The Lion and the Rose (15 page)

“Santa Marta?” I couldn’t help a little smile. “I know she does.”

“I think so, too. Not that the Heavenly Father doesn’t,” Bartolomeo allowed. “But He’s busy. He’s got His hands full finishing off the French; I’m not going to burden Him with my kitchen woes.”

“His Holiness the Pope is the one with his hands full when it comes to the French,” I pointed out. “He’s the one waging war on them.”

“It’s all the same,” Bartolomeo shrugged. “The Heavenly Father and the Holy Father—they’re both about equally far above a kitchen apprentice with a pan full of tubers, aren’t they? Pure, powerful, perfect—things I can’t ever aspire to. Except maybe in food,” he added, and gave the pan a swirl.

“I would hardly call the Holy Father pure,” I snorted. “Or are you going to tell me he loves Madonna Giulia like a daughter?”

Bartolomeo grinned. “Even the Holy Father was a man first, and Madonna Giulia would tempt God Himself. Come to think of it, God Himself was a man once, too. He’d understand.”

Belatedly, I reined myself in from further gossip. It was one thing to encourage my apprentice’s good cheer, but too much free rein was another thing entirely. Bartolomeo might be only eighteen, but the other apprentices listened to him, and so did the undercooks who should have been giving him orders rather than taking them—he’d even gotten clever lately in how he challenged me! He no longer picked open quarrels when we disagreed on what to put into a sauce or how to roll out pasta; instead, he followed me about with ostentatious humility saying, “If you please,
signorina
, just a touch more mint? And if you please,
signorina
, if we could roll out the
tagliatelli
with a comb to give the sauce more grip? And if you please,
signorina
—” Always during the busiest hour of pre-
pranzo
rushing. Until finally I would snap, “Oh, do what you please with the
tagliatelli
, Bartolomeo!” and then see his wide grin and realize I had been played like a viol. So it went against the grain to give him a free hand with anything, even just with a bunch of tubers and a line or two of conversation in the small hours of the night, because if you gave Bartolomeo one pinch of independence he’d have your whole kitchen turned upside-down in a heartbeat.

But whatever those unpromising-looking tubers were sizzling in the pan, they were just starting to turn golden about the edges and they smelled marvelous as I took a long sniff over my apprentice’s shoulder.

“Passable,” I said. “Give them a flip now—”

“No. They need a bit more browning on this side.” A drop of olive oil leaped out and sizzled on his bare arm, but he paid no attention. He flipped a slice neatly out of the pan to the notch-eared tomcat, who pounced with a rusty
mrow
.

“Don’t feed that beast!” I scolded. “He’s spoiled enough, the way the maids coo over him—”

“Why are you so hard on that cat,
signorina
?” Flipping another disk out of the pan to the floor.

“It’s no use being sentimental about animals, Bartolomeo. Either they earn their keep or we eat them. I haven’t any use for a cat that doesn’t catch mice.” I craned my neck at the pan as he gave it a shake. The little disks had gone golden all over, and my mouth was watering. “Take them off the heat!”

“All in good time . . .” He flipped them expertly, gave another swirl and a nod as the other side crisped, and turned them out into a clean bowl. I reached for one of the crisp little golden disks, but he nudged my hand away. “They’re too hot,
signorina
, so wait till you’re asked.”

“My kitchen, apprentice.” I gave him an absent rap on the shoulder as I always did, and it surprised me when he caught my wrist and held it.

“Stop doing that,” he said. “I am eighteen years of age, so quit whacking me like a scullion. And it’s my recipe even if it is your kitchen, so I’ll tell you when you’re allowed to taste it.”

I felt my brows fly up in surprise, and I almost told him he was an insolent lug, as I had last week when he dared add beaten mint to my dish of salted tuna belly. But his voice now was firm rather than belligerent, and his eyes were steady as they looked down at me. My apprentice
was
eighteen years old, and perhaps we’d been arguing too loudly for me to notice that the unsteady wobbles of his young voice had settled into a confident tenor, and his milk-pale shoulders were as broad as Marco’s. Just last week I’d watched him step between two of his fellow apprentices as they started a shoving match, haul them out in the yard, crack their heads together until they yowled, and then deliver a stern tongue-lashing that could have come straight from me. They’d
listened
, too, muttering and rubbing their sore heads, and it didn’t seem to occur to them that he didn’t have any real authority over them. My erstwhile pot-boy had grown up, it seemed, and I wondered if I should think about raising him from apprentice to undercook.

