The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (24 page)

Her angular shoulders sagged, and I wondered if she’d even registered whom she was talking to. Carmelina Mangano was usually careful to avoid my company. Probably because I could rarely dodge the temptation to ruffle her easily ruffled feathers. “Cheer up,” I said, giving a deliberately familiar pat to her hip. “Surely you wouldn’t grudge the beggars of Rome a taste of your confections. Or are the fruits of your labor reserved only for the great?”

“If the great bother to eat them!” A burst of music and laughter issued from the brightly lit windows above, and she glanced up. “I suppose the celebrations will go on till dawn.”

“Till the bride goes to bed, at least.”

“Such a little thing to be a wife.”

“Oh, they won’t bed her down with Lord Sforza yet. Consummation of the marriage, by the Pope’s decree, is to wait at least another six months out of consideration for her tender youth.”

“A kind father.”

“A practical one. If the marriage goes unconsummated, he can annul it should a better match present itself.”

“What, so all this was wasted? The fifteen-thousand-ducat dress, and the wedding banquet, and my sweets?” Another bitter glance out at the
piazza
of smashed pastries.

“What’s a little waste to a pope?”

It was the most civil exchange we’d ever had, this lanky prickly cook and me. Weariness and darkness, I suppose, can turn any conversation cordial out of sheer exhaustion. Her voice was almost friendly . . . just as long as we were speaking of neutral things, anyway. Weddings and food and anything, really, except herself.

And I found that strange, because I’ve never known a woman who didn’t like to talk about herself with an attentive man. Even a small man like me.

“I don’t suppose you bothered to try any of my sweets.” Carmelina slanted a glance at me, arms still folded across her breasts in challenge. The torchlight from the papal guards cut harsh shadows across her strong nose and long jaw. “You don’t eat more than a bird, Messer Leonello!”

“I am forced to abstemiousness in food and drink.” Gesturing down at my short trunk. “Dwarves, I fear, are prone to fat. Such is the effect of a grown man’s appetite in a stunted body. But I confess I did try a few of those
tourtes
. The tiny blood-orange things with the honey glaze. Bitter to go with the sweet.”

Like you
, I almost said.
Signorina Cuoca
was all dark angles and lean corners in both face and body; nothing like the soft curves of figure and fair tints of skin that the world deemed beautiful. But she had a tang that prettier women lacked, a tang as tart and refreshing as a dash of lemon water on a hot day, and I wondered if her skin tasted like lemon on the tongue. But she grimaced before I could think of anything charming to say, and I cocked my head instead. “What is it?”

“Those blood-orange
tourtes
you liked?” Carmelina said. “The woman at market who sells me fruit every week; well, I bought six whole crates of blood oranges off her to make those. And I just heard a few days ago from the scullions that she’s dead. Found with her throat slashed, and staked down right through the hands too.” Carmelina crossed herself. “Spread out and left to die right in her own fruit stall, Santa Marta save her soul.”

“Staked,” I said. “Through the hands?”

“She was so pleased to sell me all those oranges. I was looking forward to telling her how well the pastries turned out . . .” Carmelina sighed. “Good night, Messer Leonello.”

I stood looking out over the
piazza
, long after she had disappeared.

One woman dead of a slashed throat, staked to a table. Now . . . two?

It means nothing
, I told myself. Women died every night in Rome, their throats cut by jealous husbands or thieving footpads or angry debtors. Many women. In the great scheme of this violent city, it meant nothing.

And even if two died in what might be called a similar fashion—well, so what? One could draw similarities between any two deaths, if one tried hard enough. Two deaths; it was merely a coincidence. You would need at least three to call it a pattern.

But I couldn’t help thinking of my third man, the man I’d never found. A man wearing a mask.

It wouldn’t do any harm, I supposed, to ask a few questions about this woman Carmelina had known. The unfortunate orange seller.

I kicked one of Carmelina’s flattened
tourtes
away into the shadows, not liking myself very much. Because a woman was dead, and yet the news made me feel suddenly, oddly cheerful. Refreshed, almost. Not bored at all.

