The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (28 page)

“I know.” I’d stood on tiptoe to kiss my brother. “Thank you, Sandro.”

As for the rest of
la famiglia Farnese
 . . . well. What exactly had they all done, learning I had skipped away from my husband’s bed to the Holy Father’s?
We should exile you from this family for the shame you’ve brought upon it
, my brother Angelo had written in more than one furious letter . . . until the Pope bestowed upon him an Orsini bride with a hefty dowry.
I would never have believed that any sister of mine could behave like a common flea-house trollop
, my second brother had written icily . . . and then finished his letter asking if I would ask the Pope to pay for repairs on our crumbling
castello
by the lake.
You were always flighty and vain, and now you’re a common slut!
my sister Gerolama had written me . . . but now her letters begged favors for her stick-like Florentine husband.

I ask you. So much for the vaunted family morals. I hadn’t gone home to Capodimonte once since my wedding, and I didn’t think I’d be returning any time soon. My family didn’t want to see me, after all; they just wanted to see the things I could get them, and those could be requested by letter without the inconvenience of my immoral self in their presence.

A great roar came up from the crowd then, yanking me from my thoughts. Juan Borgia had mounted his gilded-prow galley that would whisk him off to Barcelona, pausing to wave his emerald-studded cap at the docks again. Oh, would he just hurry up and be gone? I couldn’t stand around faking tears much longer.

“Four galleys to see him to Barcelona?” Sandro scoffed as the oars shipped with a slow graceful motion, and the galley glided ponderously away from the dock like a fat dowager in huge skirts.

“Full of jewels, furs, brocades, carpets, tapestries, presents for his bride, more presents for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella . . .” I stood on tiptoe to watch the galleys retreat, finally allowing myself a beam. “And they say women pack too heavily on journeys.”

“How long do you wager it will take him to spend all four galleys’ worth?”

“At least he’s gone.” I waved happily. “Gone for good, if I’m
very
well behaved and the Holy Virgin answers my prayers.”

“Since when have you ever been well behaved?”

“Oh, you’re one to lecture me, Alessandro Farnese. What’s the name of your latest
amore
? Battestina, isn’t it?”

“Silvia,” my brother confessed. “Battestina got clingy.”

“You should send your mistresses to me for advice. I’m never clingy.”

The crowd was dispersing now, wandering off in search of a new diversion—but the Pope stayed, looking out over the gleaming river in his sedan chair, papal guard clustered about him. Sandro slipped away, murmuring of Curia duties—“Don’t you mean duties to this new Silvia of yours?” I whispered—but the Borgias stayed until Juan’s ship had disappeared from sight around the bend in the river. Then Rodrigo’s gaze stirred as he found my face, dashing a heavy hand at his eyes, and I blew him a kiss.

* * *

N
ow that I was officially a fallen woman, a woman of loose morals, a harlot, take your pick of titles, people liked to tell me about the weight of sin I carried on my shoulders. Mostly mendicant friars and virtuous women, who really got far more excited about this sort of thing than I did. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that my shoulders felt quite unweighted. Rodrigo was right: Why
should
I be afraid of hellfire as a fornicator and an adulteress, when I could have my absolution straight from the Holy Father’s own lips (between kisses)? Who was more qualified to forgive my sins than God’s own chosen Vicar?

Mind you, being a mistress has its responsibilities. Wives can be capricious or bad-tempered sometimes, or prone to headaches—but a mistress must always be charming, sprightly, and ready to entertain. And wives only have to get dressed and ready to face the day, whereas I have to get dressed and ready to face the night as well.

If I’d been a proper wife, no doubt Orsino would be tired of me by now and trouble me only once a week or so when he’d come into my chamber, climb on for a quick poke under my nightdress, then roll off and start to snore. Everyone knew husbands got bored with their wives, who, properly speaking, weren’t supposed to enjoy the nighttime side of things anyway. But Rodrigo, well . . . I gave a little involuntary laugh. The Holy Father was
different
when it came to passion, let us say. And furthermore, I never knew when he might take the passage from the Vatican to the Palazzo Santa Maria. Even if he couldn’t come to spend
cena
with Lucrezia and me, sometimes he would steal an hour or two after midnight to come to my bed, so I always made sure to prepare myself: velvet dress changed for a filmy shift, a light combing of rosewater through my hair to keep it lying smooth instead of frizzing out from the day’s plaits and pins, a scented apricot cream rubbed all over my skin (with special attention to heels and elbows), and only then would I tuck myself between the silk sheets of my huge curtained bed with no idea whether I’d be allowed to sleep the night through or not.

