The Lion and the Rose (14 page)

“A beseeching Persephone, framed by her hair,” Botticelli muttered, arranging my unresisting arms again. “The pomegranate cupped in the lower hand, below the belly; the other hand extended across the breast—yes, like that. Six seeds lying across the palm like jewels, offered to the viewer. Tilt the head, part the lips, the eyes lowered just a trifle. Persephone before she eats the seeds, the agony of choice before she dooms herself to the underworld . . .”

I heard scratching as he took up his chalks and began to sketch. I held my pose. Cardinals gazed at me avidly, pages, archbishops, secretaries, all gaping. Johann Burchard, the prim little master of ceremonies, was flushing so dark he looked like a Moor. Cardinal Piccolomini and his supporters still sat tight-lipped. Rodrigo looked saturnine, amused—and so tender, when his eyes rested on me.

“She should have jewels,” Leonello observed, looking over the painter’s shoulder. “Venus was born from the waves naked, but the king of the underworld showered all the jewels of the earth on his bride, trying to win her love. One wonders how well it succeeded . . .”

“A ruby, perhaps,” Botticelli agreed. “Like a drop of blood at the throat, echoing the pomegranate . . .”

I kept my gaze serene, fixed on the Resurrection over their heads. I suppose it didn’t take as long as it felt.

“For a first sitting, that will do.” Botticelli laid down his chalk judiciously. “I’ll mark the colors in later—the red of the pomegranate, drawing the eye in the center; the hair, hmm, perhaps picked out in gold leaf. A dark space behind her, I think; the whirling dark of the underworld . . . Echoes of Eve, with the pomegranate symbolizing the eternal apple . . .”

“If Maestro Botticelli is finished, I think you have all ogled my Giulia long enough!” Rodrigo approached, his eyes gleaming with fond pride as I dropped my posed arms and shook my hair around me again. “What a picture you are,
mi perla
. In paint or in the flesh.”

I ignored him, nodding my thanks to Leonello as he handed me the bundle of my shift.

“It will be a splendid painting,” Maestro Botticelli said, and oddly my heart squeezed out a little gladness for him. He had a flush in his thin cheeks, a fire of creation in his eye—far better than the worn, graying man who had parroted Fra Savonarola’s dictates of damnation.
Leave off Savonarola’s hellfire
, I thought,
and go back to painting your goddesses
. He certainly looked happier that way. “Several more sittings will be required, of course. But I am to set out for Florence in two days . . .”

“Then let us continue the sittings in Florence,” I said, shrugging my dress up over my shoulders and turning so the pages could fasten the lacings up my back. I was still clutching the lemon that was supposed to be a pomegranate, so hard my nails scored the withered skin. “I am to visit my sister there very soon; we can finish the portrait then. I will be staying some weeks, so there will be plenty of time.”

“Weeks?” my Pope protested. “How can I do without you for even one week?”

“Perhaps I’ll stay a month.” I tossed the words over one shoulder, bending to retrieve the leash of my little goat.

“Giulia—” Rodrigo sounded exasperated but still fond, keeping his voice low. “This was not about you,
mi perla
. You think I like these straitlaced fanatics like Savonarola prating their lunacy at me? My cardinals use the excuse to chastise me, and where does it end? I’ve sent a message, that’s all.”

“Next time”—I turned and flung the withered lemon at his feet—“you can leave my public humiliation out of your
messages
!”

My Pope looked at the lemon and then back at me, and maybe that was the beginning of chagrin forming in his eyes. But I whirled away with my gown still half unlaced and left the
sala
behind: the whispering cardinals, my sputtering Pope, the two painters still twittering about new techniques in plaster. A month in Florence? Maybe that wouldn’t be long enough. Maybe two months. “I need a respite.”

“A respite from what?” Leonello asked. I hadn’t realized I’d said it out loud.

“The
Borgias
,” I said, and felt myself near tears. “
All
of them.”

Carmelina

T
here.” I hurled the little purse at him like a stone. “Eight ducats. Now get out of my chamber.”

“La Bella didn’t mind, I’ll wager.” Marco caught the pouch before it hit him, pouring the coins out into his palm. “She’s got a purse as open as her legs—”

“Don’t be vile!” I would have flown at my cousin and boxed his ears, but he saw the look on my face and hastily retreated behind my narrow bed. “I don’t care what you threaten next time. I am never begging money for you or your poxy dicing debts again.”

