The Lion and the Rose (23 page)

Sancha of Aragon was watching with lips parted below her fox muzzle, dress dragged off her shoulder and one nipple showing darkly above the fox-fur trim of her bodice as she shouted for Juan to
finish him off, finish him off!
A cardinal in a horse’s long-nosed mask was whinnying drunkenly, laughing and calling for more wine. I saw Madonna Giulia on the very fringe, trying to call for order, but Leonello dropped his lion mask into her hands and swept her behind him, lion’s eyes flickering in all directions.

“
Enough!
” someone roared in a bull’s bellow. The strange bestial roaring died away, not slowly, as heads turned toward the masked bull with the curved horns. The Duke of Gandia and his opponent were the last to pull apart, rising with a final mutual snarl, panting and heaving. “Brawling before our guests!” the Pope shouted at his son, and descended to a rattle of furious Spanish.

“Your Holiness!” Juan cut him off, swaying in the grass. Glassy-eyed drunk; I could see it—drunker than when he had fumbled at my hip. “Do you know what he called me? The offense could not be borne!”

His opponent snarled, clawing off his bear mask. I recognized him—one of Ascanio Sforza’s party and a friend of Lucrezia’s husband; a young lordling who had once sent down a compliment for my salted ox tongue. “You said a pig’s mask would suit me better than a bear,” he spat at Juan. “Called me a lounging glutton!”

“And he insulted my birth!” Juan roared to his father. “Insulted my lady mother, called me a bastard!”

“We are,” Cesare Borgia noted dryly from one side. Juan Borgia’s elaborate tiger doublet was torn and dirty now, his face smeared with blood, but his brother in the glittering serpent mask was chill and immaculate as new ice.

“
I will not hear my name insulted
,” Juan howled, and I half-expected him to fling himself on the ground like a screaming child. “Your Holiness, I demand justice!”

The figure in the bull mask stood still, arms crossed over a burly chest. I wished I could see his face, but the bull’s muzzle gave nothing away.

The Count of Pesaro shouldered forward, square-faced and earnest beside his exquisite peacock of a wife, giving his friend in the bear mask a reassuring clap on the arm. “Your Holiness, surely we can blame this quarrel on the wine. My friend will be more than happy to apologize for any offense—”

“Of course, Your Holiness,” the young lordling said, starting to look nervous, but the Pope ignored them both utterly and gave one careless gesture to the guards.

“Hang him.”

No bestial howl this time; only silence. The young lord with his silly bear mask stood frozen. He only began to struggle when the guards seized hold of him. “Your Holiness! I never—I didn’t—”

“Your Holiness,” Lord Sforza began.

“I will not hear my children insulted,” said the bull, and then the shouting broke out again. Some pushing to see, some pushing to move away, Juan standing with his head thrown back and triumph in his eyes. I saw Madonna Giulia threading swiftly to the bull’s side, speaking in tones too soft to hear, but he only swatted her away. The young lord was screaming as they called for rope, a length of rope, and for a moment of sickened hope I prayed there was no rope. But someone found rope, of course they did, and the guards looped it about the young man’s throat.

“You’re mad!” the Count of Pesaro wailed. “You’re all mad, you bloody Borgias—”

“Then leave us,” Cesare Borgia said carelessly. “We have no need of you, Sforza. Not now.” And putting his serpent’s arm about Lucrezia’s shoulders, he walked her away as guardsmen tossed the free end of the rope up to the high rail of the loggia overhead, and the bear-headed lordling just shrieked.

I did not watch him hang. I turned away, half blind in my mask, and pushed through the crowd back to the servants’ door. I tore off my giraffe’s face, feeling the gorge rise in my throat. “What’s happened?” Marco greeted me, holding a wad of cloth to his bleeding lip, but I shoved past him and fled to my tiny chamber, ripping the dappled hose and doublet away with shaking fingers. The next day it was whispered everywhere in Rome that the masquerade had continued its merriment after the man hanged—that the Pope and his concubine trod a happy
basse-danse
under the jerking boots. Lies, all lies. The guests trailed out uncertainly, hiding their masks under their cloaks like shameful things. Giulia turned away from her bull before he could approach her, fleeing upstairs, and her brother Cardinal Farnese barred the Pope from following. I saw her later at the window of her chamber, still clutching Leonello’s lion mask, looking ghastly sick as she stared out over the city.