At dawn I saw the wedding guests stumble tipsily into the dark. A bare-shouldered beauty whose companion was still fumbling candied cherries out of her bodice in imitation of the Pope . . . Madonna Adriana, asleep in a sedan chair with her mouth sagging open . . . and Cesare Borgia in his churchman’s robes, his little jeweled bride of his sister fast asleep in his arms as he carried her back to her virgin bed.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue live together.

—PETRARCH

Giulia

I
had the most perfect and beautiful baby in the world.

“She may be pretty, but she is far from perfect,” Leonello commented when I said as much, on the long lazy afternoon the day after the wedding. Most of the household was still asleep, and those few who
were
awake lay around the
palazzo
like felled oxen, moaning gently from the results of too much wine. Weddings are exhausting, aren’t they? “That baby yells louder than a Venetian fishwife when she’s hungry, and she’s usually hungry,” Leonello continued. “Why couldn’t you send her to live in the country with a wet nurse, like most mothers? The whole
palazzo
would get a good deal more sleep.”

“Send Laura away? Never.”

My daughter had just been a slimy collection of flailing limbs when they first laid her in my arms, a little red frog of a thing with one ear inexplicably folded down and stuck to itself. I’d been quite unreasonably worried about that ear. My daughter couldn’t grow up with a bent ear! She wasn’t one hour old before I was rocking her worriedly, loving her so much I could die and reassuring her that I’d fix her hair in knotted shell braids on each side of her head so no one would ever be able to laugh at her ear. I’d kill anybody who laughed at her; I already knew that before she was a day old. But the ear unfolded itself, the newborn redness gave way to poreless peach-soft skin, and she turned into the prettiest baby ever born. Not that it mattered to me because Laura was my daughter and I’d adore her whether she was pretty or plain.

Though I was glad about the ear. Those knotted shell braids on either side of the head don’t really look well on anybody, do they?

“Her hair’s growing,” I said as I turned on my back in the grass and hoisted my bright-eyed baby into the air above my head. “I think she’ll be as blond as me.”

“She had better be, with a name like Laura. Did you really have to name her after the most famous blond bore in the world’s history of bad poetry?” Leonello complained. “She’ll go brunette as she gets older, you wait, and then she’ll spend her life gritting her teeth when people ask why she isn’t golden like Petrarch’s Laura.”

“Nonsense. She’s going to have lovely fair hair just like mine, and I’ll show her how to rinse it with a saffron cinnabar decoction.” I drew Laura down on my breast, kissing her downy head and basking in the warmth of the sun. The grass of the
palazzo
garden was soft beneath me; the fountain splashed somewhere to my right; the sun was summer-warm above, and a breeze blew delightfully over my bare arms and bare neck and bare feet. I’d come downstairs in my sleeveless filmy shift without even a robe, reveling in the joy of free limbs after all those long hours at the wedding yesterday laced into a stiff bodice and tight sleeves.

“You’ll get freckled,” Leonello observed from his wall bench in the shade, his boots propped up on a padded stool and a book facedown in his lap. My pet goat lay asleep beside him, periodically stirring himself with a flap of silky ears to nibble the buds off the vines that flowered over the walls. “Freckled and sunburned, and you won’t be anybody’s mistress then.”

“I don’t care.” All I cared about was that the wedding was
over
; all the frantic fuss and frenzy of it finally done. Madonna Adriana had yet to appear from her chamber though it was past noon, and of course dear Lucrezia had still been fast asleep when I poked my head in on rising from my own bed. I’d been the one to tuck her into her bed at dawn this morning, helping the maids unhook her sleepy body from the stiff jeweled dress and smooth her between the silk sheets. Until she was old enough to consummate her marriage, she would continue to reside with me at the Palazzo Santa Maria rather than with her new husband, and I was glad of it. “Beautiful,” she’d whispered, sliding into sleep, and I loved her almost as much as Laura.

“She’s exhausted,” I’d whispered to Rodrigo, who had come through the passage to the Palazzo Santa Maria to see his daughter back safe to her bed after the last wedding festivities.

