The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (13 page)

“There you go.” I draped the chain of daisies and violets over her hair, smiling as she pirouetted over to the fountain.

“Madonna Adriana says I can sun my hair this afternoon, after I’m done with my Latin exercises and my dancing practice.” She stood on tiptoe over the water, craning to see her reflection. “You will sit with me, won’t you?”

“Yes,” I found myself saying. “All afternoon, if you like.”

“I wish I could sit with you.” The Cardinal rose from the grass, dusting off his scarlet robes. “But I fear I am expected at the Pope’s bedside. He gets fretful if he doesn’t have company with his afternoon cup of blood.”

“
Blood?
” I couldn’t help saying.

“Yes, he drinks a dram of blood every day. Drawn from the veins of virgin boys—some charlatan of a doctor told him it had restorative powers. Personally, I would just make my peace with God and die.” Cardinal Borgia leaned down and placed a kiss on his daughter’s blond head. “Off with you, little one. Your dancing hardly needs improvement, but the Latin verbs most decidedly do. If you can translate a page of Cicero’s letters for me by tomorrow, and recite it with a good accent, I’ll see you have a new dress for your portrait to Don Gaspare.”

Lucrezia dropped another curtsy and flew away to her tutors. I rose to follow her, but the Cardinal put two fingers to my wrist and stopped me. “I should like to have you painted as well, Giulia.”

“As the Virgin?” I raised my eyebrows. “And when did I give you permission to call me by name?”

“Not as the Virgin,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken, and his fingers slowly circled my wrist. “Nor as Demeter. I think perhaps you will make a better Persephone than my daughter.”

“Do you, indeed?” My education had been limited to the usual subjects: embroidery, dancing, beautiful handwriting, enough arithmetic to keep a household’s books, and enough Dante to provide me with witty quotations. No one had ever demanded that I translate Cicero; I was taught only enough Latin to say my prayers—but Sandro and my other brothers had learned their Latin and Greek from a balding heron of a classics tutor, and my mother had allowed me to sit in on the lessons while I embroidered, since it kept me out of trouble. Mostly I’d sat making faces at Sandro and tying my embroidery into hopeless knots, but I picked up a few other things. The Greek verbs and Latin declensions went in one ear and out the other, but I liked the stories of the ancient gods and their innumerable love affairs. “If I’m Persephone,” I went on, “then what does that make you, Your Eminence? The lord of the underworld who kidnapped me and kept me against my will? Can I eat the pomegranates, or will the seeds doom me to stay here forever like Persephone?”

“I always wonder if Persephone didn’t eat her pomegranate seeds willingly.” Slowly Cardinal Borgia’s hard thumb rubbed back and forth across the inside of my wrist. “If she didn’t decide she wanted to stay with her dark lord after all.”

“Who would want to be queen of the underworld?” He had drawn me closer, my hand still trapped in his. If he tried to kiss me, he’d get another good hard slap.

“Perhaps the underworld wasn’t so bad.” His thumb passed over my knuckles now, very lightly, back and forth. “Dark, maybe. But a great many good things can happen in the dark.” Back and forth. “I think Persephone knew that, when she swallowed those seeds.”

I had nothing to say to that. I could feel the heat that had spread down my neck, but I refused to look away from him, refused to blink and blush and giggle like a flustered convent girl. The silence enveloped us. His stroking thumb passed my knuckles, down the length of my fingers.

“Until next time,” he said.

“When?” The word came out before I realized it. Oh, Holy Virgin, I’d been telling myself I wouldn’t ask!

He smiled faintly. “Who knows? It all depends on the Pope’s health.”

“You want to be Pope next,” I said. It was not a question. “Don’t you.”

“No.” His thumb skimmed back and forth along my fingertips, the barest of touches. “I want to be with you. In the dark.”

He stepped away, releasing my hand. His scarlet shape had disappeared up the stairs and into the
palazzo
before I realized that once again he’d left something in my hand. Something he’d sent Lucrezia to fetch, and hidden in his sleeve.

Not a necklace this time. No rubies or pearls; no gilt-buckled snakeskin slippers or enameled hand mirrors or silver nets for my hair: the gifts that had been turning up in my chamber nearly every day, wrapped in cardinal-scarlet ribbons.

A pomegranate.