No one ate my sugar subtleties. The spun-sugar unicorn, the swan and the peacock, the bull with its molded horns I had painstakingly applied with gold leaf; none of them were even carried up to the garden. I stood down in the kitchens long after the stewards and undercooks and the rest of my uneasy scullions had gone to bed, staring at the sugar unicorn. Its horn still lay broken off beside its prancing gilded hooves; no one had mended it with egg white and a brush, and that was when I realized Bartolomeo was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A greedy youth, self-important, proud, vicious, and irrational.

—A CONTEMPORARY’S DESCRIPTION OF JUAN BORGIA

Giulia

E
veryone dislikes their mother-in-law, and at the beginning of my marriage, I was no exception.

Adriana da Mila had brokered the arrangement between Orsino and the Pope—the arrangement that had turned her son’s wife into the Borgia concubine—and as a bewildered new bride I had found that very hard indeed to swallow. Complain all you like about
your
mother-in-law; mine was a procuress.

But that old bitterness had softened since our mutual stint of captivity with the French. There’s nothing like shared terror to bring about camaraderie. Adriana had been most courageous in the way she’d helped me calm the maids and tend Leonello’s wounds. And she did absolutely adore my daughter, even if Laura wasn’t really (except in name) her granddaughter. A mother can forgive a great deal of someone who loves her child, after all, and I was no exception. So I wasn’t pleased at all when I came upon my mother-in-law, sitting with her face crumpled in deep lines of bewildered hurt.

“Adriana?” I had just returned from confession when I saw a stream of maids passing in and out of her private chambers with armloads of gowns and shoes and linens. “Adriana, are you leaving for a journey?” Properly speaking, I should have addressed her formally as was customary for a dutiful daughter-in-law, but we had been through too much to be anything but equals.

“Yes. I’m leaving.” In the middle of the bustle she sat still, a plump figure in violet velvet slumped on a footstool. Her hands were still too, and that was something different—she was never without a piece of embroidery or a list of plans for the next banquet, or more likely the
palazzo
’s account books with their figures lovingly totted and checked down to the last
scudo
. “Yes, I’m leaving, Giulia. I’m going to my niece in Liguria, and I don’t think I shall be back soon.”

“Is your niece ill?” I came into the chamber, moving a pile of embroidered linen shifts and taking a seat. “You said she’d had a baby not long ago. I can accompany you—”

“No, I’m going to stay with her. I’m not needed here anymore, you see.” Adriana looked up at me, tried to smile. “Little Joffre and Lucrezia grown and married with households of their own; they don’t need me to supervise them. And you don’t need a chaperone either, Giulia. You’ve long since proved yourself a good faithful girl.”

“But why now?” Because I could see pain in her eyes, bewildered pain like a puppy who has just been kicked, and it was a strange image to pair with that of my sleek and self-assured mother-in-law. “What’s happened?”

“Oh, just Lucrezia.” Another attempt at a smile. “Goodness, but girls of her age can be tiresome! Be on your guard when Laura turns seventeen—”

“Adriana.”

“It’s nothing, my dear. Really nothing. Lucrezia sitting with Sancha, down in the garden just now, sunning their hair. I came out to sit with them. It’s a nice thing about being an old woman, you know; sitting in the sun without a hat because you don’t have to worry anymore about ruining your skin—”

“You’re not so old as that.” I motioned the maids back out of earshot. “Go on.”

“Well, that Sancha. She made one of her little jokes—oh, what a nasty piece she is, Joffre deserved better! She joked about lending me that expensive cream she rubs into her face. Not that it would do me any good, she said, because I had wrinkled old skin like a lizard.” Adriana’s hand crept up to touch her own cheek.

“Sancha’s a tart,” I comforted. “A thoughtless little tart who probably has the French disease by now. We’ll see how much she pokes fun at other people’s looks when she starts coming out in pustules.”

