The Lion and the Rose (18 page)

Giulia let her lashes drop over her eyes again and stepped out of her tall stilt clogs. “A donation,” she murmured, proffering them with a gesture and then detaching the fur collar from her robe. “I shall feed my womanly vanity into the flames.”

“God be praised,” intoned one of the other Angels, a stringy fellow not yet old enough to shave. He cast a look at me, and I thought it wise to surrender my worn deck of cards. I’d had that deck for more than five years, since the days I’d made my money playing
primiera
and fleecing sailors out of their wages . . . the other two guardsmen were quick to follow my lead, contributing between them a set of bone-carved dice and a little good-luck charm on a silver chain. I tensed as the stringy Angel sniffed at our contributions. If he tried to take my knives . . .

The stocky leader still looked dissatisfied with Giulia. My mistress had listened to her sister’s warnings about the new austerity demanded of the women of Florence, and kept her silks and jewels for the privacy of the
sala
—venturing out today, she wore a gray wool dress under her fur-lined robe, and not even a ring for adornment. There was nothing the Angels could reproach—except the fact that even wrapped in gray wool, La Bella looked luscious and bewitching and tempting enough to inspire all kinds of sin.

“That hair,” the Angel finally said. “That’s false hair, that is. A hairpiece that might as well be woven of vanity!”

“Vanity and immodesty!” the stringy Angel thundered.

“It’s not false hair,” my mistress protested. “It all grows on my head, I assure you.”

“You’re lying,
madonna
. No woman has that much hair.”

“Oh, Holy Virgin save me,” Giulia said, and in an exasperated jerk she pulled off the net and shook her hair down around her. “Does that satisfy you?”

The Angels all insisted on giving it a good tug to make sure it was real, and I tensed at Giulia’s side but her gaze flicked at me in warning.

“You should cut that hair and add it to the fire,” the first Angel warned, pulling the long waves through his fingers just a bit more slowly than I thought strictly necessary. “A woman’s hair is her vanity. She adorns herself with it, she takes pride in it, and soon enough she is plucking and dyeing like a whore.”

“Or like that pack of Borgia sluts in Rome.” The stringy Angel spat into the street. “The Pope’s daughter, she suns her hair all day while drinking and dallying with lovers.”

Giulia’s chin jerked at that. “Madonna Lucrezia is the most pious of girls—”

“A slut,” the first Angel insisted, and thrust something into my mistress’s hands. “Read this if you want the truth of it. Lucrezia Borgia plays the whore for her own father
and
her brothers, and so does that harlot princess from Naples. They pleasure themselves on the altars of the holy Basilica itself, drunken and naked, and the Pope and his pack of corrupt cardinals like to watch—”

“They do
not
!” Giulia burst out, and I breathed shallowly through my nose as all three Angels fastened their eyes on her.

“Contradicting the holy followers of Fra Savonarola,” the third Angel said in his squeaking voice, looking at the others. “This woman holds herself very high!”

“Too high.” The stocky Angel stepped closer to Giulia. “I think we will cut that hair for the fire after all,
signora
. Kneel!”

“I will do no such thing,” Giulia retorted, retreating back a sharp step before he could grab hold of her hair, and on my signal the other two guardsmen waded into Savonarola’s Angels.

The sounds of grunts and blows filled the cold street. All three Angels had stout staves, and one of Giulia’s guardsmen hissed a curse through his teeth as the scrawny Angel thumped him soundly across the shoulder. But my mistress’s guards had short swords, and both flashed out of their scabbards. “Pommels only,” I called, both knives drawn before my mistress as I kept out of the fray, because I wanted no bodies in the street today if I could help it. God only knew what punishment Florence’s mad Dominican friar would levy on anyone who killed one of his holy thugs. “Pommels,” I called again, “or flats of the blade!” Both guardsmen heard me, using their swords as cudgels rather than spilling blood with the cutting edges. One guard had got caught between two Angels, both of them buffeting him with their staves as they gave shrill whoops, and I stepped sideways to see if there was an angle where I could trip the scrawny one. But the stocky leader of the three saw my attention shift, and he darted around me to seize Giulia by the hair. “On your knees, whore” he whispered, and had his knife ready to saw through the gold mass doubled around his hand.