Carmelina

M
y cousin surprised me that Sunday by looking me in the eye as he reached for his hat and cloak. “Er—” he began, and stopped. He cleared his throat. We had the kitchens to ourselves for once—most of the cooks and maidservants had already gone to Mass. The flagstones gleamed, the trestle tables were scrubbed white, sun poured through the small leaded windowpanes, and I’d been looking forward to a little quiet. I had a
crostata
of summer peaches to make, and I was itching to try a new idea I’d had for the crust: a sort of ribboned twist of flaky pastry layered about the top in a spiral. But Marco still lingered, twisting his cap between his hands and looking more than a bit shamefaced. He’d be late to Mass. “Um,” he said at last. “Many thanks, Carmelina. For, er, yesterday.”

“I’m the one who owes you thanks, Marco.” It wouldn’t hurt to remind him of his generosity in sheltering me here. I looked down again at the bowl of peaches I was sorting for the
crostata
, separating the ripe from the bruised. “I’m glad to help any way I can.”

Marco hadn’t lost himself at the gaming tables
quite
as thoroughly as he had the day of Madonna Giulia’s wedding . . . but I’d still had to cover for him when the hour for
cena
approached and he hadn’t returned in time to begin preparations. I’d taken charge: supervising the rack of ribs onto its spit for the Borgia children, checking the
tourtes
as the apprentices filled the crusts, seasoning the salads before the maids carried them out, overseeing the decanting of the wine. Marco had returned, flushed with embarrassment, sometime after the rack of ribs had come back from the
sala
as a pile of picked bones.

“I couldn’t leave,” he insisted to me now, as though I’d argued with him. I remembered him saying just the same thing to my father, in the same tone of voice. “My luck was just starting to turn—one more hand and I’d have made it all back!”

“Yes, Marco,” I sighed into the bowl of peaches. As master cook to a cardinal’s cousin and his treasured bastards, my cousin brought home twenty-five ducats a year—and how much of it went to dice, to cards and bull-baitings and bets on when the Pope would die and who would be Pope next? I’d seen Marco lay a week’s wages on whether one roach would cross a floor faster than another.

“I won’t do it again,” Marco said confidently. He’d said that to my father, too. And still at least twice a week he’d make some excuse and slip out for a few hours between noon and the preparation of the evening meal, excitement burning in two bright spots along his handsome cheeks and his eyes gleaming fever-bright. “I won’t forget you covering for me. You’re a savior, little cousin.”

He reached out, giving my chin a tweak of thanks. He had a fondness in his eye that surprised me—normally he regarded me with irritation, as if he still didn’t quite believe how I’d finagled my way into his kitchens.

“I am thankful, Carmelina,” he said now, and there was no resentment in his voice. “I may shout at you sometimes—and you know I don’t approve of what you’ve done, not at all. But I’m glad to have you here.”

“Thank you, Marco.” I couldn’t help being touched. He
was
my distant cousin, after all—the last family I had, really. I liked it much better when he didn’t resent me. “Though you shouldn’t apologize for shouting, you know,” I added. “All cooks shout.”

“Dear God in heaven, your father did.” Marco shook his head, reminiscent. “Then he’d lay across the side of my head with a ladle if I still wasn’t moving fast enough to suit him. And now I do the same to Piero and the other apprentices.”

“Fire Piero,” I advised, tossing a peach aside as I felt a rotten spot under my thumb. “The boy’s insolent, and he’s no good with pastry.”

“I hate getting rid of people. You fire him when he comes back from Mass.”

“Gladly.” That would raise my status among the apprentices, and no mistake. Respect had to be earned in a kitchen—if I fired Piero, and the
maestro di cucina
backed my decision, they’d all look at me differently. Hopefully with fear. Apprentices work better when motivated by a little terror.

Marco lounged against the doorjamb, cloak slung over his arm. “Pity you weren’t born a boy, little cousin. You’d have made a better cook than me.”

“I
am
a better cook than you,” I told him. “Remember when you were sixteen, and you ruined that beef loin stew because you were busy getting odds on the Palio? Who do you think saved that stew? Who threw in raisins and rose vinegar and Greek wine until it was edible,
and
got it off the fire all by herself when her father’s back was turned? Me, that’s who, and me no more than twelve.”