“But Lucrezia laughed!” Adriana’s eyes flew up to mine, and I saw her chin quiver. “She laughed too, and there was a plate of
biscotti
they were sharing, and she said I wasn’t to have any because I was getting too plump.” Adriana plucked at the generous lacing over the bodice of her violet velvet gown. “That sweet girl I helped raise,
mocking
me. Not for the first time, either. A week back, she was twitting me about my hair; said I was too old to be using curling tongs . . .”

I could feel my teeth grit. “You know she didn’t mean it. Not really.”

“Oh, I know.” A gusty sigh. “But Lucrezia’s changed, you know—they’ve all changed. Rodrigo, well, you didn’t know him as a boy like I did, but the boy I knew wouldn’t have hanged a guest at a party for a few insults!”

My thoughts froze on that. A corpse at a masquerade, hanging from a railing like a dead chicken on the walls of Carmelina’s kitchens, and Rodrigo had treated it like nothing. As though the man were no more important than a dead chicken. “Bah!” he finally snapped when I’d railed at him too long. “Leave it, Giulia! People can say what they like of Us; We are God’s Vicar. But they will keep their tongues off Our family! We would have strung the man up for making any insult to you as well!”

Not five years ago, you wouldn’t have
, I couldn’t help thinking.

Adriana was still talking, that quiver running through her voice. “They’re all different, you know. Juan brawling like a mad dog; he’s always been a wild boy, but the things I hear about his army outside Bracciano . . . not to mention his goings-on in Spain. Joffre getting sulky and bad-tempered, hitting the servants and kicking the dogs out of the way when he used to be so good-natured. And Cesare, well, what to say about him.”

“But you don’t have to leave.” Once I’d have been delighted to get rid of my mother-in-law’s watchful eye, but not like this. “They need you.”

“No, they don’t.” Her eyes met mine, tired and watery. “And whom they don’t need, they discard. I just never thought it would be me, after all I’ve—well, never mind.”

That silenced me. Adriana’s loyalty had always been to my Pope—something to do with the way he had protected her and the young Orsino when her husband died and the wolves began circling for Orsino’s inheritance. She’d been loyal to Rodrigo ever since, and that had been another thing that had once made me resentful, because who wants a mother-in-law who tattles to the Pope himself whenever she gets wind of misbehavior in the family?

And now she was to be tossed aside, after all that loyalty, with a few casual insults.

“Lucrezia will apologize,” I said. If I had to break every bone in her body, she’d apologize. “Surely then—”

“No, I’m done.” Adriana dabbed briskly at her eyes, the efficient housewife again even though her chin still wobbled. “I’m going to my niece. She’s always been like a daughter to me, and she’s worried that her first baby isn’t thriving as he should. She’d welcome a helping hand, and I’d rather go where I’m needed.”

Not mocked.
We didn’t say it, but we both thought it.

“I’ll miss you, Adriana,” I said, and I meant it. Because my mother-in-law’s loyalty might lie with the Pope on most things, but she’d sealed her lips tight on one secret just for me: the little matter of the French general and that night we’d been captured, when I was invited to dine with the French officers. I’d come back with cheeks a dull red and blotches on my neck, but I’d come back with a surgeon for Leonello and a store of blankets and supplies for all the maids too. Adriana had wordlessly helped me adjust my gown and never said a word to my Pope afterward. Just parroted my bland assertions that the French general had been a
perfect gentleman
. I must admit I was grateful to her for that.

She patted my cheek, giving a watery little sigh. “You’re a dear girl, Giulia Farnese.”

I spent an hour helping my mother-in-law pack, folding linens beside the maids and tucking little sprigs of her favorite dried lavender between the sleeves so they would smell fragrant in their chest. I called a few of the household’s sweet-voiced page boys to give us some music, poured her wine, and got her smiling again when I bemoaned how the
palazzo
’s finances would surely fall down in ruins with a flighty girl like me holding the purse strings. I persuaded her to lie down for an afternoon doze, and when I had ordered a cold cloth for her head and another cup of wine, I stormed out to find my lover’s clever, lovely, newly cruel daughter.

