The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (36 page)

“Dead.” I slipped the shortest blade into its new home at my wrist cuff. “Some fifteen years dead.”

“What happened?”

“What happens to many of us.” I pushed another knife into its place in my new boot top. “Three drunks at a wine shop. They thought it amusing to kick him about . . . one of them must have kicked too hard. He was spitting blood from inside by the time I returned from my lessons.”

“Did you ever find them? The men who . . .”

“I vowed to find them, certainly. Find them and wreak bloody vengeance, oh yes. But how could I find them when all I had for a clue was ‘three drunks’? Not that it stopped me from trying.” I stretched my lips in a smile. “I was a stupid boy.” Silence stretched between us, then, and I did not want to look at Madonna Giulia.
If you say you are sorry for me, I will choke you
, I thought.
Wrap these new-gloved hands around your pretty throat and squeeze every drop of pity out of you.

But La Bella didn’t say anything. She only looked at me, still on her knees beside my pile of clothing so she had to tilt her head back at me as though I were a man of normal height. Her big dark eyes brimmed silence, looking not only at but through me as she passed me the last of my blades, and I still wanted to choke her. I wanted to be cruel, call her a brainless whore and make her weep.
How dare you understand me. How dare you wheedle my secrets out of me.
But wasn’t that what the best whores did, the ones who understood men to the tips of their intuitive fingers? The best whores weren’t brainless at all, and neither was she.

I swallowed my cruelty, settling my last dagger into its tab on my new belt, and looked into the mirror the maids had left propped up before me. I saw a dark man, a dangerous man, even a handsome man. A man at whom larger men would laugh at their peril.

“Better take the mirror away,” I said. “I’m in danger of growing as vain as you, Madonna Giulia.”

“I pray I have not offended you, Messer Leonello,” she said quietly.

“On the contrary, my dear lady.” I turned and gave a faultless, empty bow over her hand. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Thankless and perfidious Giulia!

—EXCERPT OF A LETTER FROM RODRIGO BORGIA TO GIULIA FARNESE

Giulia

I
t was always a bad sign when Rodrigo lost his temper without dropping the papal
We
.

“All Christendom bows before Us, and We can’t command obedience from one witless harlot?” he roared. “As if the French aren’t enough trouble!”

“I am sorry as always if I have offended Your Holiness,” I murmured, looking down at my folded hands.

“
Offended Us?
” he shouted, storming up and down as though the rage were too great to be contained by stillness.
“You foolish, feckless, half-witted girl, you’ve destroyed everything!”

I hadn’t waited this time for Madonna Adriana or some other helpful informant to tell my Pope that his daughter and her husband had consummated their marriage. I had gone direct from bidding Lord Sforza good-bye, watching him give Lucrezia’s hand a squeeze from the height of his horse as she unashamedly held her face up in the courtyard for a farewell kiss, and sat down to write Rodrigo myself. And when I had the news he had returned to Rome a week later, I oiled and scented every inch of my skin, looped my throat with the huge teardrop pearl that had been his first gift, laced myself into my new lavender silk with the silver brocade insets, left my hair loose and rolling to my feet the way he liked it, and waited. By the time His Holiness Pope Alexander VI came storming into my
sala
at the Palazzo Santa Maria, his face was so dark with fury against his white robes that he could have been a Moor. My maids were fleeing for the door before the first furious Spanish roars erupted all over me like a fountain of scalding hot water.

“Lucrezia is a woman grown,” I said when my Pope paused for breath. “Old enough to take up her duties as a wife. As you yourself wrote, signed, and had witnessed in her marriage contract.”

“Don’t play notary, Giulia Farnese,” he snapped, still pacing the length of my
sala
. One of the maids had dropped the shift she was mending as she fled the room; he kicked it furiously out of the way. “You knew Our wishes in the matter. She was to remain virgin, and that Sforza lout was to keep his hands off!”

“I thought of Your Holiness’s alliance with the Sforza and Milan.” I kept my tone to a submissive murmur; soothing, caressing. “Lord Sforza had begun to believe you meant to cast him off—”

“We were damned well considering it! Count of Pesaro, hah. He’s a failed
condottiere
and a provincial puppet, and he thinks he’s worthy of a pope’s daughter?” Rodrigo’s papal ring flashed as he drove one fist against his other palm. “I bought a royal match each for Juan and Joffre; Lucrezia deserves no less!”

“. . . So Your Holiness
does
mean to annul the marriage?”

“We can hardly do so now,” he snarled at me. “Not with the marriage consummated! You air-brained fool, meddling in Our politics—”

“Cesare was there as well,” I couldn’t help pointing out, trying not to sound exasperated. “He knew your wishes when it came to Lucrezia’s marriage. Why aren’t you shouting at
him
for not stopping Lord Sforza?” Really, men. Lucrezia’s duenna and her big brother at hand to watch over her, and her misbehavior was still all
my
fault? I ask you.

