The Lion and the Rose (48 page)

I hesitated before speaking. “I think I’m going mad here.”

His fingers tightened a little around the bar of the grille, but his voice was still conversational. “You need
macaroni
.”

“What?” My eyes stung.

“
Macaroni
,” he said. “Layered in a dish with slabs of
provatura
cheese and lumps of butter, cooked slowly until it all melts together.”

My mouth watered. “I didn’t teach you that.”

“Certainly not; it’s my own recipe and its going into my compendium, too. It’s just what you need right now. Pasta with a great deal of butter and cheese,” he said seriously, “cures all.”

I snorted laughter and stifled it behind my hand. Suora Ursula was still eyeing Bartolomeo, looking suspicious despite the crucifix about his neck and the pious little bow he aimed in her direction. A few of the visiting matrons in their rich gowns were eyeing him too, for different reasons.

He turned back to me, and his smile dropped away. “I will get you out of here.”

“It’s a great sin,” I whispered. That meant very little to me, with my tattered conscience and list of offenses against God, but for a bright soul like my apprentice’s . . . “Understand what it
means
, Bartolomeo. Stealing a nun from her convent? It’s like stealing a man’s wife away, only it’s worse because it’s a wife to God Himself. Adultery
and
desecration combined—”

And I couldn’t help but remember my private, terrified thought after Marco died:
Is God so jealous of His brides that I’m a curse to any man who lays hands on me?

“I don’t care what kind of sin it is.” Bartolomeo’s voice was steady. “I’ll think about that later. After I get you out.”

“If I leave these walls, Cesare Borgia will see me dead. He’s killed everyone else who knew—”

“I’ve an idea or two. Just be patient a little longer. I swear, I’ll have you out soon.”

A young cook against a Borgia prince? Those were odds too long for any gambler. But Bartolomeo’s eyes burned into mine, that familiar bright cinnamon, and I felt warm for the first time in a year. Warm and safe and full, as though I’d eaten a whole platter of his buttered
macaroni
.

A young lay sister came flying in on noiseless feet and went straight to Suora Ursula. She looked at me as she began to whisper something.

“Maybe I’ll get out of here,” I whispered, fumbling in my pouch. “Maybe not. If I don’t—”

“Carmelina—”

“If I don’t, take this.” I pushed the little bundle of Santa Marta’s hand into his hand through the grille. “Careful, she’s very brittle at her age. If you snap her fingers off, I shall lay a curse on you and you’ll never cook
macaroni
again without burning it up!”

“I can’t take her. She’s
your
saint.”

“She’s yours too.” I saw Suora Ursula clumping toward me on her great bearlike paws. “I’m no cook anymore, Bartolomeo. Not here. And she belongs with a cook.”

One side of his mouth flicked down, wry. “I offer to marry you. I offer to commit desecration and adultery for you. I offer to make you
pasta
. And you offer me a dead severed hand?”

“You ass, it’s all I have! So take it or leave it!”

He took it. “I’ll give her back to you soon, I promise.” He reached through the bars and gripped my hand hard and fierce, strong fingers lacing through mine, his thumb skimming along my knuckles. “When I take you home. Nothing’s the same without you—even that old tomcat prowls around looking for you and moping—”

“That useless one-eared cat from the Palazzo Santa Maria?” I couldn’t help asking.

“I took him with me when I left.” Bartolomeo traced the livid mark left by Juan Borgia’s knife, and the scar burned all over again. “I’ve got a soft spot for him. We both mope and sulk without you—”

“Suora Serafina!” Suora Ursula had a roar that would have made any bear proud. “I have checked with our prioress, and she informs me you are not to receive any visitors at all. Apologies to your
cousin
”—eyes sweeping Bartolomeo with mistrust—“but he will have to leave at once.”

Bartolomeo didn’t let my hand go. Not till Suora Ursula yanked me away from the grille and began marching me out of the parlor like a heifer being led off to the kitchens for slaughter. “Rest assured you have earned a suitable penance for this,” she said in her vicious whisper. “And Suora Teresa as well, for allowing you into the parlor without first seeking permission!”

“Flay me bloody if you like, you hairy hag,” I said loud and clear, loud enough for Bartolomeo to hear where he stood up against the grille. And I slid out from under her claws and stalked out with as much of my old swagger as I could muster, because I didn’t think I’d ever see Bartolomeo again and he might as well see me leave his life as Carmelina. Not as scared Suora Serafina, who I was destined to remain for the rest of my days.

