the maids’ festive mood, and I didn’t care a bit about the Duke of Gandia’s coming campaign. I turned the other direction, shivering even in my heavy cloak.

The Duke of Gandia had not gotten a fair day for his departure—it was blustery, gray, with a spiteful October breeze that tugged at my skirt hem, and the looming threat of rain. I was more concerned with the letter in my pouch alongside the hand of Santa Marta. I wondered what Santa Marta made of the words my younger sister had written in her looping childish hand.

Pray for our family, Carmelina, because a fever took Father to God.

Maddalena went on to say a good deal more—a great many warnings that I was
not
by any means to come back to Venice to bring shame upon the family by appearing at the burial, and after that followed a whole self-congratulatory paragraph on how virtuous she had been for taking our mother into her home.
I suppose she will be fit to look after the children; at least it will save me the need for a nursemaid. Naturally I have not told our mother anything of you, she would hardly approve of my writing, but I have far too forgiving a heart—my husband says I am a perfect saint . . .

But all I really bothered to read was
a fever took Father to God
.

“Where should I go to, to pray for his soul?” I asked Santa Marta, who was as usual tied up securely in my pouch. “I thought I should go to the Basilica San Pietro, but perhaps Father would think that sacrilegious?”

It might seem silly to talk to a hand, even Santa Marta’s, but I always had the feeling she was listening. I wasn’t entirely convinced she didn’t
move
sometimes—back in the days when she’d been a proper relic in a seemly reliquary with a viewing window, people used to whisper that the hand would make the sign of the cross if Santa Marta had answered your prayers. I never saw that hand make the sign of the cross, but she did have a habit of falling out of her pouch if she didn’t have a good enough view of what went on around her.

“Now that I think on it, Father will be utterly furious if I go pray for him. Even if he’s dead,” I added to Santa Marta’s listening ears (well, fingers). “He’ll be up there in heaven stamping and roaring that he has no need for worthless prayers from a runaway nun, and he’d be right.”

On the other hand . . .
I’m maestra di cucina now, Father.
I’d been told all my life that a woman could never have a position like my father’s, yet now I did. I owed my rise to Adriana da Mila’s tight grip on her purse rather than my own skills, of course, but I wasn’t going to quibble with my luck. I looked up at the gray heavens. “Are you proud of me, Father?”

If he had gone to heaven at all, that is. Surely that was his eventual destination—my father might have clouted me a good deal, and hated me when I ran away from the convent, but I could not in all fairness call him a wicked man. Nor was he exactly a saintly one. Perhaps he was in purgatory for a time, working off a batch of smaller sins like vanity and pride and his tendency to pad the accounts when it came to his wealthier clients. “You had all better be ready for him when he finally does arrive in heaven,” I told Santa Marta. “The way he schemed to cook for the Doge, well, that will be nothing to how he’ll scheme to cook for God Himself.”

A woman with a market basket gave me a startled look, and I realized I was talking aloud like a madwoman. I tugged my cloak closer about me, feeling the bite of the wind, and I decided against the Basilica San Pietro, setting off across the long stretch of the Ponte Sant’Angelo instead. Maybe I could find a shrine to Santa Marta, and just lay some flowers on it in my father’s memory . . . but I passed a churchyard first, some small distance from the busy Campo dei Fiori, and the sight stopped me.

Just a small church in this city of churches; no grand dome or expanse of gleaming windows to draw the pilgrims in their hordes. The churchyard was overgrown, the paving stones cracked in places. But this church must have had a little convent attached to it, because I saw two sisters in the weedy churchyard, spading at the wild grass as the wind tugged at their black-and-white habits. One was old and had a tight-drawn face under her veil; the other was young with a crop of pimples by her nose. Both had chapped hands and faces reddened from cold, and even though their lips were moving silently, I knew they weren’t muttering prayers. Lay sisters, both of them, because highborn choir nuns never spaded churchyards. The nobly born girls who brought illustrious family names and sizable dowries to the convent weren’t required to work. The lay sisters worked for
them
, cleaning their cells and ironing the silk shifts they wore under their habits and making their beds since the choir nuns were allowed to sleep through the endless dawn prayers if they felt like it. I’d spaded my share of herb gardens and churchyards, blowing on my cold hands as my higher-born sisters practiced their Josquin motets or sat in cozy parlors gossiping about the latest fashions with their illustrious visitors.

“If I’d been able to cook,” I told Santa Marta, “I might have stayed.” Perhaps that was blasphemy, to put a mere earthly occupation above holy vows—but really, I’d been told many times as a child that every man honored God by the work he did with his hands. If I’d been allowed to honor God with the food I cooked, I might still be back in that convent putting prayers into the ovens along with the bread. But as a raw young novice, I’d been put under a savage-tempered old cow whose idea of high culinary discernment was boiling vegetables until gray. Even later when my skill with sweets vaulted me a bit higher up the ladder, there was nothing more innovative than, “Just add more sugar, Suora Serafina!”