“That was you?” Marco whistled. “I owe you, then. Or at least the skin on my back does. Aren’t you coming to Mass?”

“No church would have me.” Not with the sins I had on my soul, and I didn’t see how could I ever confess those sins to a priest without giving myself up to the justice of the Church. Early this morning I’d taken the withered hand of Santa Marta from the little hanging pouch I generally carried under my overskirt, and just said my prayers to her instead. It would have to be enough. Besides, I really was itching to try that new crust. If I could roll the dough out in a spiral twist without toughening the texture . . .

“Can you keep an eye on the maids when they get back from church, then? There’s, er, a shrine I want to visit across the Borgo after Mass—”

There was a
primiera
game he wanted to visit across the Borgo after Mass, or perhaps a cockfight.

“Enjoy your shrine,” I said, raising my eyebrows just a touch, and Marco gave me a little-boy grin and was gone in a whirl of hope. Today,
today
, was the day his luck would turn, after all. If not today, then certainly tomorrow.

Always tomorrow.

The maidservants were already starting to trickle back, those who hadn’t bothered to go confess their sins after Mass, and I quickly set them to work polishing silver and taking inventory in the storerooms. At least these were proper kitchens—really, I savored the chance to have them all to myself. The chief kitchen with its ovens and eternally revolving spit, separated as it should be from the scullery where the flagstones were silvery with fish scales and the pot-boys scrubbed an eternal procession of dirty dishes . . . the cold room after that, where cream tops could be whipped up in peace and the game stored away from the heat of the ovens . . . the courtyard where wagons arrived at all times of night and day with wood for the ovens and game for the spits and fish still flopping-fresh from the river.

In an ordinary kitchen I’d have to spend my free hours frantically catching up on those tasks that always seemed to pile up in a busy household: the wood ash to be removed from the ovens, the game to be vigilantly checked for the first faint signs of rot, the floors to be swept and swept and swept again. But here everything was cool and organized: the game didn’t go bad because there was room to store it properly; there was an endless succession of scullions and pot-boys to empty the ovens and keep the floors swept; loads of kindling and barrels of wine were delivered by the cartload and I never had to think about my fires dying or my household going thirsty or capons going unflavored.

Yes, I could get used to cooking in a household like this. The kind of household where I could get the occasional hour of peace and quiet—put my peach
crostata
in the ovens and take time to update my father’s recipes, if that was what I felt like doing. And I rather did, this afternoon. Once I’d regarded my father’s recipes as just as sacred and unchangeable as the stone tablets handed down to Moses—but now I was starting to make a few changes of my own. A pinch of saffron to bring color and warmth to a sauce; a dash of salt for bite in a sweet
tourte
 . . . what
did
my father have to say about a peach
crostata
, anyway? I turned the worn pages to page 261, Chapter: Pastry, savoring my own uninterrupted thoughts in the silence, but I should have known no cook ever gets an uninterrupted hour to do anything. Even in a household as luxurious and well appointed as this one.

“Oh, ho!” I heard a boy’s voice behind me. “I thought I knew all Madonna Adriana’s servant girls, but you’re new.”

“Out,” I said without turning. I had no intention of being interrupted by some page boy or manservant with fancies of kitchen girls brought to bloom too early by the heat of the kettle steam; girls with half-unlaced bodices sucking honey from the tip of one finger and just aching to be bent over a trestle table and rubbed with olive oil like a fresh-plucked duck. Santa Marta save me from the overheated male imagination! “Out of my kitchens at once,” I repeated, and turned a page.

“They aren’t your kitchens, my lovely. They’re Maestro Mantini’s, or whatever his name is.”

I turned and glowered, but my glower faded fast as I took in the auburn hair, the long lean body lounging against the door frame, the patchy wisps of reddish beard and the fine doublet carelessly unlaced over hose and fashionable shoes of tooled Spanish leather. Not a page boy or manservant, but Juan Borgia: second son of Cardinal Borgia, a boy of sixteen who was already Duke of Gandia and had his own household in the city but still spent a good deal of time at the Palazzo Montegiordano visiting his little sister, Lucrezia, and younger brother, Joffre. I had seen Juan Borgia from a distance now and then, swaggering with his friends or mussing his sister’s hair or ogling Madonna Giulia—and I had overheard quite a bit more about him from the maidservants.