The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (12 page)

“Since when has my cousin’s house been taken over by Greek goddesses?” A deep voice sounded behind me, a voice I knew well with its thread of amusement and its Spanish burr. “Demeter and Persephone, in the flesh.”

Lucrezia scrambled to her feet, performed another exquisite curtsy in the grass, and flung herself at her father. I expected him to reprove her—my own long-dead father certainly would have set me on my feet with a stern little lecture on the tenets of womanly dignity—but Cardinal Borgia hugged his daughter tight, lifting her in the air so her blue skirts belled.

“No, no,” he interrupted her as she began rattling off some question in Spanish. “Madonna Giulia doesn’t speak our Catalan, remember?”

Lucrezia dropped easily out of Spanish. “Can I be painted as Persephone for my portrait for Don Gaspare? I’ll hold a pomegranate and wear flowers in my hair—”

“Only if Madonna Giulia will consent to be painted as Demeter.” The Cardinal’s dark eyes moved to me. “As she sits now, with her hair around her and corn in her lap. What do you think, Lucrezia
mia
?”

“I think she needs flowers for her hair too,” Lucrezia decided, and dashed at once to the rosebushes lining the rosy stone walls of the garden courtyard.

“Clever, Your Eminence.” I threw my comb at Cardinal Borgia as he settled into the grass beside me and tossed his square cardinal’s hat carelessly beside the fountain. “Sending your daughter to help seduce me!”

“Is it working?” He gave a lazy blink, leaning on one elbow like a Roman emperor.

I smiled involuntarily, watching Lucrezia gather rosebuds into her skirt, her hair a bright aureole in the sun. “She is very charming.”

“She is that.” He watched his daughter with undisguised fondness. “I breed beautiful daughters, Madonna Giulia. Would you like one?”

“I want sons, thank you,” I said with a sniff worthy of my straitlaced sister. “Sons from my husband, not from you.”

“Don’t parrot your
duenna
,” the Cardinal said amiably. “Women say they want sons, because they know their husbands want them. But beautiful women always want daughters.”

I blinked. All right, so perhaps I’d dreamed of a daughter once I was married. A little girl with my fair hair and dark eyes, and Sandro’s outrageously long lashes which I somehow hadn’t inherited along with the eyes (which was injustice on a grand scale, but hopefully my daughter would be luckier). A little girl I could sit with in the sun, just as I had been sitting with little Lucrezia Borgia.

Cardinal Borgia lay watching me. “She’d have my name,” he said, “if that daughter you bore was mine. And a nobleman for a husband, just as Lucrezia will.”

“While I’m reviled as a whore and an adulteress, and my daughter is raised by Madonna Adriana instead of me?” I jerked my chin up. “Just like Lucrezia and her brothers? Little Joffre, who I just met, and Juan the young lecher, and that other one who just returned from the university in Pisa. Where is
their
mother now?”

“Happy proprietress of three prosperous Roman inns and a slew of property along the Tiber,” the Cardinal said promptly. “All gifts from me. Vannozza has no cause to complain. We had ten years and four children together, she and I, and remain good friends. Her latest husband did not care for a slew of Borgia bastards in his home, so—” A Spanish shrug at the rosy walls of Madonna Adriana’s garden, followed by a chuckle. “And I can tell you Vannozza is not reviled by anybody, as an adulteress or anything else. They wouldn’t dare.”

“Even though her children are all bastards?”

“My dear girl, no one cares for such things! This isn't France, you know, or England, where everyone is either straight-laced or provincial.Our lords here, the Duke of Milan, the Duke of Ferrara, the King of Naples; they raise all their children together in luxury, and no one cares which child came from which womb! They're men of the world, and so am I.”

“You put yourself equal with the King of Naples and the Duke of Milan, then?”

“I put myself equal with any man living.”

“Madonna Giulia, look!” Lucrezia ran up happily, spilling a skirtful of roses into my lap. “All red; they’ll be beautiful in your hair. May I?”

“If you like.” I lifted my mass of hair from its pile on the grass and began to bundle it back into its net, but the Cardinal’s hand stopped me.

“Leave it.” Was his voice a trifle hoarse? “I’ve not seen it loose before.”