“Pass me the pepper,” said Bartolomeo, releasing my wrist. “If you please,
signorina
. And a block of the good Parmesan, and a grater.”

“Yes,
maestro
,” I said with just a bit of a sniff so he’d see the concession I was making, and I fetched both. Bartolomeo tossed the crisp golden disks with pepper and just a little fine-grated cheese, and popped one into his mouth. He chewed. I waited. “Well?”

“Needs more salt,” he decided. Another sprinkle, another taste, as I shifted from foot to foot. My mouth was watering again, and Bartolomeo’s cheeks creased in a smile as he proffered a fried golden coin of tuber. “Here.”

Taste exploded in my mouth—the crunch of salt flakes and faint burn of fresh pepper, the crisp fried skin on the outside giving way to something mealy, mild . . . and quite wonderful.

“Hmph,” I said, swallowing the last heavenly crumb. “I’d add a dash of rosemary.”

“At least you didn’t say cinnamon,” Bartolomeo said, and then he kissed me. Not a boy’s clumsy peck but a young man’s kiss, too hard, too hungry, too eager, but I was too astounded to pull away as he cupped one big hand around the back of my neck and pulled me up against him.

I tasted flakes of salt on his lips from the fried golden disks we’d shared, tasted pepper and Parmesan and the good olive oil from Apulia. His lips parted mine hungrily, one hand sliding up into my hair and the other gripping my waist, and I didn’t pull away as fast as I should have because he tasted so
good
. Cooks were better for kissing than anyone else. Cooks had sweet breath from chewing mint rather than drinking rotgut beer; cooks smelled of rosemary and nutmeg rather than sweat and smoke; cooks were hard-bodied from hauling kegs and carcasses all day rather than soft-gutted from sitting about a barracks or a shop counter. A guardsman or a clerk gripped you in hairy arms, but a cook’s skin was smooth to the touch because his arms were singed hairless by hot ovens . . .

My lips parted under his before I could think of moving away. A mistake, because he lifted me to the edge of the trestle table, one hand smoothing my hip through my shift, the other still twined in my hair.

“Stop,” I managed to mutter then, though his hand moving from my hip down the outside of my thigh burned me. “Stop, we can’t—I can’t—”

“Why?” His mouth had moved to my neck, and he was drinking the skin of my shoulder where my shift had slipped down. “Why not?”

“Because—” Because he was my apprentice, because he was eighteen, because I had a position to maintain in this household, and the respect that had to be maintained with it—because—

I should have pulled away. I should have pulled away at once, but he had ambushed me as neatly as the French army, my apprentice boy who had somehow stopped being a boy when I wasn’t looking. I wound my hands into his bright hair—to pull his head back, to shake some sense into him—but my bed had been empty such a long time, and now I had a pair of smooth hard-muscled arms about me again, and a kiss that tasted as good as those fried golden things. I was lonely and hungry and cold, and my apprentice smelled of wild thyme and his flesh was warm as a kettle on rolling boil. “Bartolomeo—” I managed to say.

“Mouths shut,” he murmured against my lips, “and hands moving.”

His big kitchen-scarred hand slipped up to span my breasts, and my whole body juddered at the touch. It was all he needed. He scooped me up so my legs wrapped his waist and it was only a few short steps to his tiny cubbyhole beside the wine cellars. If it had been farther, if he’d put me down to walk—if we’d had to stop and fumble with boots and ties, apron knots and a gown’s laces—but my shift billowed to the floor half a heartbeat after he kicked the door shut with one bare foot, and his breeches followed another heartbeat later, and there was no time to think, no time to think and no desire to think either. Just hunger, a ravenous tearing hunger as though the flesh had been starved instead of the belly, and on the narrow straw-stuffed apprentice’s pallet on the floor we flung our bodies down like feasts and tore at each other, savored each other, ate and drank each other, until there was nothing left but crumbs.

And it’s only when the crumbs are left and you’re scraping the dish that you begin to feel the shame of having acted like such a glutton.