I knew I’d see my Pope tonight, however, so I hurried more than usual with the rosewater and creams, hesitating just a moment when Pantisilea handed me a sealed letter. “Another one,
madonna.
Tell me what’s in this one?”

“Certainly not. You can go to bed now, Pantisilea.”

“I’ve got a squire waiting for me.” She winked and flitted off in high good humor. I waited till the heavy door shut before taking my letter out again. Pantisilea and I were quite fond of each other now that I’d suborned her loyalty from my mother-in-law’s side to mine. She was the one to privately smuggle me the letters I sometimes got from my husband.

I broke the seal on the letter and made my way through the childlike scrawl. He wrote the letters with his own hand; that was clear enough from the spelling, which was even more appalling than Lucrezia’s. Orsino wrote to tell me that he was wel. He hoped I was wel. There was good hunting at Carbognano; yesterday he had bagged a stagge with a fine rakk of antlers. There was talk of the French invading . . .

Pages of awkward courtesies, hardly different from the last letter and the letter before that. I sighed, touching the page to a candle flame and letting it burn in the shallow dish where I kept a handful of Carmelina’s honey-drenched
mostaccioli
, or would have kept a handful of her honey-drenched
mostaccioli
if I didn’t keep eating them all in one sitting. The letter flared into ash, and I nibbled a thumbnail. Poor Orsino; why did he keep writing to me when we hadn’t even seen each other since that awkward coupling in the stables? If he didn’t want me enough to claim me for his own, or my daughter for that matter (and she wasn’t his!
He
knew that, surely; he hadn’t even come to Rome for her christening!), then why did he write? I wrote him back only because I still felt sorry for him, sorry and sometimes vaguely guilty. I kept my notes brief and formal, smuggled back to Orsino through Pantisilea so my mother-in-law wouldn’t find out and tell my Pope. If Rodrigo knew, he’d have my young husband on the
strappado
and no mistake.

Or perhaps he’d just laugh derisively. Either way, I didn’t really want to find out. I had no affection for Orsino, but I didn’t want to see him hurt, either.

“Hello,
mi perla
.”

I smiled, hearing the deep voice behind me. I had plenty of nicknames in Rome by now—“La Bella,” which was really quite flattering, and “the Venus of the Vatican,” which was somewhat flattering, and “the Bride of Christ,” which I didn’t find flattering at all, though Leonello found it so sidesplittingly funny that I had a dark suspicion he might have been the one to come up with it in the first place. Only Rodrigo, however, called me his pearl. “Your Holiness,” I said softly, and blew out all the tapers but one. Padding across the woven carpet in my bare feet, I brought his hand up to my lips and kissed his ring. He nodded gravely, as he always did, then scooped me up in his burly arms and carried me to bed. He always did that too. There’s something about being small—men always seemed to want to pick you up and carry you somewhere, didn’t they? I was forever being toted about like a doll. “Oddly,” Leonello had told me once when I said as much to him, “I find my experience of being small somewhat different.”

Tonight, however, my Pope did not seem inclined for love. He put his head against my breast instead, absently kissing the base of my throat, and I leaned my cheek against his head and curled the locks of his black hair around my fingers. “You’re thinking of Juan,” I said at last.

“Juan.” Rodrigo was just a somber profile in the flickering half-dark of the single candle: an eagle nose, a bulky chest, a sad voice. “Gone, like Pedro Luis. Pedro, he was so young when . . .” Rodrigo’s voice trailed off, as it always did when he spoke of the firstborn son in Spain who had died after his first military command. “They said he was brave, very brave. I’ve told you that?”

“Many times.”

“Juan, he’s brave. Like Pedro Luis. He’ll be a great
condottiere
.”

I had my own doubts that a boy of seventeen who could hardly tear himself away from his hobbies of harassing the kitchen maids and killing cats in alleys was really poised to be the next Achilles, but I certainly wasn’t fool enough to say so. “Juan is gone, but he’s not dead, you know,” I said instead, smoothing Rodrigo’s hair. “He’ll be back.”

“I don’t like him going at all! Any of them. I like my family
here
, with me.”

