The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (30 page)

“So poor Francesca’s pregnant?” she was saying. The conversation had apparently moved from world gossip to household gossip. “I told her that guardsman was no good. I don’t suppose he’ll marry her?”

“No, and Madonna Adriana’s turned her out,” Pantisilea contributed, unashamedly rummaging among her mistress’s perfume vials. “No one keeps a maid on when her belly’s under her chin, we all know that.”

“How you keep
yours
flat with all the rutting you do—!”

“I have my ways,” Pantisilea said smugly. “You have to, if you want a man under the sheets
and
your post to go with it!”

Nods among the maids. They were a young and silly lot, most of them—Santa Marta forbid Madonna Adriana hire trained maidservants when she could get raw country girls so much cheaper!—and this batch of gigglers might not know that maidservants weren’t really supposed to gossip with their mistress or help themselves to her perfumes . . . but even inexperienced girls like these knew that a maidservant kept her belly empty, or she lost her place.

“Francesca was taking a potion,” Pia whispered. “She got it from an old crone who swore if she drank it every Sunday and sang a little charm, it would keep her from conceiving—”

“None of those potions work, do they?”

I glanced behind me involuntarily, and I wasn’t the only one. If there’s anything priests love to thunder about, it’s the things women do to keep their bellies flat.

“Well, don’t ask me how it’s done,” the Pope’s mistress said. “I may be a wicked woman, but I don’t know a thing about how to stop babies from coming, except to keep nursing the one you have as long as possible. That’s what my mother-in-law says, anyway.” Madonna Giulia lifted her baby out of the basket, settling little Laura’s plump limbs into her own lap. “Of course the old trout had to tell me that the very first time I was
nursing
Laura. ‘Nothing grinds away a woman’s youth like a series of births, my dear, so you’d best avoid more babies if you want to keep your figure and your place.’”

We couldn’t help laughing at her flawless mimicry, though there were more sidelong glances.

“It’s a sin,” one of the maids said firmly, crossing herself. “It’s a sin, trying to limit the children you bear. You have to take what God sends!” But the other girls were already whispering. Maybe it was something about that stiff white mask most of us were wearing by now—we could hide our eagerness, hide our faces from the things we were saying. The things priests told us women were never supposed to say.

“If you can get your man not to seed you,” one of the maids whispered, “when he
finishes
, that is—then you won’t conceive. If he finishes elsewhere—”

“Oh, when can you ever get a man to do that!”

More giggles. I wondered if they were all blushing as hard as I was under the mask.

“It’s all to do with the moon,” Pantisilea said with authority. She was our resident harlot, after all, though a nicer harlot had never been born. “When we’re ripe to breed, I mean. You watch the moon and you chart your courses with it—”

“There are more reliable ways than that,” I heard myself saying. All those white-masked faces turned toward me, and I rubbed self-consciously at my cheek, which was beginning to flake. “Well, there are.”

“How would you know?” Pantisilea asked, offended. She was the harlot, after all; she couldn’t have a kitchen grubber like me infringing on her field of expertise.

“Venice is the city of courtesans,” I said. “There was one called La Turca, she was shining black all over, the most expensive whore in La Serenissima—well, I knew one of the girls she hired as a maid. I learned a thing or two.”

“Let’s hear it, then!” Giulia bestowed a kiss on the dimpled fist Laura had wound around a lock of her mother’s hair. “I love my baby, but I don’t want eight more. Out with it!”

I hesitated, wondering just what kind of sin it was to be giving the most notorious woman in Rome advice about limiting the number of bastards she bore to a pope. “Take a lime and halve it,” I said at last. “Then . . .” I mimed silently.

Noses wrinkled around our little circle. “Sounds uncomfortable,” Pantisilea decreed.

“Neapolitan limes,” I advised. “They’re smaller. More expensive, of course, but you buy the good limes to stuff into a chicken’s cavity, after all. No reason not to stuff your own with quality ingredients.” I shrugged again. “It’s not foolproof, La Turca’s maid said, but I suppose nothing is.”

“Except staying a virgin.” My mistress smiled, cracking the mask still further about her eyes. Giulia Farnese could not go two sentences without smiling. “And who wants to do that?”

“Not me,” about four maids said in unison, and everyone went off into gales of giggles.