It wasn’t until Bartolomeo was out of sight that I burst into tears. Not for my red-haired and handsome young man—not for Santa Marta’s hand—not even for my own fate. Bartolomeo’s last words were still ringing in my ears:
Even that old tomcat prowls around looking for you and moping . . . we both mope and sulk without you.
Suddenly I was crying, and I didn’t know why. Everything that had happened within these walls, and I dissolved in tears over a useless, foul-tempered cat who should long ago have been made into a sausage.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Love is when he gives you a piece of your soul, that you never knew was missing.

—TORQUATO TASSO

Giulia

W
ell?” Lucrezia Borgia twirled before me, flaring her skirts. “How do I look?”

Her ladies squealed and burst into applause for the Pope’s daughter, the former Countess of Pesaro arrayed in her bridal gown of gold French brocade worked all over with black silk embroidery and tucked scarlet velvet. Her waist circled by its girdle of grape-sized pearls might never have borne a child at all, and her sun-bleached hair flowed loose like any virgin bride’s under a little jeweled cap, which she tilted at a rakish angle. A girl of eighteen with bright eyes and rouged cheeks and powdered bosom, and for a moment I remembered her as she’d looked at her wedding to Lord Sforza five years ago. A tremulous little swan in jeweled chains, with all the world before her.

“You are beautiful,” I said, and managed a smile.

“I know,” Lucrezia giggled, and her ladies descended on her for one last tweak of the sleeves or dab of scent. I just sat with my hands in my lap on the wall bench: my old chamber in the Palazzo Santa Maria where I’d tried on gown after gown before Lucrezia’s first wedding, trying to find something that would make me pale and plain since no one should ever outshine the bride. But this was Lucrezia’s chamber now, and Lucrezia’s
palazzo
where she and her entire household of ladies and maids had come to wait for Alfonso of Aragon to arrive in Rome.

“I do wish you wouldn’t wear black, Giulia,” Lucrezia scolded me, peering into a hand mirror to arrange her little cap at a more dashing angle. “So gloomy! Even your complexion can’t carry off all that unrelieved black, you know.”

Caterina Gonzaga made sure to smile pityingly. She was piqued at me all over again because she had not been allowed to escort the Pope’s daughter in her wedding vows as I had escorted Lucrezia to the Count of Pesaro. Lucrezia’s vows with Alfonso of Aragon yesterday had been a mere formality, a private exchange of rings and a few words as confirmation to the proxy wedding that had already taken place in Naples. The real festivities would take place today with the wedding banquets, the feasts and gifts, and then the bedding of the bridal couple. But as the current papal mistress, Caterina clearly felt she had been slighted. It was the only highlight of my day so far.

“My pink silk,” Lucrezia was enthusing at me. “I’m sure we can lace it to fit you in a trice, if you will lay off that dreary black velvet—”

“I am still in mourning,” I said quietly. “It has been only three months, you know.”

Lucrezia’s little face creased in sympathy at once, and she dropped down beside me on the wall bench in a sigh of French brocade. “I’m sorry,” she said remorsefully, and waved off her ladies. “I know you’re still sad, poor Giulia. I shouldn’t have insisted you come to my wedding banquet today—you haven’t been out to so much as a masque in months—but I couldn’t be married again without you. I just couldn’t.”

She flung her arms about me in a hug. I gave a brief squeeze and then eased her back. “Careful. You’ll crush your embroideries.”

“Straighten me, will you? I mustn’t go to Alfonso all rumpled. It’s his job to rumple me, but not until later.” She giggled again. “
Such
a handsome man, Giulia, you can’t imagine! My heart
stopped
when we exchanged rings; he has the biggest brown eyes, just like velvet—”

“My heart stopped too,” I said. “When I exchanged the rings with Orsino.”

“Of course you’re thinking of him today.” Lucrezia patted my cheek. “But you mustn’t grieve! When my Alfonso and I set up a household of our own, you’ll come as one of my ladies and I’ll find you a new husband. These Neapolitan lords are very handsome, though of course none are as handsome as my Alfonso.”

She looked pure, glowing, incandescent with love. Exactly as she’d looked as she gazed at Giovanni Sforza.

“Thank you,” I said in the remote voice I couldn’t seem to inflect with any feeling at all these past months. “But after the wedding I intend to return home to my daughter.”