“I hope
you
aren’t exhausted,” he’d said with that glint in his black eyes that never failed to put a quiver in my knees, and, winding his hands deep into my hair, he’d dragged me back to my bed and made love to me with as much energy as though he hadn’t been awake for the past day and night together. He was gone when I woke very late this morning, but then he could never stay. The Pope was always too busy to linger anywhere, even in my bed. But he’d left a new pearl bracelet on the pillow where the dent of his head had been.

“Did the Holy Father mean those pearls for the baby?” Leonello inquired as I unhooked the bracelet from my wrist and doubled it around Laura’s plump little ankle instead. “I see the Dominicans are right when they thunder on about the extravagance of upstart Spanish popes and their debauched harems, where even the babies are bejeweled.”

“I want Laura to grow up with beautiful things; she deserves it. Look at that skin, she’s made for pearls! Yes, aren’t you beautiful,
Lauretta mia
—” I blew kisses all over her neck, sitting up in the grass. “Do you want to hold her?”

“No.”

“Here, just support her head.”

“I don’t want to hold her!”

“Careful, she kicks.”

“Dio.”
Leonello dropped his book as I deposited Laura into his stubby hands. He held her at arm’s length, making a series of ghastly leering faces like a procession of devilish Carnival masks, and Laura stared in utter fascination.

I laughed. “See? She likes you.”

“She shows a lamentable lapse of judgment.” Leonello twisted his features into a horrible gargoyle’s glower. Laura crowed, waving at him, and I smiled. You wouldn’t think a dwarf would make a good midwife, but Leonello had been
such
a help during the birthing two months ago. Not that he did much more than sit in the corner ignoring the various attempts to evict him and remarking that childbirth was a disgusting business—but frankly, he was right. Childbirth
is
disgusting, and what’s more it’s boring, all the panting and the walking up and down and the midwives telling me to breathe or push or pray (as if I could remember any prayers around the pains!). What I’d needed was distractions, not prayers, and Leonello had ignored the shooing of the midwives and set himself to distracting me, telling a rapid series of obscene jokes in that expressionless monotone of his that seemed to make everything funnier. I’d laughed helplessly around the pains, and I swear the laughter made Laura come faster.

“You’re very good with her.” I turned on my side in the grass, propping my chin on my hand. “You should get married and have some babies of your own.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Is it not obvious?” His voice was very dry.

“You’re learned and clever and you have a wonderful voice. If you’d just read poetry instead of mocking it, you’d have women positively swooning.” I looked him over critically. “You could dress better, though. That Borgia mulberry color doesn’t do anything for you. Green, perhaps, or black. You could look very sinister and dashing in black.”

“Dashing,” he said, making another horrible face at Laura.

“Maybe a turban in the Turkish style,” I giggled. “You could hide a half-dozen more knives in a turban, I’m sure. And lace cuffs—”

“Lace? Lace?
Dio.
You have a baby and a goat to dress in frills, woman; leave me in peace!”

A frigid voice interrupted our laughter. “Is there no one awake in this
palazzo
except dwarves and goats and giggling maidservants?”

“No,” said Leonello, looking up to our visitor. “We are all locked fast in enchanted slumber, like a princess in her thorn-bound tower. Victims not of a witch’s enchantment, but of that gilded excrescence of a wedding. Welcome to the seraglio. Whom do you seek, fair lady?”

I followed his gaze to see a woman in the arches of the loggia just above me. Perhaps forty-five; auburn-haired, tall, and trim-waisted in russet velvet with a pair of plum silk sleeves; beautiful in her powdered and preserved fashion. I’d never met her before, but she gazed at me down the length of her high-bridged nose in a way that was acutely familiar.

“Ah,” she said, scrutinizing me top to toe. “You are La Bella, I take it?”

“I am Giulia Farnese.” I rose with as much poise as I could summon while brushing bits of grass from my crumpled shift. “And you are—?”

Of course I knew exactly who she was.

“Vannozza dei Cattanei.” Her voice was cold. “Your predecessor.”

“Indeed,” I said, as though unimpressed, and repressed the urge to pat at my hair.