I pulled my hand away from his but let my hair drop around my shoulders again. Lucrezia whirled around me, a blue butterfly tucking a rose here, a bud there, exclaiming in delight as her father looked at me—and looked—and looked—

I flushed. Most men have the good grace to drop their eyes when you catch them gaping, or at least feign interest in the Pinturicchio altarpiece or flowing fountain or dogfight or anything that they can find to look at just past your shoulder. “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare, Eminence?” I said tartly.

“Yes.” But he went on looking, and his eyes were black and full of fires.

“There!” Lucrezia stood back, satisfied. “Now you look
exactly
like Demeter, all peach and gold and red.”

“Gather some more flowers, then.” I smiled up at her. “And I’ll weave them into a crown for you, Persephone.”

“Blue flowers,” she decided. “To go with my dress—” And she skipped off in search of violets and hyacinths among the roses.

“I’ll hate to lose her to a husband,” Cardinal Borgia said as naturally as if he had not been gazing at me a moment ago with his heart in his eyes. “She’s my comfort. Sons are always trouble—”

I thought of leering sixteen-year-old Juan, and agreed.

“—but daughters are a man’s delight.” He watched Lucrezia gathering flowers, and shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder why I chose the Church, Giulia. Scheming and whispering and plotting, and that College of Cardinals like a nest of chattering red hens . . . when I could have this.” He gestured around him. “Sunlight. Flowers. Children. You.”

“You can’t have me,” I told him. “And I don’t believe you at all, Eminence. You like scheming and whispering and plotting. Don’t try to tell me otherwise just to tug on my heart.”

He grinned, and it surprised me. His eagle’s nose and watchful black eyes took on a different cast above that youthful white grin in the swarthy face. “I do have
some
regrets. You, for example.”

I raised skeptical brows. “I suppose if you weren’t a cardinal you would have married me?”

“No, I’d probably have some rich wife as square as a four-poster bed,” he said candidly. “But I’d have the time to devote a week to seducing you properly. Thanks to the College of Cardinals and their dithering about the Pope dying, I’ve hardly been able to devote any time to you at all.”

“A week?” I batted a rose out of my eye that had come loose from Lucrezia’s twining. “Is that how long it usually takes you to seduce a woman? What a sorry opinion you must have of female virtue.”

“On the contrary. What I have is a high opinion of my own skills. But even I need
time
,” he complained. “Normally one begins with a necklace, then there is a banquet with the right kind of music and light conversation. Then perhaps a trip to the countryside where I could show how magnificently I sit a horse. A few more gifts—perhaps a perfume that I had mixed for you specially; I have a very good nose for a woman’s scent. What’s that you’re wearing now, honeysuckle and gillyflower? I thought so. Then a more intimate
cena
, on a pleasure boat along the Tiber, if one can find a place where the mud doesn’t stink to the heavens and ruin the mood . . . yes, usually it takes a week.”

He sighed. “And yet here we are, nearly two months later: you still laced into that dress when you should be naked in the grass right now with a golden-haired little girl already growing in your belly, and I have the College of Cardinals to thank for it.” Rodrigo Borgia cocked an eyebrow at me. “One thing to be thankful for if the Pope hurries up and dies. I’ll finally have time to devote to you.”

My face flamed the same color as the roses in my hair. I didn’t know where to put my eyes, or my hands, and I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. All I could think was that I’d had plenty of men
look
at me as though they wished they could see me naked, but this was the first time I’d had one
tell
me so. It wasn’t poetic, not at all. Did Petrarch ever say a word about Laura lying naked in the grass? No, because it wasn’t poetic, and it wasn’t romantic, and it certainly wasn’t seemly either, so why did my skin feel warm all over? I fumbled for words, any words, around a tongue gone suddenly thick. Oh, Holy Virgin, my mother’s instructions on the art of polite discourse had never prepared me for a conversation like this! “So the Pope is dying?” I finally managed to say, inanely.

“Yes, quite soon. Of course he’s been dying for years, so who knows if he means it this time.”

The Cardinal turned on his back in the grass, putting his dark head into my lap.

I leaned over him, glaring. “Did I say you could do that?”

“No.”

“Move at once!”

“No.”

“Now, really, Eminence—”

“Spill me out by all means.” His eyes sparkled. “Lucrezia’s feelings will be hurt, of course—she is very protective of me, especially when I’m tired.”

I studied his face upside down, the dark eyes sunken and the swarthy skin grained under them. “You do look tired,” I admitted, grudgingly.

