The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

Before all else, be armed.

—MACHIAVELLI

Carmelina

W
hen I first came to Rome, I had nothing to my name but a tatered bundle of recipes and a mummified hand. One was my shame and the other, with a little luck, was my future. “Santa Marta, don’t fail me now,” I murmured, patting the lumpy little bundle under my skirt, and knocked.

I had to knock four times before the door yanked open, and a serving woman with a face like an angry walnut appeared. “Yes?” she said shortly, looking me up and down. I might be tall, long-faced, and plain at best, and I certainly did not look my best that morning, but she didn’t have to make it quite so clear.

I pinned a smile into place. “I seek Maestro Marco Santini. He is
maestro di cucina
here?”

“You’re not the only one seeking him. He owe you money? He had to pay the last one in spices, and Madonna Adriana wasn’t happy—”

“He’s my cousin.” All true so far, though anything else I told her would likely be lies.

“Well, he’s not here. Madonna Adriana’s son is to be married, and Madonna Adriana palmed the feast off on that cardinal cousin of hers. Maestro Santini, he’ll be at the Cardinal’s
palazzo
now with the other servants, making preparations.
Dio
,” the serving woman muttered, “let him be there.”

“Where?” I felt my smile slipping. I’d crossed half the city already in too-tight secondhand shoes; my feet hurt and sweat collected between my shoulder blades because a late-May morning in Rome was far hotter than it had any right to be. And if this stupid woman kept blocking my way I’d cut off her thumbs and fry them in good olive oil with a little garlic and make her eat them. “It’s very important that I find him,
signora
.”

She set me on my way with a grudging set of directions, so I spared her thumbs and plunged back into the chaos that was Rome. At any other time I would have gaped at the noise, the crush, the din, so different from the silent waterways I’d always called home, but life for me had narrowed. Carts rumbled past me on one side, swaggering young bravos in parti-colored doublets shouldered past on the other, sharp-eyed servant girls counted coins to wheedling vendors, and stray dogs sniffed my skirts as I passed—but I saw none of it. I plowed through the crowds as if blind, walking a tunnel of noise and color I’d followed south all the way from Venice to Rome. A terror-laced tunnel with Marco at the end of it: a cousin I hadn’t seen in five years who had somehow become my only hope for survival.

Well, my eyes might not have registered much, but my nose did. Even as my heart thudded and my feet ached and my frightened thoughts yammered in my brain telling me I was a fool, my nose was busy parceling out the scents and smells of Rome. You can’t turn off a cook’s nose: My whole life was fracturing around me like one of those impractical Murano goblets that break the instant you look at them, but my nose was happily telling me
manure, yes, from all the carts; ox blood, my, you don’t get that in Venice; let’s see, that smell there feels like sun baking on marble, and what’s that dusty sweet scent? Incense? Yes, incense, of course, considering there’s a church or a shrine in every piazza in this city
. Even with my eyes shut, my ever-busy cook’s nose could have told me I was no longer in Venice. Venice was sulfur and brick and the hot, melting-sand smell of sun on glass; rot rising from the canals and salt from the lagoon. Venice was home.

Not anymore
, I reminded myself grimly as I passed the Ponte Sant’Angelo where they hung the bodies of those thieves less fortunate than me—those, in other words, unfortunate enough to get caught. I saw one fresh corpse, a thief who had had his hands and ears chopped off and strung about his neck before being hanged. He had a smell too, the rich stink of rot. Beside the thief was a heretic who had been hanged upside down and was now little more than a few picked bones. The crows were busy all over the bridge, pecking and gulping, and I said a quick prayer that they’d never peck and gulp at
my
bones. Which at the moment was far from certain, and for a moment I thought my queasy stomach would heave up what little food I’d been able to afford that morning.