I darted back, my throat dry as a bone, ready to prickle him with steel, but my mistress—oh, my clever mistress. Rather than yank backward against the Angel’s grip, she flung herself forward against him and plastered her mouth over his. He went stiff all over in surprise, hand loosening in her hair for just an instant. Quite long enough for me to bump his knee out from under him with a blow of my knife hilt. Giulia helped with a shove of her own to the burly chest, and he fell flat on his back in the muddy street.

“
Guards!
” I rapped out, and both guardsmen lunged back to array themselves before their mistress and me. One of the guards had a bloody nose and the other had a set of knuckles that would be the size of cabbages tomorrow, but they’d left both Angels groaning over smashed shins and bleeding heads.

“Good sir,” I said, addressing the stocky Angel with all the bland politeness I could muster as he scraped himself off the stones with a very red face. “I do apologize for any pain we have caused your fellows. Be assured we will be on our way, and my mistress will keep to her household in future like a modest and decent woman.”

“She
kissed
me!” the stocky Angel shouted, pointing at my mistress, who was speedily bundling her hair back into its net. “She kissed me, that foul harlot—”

“And this foul harlot has the French pox,” Giulia said sweetly. “Enjoy the pustules!”

They started for her again, and I showed them the knives in my hands. “Come one step closer and I will spear your eyes in their sockets like grapes,” I said. “I suggest you be on your way. Plenty of sinners in this city, after all, and we have already made our donations to Fra Savonarola’s fire. Good day, and God keep you.”

The stocky Angel scowled, looking more than ready to continue the quarrel, and part of me hoped he would. But the other two looked bruised and embarrassed, already edging back down the street, and their leader seemed to realize he stood alone now against Giulia, me, and both of our large, grinning, and truculent guards. “Be on your way,
madonna
,” he warned her with a dark look, rubbing ostentatiously at his lips where she had glued hers. Somehow I doubted he was truly as sorry about that kiss as he pretended. Sorry, perhaps, that it had not been one whit sincere. “And meditate on your sins! Vanity, pride, and unbridled lust. We put women in the stocks for less in Florence!”

He strode to catch up with his fellows and they regained something of their swagger as they retreated from us, taking up three quarters of the street and forcing the few cloaked and hurrying passersby to squeeze out of their way. I didn’t sheathe the knife in my hand until they were out of sight, and only then did I let out the breath I had been holding. “Madonna Giulia,” I said, “we go home at once.”

She nodded, and we set a swift pace back toward her sister’s house.

“Clever trick, that kiss,” I said. “Very quick of you.”

“You were about to kill him,” she said, and quoted my own words at me from just before I had vaulted into the bullring. “‘If a man’s about to die, he should get to kiss a beautiful woman first.’”

“Very true,” I said, and we both fell silent. I kept one unobtrusive hand on my dagger as we hastened along, the sound of my boots muffled in the cold. Florence’s streets were empty except for the occasional beggar or harried housewife or drinker too far gone in his cups to be careful. All Florence knew by now it was better to stay in, stay safe, stay behind locked doors where at least they couldn’t be seized by Angels and accused of sinning.

The moment we were safe inside her sister’s doors, Madonna Giulia sank down on the first wall bench without even bothering to shed her cloak. She was looking at something—whatever it was the Angels had thrust into her hands before the struggle began.

“What’s that?” I asked as I took off my cloak, and she showed me wordlessly. A pamphlet: cheaply printed, smudgily illustrated. The familiar bulky figure of Pope Alexander VI showed on the first page, reproduced badly in his papal tiara. He had been printed with a leer on his face and the flames of hell licking around him.

“Do people really believe such things?” Giulia whispered, turning the pages with the very tips of her fingers. “It’s—it’s
filth
.”

“People love to tell filthy rumors of the great, Madonna Giulia.” I motioned the guardsmen inside—
Get yourselves a good drink, you’ve earned it
—and turned back to my mistress where she sat with her snow-damp skirts around her on the tiles of the entry. “Your cloak, if you please.”

She surrendered it without argument, still looking down at the pamphlet. “This isn’t just filthy rumors, Leonello, it’s
foul
. And it’s not just—here they say the Holy Father steals the estates of dead cardinals to fill his coffers—that he sells offices and benefices by the cartload—that he promotes his family and his ‘rapacious Catalan minions’—really,
minions
? That any king in Europe who wishes to put away a devout queen to marry his mistress can buy a divorce from ‘this bastard
marrano
pope . . .’” More pages turned. “That Juan is a murderer and a violator of virgins . . . that Cesare practices the dark arts and fornicates with his sister—how can people believe such things?”