“Dying popes mean more work for everyone else. And since it’s me who will call the Conclave once he’s gone, well, the bribes begin to fly. Do you fancy an emerald bracelet? Cardinal Piccolomini slipped it under my plate just yesterday. He wants my vote to make him Pope, of course. They all do. Cardinal della Rovere is ready to stab me on sight just for the way I’ve been nodding when Cardinal Carafa whispers in my ear. I nod as much as possible. Irritating della Rovere is one of my chief pleasures in life.”

“Don’t
you
want to be Pope? I looked down at him. “I thought all cardinals did.”

“Not me,” he said airily. “A pope who adores his bastard children, who seduces beautiful golden-haired brides? Perish the thought.”

“Popes can have bastards, just like all those great lords you were speaking of. Pope Innocent has two.” I knew all the gossip.

“Actually he has sixteen.”

Apparently not
all
the gossip. “He doesn’t have a mistress, though,” I countered. “Not after he was elected, Sandro told me. A pope must keep up appearances.”

“See? Why would anyone want to be Pope?” Cardinal Borgia yawned. “Certainly not me.”

“Liar. You
do
want to be Pope, of course you do, so why pursue me at all? You’d have to give me up, and then where would I be?” I knew exactly what my mother would say, not to mention my confessor. “If I give my virtue to you, I go to hell for it.”

“My dear girl, of course you wouldn’t. What do you think confession is for? Humor me,” he added as I looked skeptical.

I sighed. “We confess sins so we may repent them, of course.”

“Yes.” He crossed himself, still lying down. “But one needn’t really worry about the fires of hell just for a few carnal sins, Giulia Farnese.”

“That’s not what I was taught!”

“If God truly objected to my batch of beautiful children and my devastating passion for you”—reaching up from my lap to run a finger down the side of my face—“would He have elevated me as one of his most holy cardinals? No. He would simply smite me dead with a bolt from heaven, or at least a timely plague. Our Heavenly Father says as much through his inactions as his actions, after all. If He does not act, then He approves.”

I scowled, moving away from the hand at my cheek. “You’re twisting things about.”

“Not at all. Merely pointing out that the fires of hell are not
quite
so inevitable, when it comes to fleshly sins, as mothers like to tell their daughters.” He sat up lazily. “Allow me to educate you.”

“Can you do that while keeping your hands to yourself?” I swatted him away as he plucked a rosebud from my hair.

He ignored me. “It’s not the sin that matters, dear girl, it’s the repentance afterward. I could take you to my bed and keep you there all day—this afternoon, perhaps? No? Ah, well—and before I left I could grant you absolution for everything. All you would have to do is say a few prayers in penance.”

“A few Misereres don’t make up for fornication.” My confessor would have been quite adamant about
that
.

“Why not?” Cardinal Borgia inhaled my rose deeply. “I have God’s authority to state that they do.”

“And what about
your
repentance? You don’t seem particularly sorry about any of this!”

“Of course I am.” His voice was serious. “I am deeply penitent that I cannot enjoy your favors as your wedded husband. And to expiate those sins—lust, envy, hopefully fornication—I would give an Act of Contrition and a donation to the poor-box for every kiss you gave me.” He picked up my hand and kissed it swiftly. “You see? I have had my kiss, my soul is washed clean, and the poor are enriched.”

“That is
not
true repentance.”

“Of course it is. God made us imperfect, dear girl. Thus He also made loopholes, so He has an excuse to forgive us.”

I was hunting for the flaw in that when Lucrezia ran up with a skirtful of violets and daisies. “Madonna Giulia, can I have a crown?”

“Certainly.” I took a handful of violets, grateful for the distraction, and began threading the flower stems together into a chain. I didn’t want to talk anymore about dubious loopholes in God’s forgiveness, and Cardinal Borgia didn’t pursue it either. He just looked amused, and he lazily beckoned his daughter with one finger so he could whisper something in Catalan. She giggled and dashed off, and he put his head back into my lap.

“Stop that,” I said.

“At once,” he said, reaching up to wind a lock of my hair around his fingers. His own hair was very black, untouched by gray.

Lucrezia came back with another giggle, pressing something into her father’s hand that he concealed in his sleeve. “Is my crown ready, Madonna Giulia?” she entreated me with a whirl of pale blue skirts.