I lay gasping and covered with sweat on the lumpy pallet, the hard shoulder and hip of my apprentice—my
apprentice
!—still pressed against my side. I heard Bartolomeo’s breath slowing and I closed my eyes and prayed as I had never prayed in my life.
Sweet Santa Marta, just let him fall asleep.
Marco had always promptly fallen asleep when he rolled away from me. If Bartolomeo did too, surely I could creep off to my own chamber and pretend this had all been some fevered nightmare. Surely.
Sweet Santa Marta, please let him sleep.

“More Parmesan,” Bartolomeo said up to the ceiling.

“What?” I replied before I could switch to my other plan, which was to pretend that
I
was asleep. Or perhaps dead.

“More Parmesan.” He turned his head, looking at me over the thin pillow. “On those fried tubers. And a dash of rosemary. You’re right about that.”

“Oh.” I felt my face flaming.

“I’m going to write that recipe up,” he said cheerfully. “I write up all my recipes. The ones that work, anyway. I had an idea for shaved ice and frozen fruits and cream that was a disaster. I wanted it all creamy and cold and smooth, and it just melted into a great sticky puddle. But the fried tubers, those were good. I’m going to make a book someday—all the best recipes,
and
the best advice for cooks.” He reached out, smoothing back a curl of hair that was sticking to my neck. “You could help me write that part.”

I moved away from his hand, sitting up.

“Where are you going?” He sat up too, sliding his arms around my waist from behind and kissing the back of my neck. “You think I’m letting you up yet, as long as I’ve wanted to get you here? Just give me, oh, the length of time it takes to say a rosary, and then . . .” He buried his nose in my loose hair. “Sweet Santa Marta, maybe I won’t even need that long. You smell like cinnamon.”

“It’s very late.” I pulled away from his arms, keeping my words stern. “I’ll need to be back to my chamber before anyone’s awake to see me come out of here.”

“Why shouldn’t they see?” He fell back on his elbows, admiring me as I rose. “They’ll know soon enough anyway.”

“Oh, will they?” I snarled, fumbling for my shift. Men, always boasting about the women they’d wheedled out of their skirts. What an achievement for a mere apprentice: getting his own
maestra di cucina
to flop on her back. What a
joke
for the scullery.

Bartolomeo shrugged, unfazed. “They’ll know when we make the announcement.”

“Announcement?” I found my shift, yanking it gratefully down over my head. My whole body felt flushed and awkward with embarrassment. “Announcement of what?”

He grinned. “Marry me.”

I stood there goggling like a goose about to get its neck wrung.

“You think I’d bed you and not marry you?” He raised his eyebrows at my aghast silence. “What sort of man do you think I am? I know we can’t wed before I’m done with my apprenticeship, but I’m near finished anyway. I’m already better than half the undercooks Madonna Adriana hired on the cheap—”

Sweet Santa Marta
, I thought again in utter horror, but the prayer stopped short this time. My patron saint clearly wasn’t going to be any help in situations like this, good as she was for keeping a roast rare on the spit or a sauce from breaking.
This
was far out of her control.

Bartolomeo must have taken my frantic, silent hunt for words as some kind of permission, because he rose from his pallet and came to slip his arms about my waist. “Summertime, do you think? We could save a little, go to the priest then—”

My mouth was dry, and my heart hammered. In the light of the single taper I could see every detail of this tiny cubby of a chamber: barely big enough for a pallet and a stool and a bag of clothes but exquisitely neat for all that; a bowl of crushed mint leaves that he must have placed to keep the windowless air sweet; a packet of scribbled papers that might have been the start of his recipe collection. A tiny chamber not tall enough even at its highest point for my apprentice to stand up straight, but he was standing in the middle of it now, utterly naked and proposing marriage to me.

A tiny, astounded part of me thought back to the words that had drifted through my head when I first woke up, just an hour ago:
This is the sort of dream a woman has when her life has no particular passion in it, and probably never will.

“These will be our kitchens, yours and mine, we’ll run everything between us!” His words poured fast and eager now, like warm olive oil out of a jar. “The two of us, we’ll be the greatest cooks in Rome. Sweet Christ, Carmelina, I’ve never known a woman who could cook like you! Even,” he conceded, “if you put too much orange juice in everything.”

“I do not,” I couldn’t help saying, even though it rocked me clear back onto my heels to hear him say my name instead of
signorina
.