The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (37 page)

He wasn’t the only one. By the time the wedding approached on leaden wings, my nose was huge and red and running. Even before the Bishop made us stand about outside in the rain while he droned a blessing and sprinkled us with holy water—as if there weren’t enough water already!—I was sneezing more or less constantly into my brocade sleeve.
Giulia la Bella
, I thought morosely as the wedding guests trailed muddy-hemmed and determinedly cheerful into the barren chapel of the Castel Nuovo. I didn’t feel at all like the Venus of the Vatican today. I felt damp, draggled, spotty, and sniveling; not at all at my best in a rose-pink dress whose hem I had
not
been able to keep out of the mud. And it was a morning I would have liked to shine, because Sancha of Aragon was undeniably a beauty.

She was also, unless I was very much mistaken, trouble. A dark-haired, olive-skinned, blue-eyed little thing of sixteen, buxom and sashaying in a blue brocade gown, and even the roar of the rain outside couldn’t dampen the bright glances she was casting all through the chapel. She dimpled at the Bishop; she dropped her lashes at Cesare, who stood saturnine and silent in his cardinal reds; she flashed her pearly teeth at my Pope, who looked amused. She didn’t have a glance for poor little Joffre, kneeling at her side before the altar on a golden cushion, pop-eyed and sincere and a good head shorter than she was. A well-behaved boy of twelve years old, good-looking enough with his auburn hair and doublet of slashed velvet, but he looked nervous and twitchy beside his self-possessed bride—beside his brothers and sister too, truth be told. Joffre somehow looked like he’d been made up out of all the leftover bits after inscrutable Cesare and swaggering Juan and charming Lucrezia were finished. Rodrigo wasn’t as fond of Joffre as he was of the others—I remembered what he’d once said, that Joffre perhaps wasn’t of his getting at all. As if it were Joffre’s fault that snippy, long-nosed Vannozza dei Cattanei had a wandering eye!

“Poor Joffre,” I couldn’t help murmuring, and sneezed into my sleeve.

“Yes,” Madonna Adriana agreed unexpectedly at my side, keeping her voice low. “That’s a little harlot if I ever saw one. Let’s hope the help she brings from Naples against the French is worth it.”

Sancha of Aragon cast another sparkling glance up at my Pope as her new title of Princess of Squillace was read out, and bent her head ceremonially to kiss Rodrigo’s shoe. “Leonello,” I whispered to my bodyguard as he craned for a look at the bridal breasts. “No ogling!”

“Tell that to your Pope.” Leonello gave me a grin of pure mockery, eyes bright as glass and just as hard. Leonello had been cooler in my company these past months, sharper-tongued and a little remote. I knew well enough why—he didn’t like the moment of confession he’d let slip when I gave him his new doublet. I hadn’t been fool enough to pity him for the past he’d recounted, but he still resented me. Somehow the secrets he’d let slip were all
my
doing, but wasn’t that always the way of it? Men erred, or thought they erred, and it was always a woman’s fault.

Sancha of Aragon gave a little flounce of her skirts and a few other things as she settled herself again on her golden cushion. The Pope certainly did seem to be appreciating the Neapolitan breasts on such generous display before him! Not just Sancha but all her ladies, and the Roman ladies too were beginning to preen. I gave another forlorn sniffle, wishing the rain hadn’t damped my eyes to watery slits and my kerchief into a sodden ball. By the time the oaths had been recited, the ceremonial sword lowered over the heads of the bride and her little husband, and the guests escorted out of the chapel by spiral staircase into the
sala
above, I would have traded all the pearls in my hair and around my neck for a chance to collapse in a quiet bed and die, or at least let myself dribble and molder unseen. But the Pope’s concubine must be poised and beautiful and sprightly whenever in the public eye, so I gave a valiant sniff of my running nose and bestowed a kiss on Joffre as he descended with his new wife.

He and Sancha trod a graceful
pavane
after the lengthy banquet, Joffre squiring her solemn-faced through the complex passes even though he wasn’t tall enough to lift her in the turns of
la volta
that followed. Cesare Borgia came down to partner his new sister for that, her ladies descending like a swirl of bright blossoms to join them.

“You won’t join in, Giulia?” Rodrigo asked me where I sat nestled in a lake of my own skirts on a stool at his side. “I do like to watch you dance.”

