The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (22 page)

“Don’t see why we have to listen to him,” one of her maids said behind the screen—scrawny Pantisilea, who wasn’t so improbably named as I’d thought. Penthesilea the Amazon queen had dragged all the men she met off to captivity; Pantisilea the maid dragged all the men she met off to her bed. “I’ve never had a dwarf,” she’d told me cheerfully on first acquaintance. “Want to try me?” And we’d had a laugh or two between the sheets, but now she was looking at me over the screen with a dubious eye. “What does a bodyguard know about dresses?”

“We are in dire need of a man’s opinion,” Giulia informed her. “Oof, that’s tight, loosen those laces—”

“He’s not a man,
madonna
,” one of the other maids objected.

“But at least he’s impartial,” I said from my wall. “What you need is a pair of eyes that does not notice your beauty.”

“You don’t think I’m beautiful, Leonello?” Giulia peeked over the top of the screen, giving me the benefit of her big wounded eyes before being yanked down again by the maids.

“Certainly you are.” I turned a page absently. “But I have worked in your company near a year now,
madonna
, and no matter how beautiful the frescoes on one’s wall, eventually one ceases to notice them.”

“You’re horrid,” Giulia complained. “His Holiness says he’s as struck as he was when he first laid eyes on me.”

“Which is why you want my opinion instead of His Holiness the Pope’s.”

Giulia flew out behind the screen again, this time arrayed in embroidered yellow-green silk. “Well?”

“Better,” I said. Not really—even unjeweled and swathed in a dress the color of cat vomit, Giulia Farnese would still draw all eyes. The virtuous women of Rome could be divided fairly evenly into two camps: those who drew their skirts aside from the Bride of Christ and her scandalous reputation, and those who fawned on her because their husbands hoped for some favor from His Holiness. But every woman in Rome, whether scornful or sycophantic, craned their necks to see every detail of what Giulia Farnese wore. If she appeared at Mass in the Basilica San Pietro in a blue velvet gown, every cloth merchant in the city began hawking “papal blue.” If she wore a dashing little furred cap tilted over one eye when she went to confession, every woman in Rome with a claim to high fashion was sporting a “Farnese
biretta
” within a fortnight. Doubtless by tomorrow morning, there would be a storm of women racing off to their robe makers for dresses in cat-vomit silk.

“Better,” I said again as my mistress twirled. “You’ll be the least ostentatious woman at the Gilded Excrescence.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call Lucrezia’s wedding that.” Giulia made a face at me as her maids tied her sleeves. “It’s sure to be a beautiful occasion.”

“Certainly it will be a sumptuous one.” His Holiness the Pope was sparing no expense in the wedding of his bastard daughter. I looked down into the cradle beside my wall bench at the bride’s little sister. “Will you be having a wedding like this in thirteen years or so, little one?”

The baby gnawed on her own fist in her nest of crested linens: the latest addition to the papal seraglio, born almost nine months to the week that Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and there wasn’t a soul in Rome who hadn’t done their sums on hearing
that
.

“Why shouldn’t Laura have a wedding like this someday?” Brushing the maids aside, Giulia came to lift her daughter out of the ornately carved cradle. The baby gurgled and spit up on her mother’s shoulder, but Giulia dabbed at the silk unconcernedly. “A count or a duke is none too good for a pope’s daughter.”

“And by the time she grows old enough to think of marrying, His Holiness will be bankrupt from all the other weddings.” Thirteen-year-old Lucrezia was the first of the Borgia bastards to marry (at least the first of the bastards he had here in Rome) but there was already talk of a Spanish bride for Juan and a Neapolitan princess for little Joffre. I wasn’t supposed to know His Holiness’s ruminations, but I still liked to keep my card-play sharp, and I often played
primiera
with the papal secretaries. They sometimes put papal secrets in the pot instead of coin. “His Holiness should just put her in a convent to save money,” I advised.

“Nonsense; if she’s anything like me
or
her father, she’d be a dreadful nun. Won’t you,
Lauretta
mia
—look, doesn’t she have Rodrigo’s nose?”

“She has exactly the same nose as any other baby.”

Giulia ignored me, blowing loud kisses all over baby Laura and finally laying her back in the carved cradle. “Oh, dear, I’m late!”