“Cesare will always take Lucrezia’s side over Ours,” Rodrigo snapped. “We thought We could at least count on you to follow Our wishes!”

He went ranting at me again, and I cast my lashes down. A touch of the penitent wouldn’t hurt: a repentant Magdalene ready to kneel at his feet and press her lips to the papal shoes.

“Lucrezia is happy, Your Holiness,” I ventured as soon as he stopped for a wrathful breath. “So happy. Lord Sforza pleases her, and she pleases him.”

“It is not her business to be happy! She is Our daughter; she will do as she is told!”

“Always.” I cast a glance up through my lashes. “But surely His Holiness is pleased to see her so content in the marriage
you
made for her?”

Not just content, but glowing. Lucrezia had flung ecstatic arms about me the moment the Sforza entourage left the courtyard in its important clatter of hooves. “Thank you,” she had whispered. “I can bear it now, if he has to be gone for a time. I’m not
useless
anymore!” She had spent the past weeks humming all over the
palazzo
, stitching with great wifely industry on an embroidered shirt that she meant to give her husband on his next visit. “Husbands like presents from their wife’s own hands,” she told me with a sage nod, and I’d been careful not to smile.

Lucrezia’s father was not smiling either. His dusky face darkened even further, and his eyes narrowed to folds at the corners in a way that prickled me.

“You are Our concubine, Giulia Farnese.” His voice dropped from its bull roar to a cold levy of sentence. “Not Our councilor, not Our ambassador, not Our adviser. And certainly not the mother of Our daughter Lucrezia. Or of any other child of Ours.”

That stabbed me. Tears pricked my eyes, but I bit fiercely on the inside of my cheek. I would
not
cry before him; I would
not
.

“I am none of those things, Your Holiness,” I managed to say, looking up at him with a steady gaze. “Unlike your ambassadors and your councilors and your advisers, I care only for your happiness. Your happiness, and that of your family.”

“That is precious little consolation.” He clipped off the words. “You disappoint me, Giulia.”

At least I disappointed
him
, not Us. “It pains me to think so.” I stretched out a hand, touching the back of his knuckles, but he brushed me aside.

“I have a great deal of business to attend to.” Turning away. “Do not look for me tonight.”

I was
not
going to stand by for a fortnight this time, waiting and hoping for him to get over his temper as I had when we quarreled over Laura and Orsino. I caught hold of his embroidered sleeve, halting him. “Surely it is part of the Holy Father’s duties to punish transgressors?”

“Yes.” Impatiently, he shook at my grip.

“Then punish me.” I sank to my knees before him, allowing my skirts to pool around me. “I am in error, Your Holiness, and I require penance. Punish me for my wrongdoing.”

He stopped, looking down at me. I released his sleeve and bowed my head until my hair flooded forward over his feet: a penitent Magdalene in truth, kneeling at the feet of Christ. All the Magdalenes ever depicted in paint have wonderful hair, don’t they? Penitence just doesn’t look as picturesque without a good flood of hair. “Forgive me, Father,” I whispered. “For I have sinned.”

He was silent. But he did not move either, and I reached slowly, oh so slowly, for his hand. I brought it to my lips, allowing my breath to whisper across his fingertips, and kissed his ring. “Punish me,” I whispered, and through my veil of hair I cast him a slow, burning glance.

His hand descended on my head, the papal benediction I had seen him bestow hundreds of times. But his hand wound through my hair, jerking me to my feet with a painful yank. “You deserve it,” he whispered.

“I do,” I whispered back, and kissed him with my teeth. He caught me up in an embrace so hard it hurt, tossing me down on the satin-covered daybed, and so much for my new lavender gown with the silver brocade insets because it came off me with a great rip of expensive silk. I wrapped my arms around him, my knees, and I gasped quietly as his mouth left rough marks on my shoulders.

“Minx,” he muttered with an angry, unwilling chuff of laughter against my breast. “Meddling minx—”

“Then punish me for my meddling,” I whispered, setting my teeth into the lobe of his ear, raking his back with my nails, and he filled me with a groan that was half need and half fury.

“Goodness,” I said afterward, curling against him. “I should anger you more often, Your Holiness.” He had bent his head to my breasts and used his teeth until I cried out, not precisely from pain. My skin still tingled. “I do believe I like your kind of punishment.”

He gave a
hmph
at that, a glint still showing dangerous in his eye, but he pulled my head down against his shoulder. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Giulia Farnese.”

“Then I shall endeavor to give you more for your trouble.”

“More?” He cocked a heavy dark brow. “More what?”

“I don’t know,” I said demurely. “I shall have to put my mind to it.”