But then I saw my goal: the Cardinal’s
palazzo
rising rich and arrogant midway between the Campo dei Fiori and the Ponte Sant’Angelo. “Can’t miss it,” the sour old walnut in the apron had told me. “Not with that huge shield over the door. Got a bull on it—what kind of crest is that for a man of God?” And even if I’d missed the bull, there was no mistaking the crush of people flowing through the great doors. Ladies in figured velvets and air-light veils; clerics in red and purple robes; young dandies with jewels on their fingers and those huge slashed sleeves—yes, a wedding party awaiting the arrival of the bride.

Those grand double doors weren’t for me, not in my too-small shoes and the patched ill-fitting dress I’d gotten used off a vendor who tried to tell me the stains at the hem were embroidery and not old mud. But there’s always a separate entrance for servants and deliveries, and soon I was knocking on another door. This time I didn’t even have time to pat the little bundle under my skirt and mutter a prayer before the door was wrenched open.

“Thank the Madonna, Maestro, you’re—” The young man in the apron broke off, staring at me. “Who are you?”

“Carmelina Mangano.” I felt a lock of short black hair spring loose on my forehead, the heat frizzing it out from under the headdress I’d improvised from another length of stained cloth. “My cousin, Maestro Marco Santini—”

“Yes?” the apprentice said eagerly. “You know where he is?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Oh, God in heaven,” the boy moaned. “He flitted out to play
zara
this morning—just a round, he said, no more than an hour, just to relax him before the feast. Saints help us, it’s been hours now and we’re sunk—”

Sounded like Marco was up to his old tricks. “A nose for sauces and a hand for pastry,” my father had often complained about my cousin, “and nothing between the ears but cards and dice!” But the apprentice had turned away from the door, yammering and moaning to a cluster of flour-aproned serving girls, and my nose started swooning.

Saffron. Sweet Santa Marta, how long had it been since I smelled
saffron
? Or the sweet sizzle of duck being turned on a spit and sauced with honey and the juice from an orange? A sharper smell, that would be fine vinegar, the good stuff from Modena so tart and yet so mellow on the tongue it could bring tears to the eyes . . .

I’d spent the last weeks breathing fear like air, the sour taste of it and the acrid smell of it—and now I smelled something else, something
good
, and the fear was gone. Without meaning to I’d followed my entranced nose inside the kitchens, past the cluster of agitated apprentices. All around me was a kitchen thronged with people, but I just closed my eyes and sniffed rapturously.
Olive oil.
Good olive oil sizzling in a pan rather than lurking sullen and spoiled in a jar; olive oil so fresh from the pressing it would still be bright green when it was poured . . . the sweet burn of pepper just ground . . . the smoky saltiness of cheese fresh-cut from the wheel—I hadn’t smelled good cheese in at least a year. Flour, the fine milled stuff so light it drifted in the air, and something savory baking in a crust . . .

Or
burning
in a crust. My eyes snapped open, and I saw a telltale puff of smoke from the nearest oven. I flew across the kitchen, lifting double handfuls of my stained skirt to seize the hot pan and whisk it out of the heat. The pastry shell bubbled black and scorched, and before I could think twice I was shouting.

“Sweet Santa Marta!” I yelled, and the agitated cluster of white-aproned apprentices and serving girls turned to stare at me. “Letting a
tourte
burn? If you worked for me, I’d dice you all into a pottage!”

“Who are you?” one of the serving girls blinked.

“Who cares who she is?” an apprentice snarled. “Maestro Santini’s scarpered off to play
zara
again, and if we can’t get that bloody wedding feast ready—”

They began to argue, and I just let my eyes travel the kitchens. What a sight. Small, cramped kitchens, for one thing—the Cardinal with the bull over his door might have spent a fortune on that fine tapestried entrance hall I’d glimpsed as the wedding guests streamed in, but he hadn’t spent a ducat on his kitchens. Still, the cramped, smoky fireplace and bowed spit and inconveniently placed trestle tables weren’t what made me start cursing. It was the sight of the roast birds
not
being turned and basted on their various spits, the bowls of flour
not
being kneaded into pastry, the eggs
not
being whipped into delicious frothy peaks. The sight of iniquity, immorality, pure evil, and possibly the world’s end: a kitchen in disorder.