“You’re always late,
madonna
,” one of the maids scolded, and La Bella flew like a yellow-green bird with her entourage behind her.

I slipped down from the wall bench, shooing the white goat as it moved on from a mostly consumed slipper to a pair of embroidered gloves, and I sauntered after my mistress. I paused a moment to lean over the cradle, partly to tickle little Laura until she giggled and partly to make the superstitious nursemaid fork the sign of the devil behind her back as she always did when the little fiend—that would be me—came too close to her charge.

The new Pope was not a man to waste time. Immediately after his ascension to the throne of San Pietro, he moved the papal seraglio containing Madonna Adriana and his daughter and his mistress to the exquisite Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, a stone’s throw from the Vatican itself. All Rome was abuzz at the scandal, and even I had raised an eyebrow; popes had kept mistresses and bastards before, and most cardinals maintained at least one unofficial household, but there was always the necessary shell of respectability: concubines passed off as cousins, illegitimate sons as nephews. But Pope Alexander VI cared not a fig for gossip and made no such pretense, moving his mistress openly to her new home, and I had been moved right along with the rest of her servants and belongings. We had all let out gasps and whistles at the sight of the Palazzo Santa Maria: the high-arched loggias framing the jewel-like gardens, the marble terraces and splashing fountains, the long flights of shallow steps leading to breathtaking vistas over Rome. An Eden fit for Dante’s
Paradiso
 . . .

And just now, it could have doubled for the
Inferno
. Perhaps one of the livelier rings of hell, with a few of the more energetic sins. Despair; yes, I saw plenty of that as I descended into a throng of servants wringing their hands and wild-eyed stewards perusing fistfuls of increasingly frayed lists. Vanity, certainly; I saw that too—the bride’s attendants preening everywhere there was a reflective surface and trying to pretend they weren’t counting the pearls on the bodice of the girl beside them. Wrath; plenty of that too as maids got their ears violently boxed for not being fast enough with a cup of wine, and pages shouted at each other with voices gone shrill from strain.

Dio.
Weddings.

“Where are you going, dwarf?” a rude voice demanded as I made my way through the throng to a certain tapestry-covered archway. My eyes traveled up a pair of absurd cloth-of-silver pantaloons, a gold robe with a dagged edge that trailed the floor, and a broad collar of pearls and balas rubies.

“I see one of the Sultan’s concubines has gone astray.”

Juan Borgia flushed under his absurd turban with its ceiling-scraping plume and huge ruby. A suave Turkish prince had arrived in Rome as a hostage not long ago, and his flamboyant robes and pantaloons had been adopted by all the young fops in Rome. One could look out over a sea of turbans at Mass and not be sure whether one was in a church or a mosque.

“I wouldn’t expect a dwarf to understand the fashions,” he said, giving an eye to my ill-fitting Borgia livery. A year in the Pope’s service and I still didn’t have a doublet that fit around my oddly proportioned body.

“There’s some advantage at least in being a dwarf,” I answered the Duke of Gandia. “Even in a hat as silly as that one, I could still clear a doorway without ducking. Do try not to trip on those curly shoes, will you, and send the bride sprawling on her way to her husband?”

I swept a flourish of a bow and continued past him. Not wise, perhaps, to be rude to the Pope’s favorite son, but my viper tongue still required a fool now and then on which to exercise its edges, and Juan Borgia served admirably in place of drunken innkeepers and tavern cheats.

Lucrezia Borgia would pass through the streets of Rome on her way to the Vatican, escorted in her bridal procession by her brother the faux Turk and Madonna Giulia and a full hundred and fifty additional Roman ladies arrayed in their finest. Crowds would gather to see them pass, commenting on the jewels and the gowns and the splendor of the occasion, craning their necks and hoping for largesse until the moment the Pope’s daughter disappeared into the Vatican. I wondered idly what the crowds really thought of such pomp—a train of hundreds for the Borgia bride when most Roman girls went accompanied only by family and friends; diamonds and sables and pedigreed horses for wedding gifts when most girls got only embroidered belts or perhaps a length of cloth; a fifteen-thousand-ducat wedding dress when most fathers, on their yearly earnings of perhaps twenty-five ducats, could afford only a pair of new sleeves to dress up their daughter’s best gown.