Marco had the grace to look shamefaced. “I wouldn’t have told, you know. Not really.”

He tried a wheedling smile, but I still had fury roiling about in my chest like a kettle about to boil over. My fool of a cousin evidently did not have enough to do in the Duke of Gandia’s half-staffed
palazzo
. In absence of anyone to cook for, he’d been gaming again and had lost three months’ worth of pay wagering on Cesare Borgia’s bullfights a fortnight ago. Judging from the dark bruises on his face and the puffed cut on his lip, Marco’s smile had not succeeded this time in getting him out of the debt.

We hadn’t spoken since he’d left the Palazzo Santa Maria with his pack over his shoulder, still full of sullen resentment at me for taking his position. But he’d turned up this morning, shamefaced and shuffling just outside my tiny chamber, and he hadn’t been looking for the pleasure of my company.

“Just beg the money from Madonna Giulia. She’s fond of you! Eight ducats, little cousin, it’s nothing to her. In fact, ask for ten and I’ll have a little something extra to put on a
pallone
match—”

“Absolutely not,” I’d stated.

He’d tried pleading, and he even tried kissing, and when neither of those worked—

“You know what they’ll do to me next?” he’d shouted, pointing at his split lip. “You’ll get me those eight ducats from La Bella, Carmelina, or maybe I’ll go to Adriana da Mila with a few stories about you! You won’t be mistress of these kitchens anymore if that old bitch finds out where you fled from!”

Now, of course, he was not wild-eyed at all. Ashamed again, and cajoling.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he insisted, as I continued to gaze at him with stony eyes. “I wouldn’t really have told that you’re—well, you know. Not really. It’s my skin too if they find out, after all. I was just desperate. I didn’t mean it!”

“Of course not,” I said. “Not now you have the coin.”

He shuffled a little behind my bed, hooking his thumbs through his belt. My big feckless cousin, so tall and strong with his curly black hair all mussed like a little boy’s. Seedy around the edges, though. His shirt was grimy, and his right eye swelled and bruised to the color of the squid ink I sometimes used as a sauce for wide ribbons of pasta.

I could not believe we had ever shared a bed.

“No harm done, is there, little cousin?” Marco continued in the face of my silence. “Madonna Giulia didn’t mind giving you the coin, did she?”

“That’s not the point.” Of course my mistress had opened her purse at once when she heard my fumbling flame-faced story about an orphaned cousin arrived from Parma. She gave money away like water, to her servants or to the beggars in the streets or to anyone who asked for it. “Madonna Giulia isn’t the point at all, Marco. You
threatened
me.”

“I had to get the money!”

“And now you’re leaving.” I pointed to the door. “Madonna Giulia departs for Florence tomorrow, and I’ll need to prepare her a few treats for the journey. Get out, you lying caul-brained goat turd.”

“Well, now, no need to be so hasty. I thought I’d pay a visit to my kitchens, see everyone—”

“They aren’t
your
kitchens, Marco!” I bundled my cousin toward the courtyard. “They haven’t been your kitchens for a very long time. So
get
out
.”

I banged the door on his indignant face and contemplated my own imminent future with a scowl. I should have been accompanying Madonna Giulia to Florence, really. “No journey is complete without a little basket of your pastries,” she’d declared. “I always eat when I’m traveling! Especially those little kerchiefy-shaped
crostata
things with the honeyed strawberries . . .” But I was supposed to be tending my orphaned cousin from Parma, the fictitious one for whom I’d begged eight ducats, and of course Madonna Giulia had given me leave to stay home from her Florentine visit. She was far too generous with her servants, not just in money but in time she allowed for us to miss our work. Making up for Madonna Adriana’s stinginess with our wages and our free hours, I always thought, and the other maidservants took shameless advantage—but this was the first time I’d abused my mistress’s easy generosity. So I guiltily made an extra basketful of those little kerchiefy-shaped
crostata
things with honeyed strawberries for her to share with her golden gabble-head of a daughter on their journey, and went back to my kitchens alone.

The Palazzo Santa Maria seemed empty without her. Madonna Lucrezia was still dawdling in Rome, finding excuses to postpone her return to “that backwater sinkhole” that was Pesaro, but she spent more nights dancing and banqueting through the various great
palazzi
of the city than she did at her old girlhood home. Madonna Adriana was no longer really needed to chaperone the Pope’s daughter and had taken herself off to spend the winter with her niece in Liguria who had just delivered a baby. Without Madonna Giulia drifting about the house like a joyous bubble, playing games with her daughter and sunning her hair and singing tuneless little love songs, the loggias of the
palazzo
seemed cold and empty.

