The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (14 page)

Who had all, I noticed, abandoned their inventorying and silver polishing to disappear speedily into the storerooms the instant he appeared.

“Your lordship.” I rose, bobbing just enough of a curtsy for respect while keeping my voice firm. “I do apologize most humbly, but I am the cousin of Maestro Marco Santini, and he has left his kitchens in my trust. He is most particular about those he allows near his fires and ovens.”

“They aren’t his fires and ovens, they’re mine.” The Duke of Gandia caressed the hilt of the rapier at his waist, grinning. “And so are you, my pretty.”

Apparently he hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t pretty at all. I suppose anything female is pretty to a boy of sixteen, even something long and plain as a stalk of asparagus and wrapped in a cinnamon-stained apron.

“I work for Madonna Adriana, your lordship,” I corrected, eyes down, “and with respect, these kitchens are hers.”

“Who do you think pays for it? She lets me do what I like, Adriana does. My father, my sister, my brothers—the old bitch knows who keeps her bread buttered.” He moved into the kitchen with a swagger. Or as much of a swagger as he could manage in such fashionably pointed shoes. “So, are you Maestro Santini’s whore?”

I felt my cheeks heat, but kept my gaze on the floor. “I am his cousin. Recently orphaned—”

“Cousin and whore, then.” The Duke of Gandia waved a careless hand, looking me up and down. “I’ve never had a kitchen whore before. What’s the difference from the ordinary kind?” He leaned close and took a sniff, his downy cheek pressing against mine. “You smell better, that’s certain.”

I jerked my head away, edging around to put the table between us. “Your lordship—”

“Come on, then!” He grinned, grabbing me around the waist. “Let’s baste you with honey and give you a good hard spin on my spit.”

As if I’d never heard that before.
Santa Marta,
I asked my patron saint silently, or at least her hand,
did the apostles of our Lord hang about your kitchen asking if you wanted a spin on their spit?

“Pardon me, your lordship,” I said brightly. “Just let me put away my recipes here; Maestro Santini will flay me if I leave them out—”

“Recipes, eh?” He grabbed a page, squinting at it upside down. “Looks like rubbish, all that coded stuff. Is it spells and magic? Did Maestro Santini find himself a whore, a cook, and a witch all in one? Maybe you can cast a spell for me. Get that pretty blond piece Giulia Farnese wet for me instead of His Eminence my father; she’s too ripe for an old man . . .”

“No magic here!” I trilled a little laugh. “Just a recipe for bull’s testicles. Does your lordship know how to cook testicles?”

“Testicles?” His grip loosened a little on my waist. “Er—”

“They have to be fresh, of course.” I whipped a white peach from the bowl on the trestle table, so ripe my fingers sank into the soft flesh. “Ideally, just snipped off the bull and still dripping blood. Then you skewer them on a spit—” I rammed a skewer through the peach with more force than strictly necessary. “Or you can serve them in slices.” Sliding the fruit off the skewer, I took the biggest knife Marco had, a monster of a thing like a battle-ax mated with a cleaver, and halved the peach with one vicious
whack
. Juan Borgia winced, and I thought I heard a suppressed giggle from the storerooms where the maids were still hiding. “Fry in a pan with spring onions”—another
whack
; the peach fell into quarters—“and prosciutto.”
Whack.
Eighths. I stabbed a chunk of peach flesh on the tip of the massive knife and held it out toward the Cardinal’s son, reddish peach juice dripping off the blade like blood. “Hungry, your lordship?”

Definitely a splutter of muffled laughter from the storerooms, but the Duke of Gandia didn’t hear it. He looked at me, enthusiasm definitely waned. I gave a quick glance at the front of his hose and saw that his spit wasn’t up for skewering anything at the moment. “Never mind, you’re an ugly wench anyway,” he scowled. “The cook can have you.”

He stalked off, and I swept a deep curtsy, careful not to smile until he was safely gone.

The storeroom doors creaked open, and I looked over as half a dozen giggling maidservants tiptoed back into the kitchen. “You lot weren’t very helpful!”

“Sorry,
signorina
,” they chorused, curtsying. “Looked like you had him well under control.” They collapsed into shrieks of laughter again.

“‘Spin on my spit’? ” one of the girls choked. “Oh,
honestly
!”

I looked between them. “You’ve heard that before, have you?”

“Who hasn’t!”

I joined the laughter, giving my big knife an expert flip in honor of the Duke’s deflated face and even more deflated codpiece.

“Can you teach me to handle a knife like that,
signorina
?” a pockmarked maid asked. She’d never given me anything but scowls before—most of the maidservants had resented the kitchens’ invasion by an assistant cook, a woman no less, who was suddenly giving them their orders. But now they all stood grinning at me, fists on hips. “I could stand to learn a few things,” the maid went on, giving my knife a nod. “Useful, having a blade on hand next time
il Duche
comes prancing round with his codpiece flapping open!”