If I knew crowds, they would be pleased by the pomp, dazzled rather than offended. The Borgias, in the eyes of most of the world including themselves, had been put upon the earth by God to lead sumptuous lives on behalf of the masses. Their pomp was God’s will.

I took the private route out of the
palazzo
, not caring to be crushed by eager crowds. A passage already existed between the Palazzo Santa Maria and the Vatican itself, by which the Pope could visit his mistress and family, and all Rome was abuzz with that bit of gossip too. At least three times a week the Holy Father quite openly dismissed his retinue and took the short walk from his papal apartments, and the satin-textured, intensely feminine world of the papal seraglio changed to an ordinary bustling Roman household as Giulia Farnese dispensed wifely kisses, Madonna Adriana called for another place at the table, and Lucrezia bounced for her share of fatherly hugs. The Holy Father could relax like any ordinary Roman merchant, sit down to a good
cena
with a pretty wife on one side and a capable mother-in-law on the other and a cherished daughter running to refill his wine cup. Common, happy domesticity: a drug even for Christendom’s most powerful man.

The fact that the woman who served as the Pope’s wife had a quite legal husband of her own stashed away in the countryside—well, that was a mere detail.

The passage was unlit, but tiled and well swept. I kept pace with one shoulder brushing the wall, counting steps as I took out my knives and flicked their edges in the dark. A new set of knives, presented to me by His Excellency Cesare Borgia on the day after the Pope’s ascension, when I’d been offered a permanent position as Giulia Farnese’s bodyguard. “The charge of murder against you is gone,” the young Bishop had deigned to tell me, cocked back at his desk with his auburn hair mussed around its very slight tonsure. “But the charge can be resurrected if any more recreational murders come from those stubby little hands of yours. Understood?”

“Recreational murders,” I’d grinned. “I like that.”

“See you don’t get to like it too much. For murders in your daily line of work, perhaps you would care to have these.” And he’d tossed a bundled set of new finger knives at me, crafted along the lines of my old ones but a set of ten rather than four, exquisitely balanced little blades ranging from a mere inch in length to a pig-sticker of half a foot. “Perhaps you will not turn up your nose at this Toledo steel?”

He wanted my Toledo steel at his sister’s wedding today. “I’ll have you up close,” he said. “With the other guards beside His Holiness’s throne.”

I nodded. The cream of Roman nobility would be in attendance at the wedding of the Pope’s daughter, and the cream of a dozen other cities as well—Ferrara and Milan and Mantua and Venice—and the Borgia enemies would be thick among them. Should any decide to melt from the throng with murderous intent during the wedding vows, the papal guard would spring around the Pope, but I had different targets to protect: Lucrezia and Giulia. “The twin stars of the Borgia firmament,” I said in my most extravagant poet’s drawl, and gave a bark of laughter at myself for flights of fancy. Too much poetry; too many late nights translating a volume of Provençal troubadour verses I’d recently found. “Back to the ancient Romans,” I promised myself as I clambered up the final flight of shallow steps toward the private entrance into the Vatican. Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic wars; that simple straightforward Latin could knock the fancy language out of anyone, and the library at the Palazzo Santa Maria had a gorgeously engraved volume of the
Commentarii de Bello Gallico
. Even more than for the Toledo blades hidden in my belt and boot tops and wrist sheaths, I was growing spoiled for fine books.

“Oh,
Gott im Himmel
, save me from this day!” I heard a frantic mumble as I entered the new Borgia apartments the Pope had carved out for himself among the older, mustier chambers of the Vatican. “This is the end, this is the absolute
end
!”

“Messer Burchard.” I greeted the Pope’s master of ceremonies cheerfully. “What ails you today?”

The little German in his dusty black robe and his square cap crammed over a frizzing head of hair shook a fistful of lists at me. “Only the end of all order and sanity in God’s good earth, that’s all!
Gott im Himmel!
”

By which he could have meant the bridal attendants were late, the Pope had worn the wrong color shoes, or the pages had attempted to make their entrance without gloves. I had grown to know Johann Burchard well in the past months, generally because he was always rushing about as though his head were on fire or the world about to end, or perhaps both, and was therefore usually in need of someone to wail at. He could certainly not wail at the Pope, and the other officials tended to find pressing duties whenever he collared them, but my legs were too short to carry me out of earshot of his complaints.