Laura. My sweet Laura, all I had left.

“Of course you miss her.” Lucrezia lowered her voice, mindful of her ladies. “I miss my baby
so
much, you know. Such a dear little thing with those plump cheeks!”

I wondered how she even remembered the plump cheeks. To my knowledge Lucrezia had had only a day or two with her child before it was packed off to a discreet household in the country—a household staffed with servants and wet nurses well paid to keep quiet. The Pope’s daughter had spent far more hours squealing over her own restored slimness than squealing over her child.

“Cesare says maybe I can have my baby back in a few years, when rumors die down. We can tell everyone it’s Cesare’s bastard, or maybe Father’s.” A vague wave of her hand, and I noted how careful she was not to mention whether her child was a boy or a girl. More Borgia secrets, and my privilege to hear them had been revoked. I didn’t ask about the child’s sex, lest my curiosity be taken for a sign that I might wish to raise it after all.

I’d left my own daughter in Carbognano with Adriana da Mila, after returning there with Orsino’s crushed body for burial. “We must arrange the funeral rites together, Giulia.” My mother-in-law had greeted me with a brave face, but her eyes were deep red wells and she peered out of them like a bewildered animal hiding in the underbrush.

“Of course.” Orsino would have wanted me there: his little rose weeping behind black veils at his graveside. It was the last duty I owed him. But I let Adriana da Mila take chief place among the mourners, regardless of what her son would have wanted. He was dead, and his mother and I were alive, and of the two of us I knew who had loved him best. It was only after the last clod of earth had fallen that Adriana asked the question I dreaded. “Giulia, you never said—the accident . . .”

“A tragic accident.” I cut her off firmly. “Rain had weakened the ceiling. Poor Vittorio Capece is beside himself with guilt over it all. Orsino was lingering beneath the archway when it fell—he would have known nothing.”

Her eyes puddled with relief, and as I put my consoling arms around her, I bit down on the memory of Orsino’s lean body crumpled among the fallen plasterwork. His blue eyes had been knocked clear out of his crushed skull—I’d seen that very clearly, before Vittorio led me away. Did a few falling stones from a collapsing archway really crush a skull like that? I thought not. His head had been beaten in by a sword hilt, I guessed, or a cudgel. Easy enough to smash loose the plasterwork above afterward, to make it all look an accident. Hadn’t Leonello said something about that, a long time ago? Ways to murder without really murdering.

But I said nothing of my dark private convictions to Madonna Adriana, who had served Rodrigo Borgia with such long and faithful affection. My reckless words to Rodrigo had gotten her son killed—but she wouldn’t know it. Let her have her grief and her peace of mind. I didn’t deserve either.

My fault.
My fault that my husband had died. Leonello had seen Rodrigo more clearly than I:
Women and children are not fitting objects for vengeance. The Holy Father may find some way to punish you, but it will not come at the end of Michelotto’s knife.

Wise Leonello. Maybe I hadn’t been the one to end up crumpled beneath a collapsed doorway, but I’d still thrown it in Rodrigo’s face that my husband had gone behind his back, had bedded me all along—and I’d been punished for it. My punishment had come all neatly tied up with vengeance against Orsino; there was a tidiness to that which I thought might have come from Cesare. I could see Rodrigo raging to his eldest son, and Cesare applying his cold and fearsome logic to the solution.

My fault.
But my poor mother-in-law would never know what had truly happened to her son, nor would anyone else. That was my burden to bear. Mine alone.

“Would you look after Laura for a little while?” I had asked Adriana instead after drying her tears. “Lucrezia has required me to return to Rome for her wedding, but it’s time Laura had the comforts of home. And she’ll be such company for you.” I wasn’t taking Laura back to the Holy City ever again if I could help it. Not as long as the Holy City was under Borgia rule.

“Yes, of course I’ll look after her.” My former mother-in-law wiped her eyes. “Bless her, she’s the image of Orsino already. Those beautiful curls—”

“His true daughter,” I agreed. Cesare Borgia had once told me I could not lie, but this was a falsehood I’d gladly tell for the rest of my days.

I missed my Laura so dreadfully, but she was safe in Carbognano now. She was able to write me misspelled little letters under Adriana’s tutelage, straggling words galloping up the page and back down again, all about her pony and the ripening nuts on the hazel trees and Fra Teseo who was teaching her French but it was
boring
. And when was I coming home?