“If it was his big brother Cesare, now,” another maid whistled, “I wouldn’t be needing any knife!”

“Or Maestro Santini,” the first maid giggled, lowering her head confidentially. “You’re his cousin, Carmelina—does he have a woman? Do tell, do tell!”

“The only woman Marco keeps is Lady Fortuna,” I dismissed, “and he only wants her when he’s playing
zara
.”

I couldn’t help but be pleased, though—the first time the maids had even unbent enough to call me by name.

“So Maestro Santini’s a fool,” the pockmarked maid shrugged. “He’s still a handsome one.”

Nods all around, and I couldn’t help but shrug in agreement. Handsome my cousin mostly certainly was, and one of the few men I could look
up
at; so pleasant for a girl like me who had grown long as a kitchen spit by the time she was fourteen. “How about that inventory, now?” I said briskly to the maids. “
And
the silver. You know what I always say: mouths shut—”

“‘—and hands moving,’” they chorused.

“Exactly. And afterward, maybe I can show you all a few tricks with a knife that might help fend off
il Duche
in future.”

They went back to their work with good-humored complaints. I smiled, going back to my recipes. Perhaps I’d found a foothold in Marco’s kitchens after all—my own place in the hierarchy of the kitchens.

The peach still sat on the trestle table where I’d quartered it, oozing juice, and I popped a chunk into my mouth. “Add cherries to the peach
crostata
,” I mused. “In a lemon pastry shell brushed with a little sugar and rosewater, and that spiral twist on top . . .” I looked around to be sure the maids had retreated out of earshot, and brought out the little bundle of Santa Marta’s hand, opening the bag’s drawstrings.

“What do you think?” I asked it. “Peaches and cherries? Or peaches and blueberries?”

The hand remained still. Of course it did; it was a dead hand. It didn’t
move
, no matter what greedy nuns said. I shrugged, tucking the bundle back inside my overskirt. “Cherries,” I decided, and popped another slice of peach into my mouth. But I couldn’t help wondering, as I cleaned the knife on my apron, if I’d need it again to deal with Juan Borgia.

CHAPTER FIVE

Benefits should be conferred gradually; that way they will taste better.

—MACHIAVELLI

Giulia

T
he mare had cardinal-red ribbons braided in her silvery mane, and a placard round her neck. She was waiting for me in the stable yard when Madonna Adriana sent me down.

“Oh—” I picked my way across the straw-scattered cobbles in my tall stilt clogs, as grinning stable boys and guardsmen fell back before me. The dapple-gray mare pawed the ground, and I bent forward to read the placard hung about her slender neck.

To carry my Persephone out of the underworld if she chooses.
The words were written in the bold slashing hand I was coming to know very well.
Or for a pleasure ride beside her lord of the underworld, should she choose to stay.

No signature; just a big
R
with a trailing loop. I touched it. “Rodrigo,” I said aloud, experimentally. Hard to think of a cardinal as anything but
Your Eminence
. Hard to think that just a few months ago I hadn’t given any thought to Rodrigo Borgia except as just another flapping scarlet bat in a flock of red-robed churchmen at my wedding. And now, well, I hardly knew what I thought about him—except that I was spending far more time than was good for me remembering the way his thumb had flicked along the very tips of my fingers. It wasn’t a sin, strictly speaking. A man could touch a married woman’s hand in greeting with perfect propriety. But it was one of those not-sins that I’d decided not to take to my confessor. Somehow it
would
turn out to be a sin, then, and my fault to boot, and I’d be on my knees the next two weeks in penitential prayer for something that wasn’t my fault at all. And not telling my confessor about that touch on my fingertips seemed to make it more important than it should have been . . .

The mare lipped gently at my sleeve, ribbons fluttering in her mane. “I should give you back,” I told her, scratching the velvety nose, “but you’re a love, aren’t you?” She was beautiful: small and fine-boned, perfectly suited to a short rider like me, her dapple-gray coat brushed to a satin gleam and a lady’s hunting saddle of dark polished leather and wine-red velvet fitted to her back. I had no doubt that the stirrups were perfectly fitted to my height.

“Let’s find her a stall,” I told the grooms, who had gathered in a semicircle of admiring silence around the mare. They began dashing into the stable with rakes and armloads of hay, while I took hold of the mare’s red leather reins and led her after them. “Persephone,” I said. “Should I call you that? I don’t suppose you eat pomegranates, do you? Not good for horses.” I still had the pomegranate in my room, not knowing quite what to do with it. I hadn’t laid eyes on Cardinal Borgia since the day he pressed it into my hand—he was busy at the Vatican, Madonna Adriana said, since there didn’t seem to be any doubt now that the Pope had finally made up his mind to die. “You’ll not see my cousin for a few weeks, I imagine,” she told me this morning. Lucrezia had already flitted off to her lessons—language tutors that morning, to improve her French, and a music tutor to teach her the lute—but little Joffre still dawdled and yawned over his morning cup of sweetened lemon water, and Madonna Adriana ruffled his hair affectionately. “The children will miss their father, won’t you, my love? And perhaps you will miss him too, Giulia dear.”

