The Lion and the Rose (39 page)

And then were the days when the Pope sent his daughter a letter or perhaps a gift of wine or fruit or a length of cloth. Lucrezia did not rise from bed to receive the papal envoy, but she always made sure to bathe first, sending everyone out so she could pat herself all over with rosewater, and then arrange herself back in bed in her best lace shift, and pearls in her ears, and just a bit of red ochre to bring some color to her cheeks. Because the papal envoy, well—

He swept in to make his bow before the day bed: Pedro Calderon, known as Perotto: slender, swarthy, dashing, and handsome. “
Madonna
,” he said, with a flashing smile and a sweep of his feathered cap. “Your radiance dims the room.”

There was a great deal of fluttering and complimenting, to which Pantisilea and I listened with interest as we hovered outside with trays of sweetmeats and cups for wine, and then finally Lucrezia’s silvery voice called for us. “But why won’t he
sign
?” my mistress was pouting as we entered with curtsies. She had a new embroidered shawl about her shoulders from His Holiness, and a new letter, too, though she’d tossed that to one side. “Cesare assured me he would sign it!”

“He would have done so.” Perotto had an assured courtier’s voice, soft and reassuring. “The Count of Pesaro would have signed last week,
madonna
, but the canon lawyers—”

“Oh, bother the canon lawyers. A batch of dried-up old spiders, what do they know? Ah,” Lucrezia greeted us, and gestured the wine toward Perotto with a gracious wave. “You may go, Pantisilea. Carmelina, you stay and comb out my hair; the pins are hurting my head and you’ve got a far lighter touch.”

I didn’t have a lighter touch, and the pins weren’t aching her head either. Madonna Lucrezia just wanted the papal envoy to admire her hair, and she knew I’d comb it out for her without making eyes at Perotto as Pantisilea always did. I began pulling pins and arranging the long blond locks, which had gotten darker since they no longer had their daily sunning, and Perotto paid a few graceful and unoriginal compliments about Venus in her bower. Lucrezia preened herself, but soon she was pouting again.

“Well, you might as well tell me. What
did
the canon lawyers say?”

“They could find nothing in your past betrothals, Madonna Lucrezia, that would invalidate your current marriage.” Perotto had the envoy’s gift of presenting bad news as though it were good, but even he sounded a little worn at all the back-and-forth legal wrangling that had been going on these past months. “Your past betrothals were formally concluded before your vows to Lord Sforza, so . . .”

“So the Holy Father will have to find some other excuse for annulment.” Madonna Lucrezia’s rosy little face had gone hard. She’d had a certain guilty sympathy for her husband at first—“Oh, my poor Giovanni, his pride must be hurting him to lose me like this. He does love me so!” But after the rumors he’d lately begun spreading, well . . .

Perotto, who had had to dry a good many of Lucrezia’s tears after she’d heard of those foul rumors, changed the subject with alacrity. “Perhaps you have heard,
madonna
? Your eminent brother has returned from Naples.”

“Oh, Cesare
is
back! You must tell him to visit me immediately.” She shook her loose hair forward over one shoulder in a gesture exactly copied from Giulia Farnese, and flicked a finger at me. “Carmelina, go make some more of those little pastry things with the blood-orange slices in honey. Now, my dear Perotto . . .”

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Pantisilea sighed down in the convent kitchens when I entered with the empty plate. “He’s even prettier with his doublet off, let me tell you. I had him in Madonna Lucrezia’s
sala
last week, up against the wall with his hose around his feet. There’s nothing as funny-looking as a man with hose around his feet, is there? But he
was
very pretty, and lovely for kissing. I do like a man with no rotted teeth.”

“I wouldn’t go boasting about Perotto’s kisses if I were you,” I warned, arranging more of my little honeyed pastries on their majolica platter. My new mistress ate them by the basket; she was already starting to get fatter under the chin, and they weren’t doing her teeth any good either. “He’s Madonna Lucrezia’s to flirt with.”

“But girls like us don’t count as flirting! You could have him too if you wanted, Carmelina.” Pantisilea never minded sharing her lovers, I would say that for her.

“You’re welcome to him.” I shoved a curl back behind one ear, feeling the rustle of paper in Santa Marta’s pouch. She shared her living space with quite a thick packet of letters by now, all from a certain former apprentice of mine. Santa Marta didn’t seem to mind, but I think she approved of Bartolomeo. Her dried-up fingers had always seemed to rustle approval inside their pouch whenever I took a sniff of one of his sauces. “I don’t like dark-haired men.”