So when I woke one night to the delicious golden smell of something frying, at first I thought I was dreaming.

If so, it was a good dream. I’d been having the troubling kinds of dreams lately, the kind where I swam out of sleep still feeling a hard male chest against mine, seeing the loom of strong broad shoulders overhead, tasting the salty tang of a man’s sweat on smooth warm skin . . . not any man I knew, just a man with a shadow for a face. It’s the sort of dream a woman has when her life has no particular passion in it, and probably never will. It’s not a very helpful dream, either, because I’d made my choices, I’d chosen my life with clear eyes, and I’d known love would have no real part in it. So all in all, dreaming about frying food instead of shadowy lovers seemed a great improvement.

But then I sat up in bed, sniffing more strongly, and realized I was awake.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, prowling into the kitchens. “Bartolomeo, it’s past midnight!”

My apprentice turned, skillet in one hand and a broad spoon in the other, but rather than look guilty he just gave me a delirious grin. “Couldn’t sleep,
signorina
! Neither could you, by the look of it.”

I doubted my apprentice remained sleepless for the same reason I did. The excessive emptiness of my bed might keep me awake sometimes, but surely not Bartolomeo—he had passed his eighteenth year not long ago, and the maids who had once whacked him on the head for getting underfoot were now looking at him speculatively. And why not? A skinny, penniless pot-boy is one thing, but a promising young cook with a bright future and no mother is entirely another.

“Can’t you just steal a cask of wine to put yourself back to sleep, like all normal apprentices?” I said through a yawn. “You have to build up a fire and start frying everything in sight? That’s good kindling you’re wasting!”

He hardly seemed to hear me. “Look, I found these at market yesterday.” He thrust some odd brown tubers at me like a bouquet of roses. “Aren’t they wonderful?”

“They look like warts.” I poked at them with a dubious finger. “What are they?”

“Some kind of root. Not so different from a turnip, but the texture has more starch to it. The vendor claimed they came clear across the ocean from those new lands the Spanish found, but I wasn’t swallowing
that
nonsense.” Bartolomeo snorted. “I’ve been experimenting with them all day. Boiling, chopping, spicing, and the texture wasn’t coming out how I wanted. I was just getting into bed when I thought I’d have one more try at frying them.” His eyes had a gleam of enthusiasm as he whirled back to the trestle table where a bowl of chopped tubers or whatever they were waited for him. “A little coarse salt, a little olive oil . . .” He tilted a generous splash of oil into the pan. “Is Madonna Adriana still cross with you for buying the expensive oil from Apulia? She thought she’d save money, paying you less than she did Maestro Santini, but you never skimp on ordering good supplies the way he did. Doubt she’s saved too many
scudi
by the end of the month after your olive oil bills—”

“Careful,” I said, as a drop of that hot oil splashed out of the pan. “You couldn’t put a shirt on, Bartolomeo? You’ll burn yourself.”

“Already have,” Bartolomeo said, unconcerned. When his urge for the frying pan had hit, he’d clearly not bothered to pull on more than a pair of worn breeches before racing for the kitchens. The flagstone floor was chilly beneath my slippers, and despite the crackling kitchen fire I still shivered in my linen shift, but Bartolomeo was evidently feeling no cold as he padded barefoot about the ovens. Feeling no heat either; among the cinnamon-dark freckles splashed over his milk-pale chest and arms I could see red splotch marks where hot olive oil had spattered, but he was whistling happily between his teeth.

“You shouldn’t be using my kitchens just to experiment on strange tubers, you know.” I hesitated, wondering if I should order him to desist, but for once my rebellious apprentice was being cheerful instead of argumentative, and that seemed like something to encourage. “You’re lucky I feel like a bit of a nibble,” I finally allowed. “Let’s have a look at these roots of yours.”

“The first batch burned,” Bartolomeo admitted, jerking his chin at the trestle table toward a plate of what appeared to be little scorched black disks. “They fry up fast, whatever they are. Sweet Santa Marta, don’t let me burn the next batch or I’ll be out of tubers—” He touched the little wooden crucifix hanging about his neck on a cord. “You think she listens?”