I knew I should try, but I was getting a touch light-headed as well as runny-nosed, and all in all it would be better if the Pope’s mistress didn’t
fall over in front of the whole Neapolitan court like a drunken milkmaid at a harvest dance. “I fear I’m not up to it, Your Holiness,” I said in apology, and gave the best smile I had. But the best I had wasn’t much under watery eyes and a nose red as a pomegranate. Rodrigo looked impatient for a moment—the man who was never ill and never short of energy!—and turned with a shrug to watch the ladies dip and twirl. And I saw how his eyes tracked the buxom figure of Sancha of Aragon, then the slimmer fair-haired figure of goose-necked Caterina Gonzaga, then a pair of dark Neapolitan beauties who giggled and fluttered like peahens in the papal presence . . . then back to Caterina: wife of Count Ottaviano da Montevegio and a noted beauty of the papal court. Pale, beautiful, taller than me and nearly as blond—carrying on like an empress, and giving herself as many airs as the bride. Caterina Gonzaga dipped her head for Rodrigo’s gaze, spinning gracefully to show a flash of ankle, and he grinned.

I felt suddenly cold. Nearly two years now I had kept my Pope’s love. Oh, I wasn’t fool enough to think he was entirely faithful to me. Lusty men like that are never faithful, are they? My mother always said that a straying husband could always be endured with a little extra prayer and a great deal of patience. Although I doubt she had a pope in mind when she recited that particular homily . . . In any case, I knew better than to fuss when Rodrigo strayed now and then with some courtesan at a private party, or some eager beauty who came to his bed on the nights I was indisposed with my monthly courses. But however his flesh sometimes wandered, his eyes never did—his eyes were full of me alone. A year ago he’d have applauded only for me in the dancing, then pulled me onto his knee afterward and whispered that there was no woman in Naples who could match me. A year ago he would not have been watching Caterina Gonzaga incline her queenly head under his hunter’s eye as he politicked with the Neapolitan King and only gave me an absent token smile.

But a year ago I had not yet given him the child he wasn’t sure was his—had not defied him openly in the matter of his daughter’s marriage—didn’t have a red nose and squinchy little eyes . . . I sneezed helplessly into my sleeve again.

“Our Holy Father appears to be enjoying himself,” Leonello observed at my side. I cast him a sharp look and his hazel eyes met mine, penetrating as any of his knives, slicing through to the thoughts I was trying to hide.

“Yes, very much,” I said brightly. “And you, Leonello? Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Tolerably. No one has yet asked me to juggle anything.”

“They wouldn’t dare,” I couldn’t resist saying. “Not the way you look in your new livery.”

He slanted me an irked glance, and I resisted the urge to tell him he should be proud and not irritated. From the embittered son of a harlot and a failed juggler to this cool, hard, handsome little presence in the heart of the papal entourage! But I held my tongue. Whether tall or short, men don’t like getting advice, do they?

Was that how I’d lost Rodrigo?
a little voice in my head wondered.
Telling him I knew better in the matter of Lucrezia’s marriage?

I hadn’t lost Rodrigo. I couldn’t have. Just because his eye was wandering a little tonight—well, why
shouldn’t
it wander? I was hardly an appetizing distraction with my runny nose and watery eyes. Certainly no match for queenly Caterina Gonzaga. Why did she have to be not just taller than me but slimmer?
She
didn’t look like she had to swear off sweets and cheese and wine just to get into her dresses. Oh, I couldn’t bear these effortlessly wand-slim women! Just wait till
she
bore a child or two; then we’d see if she was still inviting Cesare to measure her waist with his hands and casting regal glances over her shoulder to make sure Rodrigo was watching! I sneezed four times in a row, groping blindly for a kerchief.
Ugh, why can’t I just die?
I thought, and chewed morosely on a morsel of Ligurian cheese. I always eat when I’m sick.

More dancing, more music, more of the bawdy jokes that always cropped up at wedding celebrations, especially as the bedding drew closer. I didn’t imagine it would be much of a bedding—Joffre was trying to look lordly, but he flushed redder with every shouted jest, and he looked so very, very young. “Madonna Giulia,” he muttered, retreating from his father’s lewd grin and casual muss of the hair. “What if I don’t know what to do?”

I mopped my nose, looking at my lover’s youngest son. I didn’t know Joffre as I did Lucrezia. Rodrigo never had any time for him, but he had supplied an army of tutors to groom his youngest son for his future role as Borgia princeling and papal pawn, and so Joffre rarely crossed my path in the
palazzo
. But he’d always been a nice little fellow, trailing after Lucrezia and occasionally playing games with my pet goat, and the brown eyes now wide with pleading couldn’t help but touch me. “What do I do?” he whispered again.