The two lay sisters in the churchyard had stopped their weeding, the elder wincing as she stretched her stout back, the younger mopping her sweaty face with a grubby sleeve. “Maybe I still would have stayed,” I told Santa Marta. “It’s what girls do, after all, when you have too many daughters. The pretty one gets the dowry and the other takes the veil.” Or in my case, the daughter who kept her virginity got the dowry, and the daughter who surrendered her virtue to a good-looking apprentice behind an orange crate got sent to the convent. I hadn’t been in love with him, and that had made it all even worse—I’d felt enough shame at my sinful lusts that I’d felt I
deserved
the convent. And since I’d been at the age when I was getting a bit full of my own skill in the kitchen, and inclined to argue about it (like Bartolomeo)—well, my father had been glad to pack me out of his kitchens.

No, I might very well have stayed at my convent till I was old and withered. I could have carved out a place for myself in the kitchens, resigned myself to it all. But—

“It was the way Father came
visiting
me,” I told Santa Marta. “Every Sunday he’d come to pay a call. He never paid so much attention to me when I lived under his own roof! And it wasn’t me he really came to see at all, but of course you know that.”

Choir nuns from illustrious families never really leave their noble relatives behind, you see. Every week a stream of velvet-clad visitors comes through those forbidding convent gates, and the nuns sit down with their married sisters and tickle their nieces under the chin and gossip about who will be next to marry and who will take the veil and what the Dogaressa wore at the last procession. The noble ladies who visit daughters in convents have feasts to plan at home; perhaps the celebration of a nephew’s marriage or a grandson’s christening. And hovering on the fringes of all those clusters of Venetian noblewomen, my father: falling into casual conversation at the grilles, ready with his book of recipes, leaving with yet another client. All with me standing there in the wimple that squeezed my face and the habit that was never long enough to cover my shins, doomed to peel onions and roll out marzipan forever.

That last day, I suppose, had been the seal. “Your fool cousin Marco got himself a patron at last,” my father deigned to tell me. “Adriana da Mila of Rome. Ha, she’ll realize
that
mistake soon enough.” Then he’d abandoned me midsentence in favor of a bejeweled Foscari matron reeling off advice to her postulant daughter, who looked like she’d very much been hoping to leave maternal advice behind by taking the veil, and I hadn’t known what I was doing until my hands were actually rifling the pouch my father had left at my feet and slipping his packet of recipes into my sleeve.

“Though I can’t really claim the rest was impulse,” I told Santa Marta. Taking Santa Marta’s reliquary, bribing a fisherman to smuggle me out in his boat—that had all been a half-formed plan I’d been turning over for some months, a plan I hadn’t put into action until I thought of a place I could flee and someone to give me work. Once I knew where I was going, well, the rest had fallen into place. Even if the addition to my belongings of a certain severed hand had not been part of the original scheme—she had gotten caught in the folds of my cloak somehow as I bundled up the crystal and silver reliquary, and I hadn’t discovered her until it was far too late to give her back.

I gave Santa Marta a pat through the pouch, unable to help a smile. I’d been horrified at first to find myself a desecrator—I could just about settle my conscience when it came to taking the reliquary, considering that the convent had swallowed up the dowry that should have been mine—but nobody could justify stealing a saint (well, part of a saint). Now, however, I wondered if Santa Marta’s hand hadn’t decided to come along with me of its own free will. The inside of a reliquary box must get dull, after all, no matter how prettily jeweled, and with me she at least had a kitchen to rule over again.

No, I was sorry about many things: sorry to break my vows even if I’d never wanted to take them in the first place; sorry to steal from the nuns who might have been greedy and silly but still hadn’t deserved to be robbed; sorry for the shame I’d brought down on my family’s reputation. I even felt pangs of conscience over the sin of bedding Marco, who would be in a great deal of trouble if it were ever found out he had lain with a nun. But I no longer felt the slightest twinge of guilt over the fact that the severed hand of my patron saint had now, in however unorthodox a fashion, found a home with me.

And despite all my sins and broken vows and occasional instances of theft, Santa Marta must have liked something about me. Because I was mistress of my own kitchens, in my own right. Because I still hadn’t been caught and returned to my convent.

You never will be now
, something whispered, and my shiver had nothing to do with the bitter autumn wind. With my father dead . . . well, who
would
catch me? My sister didn’t want me brought to justice; she wanted me as far from Venice as possible. Marco, even if he was angry with me for taking his position, still had a vested interest in keeping my secret—he’d be in as much trouble as me if I were found out. Aside from Marco, Leonello was the only other person in Rome to know my true history, and so far he seemed inclined to keep his lips sealed.

No, I was safe—or as safe as I was ever likely to be.