Not me either
, I thought. I’d not been virgin since I was seventeen and a handsome apprentice of my father’s managed to addle my wits in a storeroom behind a stack of crated oranges. It had all been rather sweaty and rushed, but a few times later I was starting to see the point of it all. Unfortunately that was when the apprentice boasted to the wrong friend, who in turn let it slip to my father, and then there was a great deal of shouting, and benches were thrown, not to mention oranges. When all was settled and done, my foolish lover found himself dismissed and packed off home, and I got a sound lashing as my father roared on about how difficult it would be to find me a husband who would take a soiled bride. I’d castigated myself a good deal at the time for my shameful lusts, but now I just castigated myself for not choosing a more discreet lover. A busy kitchen was the worst place on earth to keep secrets, and a little pleasant rolling about behind a crate of oranges had been no trade for a lost reputation.

“So—” Madonna Giulia fixed me with a pointed finger, dark eyes merry. “Who gets the benefit of your experience with halved limes, Carmelina? Do you have a sweetheart?”

“Do tell, do tell!” the cry went up.

“Certainly not.” I patted my stiff face. “Surely it’s time to wash this mask off?”

“Don’t be evasive!” Giulia uncurled her baby’s little fist and waved it at me. “Wait, I’ve got it. It’s Leonello, isn’t it?”

I had been reaching for a towel to wipe my face, and I nearly dropped it.
“Leonello?”

“He can’t take his eyes off you, you know. Every time you come into a room, he stares and stares until you leave again.”

Because he’s trying to figure out all my secrets, that’s why.
“Not Leonello,” I said instead, and began to scrub at my cheeks with the towel. “I can’t stand the little wretch.”

“He’s
stunted
.” One of the other maids wrinkled her nose. “Besides that, he’s fair cruel. Said I had a nose like a hook, and made up jokes about it for days until all the stewards were laughing too. All because I asked if dwarves were really born with hair all over them like bear cubs—”

“And he’s got all those knives. Stab you as soon as bed you, I should think.”

“But he’s clever,” Giulia overrode them. “And funny; he can always make me laugh—”

“I’ve had him,” said Pantisilea. “He’s short, but that doesn’t make such a difference, lying down . . .”

“Better you than me,” I said. I wouldn’t take Leonello in a thousand years.

“It’s that good-looking cousin of yours, isn’t it?” another maid grinned, cracking her own drying mask. “You’re bedding Maestro Santini on the sly, admit it—”

“Certainly not.” Tell these laughing maids anything, and even if they did inhabit a different world from the scullions and undercooks, there still wouldn’t be a scullion or undercook who didn’t know everything by next week. I wasn’t about to tell a soul here that I’d begun keeping a prudent store of those Neapolitan limes on hand in my chamber, for those rare occasions when Marco won at the dicing table instead of losing, and came home victorious and amorous. Those were the nights he nuzzled at my ears and told me I was pretty even if I was as tall as a man, though I suspected most of my appeal came from the fact that I couldn’t pester him for marriage as any of the other maids would have done. I’d been putting off his attentions since I came to Rome, as was prudent, but I’d needed a favor out of him if I wanted to keep Bartolomeo on as apprentice . . . and after Marco tumbled me back onto my bedclothes like an eager hound, beaming from a recent win at the
zara
board, it had been easy to pick my moment and murmur just how we could slide a new apprentice past Madonna Adriana without the fees. And after that, if Marco came prowling at my door every now and then when he felt like a bit of a romp, at least he understood the need to do it discreetly.

“No pinching my bum or sneaking a kiss where anyone can see us,” I’d said sternly that first time, putting my nose right up against Marco’s on the pillow. “I’ll get nothing but snickers and sly jokes from the scullions if they think I’m giving it to the
maestro di cucina
. And if the maids find out, they’ll think you’re only keeping me on for a whore, and then won’t I have a time getting any work out of them.”

“Sworn to secrecy,” my cousin grinned. There would be no such condemnation for him, of course, if he were to be caught bedding me—an unlimited supply of pretty maidservants was one of the great privileges of a
maestro di cucina
’s position. But that was the way of the world, and there was no sense wailing about it, so at that point I’d just yanked my shift over my head and enjoyed myself. It counted for sin, I suppose. Certainly the priests would all say so. But Marco had done me a favor in taking me in, not to mention fudging the kitchen accounts for Madonna Adriana so it looked like Bartolomeo’s apprentice fees had been paid. It seemed wiser to keep him happy when he wanted a bedmate. Not to mention the fact that he was clean and sweet-smelling between the sheets, and more than pleasant to look on without his clothes.