Soon
, I thought.
Soon, Laura.
One more thing to do. Just one more thing, I clung to that—when it was done, I would leave this snake pit and go home.

Oh, but I was so tired.

Lucrezia’s first wedding had been a vast affair: hundreds of guests milling about the papal apartments, all the ladies going into raptures over Carmelina’s sweets. I still remembered those little sugared strawberry cakelets shaped like roses . . . a formal occasion, that first wedding, at least until wine loosened inhibitions at dawn and squealing ladies had tossed all those cakelets out the windows to the watching crowds and Rodrigo had begun dropping candied cherries down my bodice. This wedding was no formal occasion at all, or perhaps it only seemed that way to me. There had been feasting and laughing and dancing much of the day, and the guests were already merry with wine as the bride made her way into the Sala dei Pontifici, where her papal father sat enthroned. Joffre lounged at his feet, trying to look languid and merely looking sulky, and Alfonso of Aragon stood at the ready in black brocade, with eyes only for his Borgia wife. He wore a black velvet cap with a brooch like a fat gold cherub that Lucrezia had given him, and I had to admit he was a handsome youth: dark and slender, with a narrow sensitive face.

They will eat you alive
, I thought as we paced across the
sala
.

But young Alfonso had only smiles as he took Lucrezia’s hand and bowed over it, and she smoldered at him through her darkened lashes. What a pretty pair they made as the viols struck up a lively tune and they danced for the Pope’s smiles. Orsino and I had danced to viols at our wedding. A sedate tune, dipping and turning palm to palm as I prayed silently for him to love me, and he couldn’t even summon the courage to look me in the eye. Regretting his devil’s bargain already, perhaps. His whole blighted life had run aground after that dance like a cursed ship.

My eyes burned dry. I felt quick pressure on my hand as I watched the bridal couple pirouette through a lively turn, and knew my brother’s touch without turning. Dear Sandro, he had been such a comfort since Orsino died. I’d retired to his modest household upon my return to Rome, and Sandro welcomed me with one of his enveloping hugs, but none of his usual chatter. He seemed to know that for once in my life I didn’t want to
talk
, just sit quietly and perhaps lose a game of chess, or help his little mistress Silvia rock and croon over her babies, or listen to a chorus of pure-voiced boy singers who somehow had the power to bring tears to my eyes when the memory of my husband didn’t. Sandro had just handed me a kerchief in silence, letting me have my tears, not asking any questions. Dear Sandro. I’d worried for a time that Rodrigo’s anger at me might fall on my brother, but Rodrigo was far too practical to dispose of someone useful. Orsino had been a nothing to him, but my brother kept the peace in the College of Cardinals with his easy jests and droll capers. Rodrigo needed that, and thank the Holy Virgin he did. If he had ordered my brother murdered and not my husband . . .

Really, I was no better a wife than Lucrezia. We both placed our brothers above our husbands. Well, at least no one accused me of sleeping with my brother. However inadequate a wife Lucrezia had been to the Count of Pesaro in other ways, she didn’t deserve
that
charge. Ugh, but people have such twisted imaginations.

The wedding banquet. Lucrezia and Alfonso presiding over the guests for the first time as husband and wife, the new Duke and Duchess of Bisceglie, holding hands under the cloth and dispatching dishes to their most favored friends. Sandro claimed my left side, some minor Neapolitan princeling my right. “Rumors of your beauty have not been false, Giulia Farnese! A true ornament to the papal court; Naples has nothing to match you! Excepting our radiant new duchess, of course. Perhaps I might call upon you . . .”

The Pope presided at his high table, watching with benevolent fondness. He was supposed to sit alone in his papal splendor, but Caterina Gonzaga perched on his knee playing with his hair and feeding him tidbits. I was surprised he didn’t spit them out, because the food from the apathetic Vatican cooks was as terrible as ever—tough stringy capons and leathery oysters drying on their shells and oversugared
biscotti
—but Rodrigo seemed to enjoy licking the sugary crumbs off Caterina Gonzaga’s neck as she tittered. His dark eyes found mine, dwelling for a moment’s bitter satisfaction before he pulled Caterina into his lap and began fishing idly under her skirts with his ringed hand. Not my Pope anymore, not ever, and he hardly had a glance for me since I had been widowed. Why would he? I had insulted him; Orsino had cuckolded him; we had both been appropriately punished and were now dismissed from the Holy Father’s notice. Borgia efficiency.