“Well, Madonna Lucrezia does.” Pantisilea winked. “Do you think she’ll take him for a lover? Perotto, I mean.”

“She might, but he won’t.” I reached for my apron. Perotto flirted with my new mistress, and paid her extravagant compliments, but no more. A very shrewd young man, and you had to be, to make a career under Pope Alexander VI. “Perotto wants to rise, and he won’t rise far if he sleeps with the Pope’s daughter.”

“
If
she’s just his daughter.” Pantisilea widened her eyes.

“None of that,” I said in the same tone I’d always used when gossip among my kitchen apprentices shaded a bit too salacious.

She waggled an eyebrow. “Everyone’s saying it.”

I glared at her, fists on hips. “How long have you worked in the Borgia household, Pantisilea? Have you ever seen anything, one thing, to justify gossip that foul?”

“Well, no—”

“Then hold your tongue. It’s vile and disgusting, and I won’t have talk like that in my kitchens.”

“They aren’t your kitchens, Carmelina Mangano,” she laughed.

“They are for now.” I rubbed a pinch of sugar between my fingers, wrinkling my nose at the quality. “So, no filthy gossip about Madonna Lucrezia.”

Someone should have told that to the Count of Pesaro. Sweet Santa Marta, how the rumors were flying, and it was all his fault! He’d gone stamping and raging off to Milan, begging help from his more illustrious relatives to fight the annulment, and he hadn’t been satisfied calling the Pope a
marrano
bastard or a Spanish upstart. No, he’d had to burst out with a lot of resentful whining that the Holy Father only wanted Lucrezia free so he could have her himself.

I don’t believe for a moment that he meant it, not the way it sounded. You had only to see the Pope with his daughter to know they were entirely fond of each other, and not in any disgusting way. But the Pope clearly considered Madonna Lucrezia his daughter first and Lord Sforza’s wife second; everyone in Rome knew that—and it was the kind of thing to make any husband jealous.

If it had just been the Count of Pesaro doing a little resentful muttering up in Milan, that would have been one thing. But Fra Savonarola had gotten hold of all those rumors clear down in Florence, where he was supposed to be making a Holy City for himself and not just listening for smut. But priests are always listening for smut.

“The nest of Borgia vipers in the Vatican, violating even the laws of blood in their unholy lusts!” Fra Savonarola thundered to his flock, and soon his words were being repeated all the way from Rome to Venice, and in every city, town, and village hamlet in between. “Brother services sister, and father services daughter, no better than beasts wallowing in the mire—” On and on it went, and everyone from Fra Savonarola to Pantisilea seemed happy to embellish the rumors.

I imagine the Holy Father had waved it off as briskly as he waved off any foul rumor. He’d have heard it all before, no doubt. But with Fra Savonarola thundering on about the foul fruits of incest, the whispers had finally penetrated inside convent walls to Madonna Lucrezia’s sheltered ears, and she’d stormed and cried and nearly made herself sick with her wailing. And I couldn’t help but notice that not nearly so many of her fine friends came to visit now, those other nobly born young wives of Rome who had brought gossip and laughter and the latest fashions to the Pope’s daughter in her exile. “No one wants to be seen with me anymore!” she shrieked. “I might as
well
stay here and rot, I can’t
face
them, everyone’s talking about me—”

Maybe that was when my new mistress’s little face changed from hesitant sympathy to cool hardness when Lord Sforza’s name arose. Because she’d stay in the Convent of San Sisto now until her marriage was annulled, and after that, the Holy Father and Cesare Borgia between them would find her another husband as fast as possible. “They want me out of
sight
,” I’d heard Madonna Lucrezia wailing to the avid ears of Suora Paolina and Suora Speranza. The nuns were the only audience she had left, and all of them clucked delightedly behind their veils to have such drama in their quiet midst. “Not one word of truth in anything my stupid husband said, and Cesare still says I’ll have to be married again as fast as possible! And until then I have to rot here until the rumors die!”

“I thought you wanted to stay here,
madonna
.” Pantisilea tried to console her. “Didn’t you just say you couldn’t stand to face everyone with all the whispering?”