I’d given her a long look. A stout woman, perhaps, but well preserved for forty-six years; her bosom still high and handsome, her perpetually smiling face unlined; well-suited to her maroon and violet velvets and elaborate headdresses and heavy gold rings. “How can you do this?” I asked her at last. “Act the pander for your own son’s wife? How
can
you?”

She hesitated, and her smile faded to something kinder than I was used to seeing. Something more than her usual professional charm. “It’s a hard world for women, Giulia.” She spoke as baldly as I. “I wasn’t born with your beauty, but I still had to make my way somehow. And if the world’s hard for young women, just wait and see how cruel it can be to widows and orphans. My husband was a good-for-nothing, and Orsino—well, he’s a great comfort and the light of my eye, but he’s no firebrand to make a swath in the world.” Her eyes rested on little Joffre. “My boy will need help if he’s to get on as he should.”

“This is your way of
helping
him?”

“He has just received administration of the city of Carbognano,” returned Madonna Adriana. “A pretty little place, and prosperous too. Later perhaps he will embark on a military career. It could be the making of him. And all of it is due to my cousin Rodrigo. If not for him, I would have lost everything after my husband died—my brothers-in-law would have stripped Orsinio’s inheritance away, left us with nothing. So in return for all the protection and kindness I look after Rodrigo.” My mother-in-law smiled, taking her arm from around Joffre’s shoulders and reaching up to give my chin an affectionate little chuck. “Now, why don’t you go down to the stables, my dear? Rodrigo sent something over for you. I think perhaps you do miss him, just a little?”

Yes.
Her sympathy so startled me that I almost gave myself away. Yes, I almost missed the Cardinal. I found him unsettling, unnerving, overcharming, and overbold—but rooms after he left them seemed flat, somehow.

Madonna Adriana had smiled at my silence. “Down to the stables, dear.” I found her kindness more disquieting than her early smugness. How was I supposed to be rude to her when she was kind?

“Ho there!” A young man’s voice sounded from the stable yard in frank admiration, bringing me out of my unsettling thoughts. “That’s a beauty!”

Go away, Juan
, I thought. The Cardinal’s second son had been making a pest of himself lately, hanging about to ogle me and move his eyebrows in what he clearly thought were seductive expressions. But when I peeked around my new mare’s nose, I saw that the young man peering into the stable was admiring my horse, not me. I also saw that he wasn’t Juan.

“So you like my horse?” I stepped out from her other side into view. “Better than you like me, I think.”

My husband, Orsino Orsini, straightened from his assessment of my mare’s slim hocks, gaping at me. He wore riding leathers and boots spattered with white summer dust from the dry roads; his fair hair was mussed, his sleeves rolled up to show arms still bony from youth. He held his cap in one hand and the reins of his gelding in the other, the horse every bit as dusty and travel-weary as his master.

“You’ve come from Carbognano?” My voice came out calm and even, I was pleased to hear.

“Yes, well—yes.”

“I hear Carbognano’s pretty.” I stroked the mare’s gray velvet nose. “Not that I’ve seen it yet.”

He flushed. “Yes, it’s very pretty.”

“A long ride for the hottest part of summer.” The sun had slammed down like a hammer on Rome with the advent of July, sending long shimmering bars of summer light cutting palpably across the streets, making the gutters steam. Everyone sensible stayed inside under the shaded loggia with cups of chilled wine or lemon water. “What brings you here?” I asked. “Husband?”

He looked down at the straw, twisting his horse’s reins between his fingers. “My mother sent for me. She thinks with the Pope to die so soon, I should be here—important things happening, it could be very advantageous for me—”

I felt a wave of hot rage at that. His
mother
summoned him, did she? A letter from Mamma had him hop-hop-hopping all the way from Carbognano? I stroked my mare’s sleek shoulder, blindly, realizing that all the stable boys were eavesdropping by now. Of course they were—the exiled husband come face to face with his straying wife; that was entertainment on a level with any bearbaiting or bullfight. Who wouldn’t eavesdrop?

I tilted my head at the boy raking the same pile of straw over and over by the hayloft, the two grooms who had decided the stall right next to Orsino needed immediate cleaning, the four other grooms fiddling with needless bits of harness or bags of grain. “Leave us.”

They filed out with evident disappointment.