He laughed again, his old laugh with its thread of amusement at the world’s follies. “My Lucrezia,” he asked, “is she truly so happy?”

“She is.”

“She’s Sforza’s wife,” he grumbled, “but she is my daughter first!”

“She’ll always be your daughter first. She loves you. But she will come to love her husband, too—you will have to share her.”

“I don’t like to share,
mi perla
. You should know that.” He tweaked my breast, more fiercely than usual, but my heart warmed. Lucrezia was happy, and I was still her father’s pearl. As long as I was that, all was forgiven.

But was it?

* * *

M
y father seems irritable,” Lucrezia complained after the year turned. “Do you think he’s irritable?”

“This business with the French has him worried,” I said lightly.

“Oh, the French.” Lucrezia dismissed the French with a toss of her head, holding up the shirt she was still embroidering for her lord of Pesaro. It would be done long before he came to collect it; he was still with his soldiers, scrambling to assemble their pay. At least he found time to write to his wife now. Lucrezia was forever rhapsodizing over the letters, reading bits aloud so I could marvel at her lord’s perspicacity, his turn of phrase, his unsophisticated bluntness that was really so much more pleasing than the polished empty compliments of courtiers. “I don’t
want
the French to invade. Giovanni will never be able to take me back to Pesaro if he has to fight instead!”

“Perhaps it won’t come to that.” Though most of us knew it would. Old King Ferrente of Naples had died, mourned by no one—he had a nasty habit of keeping his enemies in cages and strolling among them like exhibits at a menagerie, or so I heard, which was not precisely a reassuring habit in a king. But mourned or not, he was gone and his throne vacant; my Pope had passed a few weeks in restless indecision and then bestowed the Neapolitan crown not on the French king but on King Ferrente’s son. France, we heard, was Not Pleased.

Still, I did not think it the only reason His Holiness was so irked lately. Or perhaps
irked
was not the word.

Distant? Well, no. Not with Lucrezia; he could never manage to stay angry with her for long. Not with Cesare, who brushed off his father’s displeasure and went on filling his duties as the Pope’s clerical deputy with panache. Not with Juan, who had begun sending petulant letters from Spain about when he would be allowed home; not to little Joffre . . .

Maybe just distant to me.

“If I can’t go to Pesaro yet, then I wish Father would let me go to Joffre’s wedding,” Lucrezia fretted, yanking on her tangled embroidery thread. “Everyone will be there!” My Pope was to crown the new King of Naples in the Castel Nuovo, and in case the Neapolitans had any ideas about backing away from the papal alliance once they had what they wanted, the wedding of the Pope’s son to the new King’s bastard daughter was to commence immediately afterward.

“Your father doesn’t want you traveling as far as Naples.”

“You’re going,
and
Madonna Adriana.” Lucrezia pouted briefly.

“I’ll tell you every last detail about Sancha of Aragon and the other Neapolitan ladies,” I promised. “They’ll know they have an impossible task ahead of them if they try to put the two of us in the shade.”

Lucrezia’s pout disappeared in a flash of dimples. “Well, even if Sancha is a beauty, her wedding can’t possibly be as lovely as mine.”

It wasn’t.

* * *

C
an it possibly be me?” I complained to Leonello. “Am I an utter blight on all weddings? Mine was farcical, Lucrezia’s was exhausting, and this one is just dismal.”

“It does seem to have begun under a cloud,” my bodyguard agreed. From the hour my Pope had sent me ahead to Naples with the rest of the entourage, it had poured sheets of rain. Four days and nights traveling, locked in a coach with Leonello and Madonna Adriana and that fussy little German master of ceremonies named Burchard who had been sent to coach the Neapolitans on every nuance of the complicated dual coronation-and-wedding ceremonies. Burchard spent four days moaning that the new King of Naples would be sure to drop the crucifix during the oath or wear the wrong cap with his crown, and Leonello amused himself first by baiting Madonna Adriana until even she lost her placid temper, and then by torturing Burchard by helpfully pointing out all the possible disasters Burchard hadn’t yet thought of. By the time we reached the Castel Nuovo in Naples, I was damp, sneezing, and ready to throttle them all. I’d looked forward to seeing the beauties of Naples—the famous shrines, the bustling harbor, the looming Castel Nuovo with its twin turrets linked by a white marble triumphal arch. But the city was still shrouded in gloom; the flowers in the niches of all those famous shrines had been sodden into gummy piles of stems, and the white marble arch was lost in the mist over my head as our coach rolled muddily into the Castel Nuovo on the fifth day. My Pope, when he arrived, had no time for me in the tense chaos of the approaching alliance against France; the coronation was endless; I could hardly understand the heavy Neapolitan dialect; and poor Burchard was moaning “
Gott im Himmel
” more or less without pause and looking ready to collapse.