That
, I suppose, was the sinful part. Though when you’ve robbed a church, fornication seems like fairly small change as far as sins go.

One of the maids crowed, pouncing on my small involuntary smile. “It
is
Maestro Santini you’re bedding, Carmelina, admit it! I don’t blame you; he’s near as handsome as Cesare Borgia—”

“I’ve had him,” Pantisilea volunteered.

“Maestro Santini, or Cesare Borgia?” I asked. Anything to divert the subject away from me and my possible bedmates.

“Both. And I can tell you, Marco Santini’s handsome, but the
Archbishop
 . . .” Sighs all around from the maids. We were all mad for the young Archbishop of Valencia—I had to admit, even my sensible knees had buckled when he aimed that one passing grin at me, up on the loggia when I’d gone to shout at Leonello. I felt a moment’s envy of Pantisilea, but Madonna Giulia was shaking her head.

“I don’t see what all of you see in Cesare,” she scolded us. “Really, all your heads turned by a handsome face! He’s cold as a corpse, you know. After I saw how he reacted to that nasty business—”

“What nasty business?” I couldn’t help asking.

“That poor girl in the Borgo who was found killed?” Madonna Giulia grimaced. “The one found staked down, with a blade through each hand.”

We all shivered and crossed ourselves.

“Now, I heard this direct from the Holy Father—I wouldn’t be telling you, but it’s going to be all over the city in a week anyway.” Madonna Giulia snuggled baby Laura closer, as though suddenly feeling a draft. “His Holiness had the papal guards clear that poor girl’s body away, since there was so much uproar. And one of the blades through the girl’s hand was just a common kitchen knife, but the other was a good dagger. Toledo steel, with a filigreed hilt and a sapphire the size of a pigeon’s egg.”

We looked at each other, blank. There wasn’t a one of us who didn’t know that dagger by sight. We’d all seen it with our own eyes, resting on Cesaer Borgia’s hip whenever he abandoned his ecclesiastical robes.

The day was still warm, but suddenly I felt chilled.

Little Pia said what we were all thinking. “Well, surely it doesn’t mean . . .”

“Of course not.” Madonna Giulia waved the uneasy unspoken suggestion away. “Someone stole it to slander him; I don’t doubt that. But it was his
reaction
to it all. Any man would be furious, wouldn’t he, if he thought someone was spreading such foul implications? The Holy Father was certainly angry—he doesn’t care if anyone starts nasty rumors about him, but let anyone make an attack against his children—” Giulia shook her head. “Even
Juan
was raging up and down, swearing vengeance on whoever had done it. But Cesare, he just smiled and put the dagger back at his belt. And when Juan asked him how he’d lost it, you know that snide way he likes jabbing people, Cesare just said, ‘I didn’t lose it.’”

We looked at each other again. The cold little chill spread to my stomach and sank in. I could just hear the young Archbishop’s cool voice, the way it never held any emotion at all.

“So what kind of man doesn’t care if the whole city thinks he’s a murderer?” Madonna Giulia asked. “His Holiness wanted to cover everything up—as much as you can ever cover up something like this, anyway—and Cesare just said, ‘Let them talk.’ It’ll be all over Rome in a week, the news about the dagger, and Cesare doesn’t care. He’s handsome,” Giulia concluded, “but he’s a
snake
.”

“About as limber as one,” Pantisilea agreed. “I don’t mind telling you, he likes some
very
odd things. Between the sheets, I mean. Not that there were sheets involved, with me. It wasn’t anything I’d really want to do again, truth be told. You can’t imagine the places I got bruised—”

Giulia covered her ears. “No more details, please!”

“I wouldn’t mind a few more,” one of the other maids said, and the odd uneasy silence cracked. Guilty giggles rippled through our little circle as the chatter began to flow again. Madonna Giulia tilted her head back, damp blond hair sliding on its wide hat brim, and began wiping the flaking mask off her face with a damp cloth.

“Let’s get ourselves prettified for Viterbo, shall we?” she suggested in a brighter voice. “It’s just the place for a romantic tryst—love among the summer breezes, with the scent of flowers everywhere! Pia, you need a good thyme and fig mask to cool that sunburn you got at the market . . . Pantisilea, the mint and rosemary bleaching paste if you really want to whiten up those teeth against that lovely olive complexion . . . and Carmelina, cucumber-parsley milk with a hot towel compress, infallible for soft skin . . .”