More crying then. Logic, I remembered Leonello pointing out once, was not really Lucrezia Borgia’s strong suit.

The bells for Sext began to ring. That placid monotonous sound still sent a spike through my temple like a silver nail. I began to assemble the ingredients I’d need for
cena
, something cold because Madonna Lucrezia could not abide anything hot in this weather; something sweet because she could not abide anything spiced; not a salad because I could get no greens that were not wilted by heat and chewed by insects; not fruit because fruit arrived in this kitchen only after the wasps had been at it. You’d think that a wealthy convent like this one would feed its sisters like queens, but you’d be wrong. The choir nuns ate well, but from their private stores: the wine and the fine white bread and the fresh fruit they bought with their allowances or received as gifts from their families. They kept the good stuff locked away in their cells, Santa Marta rot them, and didn’t even bother touching the dismal gruel dished up in the refectory. And it
had
to be dismal, in case any sharp-eyed priest made an inspection with his nose sniffing for sin. “We eat humbly here,” I’d heard the prioress say piously. “Even the most well-born.” And she never bothered to mention that every sister who could afford it just stirred the gruel in her bowl for a while, and then went back to her own cell to dine on fresh bread and apricots and good wine from Ischia.

It had been every bit as bad cooking in the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice, but I’d forgotten how thoroughly, wretchedly soul-flattening it could be when it went on day after day. The murky olive oil and the warped pans and the ovens that didn’t heat properly. If I’d seen Lord Sforza in the flesh, I’d have bound him to a spit and cooked him, because he’d done for me as well as his little wife with all those rumors, whether he’d started them in ignorance or in malice. If Lucrezia was bound to stay at the Convent of San Sisto until her annulment could be finalized, then I was bound to stay too. For the past three months, until the end of the year or maybe all the way into the new year, depending on how long it took the Count of Pesaro to give up his wife.

“If I’m to stay here I’ll at least be well fed,” Madonna Lucrezia had sighed when I ventured to say that my services were required outside convent walls. “You’ll stay as long as I do, Carmelina. And who else is needing you, anyway? Not Giulia Farnese, because she’s gone back to that dull husband of hers,
and
broken my poor father’s heart, so if you think I’m going to listen to any letters she sends—”

Three months. Three months already, and I knew the convent now. I knew the bells were about to toll before they made a sound, I knew the clang of the gates and the rusty squeak of the grilles when they swung shut, and I knew the anonymous black-and-white-garbed sisters who had now become familiar faces: the sleek-faced prioress who visited the Pope’s daughter daily with an unctuous smile; Suora Paolina, who came from the illustrious Colonna family and was mad for candied cherries; Suora Cherubina, who had a merry laugh and a liking for figs in honey, and all the rest of them. And I did not want to know any of it.

I found myself praying again inside convent walls, and not my usual quick entreaties to Santa Marta so that my bread would rise or my
tourtes
brown evenly. Santa Marta was cross with me right now anyway, because I never dared take her out of my pouch anymore in the cell I shared with Pantisilea. But when Pantisilea dropped off to sleep I’d look up into the stuffy dark and make my prayers—not to Santa Marta or even the Holy Virgin, but to the Count of Pesaro.
Sign your wife away
, I prayed. If he could
see
his wife here, whining and wailing the hours as they passed, he’d have given her up in a heartbeat.
Sign and do it quickly, because I want to go home.

I wasn’t really sure where home was, now that the papal seraglio had ceased to exist. But Madonna Giulia would help find a place for me, that was certain. Even in her newly virtuous turn, surely she would aid me if I asked. And of course there was Bartolomeo, cooking away in Vittorio Capece’s
palazzo
and writing me letters. He wrote a clear, back-slanting hand, and I smiled at the very sight of it because I’d been the one to tell him at the age of fifteen how important it was for a cook to know his letters, so he could keep his records without being cheated. I told all my apprentices that, but Bartolomeo had been the only one to listen . . . He didn’t try to woo me anymore, in all these letters he wrote me, and thank goodness for that. He was long past any calf love infatuation by now. He just wrote prosaically of the new kitchens in the Capece
palazzo
, of the recipes he was making and refining on his own for that book he was still determined to compile. Oh, how it squeezed my heart to open a letter and read:
For a tenderloin in the Roman style,
signorina,
quarter the leanest part of the meat into chunks and space onto a spit with bacon and sage leaves . . .