“Because they are true,” I said.

Giulia looked up at me from her bench. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, not all of it,” I shrugged, hanging up her damp cloak. Servants were approaching with trays and cups of warmed wine, but I waved them back for the moment. “Your Pope is no
marrano
, and we both know Lucrezia does not pleasure her brothers or her father, and I doubt our good Cardinal Cesare practices dark magic. But for the rest of it, well, Juan Borgia has raped more than one virgin who had to be packed off to a convent, and Cesare is certainly capable of murder, and since our departed Pope Innocent VIII left us with empty coffers, his successor has filled them by means of selling benefices. And I believe a rather hefty sum changed hands when King Louis XII wished to divorce his queen and indicated he was willing to pay for the required dispensation.”

“How do you know these things?” my mistress whispered.

“It’s common knowledge, Madonna Giulia.”

“But the rest of it.” She shook her head a little. “What that stalk-necked boy said about drunken orgies and incest—”

“Half-truths.” I spread my hands. “Cesare Borgia sleeps with his sister-in-law, after all—why not his sister too? The Pope dotes so much upon his daughter that he called her away from her husband to visit him—so surely she shares his bed as well as his table. As for naked women in the Vatican, stripped for the Pope’s pleasure while he watches with his friends—well, it might not have been an orgy, but I think you can recall a recent event along those lines.”

Giulia stared at me as though I had horns. “This is how people see him? All of them?”

I thought of Cesare, who knew where to find a murderer of innocent women and didn’t care a fig about it except to find my silent burning frustration amusing. I thought of the Pope, who in the early days would not ever have exposed his pearl to the world’s greedy eyes. I thought of Lucrezia with her rouged cheeks, and Sancha arching greedily against me. I shrugged again.

“But it’s not
fair
!” Giulia burst out. “There have been other popes with bastard children—Pope Innocent had sixteen! And Rodrigo is hardly the first to sell a benefice or two, or hand out red hats and bishoprics among his family. So why does
he
incite them to all this hatred”—waving the pamphlet—“and not the others?”

I paused, leaning against the doorjamb and reflecting. A good question, that. “Perhaps because unlike the others, this pope hides nothing,” I offered. “In the past, a pope passed his bastard daughters off as nieces rather than marrying them off openly in the Vatican in huge weddings. Popes promoted a few family members—not
all
of them. Popes at least pretended virtue—smuggled their mistresses in through discreet passageways, rather than installing them openly in luxurious seraglios.”

This pope pretended nothing, hid nothing, was ashamed of nothing. I supposed that was the most unforgivable sin of all.

The chill February wind gave a moaning gust outside the door, and I saw Giulia shiver. “What will they say of Laura?” she said in a low voice. “Just because she is a Borgia and can be painted with the same brush?”

“She was christened an Orsini.”

“She’s a Borgia. Rodrigo might doubt it, but no one else in Rome does, and isn’t that what matters? What people
want
to believe?” Giulia sounded bitter. “Will they say she’s the bastard get of a fallen woman, a little harlot in the cradle?”

“Probably,” I said.

Giulia shook her head and rose, the pamphlet still crumpled in her fist.

“Let’s get upstairs to the
sala
,” I said, and touched her arm. “You look cold.”

“I am cold,” she sighed. “Cold to the bone.”

A whole entourage of papal guards in the Borgia colors awaited us in sour Gerolama’s overheated little
sala
. A stolid captain stepped forward, offering Giulia a sealed missive stamped with the Pope’s own seal. “We are to escort you back to Rome at once, Madonna Giulia,” the captain intoned. “His Holiness will not have you caught in Fra Savonarola’s unrest. News of this coming bonfire disturbs him.”

Frankly, it disturbed me. I looked at my mistress, wondering if she would disobey him in her anger over being stripped before half the College of Cardinals. But she looked down at the Pope’s seal, and her free hand drifted up to touch her head, which must have been aching after all the yanking the Angels had done on her hair. “I will pack,” she said, and I let out a silent breath of relief. This was no city for the Bride of Christ, nor for anything beautiful. Fra Savonarola was a man of dust and pain; he wanted everything beautiful rendered to ash. The Borgias might have their sins, but I could not count their love of beauty as one of them.