The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (43 page)

Sandro stood at my side during the requiem, splendid and remote in his scarlet regalia. Under cover of his red sleeve, his fingers twined with mine. “Cardinal Farnese,” I heard someone snigger during the Kyrie. “He’s a petticoat cardinal if I ever saw one—only got the red hat for being the Borgia brother-in-law!”

Sandro whipped round with a black glare. “Hold your filthy tongue!” he snapped, and the priest broke off mid-word, and there was a moment of frozen silence in which people stared at us. I looked at the floor, but Sandro just leveled another glare. “
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison . . .
” the priest resumed, but not before I heard soft giggles behind us.

The rest of the requiem was just a fog. I heard none of it, just stared at the altar. The church itself was the same as it ever was: the cross-eyed Madonna before whom I’d wriggled in childhood agonies of boredom during Mass; the steps I’d skipped up weekly to make confession; the shrine before which a half-drunk lay friar had tried to grope me when I was twelve. The churchyard was the same, the dry summer grass seeded with tiny yellow flowers. At Angelo’s grave site, I stooped to pluck one of those flowers and stood twirling it between my fingers, watching dry-eyed as his coffin was lowered into the earth. His wife sobbed beside me—had she loved him so much? I’d had no idea. How strange, to have a husband you loved, who maybe even loved you in return.

“Whore,” someone whispered in the crowd behind me.

“Will you go back to Rome?” Sandro asked me the day after we put our brother into the ground. He’d found me up on the tallest of the turrets, looking out over the rippling blue expanse of lake. I’d spent so many hours up here with my battered crownless straw hat, sunning my hair. I couldn’t afford expensive saffron and cinnabar rinses back then. Sandro leaned an elbow on the stone parapet, looking down at me.

“I
should
go back to Rome.” I’d already had a letter from Madonna Adriana, warning that Rodrigo was furious with me. Not that I’d flown to my brother’s deathbed, but that I’d done so without permission and without considering the dangers of the advancing French army. I hadn’t really given the French a thought. When you get news of a deathbed in the family, even the deathbed of a brother you’ve been on rather cold terms with, you
go
. Rodrigo wouldn’t have given a thought to the French either, if he had gotten news that one of his precious children was deathly ill—yet he was angry with me for doing exactly the same thing! I ask you. “I don’t want to go back to Rome just yet,” I said.

“Good.” Sandro ruffled my hair. “I hate seeing you hop just because that mitered old goat bleats.”

I gave my brother a look. “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t call the Holy Father names behind his back.”

“I certainly can’t say them to his
face
. I find I can’t dislike him enough for that.
But
”—and a hint of relish entered Sandro’s voice—“I quite enjoy the thought of our Holy Father fuming away like a spurned schoolboy as you skip off for a holiday.”

“A family funeral? Hardly a holiday, Sandro!”

“—like Menelaus fuming as Helen skips off to Troy with Paris—”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Sandro had been so drawn and sad since my arrival, and I was glad to see a little of his old sparkle returning. He wasn’t meant for sadness.

“So you’ll be staying awhile?” Sandro pressed. “I thought I’d stay myself; shirk my duties in Rome for a bit. Everyone thinks I’m a prancing clown as a cardinal anyway; might as well live up to the reputation.”

“You
are
a prancing clown,” I told my brother. “You’re the worst cardinal in Christendom.”

“I follow my Holy Father’s example in all things,” Sandro said piously. “Down to the fine
palazzo
and the bastard babies. You know Silvia’s pregnant? My very first bastard; such a milestone!”

“Oh, Sandro.”

“She craves oysters all the time,” he said airily. “Did you crave oysters? They’re very expensive. Maybe she just says she craves them, because she knows I’ll buy her anything in this state. She wants a boy—she’s already planning I’ll be Pope someday; then she’ll be La Bella of Rome and our son will marry a Spanish princess or a Neapolitan duchess just like the Borgia sons. I haven’t the heart to tell her that your pet goat is more likely to be elected Pope than me.”

“What you should tell her is that it’s not all jewels and glamour being La Bella.” I had found spittle on my hem after Angelo’s funeral; men had leered at me while their wives dragged at their elbows to pull them away; and several friends I’d giggled with in childhood—girls I’d whispered and dreamed with, bouncing on the way to confession as we planned the dresses we would someday have and the handsome husbands we would marry—had looked right through me when I greeted them. In Rome I was a harlot, but I was at least an important one, someone of whom favors were begged and influence courted. Here in dusty little Capodimonte a straying wife was just a whore, no matter how powerful the man with whom she strayed. No wonder none of my now-respectably-married friends wanted to know me anymore.