“Give her a kiss and tell her she’s beautiful,” I whispered back. “That will please her.”

“Yes, but how else do I please her? Cesare offered to get me a whore first to teach me a few things, but I was too embarrassed to say yes. And Juan wrote me pages of advice all the way from Spain and I don’t understand half of it—”

“Your brothers mean well, but they’re idiots.” Holy Virgin, who knew what ghastly information Juan had seen fit to pass on for the occasion of his little brother’s wedding night? Who knew Juan could even
write
? I reached out and smoothed Joffre’s hair. Lucrezia’s youth might have spared her the bedding ceremony, but a boy would not be so lucky. Any Borgia son would be expected to prove his virility, regardless of age—no doubt Juan and Cesare had tumbled their first girls while still in the cradle!

“Don’t listen to what anyone says,” I told Joffre firmly. “I would advise that you and your wife just get a good night’s sleep. It’s been a long, trying day, after all”—I paused to sneeze twice—“and there’s more than enough time in the future for all the rest of it.”

“There is?”

“Madonna Giulia!” Caterina Gonzaga paused before me as Sancha of Aragon disappeared into the giggling throng of her Neapolitan ladies, and the Pope descended laughing from his ornate chair to escort her upstairs and give his blessing for the bedding. “Surely you will join us in disrobing the bride?” Caterina cooed in her Lombard accent, smoothing a hand over that little waist again.

Only if I could bed you down in a coffin afterward
, I thought, and gave her my sweetest smile in demurral, somewhat offset by the sneezing fit that followed it. Even if Sancha of Aragon looked like a trollop, she didn’t deserve me sneezing all over her on her wedding night. I was hoping Rodrigo would stay with me—surely he could see how wretched I was feeling?—but he and the King of Naples were already ascending the stairs behind the giggling ladies, heads together as they traded wolfish grins. I gave Joffre a reassuring little wave of my sodden kerchief, and he was borne off in a tide of lewd well-wishers.

“Here you are, my dear.” I looked through my itchy, watering eyes at the square figure of Adriana da Mila, settling down beside me with, may the Holy Virgin love her forever, a
clean
kerchief in hand. “Give that nose a good blow before they get back.”

I honked gratefully. Below our dais the
sala
had mostly emptied, the courtiers gone streaming upstairs to bed the bridal couple. Only a few remained behind: couples seizing the privacy for a little passionate kissing and groping in the corners, one or two younger men unconscious from too much wine and slumped over the tables with their heads resting in a plate of sliced melon or a stack of honeyed pastry twists. A sharp-eyed steward clapped his hands, evaluating the mess of discarded cups and picked-over platters, and servants began trooping in for a little hasty tidying before the wedding guests reappeared for the revelry, the dancing, the drinking that was sure to last until dawn. I didn’t think I could make it till midnight, much less dawn.

“Perhaps a bit of powder for that nose, too.” Madonna Adriana surveyed me. “To be blunt, child, you aren’t looking your best.”

“Try me tomorrow.” I honked my nose again like a goose. “I’ll be dead by then. You can lay me out all pale and pretty in my coffin, and powder my nose all you like.”

“Perhaps a visit to the country would do you good. Get away from Rome for a few weeks; avoid the heat. And there’s no doubt His Holiness can be exhausting to entertain. Perhaps a short break from his attentions as well?”

I looked up from the kerchief at my mother-in-law. She sat calm and ringletted in an emerald-green dress, be-ringed hands resting in her lap, a serene half smile on her face. I looked down, folding her scented kerchief into precise squares and motioning Leonello back out of earshot. I didn’t want his caustic commentary on
this
conversation.

“Why, mother-in-law,” I said at last. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“On the contrary.” She tilted her head. “My cousin’s eye is wandering, you know.”

I averted my gaze, trying to look stony. It’s difficult to look stony with watery eyes. “It is not.
He
is not.”

“Yes, he is. I know the signs.”

“And I suppose that makes you happy!”

“Why on earth would you think that, Giulia Farnese?”

I aped her tones. “Because you’ve never liked me, Adriana da Mila.” We’d settled into a wary coexistence, my mother-in-law and I. She was too cushioned in complacency to quarrel with me, but I’d never exactly warmed to her for all our mundane household chatter over the past two years. I couldn’t quite forget how she’d acted the pander for her son’s bride the morning after the wedding.