“Says the man who wore my ear to a nub one night, telling me how his children were going to found a great web of interconnected dynasties throughout the world!” I bit Rodrigo’s earlobe, playful. “How are they supposed to make a great web of anything if they all stay here?”

“I’m still working on that,” he admitted.

I laughed. “So until you have the perfect solution, Your Holiness, leave Juan to Spain and Spain to Juan. Cesare—”

“The next Borgia Pope.” Rodrigo nodded. “The only problem is, I won’t be there to see him do it.”

“‘We have for Pope Cesare Borgia, Pope Alexander VII.’” I sounded out the words. “Doesn’t sound like him at all. He’d rather be the kind of Alexander who conquers the world.”

“Juan can conquer the world. He’s hot-blooded; made for the battlefield. Cesare, he’s got a cooler head, and one needs that in the Church.”

“I don’t think he wants the Church.”

“Someone in the Church doesn’t want him, that’s certain.” Rodrigo gave a derisive chuckle. “Someone’s made a nasty attempt to keep Cesare out of the College of Cardinals. That murdered girl in the Borgo, the one with her throat cut—I’ll eat my throne if it was the Jews. Judging from what turned up on the girl’s body, it was someone doing their best to smear Cesare’s reputation. Cardinal della Rovere, perhaps? He’s appalled enough at the idea of one Borgia Pope, let alone two . . .”

Rodrigo went on, half amused and half angry, and it was something faintly sinister about a dagger that had possibly belonged to Cesare, but I didn’t want to hear the details. I had no desire think about women murdered in the night, not when I lay so cozy and safe in my Pope’s arms. “So, if Cesare is to be the next Borgia Pope,” I said instead, changing the subject, “and Juan is bound to lead the papal armies, what does that leave for Joffre?”

“Naples.” Rodrigo frowned, fingers drumming against my arm as he looked up at the ceiling. He’d had it painted with a fresco of a golden-haired Europa being borne off by Jupiter in his form as a bull. Europa looked quite a lot like me, and the bull had a cloth of the Borgia mulberry and yellow across its broad back. “I shall have to do something about Naples.”

“Now?” I poked his ribs until he squirmed. He was quite endearingly ticklish, my Pope. I aimed ruthlessly for the sensitive spot at his waist, and he caught my wrists together in one strong hand. He pinioned me against his broad chest, speaking in his most thunderous papal whisper.

“I shall excommunicate you, minx, if you make me squeal.”

“And I shall beg my Holy Father for forgiveness. On my knees, of course.”

“Then I may excommunicate you just for the pleasure of the sight.” He kissed the tip of my nose, finally smiling, but his mind was still on Naples. At least it was no longer gloomily fixed on Juan and poor dead Pedro Luis. “I think Joffre will rope Naples in for me. King Ferrente has a few spare princesses lying about—he’ll give one to Joffre, if I support him against France and Spain too . . .”

“Don’t tell me Spain wants Naples now.” I made a face. “You just gave them a continent!” It had been all the talk that spring: the new Eden discovered by that Genoese sailor whose name I could never remember, an Eden Rodrigo had ceded mostly to Spain. I’d been less interested in the maps and treaties of it all than the strange things brought back from this new world: odd plants and dusky-skinned slaves in manacles, and strange bright-colored birds that were supposed to talk. Rodrigo had obtained one of the birds as a present for Lucrezia, but so far it refused to say anything, just sat sullenly on its perch and tried to take the fingers off anyone who fed it. Privately I’d named it
Vannozza
.

I dandled my fingers along Rodrigo’s chest. “So, Joffre ropes in Naples, through a Neapolitan princess. Lucrezia ropes in Milan, through a Sforza husband. What fish are you going to catch with Laura?”

“I don’t know. France, perhaps? They’re starting to make trouble.”

I smiled. Vannozza had been entirely wrong—Rodrigo was already making plans for Laura, plans every bit as grand as for any of
her
children. “A French duke,” I began, envisioning my daughter’s rosy future, but Rodrigo had already moved on.

“France will have to wait for the moment. Naples comes first.” His fingers drummed mine decisively, all his pensive silence gone in the fire of decision making. I’d never yet seen my Pope tired. “And the College of Cardinals—it needs a batch of young blood to shake up those old ganders in their red hats. It’s time Cesare was a cardinal, anyway. And what about your brother—does he fancy a red hat?”