“
Dio
,” Leonello said dryly after a fortnight’s stay. “I thought Pesaro was dull and backward. Now it seems a metropolis of enlightenment and culture.” The servants all seemed to think my bodyguard was the Devil himself, from the way they forked their fingers in the sign of the evil eye every time he strode past. He didn’t help matters by crossing his eyes at them and hissing like a serpent in response. My sister thought Leonello a freakish little man and far too rude, but Sandro liked him. They played
primiera
in the evenings, or they did before Sandro’s duties as cardinal finally recalled him to Rome, and usually Leonello won.

I had letters. From Lucrezia, complaining that her father was blaming her for not keeping me in Pesaro, and really why did she deserve to be dragged into this? From Madonna Adriana, saying the usual, or so I assumed—I tore her letters up unread. From Orsino—he was hunting; he was wel; was I wel; and since I was so close by, would I consider visitting him in Basanelo before he had to leave with his troops to march against the Frenche? And of course, I had letters from my Pope.

“Not such a good letter as the last one, Madonna Giulia?” Carmelina asked me, bringing a plate of damson-stuffed
focaccia
roses to the rooftop where I sat looking out over the lake again and bouncing Laura in my lap, because I didn’t feel like reading Rodrigo’s furious scrawl.

“Not so good, no,” I answered. “It’s always a bad sign in his letters when he starts cursing in Spanish, Italian,
and
Latin.”

Carmelina eyed me curiously. A month ago I’d have been frantic at the thought that Rodrigo was angry with me—I
had
been frantic. Now I couldn’t seem to care. I tossed the letter aside, holding Laura up so she could see the blue glitter of the lake below. “That’s Lake Bolsena,
Lauretta mia
, isn’t it beautiful? I’ll take you swimming in it tomorrow—”

“How long will we be staying, Madonna Giulia?” Carmelina asked me, and I heard the real question.
Madonna Giulia,
why
are we staying?
In Pesaro, Leonello had asked me a question about my Pope.
Why do you fight to keep him?
I hadn’t known how to answer that, but here I’d had time to think the matter through. “You know something, Carmelina?” I mused. “All my life, I’ve been trained to please. Please my mother; please the priests; please my husband.” Only that hadn’t worked out, so I’d set myself to pleasing Rodrigo Borgia instead. It had never even occurred to me to stop trying, when his eye began to wander. And where had all that eager-to-please anxiety gotten me? Holding my breath, worrying that I might anger him if I dared to side with his daughter or go to my own brother’s funeral!

“I’m tired of trying to please everyone else,” I announced. “I’m going to please myself for once, and I don’t
care
if I anger His Holiness or my mother-in-law. I want some time to myself, time to play with Laura, and sit in the sun, and think and sleep and eat. So I’ll take another plate of those
focaccia
things, Carmelina, and we’re going to stay in Capodimonte until I feel like leaving.”

She grinned at me. “As you please, Madonna Giulia.”

A month—six weeks. Carmelina invaded the kitchens like a French army, and the food improved markedly. Pantisilea was so busy bed-hopping through the local farmers, she was looking quite hollow-eyed. Gerolama and her husband went back to Florence. “Not that Florence is a pleasant place these days,” she sniffed. “That mad monk Savonarola has everyone stirred up! Not that he isn’t right about most things, there’s no doubting the world is a wicked greedy place, but now he wants us all to burn our good furniture and our nice clothes and live like mendicants!”

“Absurd,” I agreed. But mad Dominican monks seemed as remote as anything else. I couldn’t even get interested in the advancing French, though I’d heard dark whispers at Mass that they’d raped and murdered their way as far south as Parma, or maybe it was Bologna. Nothing would change Capodimonte, not even the French. Nothing ever changed here. Once I had found that maddening, but now I was not so sure.

I had another letter from my husband. I had another letter from my Pope, who must have heard about Orsino’s letters, because Rodrigo went from irritated to enraged in one short page. He began
Thankless, treacherous Giulia!
and went swiftly downhill from there.

You’ll lose him,
warned the part of me that still worried about placating him.
You’ll lose him, and then where will you be?