“If we just send out the roast peacock,” one of the undercooks was saying, “do you think they’d miss the veal?” But I cut him off.

“How many wedding guests?”

Blank looks passed between them. I wouldn’t need to cook this lot into pottage; it was clearly all they had between the ears. “The menu,” I snapped. “Tell me.”

“Whole peacock in its plumage—”

“Veal with morello cherries—”

“Bergamot pears with cloves—”

A menu pieced itself together out of the disjointed chorus. A good one, too—Marco was a dice-rolling
pazzo
, but the
pazzo
had trained under my father, and he could cook.

So could I. And there wasn’t a recipe here I didn’t know as well as my own name.

“Someone get me a small knife.” I looked around the kitchens, found a discarded apron, and tied it over my disreputable dress. “And where are the onions? Genovese onions, if you have them.”

The pot-boys gazed at me as they perspired in the heat of the banked fireplace; the white-aproned apprentices stood behind the long trestle tables with their haphazard arrangement of pots and bowls and looked at their toes; the serving maids whispered behind their hands before sinks mounded with dishes. “Who are you again?” one of the apprentices said at last, rudely. “We aren’t taking no orders from you.”

Ah, the sound of an insolent apprentice. How long had it been since I’d put one in his place? Even longer than the last time I’d smelled good cheese.

“I’m Maestro Santini’s cousin.” I smiled benevolently, finding a small knife and beginning my hunt for Genovese onions. “And who are you?”

“Piero. And just because you say you’re his cousin—”

“The wedding guests approach, Piero,” I interrupted him, leaching the sweetness out of my voice and letting it sink to a venomous whisper. My father’s whisper, the one that could whip round a kitchen shriveling spines as it traveled along. “The wedding party will soon arrive, and the peacock isn’t even off the spit yet. The pastry hasn’t even been rolled. The one dish I see plated in this ninth ring of hell you call a kitchen is a very nice shad over there.
And the cat is eating it.
”

The maids and scullions just looked at each other and mumbled. The cat hissed at me: an enormous tom with a tattered ear who bent to give a leisurely swipe of his tongue along the length of the fish. Beautiful shad, impeccably braised in what I suspected was the sauce of cinnamon and cloves that my father detailed in the packet of recipes in my pouch (page 386, Chapter: Sauces). Though when I made that sauce I liked to add a dash of salt and vinegar for bite, and just a few threads of saffron to give it color . . .

“Out!” I shooed the cat to the floor, helping it toward the door with my foot. “Out, unless you want to end up on the spit! Now, if you batch of parboiled fools can tell me—”

“Maestro Santini?” A woman’s voice sounded behind me. I whirled and then hastily followed the example of the maids and curtsied before the stout gray-haired matron in her elaborate headdress. “Maestro Santini, where—” Her eyes traveled apprehensively around the kitchens, as though she were afraid something would explode all over her maroon silks.

“Madonna Adriana,” Piero the sulky apprentice said, and then apparently ran out of inspiration. His eyes hunted desperately around the mess of pots and pans, the piles of flour, and the blackened pastry.

“Madonna Adriana da Mila, I take it?” I swept forward with my most radiant smile, hoping she wouldn’t notice my stained dress under the apron. “Maestro Santini has spoken to me often of how honored he is to work in your household.” No one had told me anything about her, actually—just her name, the employer in Rome who had been fool enough to hire Marco as her cook. Just an idle line of gossip from my father, but I’d followed the slender thread of that name all the way south to Rome. “I am his cousin Carmelina Mangano, newly come from Venice. Naturally I agreed to assist my cousin for such an illustrious occasion as this.”

She reared back. “I agreed to pay for three extra pairs of hands in the kitchens, not four—”

“I work for free,
madonna
.” I crossed myself. “As is a girl’s most sacred duty.”

Madonna Adriana brightened—ah, yes, one of those illustrious silk-clad ladies whose eyes shone not for sweets or jewels or compliments, but for the thought of getting something cheap. Better yet, free.