“They all think I’m Cardinal Borgia’s mistress.” I met my husband’s eyes. “Of course, everyone in Rome is starting to think that by now. People stare when they see me at Mass; you know that? They snicker behind their prayer books and they think I can’t hear them. Thank the Holy Virgin my brother Sandro is off in Perugia again this past month, or he’d be coming to the door with a rapier in hand. Like a brother should.”

Orsino avoided my gaze, leading his tired gelding past me into one of the empty stalls.

“Of course, I’d have thought my husband would be the one coming to the door with a rapier,” I continued, “when it comes to defending my honor.”

He began unfastening his horse’s girth. “I’m not supposed to see you,” he mumbled, concentrating on the buckles. “Mother said I’m not to stay here—just stable my horse, and then I’m off to stay with some cousins, so I don’t—”

“So you don’t even lay eyes on me?” I led my mare into the stall beside Orsino. “I’m your wife.”

“Not really. Not the way it was arranged, it was very—” His eyes flicked up at me over his gelding’s back. He had beautiful eyes, really—I’d been so pleased at our wedding when I saw what a clear blue they were, with that slight natural squint that gave him such a look of shyness. “It was different, once I saw you. I wouldn’t have—”

“Sold me?” I didn’t try to keep the bitterness out of my voice.

He hauled the saddle down from his horse’s back. “No.”

“So change your mind!” I didn’t know how to deal with my new horse’s girths and straps; I’d never unsaddled a horse in my life, so I tied her reins to the rail where they wouldn’t tangle. “I’m still your wife; we can—”

“You don’t understand,” he blurted out. “I made a bargain with Cardinal Borgia, and he’s not one to cross on a bargain. He’s a powerful man. He could squash me like— He’s not
good
, you know, for all he’s a man of God. He always gets what he wants. And he doesn’t care how he gets it. He’s not kind.”

“He’s been kind to me.” I came out of the stall, dropping the latch behind me. “Kinder than you’ve been, husband.”

“Of course you’d think that.” Orsino gave a defeated shrug of his bony young shoulders, dragging the bridle over the gelding’s ears. “I hear he’s very generous to his concubines.”

“I am
not
his concubine.”

“Juan Borgia says—I met him on the way to the
palazzo
here, he wouldn’t stop twitting me—”

“That lecherous little nit couldn’t be trusted if he told you the sun would rise tomorrow morning,” I snapped. “I am not his father’s mistress, or concubine, or whatever other choice word he or you have for it!”

“The Cardinal gave you that mare, didn’t he?” Orsino nodded bitterly at my new horse where she stood lipping hay in her new stall. “Pearls and jewels too, Juan told me.”

“I’ve not given him anything in return.” I met my husband’s eyes as squarely as I could. “I will swear by any saint you like, Orsino. I swear by the Virgin—which I still
am
.”

He averted his eyes, scuffing his feet a little as he shuffled out of the gelding’s stall.

“You want proof?” Outrage seized me in a red rush. I’d never touched my husband before, except the gliding of our palms in the grave measures of the
basse-danse
at our wedding, but now I took him by the sleeve and dragged him away from the row of stalls, back to a darker alcove out of sight of all but an inquisitive old mare at the end of the row. I could still feel the tingle along my fingers where Cardinal Borgia had stroked them, and I scrubbed my hand along my skirt to banish it. I was Orsino’s wife, and I had no business thinking of such things. I faced my husband resolutely, taking a deep breath as I took his hand and hooked it through the laces of my bodice. “I am as much a virgin now as I was on our wedding night,” I said. “And if you like, I will prove it to you.”

His head jerked up, and that blue gaze held mine. “Prove—”

“You’re my husband,” I said. “Even if you haven’t taken me yet, you have the right. I’m yours. Or at least, I’m supposed to be.”

Hesitantly his fingers touched my bodice ribbons. “You’re so beautiful,” he breathed. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, looking at you across that banquet table—”

It took a real effort to leach the exasperation thoroughly from my voice. “Then
do
something about it!
Be
my husband, in more than just name!”

“You want me?” His eyes pleaded with me. “You really do?”

No
, I thought.
Not at all.
But what did wanting matter, or love either? Girls like me took the husbands chosen for us; we went to their beds and bore their children and managed their households and did it with good cheer, too. It was what I’d been taught all my life; what I’d been bred and raised for. What did it matter if the wedding vows had been a lie from the start? I’d said them in good faith; made a vow to God as well as Orsino, and wasn’t that more important than what I
wanted
?

I looked at Orsino’s narrow, handsome face, his blue eyes and his fair hair still speckled with dust, and I felt no desire at all. But I did feel sorry for him, sorry and guilt-sick that I’d even been tempted to throw my holy vows aside all because a man with a voice like a roll of thunder told me he wanted me naked in the grass.