Here,
I thought. Because if Rodrigo tired of me, this life could be mine again, or one very much like it, with my husband in Carbognano or Bassanello. And even though I’d dreamed as a girl of a life of luxury in the Holy City, now I found I had been missing this old life. I liked eating quiet meals with my family rather than a
palazzo
full of ambitious courtiers and slippery ambassadors and scheming cardinals. I liked passing my visiting hours not with petitioners angling for favors, but with Angelo’s widow, whom I was trying to dissuade from her notion of retiring to a nunnery; with Sandro and his pert little mistress Silvia, whom he had begun bringing with him on his visits from Rome whenever he felt like shirking his ecclesiastical duties. And more than anything, I liked spending my days with Laura. All day, every day; combing her hair and taking her swimming and teaching her her first prayers now that she was old enough to speak proper words. Mothering her myself, instead of passing her off to her nurse for hours because I was required for yet another banquet at the Vatican.

I liked being ordinary. Giulia Farnese again, not Giulia la Bella, not the Venus of the Vatican, not the Bride of Christ.

Summer fell toward autumn. My Pope was well beyond angry and approaching incensed—“He ordered me back here to retrieve you on pain of excommunication,” Sandro said with a rueful wince on his next visit.

“Which of us is to be excommunicated?”

“Both, if we don’t present ourselves to the Holy Father posthaste. I’ve been ordered to retrieve you.” Sandro eyed me thoughtfully. “A little holiday is one thing,
sorellina
, but what are you up to?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. I didn’t seem to know much of anything anymore, except that I didn’t feel like jumping to Rodrigo’s side yet, just because he shouted. I did miss him—I ached sometimes at night for his warm arms around me in my big cold bed. But I still wanted time to
think
. I walked beside the lake with Laura, nodding to the fishermen, until they began to nod back shyly as they touched their caps. I took up my mother’s old habit of collecting food and secondhand clothes and taking them for distribution to the beggars who huddled outside the church. The church itself was in bad need of repairs—“one more stormy season,” the priest admitted, “and that tower will come through the roof!” I found myself looking at plans, speaking to stonemasons, scribbling estimates, browbeating the funds out of my brother for repairs. There was the yearly summer festival by the lake—our family had always presided over the festival, and I took my place to help bestow the prizes. When I gave out the purse for the largest catch of the season, one or two of the other women smiled at me.

“You can’t keep lingering like this,” Gerolama warned me on her next visit. “The Holy Father won’t hang after you forever!”

“I thought you’d be pleased,” I said tartly. “Aren’t you the one who always said I was blotting the family honor by being the Pope’s whore?”

Her eyes flickered.

“Besides,” I added, “I want to see the church tower shored up. It’s such a pleasure to have a project that isn’t an altar cloth. Or achieving the perfectly sun-bleached head of hair.” I felt . . . capable. Not just pretty. Good for something besides being decorative. Even more so the following day, when I heard a shriek and a string of Venetian curses from the kitchens, and ran in to find my imperturbable Carmelina crouched on top of the trestle table to get away from the serpent slithering idly over the flagstones. “It’s just a water snake,” I laughed. “They’re always getting into the house from the lake. It’s nothing to be afraid of!”

“Kill it, Bartolomeo!” Carmelina yelled, ignoring me.

“Are you insane?” Her red-haired apprentice scrambled right up onto the table beside her, clutching the little wooden cross around his neck. “I hate snakes!”

“It’s harmless,” I scolded. “You two! Not fazed at all when it comes to turning those disgusting Tiber eels into stew, but you’re afraid of a
water snake
?” I forked the hissing thing up with a pair of Carmelina’s tongs and tossed it out into the courtyard, only to find my cook staring at me.

“Santa Marta,” she muttered, scrambling down. “Giulia
la Bella
? It should be Giulia
la Coraggiosa
.”

Giulia the Brave? I liked that.

Perhaps it was brave of me to write to my papal lover and tell him I was thinking of paying a visit to Orsino before I came back to Rome. “He’s written to request that I come see him before he departs Bassanello with his troops.” Once such a letter would have taken me hours to write; I would have agonized over every word, and whether it would upset Rodrigo or not. Now I just wrote the bald truth, because I didn’t feel like lying. Though I did feel a little guilty when I got his reply, because I think my honesty nearly killed my Pope. I could hear the apoplectic roar all the way from Rome.