Rodrigo had told me something of his past mistresses, with a certain deprecating amusement—“Why is it women always have to
know
?” There had been a Valencian courtesan who had given him his first son, a son who had died in Spain along with the courtesan herself—there had been a complaisant vintner’s wife in Madrid, who had given him two daughters. But most of all there had been the woman he had kept at his side for a decade; the woman by whom he had fathered Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Joffre. “Though I always had my doubts about Joffre,” Rodrigo had told me, circling the point of my bare shoulder with his thumb. “Vannozza was growing bored with me by then.”

I’d laughed. “How could anyone get bored with you?” My Pope was exasperating at times, stubborn, self-willed, prone to the occasional rage, but boring? Never.

Still, he always chuckled when Vannozza’s name was mentioned, shaking his head with unmistakable fondness, and it had made me wonder about my predecessor. I’d even been curious to meet her. Preferably
not
when I stood in nothing but a grass-stained shift with my hair hanging in a braid like a shepherdess.

She looked me up and down again, and I recognized the expression. Her eldest son Cesare had looked just the same upon meeting me for the first time.
Another of my father’s whores
—the words might as well have been engraved across his forehead.

“Madonna,” I said finally, repressing the urge to hide my bare arms behind my back. “May I offer you some lemon water? Or perhaps wine?”

“No, thank you, I am here to see my daughter.”

“Lucrezia is still asleep.” I smiled. “She made a beautiful bride yesterday, but I’m afraid all the excitement exhausted her terribly.”

“I wouldn’t know. I was not allowed to attend. But you know that.”

Of course I’d known, and I’d raised an eyebrow too—a mother not attending her own daughter’s wedding? I ask you. But Rodrigo had been quite casual about it all. “Those Sforza are prideful bastards. They don’t consider Vannozza’s bloodlines quite up to their standards! Mine either, but the papal tiara helps them overlook that. Vannozza understands these things; she won’t mind keeping her distance.”

Apparently not.

“I am sorry,” I said finally. “I understand it was a matter of politics.”

“Was it?” She raised her plucked brows. “I thought it was a matter of what suited Rodrigo. But of course, that
is
politics to him.”

My cheeks heated. I was not used to anyone referring to my lover as Rodrigo but—well, me. To the world he was Pope Alexander VI. To his children he was Father—or now, teasingly, Holy Father. To his clerics he was Your Holiness. Only to me was he Rodrigo, the name I whispered in the soft fullness of night as he wrapped his hands through my hair and drew me close.

“It was a beautiful wedding,” I said at last. “Lucrezia looked like a queen.”

But Vannozza dei Cattanei had shifted her auburn eyes away from me, fastening them on Leonello and the bundle of blankets he still held. “Your daughter?” she asked, coming down from the loggia into the garden. “Lucrezia told me you’d finally birthed.”

“Yes.” I reached for my daughter, feeling a wave of protectiveness, and Laura waved her plump baby fist as Leonello surrendered her. He had shifted on his wall bench, fading somehow from an abrasive little presence to a colorless shadow against the wall.

Vannozza’s eyes flicked over my child. “She’s small,” my predecessor said at last. “Lucrezia was much bigger at that age. Pinker, too—
she
was a beauty, even in the cradle.”

I took a deep breath but let it out shallowly, forcing some warmth into my face and smiling instead. My mother had always said there was no defense against the rude like a good, sweet-toned courtesy. “Yes, Lucrezia is such a beauty,” I cooed to Vannozza dei Cattanei. “A pity she doesn’t look like you. I think she takes after Rodrigo . . . that warmth of his, you know, and the laughing voice.” I gave a little shiver of pleasure. “
So
attractive.”

Her eyes flared a little. Maybe sweet-toned courtesy
did
work against the rude. In my own experience, I found it worked better with a hint of vinegar under the honey.

“You had better hope your own daughter grows up as pretty as mine,” Vannozza snapped. “She’ll be a far more useful marriage pawn when Rodrigo starts shopping her around in a few years’ time. I wonder if you’ll be allowed to attend her wedding, Giulia la Bella? Perhaps Rodrigo’s next concubine will be the one to walk your daughter to the altar. They’ll probably be just the same age.”