“
Lucrezia!
” I yelled, not caring who in the
palazzo
heard me. She had gone in from sunning her hair, leaving her sun hat and her fan and her missal on the grass for the maids to retrieve, and evidently she had decided on a cool bath after the heat of the afternoon sun because I found the Countess of Pesaro lounging in the huge marble bath with its mosaic mermaids and trays of fragrant oils, her newly sunned and dried hair pinned very carefully on top of her head. The Tart of Aragon had evidently flitted off to her latest lover or had perhaps just gone to find a dockside tavern to hawk her wares. All in all that was a good thing because I had a quarrel to pick with Lucrezia, but Sancha I only wanted to murder. If I murdered her, then there went the alliance with Naples and my Pope would not have been pleased.

“Giulia?” Lucrezia looked up as I stormed into the
bagno
. “Whatever are you shouting about?”

I seized the water jug one of the maids had left after filling the bath and upended it over Lucrezia’s head.

“You look like a drowned rat,” I told her as she spluttered and coughed and tried to rescue her drenched hair. “Your eyes are all red and squinchy, and your hair is getting overbleached and nasty, and that horrid lip rouge you wear has smeared all around your mouth so you look like you’ve been drinking blood. And now that I’ve been as thoroughly horrid to you as you just were to poor Adriana, perhaps you will feel moved to creep up to her chamber like the nasty little rat you’ve become, and make your apologies for being so cruel.”

“
Giulia!
” Lucrezia gasped.

I folded my arms across my breasts, scowling down at her. The maids had all fled, though they were probably eavesdropping just outside the door, and I had no mind to lower my voice and spare the Pope’s daughter her dignity. “How could you?” I demanded. “Adriana da Mila
raised
you.”

“She is not my mother,” Lucrezia muttered. “And neither are you!”

“No, the mother who birthed you was only too happy to give you up, and don’t pretend any fondness there because I see the sighs of relief you always heave as soon as her visits are done.” Vannozza dei Cattanei did not visit often, thank the Holy Virgin, and when she did we spoke with icy courtesy. I was too angry to summon ice now with her daughter. “Madonna Adriana raised you in her household, and you owe her the respect of any daughter. Just as I owe her the respect of a daughter-in-law.” I thought of Lucrezia’s little envies this past year whenever she compared our gowns, our jewels, our hair. Our anything, really. “Adriana and I
both
deserve better from you.”

“Oh, the faithful daughter-in-law!” Lucrezia cried out. “As if you’ve made Adriana’s son such a marvelous wife!”

“I admit I’m no one to lecture you on wifely behavior,” I said crisply. “But that’s a lecture you need as well, because Lord Sforza deserves better, too. Your brother
threatened
him at the masquerade, and you said nothing. You didn’t even go with him when he fled back to Pesaro the next day. Fled in utter terror with his tail between his legs!”

“I was the one who warned him he should go,” Lucrezia protested. “I said it would be wise to put a little distance between himself and Cesare. You know my brother when he decides he dislikes someone.”

“Then you should have gone with Lord Sforza. Sided with your husband, Lucrezia, and not your snake of a brother.”

Lucrezia started to rise, but I jabbed two fingers into her breastbone and sank her back into the water. No woman is really at an advantage sitting naked in a tub full of water with wet hair straggling into her eyes, and Lucrezia at a disadvantage was exactly how I wanted her.

“You were always a good, sweet girl, Lucrezia.” I shook my head. “What’s changed you? I don’t think we can blame it all on the Tart of Aragon.”

“You will not call her—”

“She
is
a tart, and you’re well on your way to becoming one. Traipsing around Rome with those Neapolitan harlots she calls ladies-in-waiting, painting your eyes and flirting with Juan’s bravos—Lucrezia, do you know what they say of you, outside Rome?” Fra Savonarola’s rantings, that foul pamphlet that had made my fingertips burn. Leonello’s cool voice:
They believe such things because they are true.

“I don’t see how
you
have any right to call me a poor wife!” Lucrezia lashed out. “My father’s whore—”

“And do you want to be a whore?” I demanded. “I don’t recommend it, even if the jewels are marvelous. It’s not a path I’d ever want for my own daughter.”

“Well, I don’t have a daughter, do I?” Lucrezia’s little face was bitter. “Just a husband nobody wants anymore—Father says I’m to use any excuse I like to keep from sharing a bed with my Lord Sforza; a baby will inconvenience everything now—”

“What do you mean, inconvenience? Inconvenience whom?”