The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (53 page)

Well, such girls grew up. And Lucrezia had acted alongside me as her father’s hostess this past winter, finally old enough to take her place as the star of the papal court—perhaps it had gone to her head just a little. It certainly would have gone to mine at her age. I had only twenty-two years to my name, but sometimes I felt distinctly world-weary.

They were talking of that mad priest Fra Savonarola now, the one preaching and frothing at the mouth in Florence and getting everyone to give up their cards and their fine clothes and all their other luxuries. “Only in Florence,” Juan snickered. “That would never work in Rome!”

“My Giulia might give up cards,” Rodrigo said, giving my cheek an affectionate tweak. “But never her pearls!”

“As if anyone would go about in sackcloth just because one sour old man said puffed sleeves were heretical!” Lucrezia laughed.

“I don’t know about heretical,” I said, sipping my sour wine. “But puffed sleeves are certainly unflattering. And really, what’s more heretical than that?”

Sancha plucked at her puffed sleeves, shooting me a nasty look.

“You’d be the only one safe under Savonarola, eh, brother?” Juan cast an eye over the unadorned black Cesare usually wore instead of his red cardinal’s robes. “Maybe you should have been a Dominican! I’ll fight the French and you’ll preach hellfire.”

“Careful, brother,” said Cesare. “Or you might taste it.”

Juan just beckoned in invitation, laughing. The two brothers should have looked alike—both tall and lean, both auburn-haired, both handsome—but they didn’t. Not at all, and Juan’s jittering overbright eyes met Cesare’s still, black-steel gaze like a cross of swords. Sancha looked between them with parted lips, and Lucrezia cast her eyes up to the ceiling and said, “Really, you’re both such
children
!” But I felt a twinge of disquiet.

“You’ll have seen the new frescoes, Juan,” I jumped in brightly. “But surely not examined them yet? Perhaps we can take a closer look, before the
biscotti
are brought in. Your figure shows to great advantage . . .”

I took my wine-cup in one hand, tucking the other into Rodrigo’s broad arm, and we all rose from the
cena
table and flocked to the walls. “I
love
me as Santa Caterina,” Lucrezia sighed over her own beseeching golden-haired figure. “I still have that dress . . .”

“I don’t see why Joffre and I were just figures in the crowd,” Sancha pouted. “I could have been a saint too, you know!”

“Or Salome,” Juan leered. “The Dance of the Seven Veils—we’d get to see what you look like under the last one, new sister—”

“
Juan!
” Joffre burst out, flushing, but Sancha laughed and struck Juan a playful blow with her fan. One of those tiresome girls who is always doing something flirtatious with her fan. How I longed to smack her with it.

“My likeness is to be in the Resurrection fresco,” my Pope was saying, oblivious. “When I have time to sit for it, that is—”

“And you really should
make
the time,” I scolded. “Poor Maestro Pinturicchio has already finished everything else!”

“I don’t like being painted,” Rodrigo complained. “An utter waste of time!”

“But part of a pope’s duty is to be preserved for posterity. You’ll look magnificent, just wait and see.” My Pope was sixty-five now, and he had put on weight now that he had no more time for the hunting and riding that had long kept him lean. But his massive shoulders were imposing as ever, his swarthy hawk-nosed profile just as confident, his vigorous dark hair only threaded with gray. The papal bull at the height of his powers.

“This marks the beginning of everything.” My Pope beamed all about him: his children painted on the wall, his children clustered around him. “
La familia
reunited! Let’s drink to it again.”

His eyes were once more full of emotion, but I saw Cesare still glaring at Juan, saw Lucrezia biting her lips to make them redder, saw Sancha aiming hot looks at both her brothers-in-law, and Joffre stare vengefully at Sancha. I saw it all, and all I could think was a horribly, woefully inadequate
Oh, dear.

But Rodrigo was looking at me expectantly, so I raised my goblet. “
La familia
reunited,” I echoed and drank in a prayer along with the wine.

* * *

S
uch gloom, Giulia!” Rodrigo leaned back on his elbows against the pillows with their papal crest embroidered in gold. “When did you turn doom-cryer?”

“I’m only saying that it’s vastly overrated, having all one’s family together.” I plucked the diamond roses out of my hair and began unlacing my moss-green velvet sleeves. “Holy Virgin knows, it’s a disaster whenever my family are all in the same room. In no time my older brother is telling Sandro he’s a prancing lightweight even if he is Cardinal Farnese now, and my sister is telling me I’m a harlot. And your children are even worse! Juan and Cesare looked ready to draw daggers over the
biscotti.
”

“Brothers compete. It’s what they do.” My Pope waved a hand, dismissive, and his massive papal ring glinted in the soft light from the tapers. “It brings out the best in both of them.”

“I’ll remind you of those words when the blood hits the walls,” I said tartly, letting both my sleeves drop. “Why ever did you settle on Cesare for the church? Anyone can see he’s born to lead armies and swing swords—”

“But he’s cunning, and one needs that in the church.” Rodrigo poured out a cup of wine for the two of us to share. “To survive in the College of Cardinals, you have to be able to outplot a spider.”

“But he’s not suited for priestly vows. Not in the slightest!”

Rodrigo laughed, gesturing around him. “Are any of us?” His private chamber was dim and rich, the walls hung in painted canvas that had been laid over in elaborate gilt designs, the bed elaborately curtained in crimson velvet embroidered with the papal crest again, silver brackets everywhere lighting the room with sweet-smelling beeswax tapers. My Pope used to visit me in my official domicile at the Palazzo Santa Maria, by way of a certain passage so very private that all Rome knew about it. But his wave of protectiveness after my return from the French army still hadn’t abated, and now I slept more than half my nights at the papal apartments here in the Vatican, where Rodrigo had the sheets scattered with petals from my favorite yellow climbing roses, which he claimed looked like me. I looked around at the silks, the rose petals, the gilt and the glass and the velvet, all overlaid by that somber papal crest, and had to concede that it was not really very papal at all.

“Is your conscience bothering you?” Rodrigo made the sign of the cross over my forehead with his thumb. “
Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
There, you are washed clean of all your sins. Come kiss me.”

I smiled and kissed him. The state of my soul had bothered me a great deal when I first became a harlot, a fallen woman, a foul adulteress, take your choice of epithets. But it’s difficult to worry about the fires of hell when I get my divine forgiveness expressly from the Holy Father whenever I want it. I kissed him again, and then turned my back so he could unlace my moss-green velvet gown with the gold vines embroidered about the bosom and hem. “So you chose Cesare for the church—”

Rodrigo groaned, his fingers deft on the laces down my back. “Let it be, Giulia!”

I persisted. “—but why ever did you choose
Juan
for the military life?”

“Because that’s how it always is.” Rodrigo tickled the back of my neck with one of my golden bodice ribbons, making me squeal. “One son for the church, one for the battlefield.”

“You men!” I couldn’t help saying. “Slotting your children into various spaces the moment they’re born, as if they were vases to be put into a niche! Just because you have two sons doesn’t make them automatically fit for the Church
or
the battlefield, you know.”

“Juan’s full of fire. He’ll make a fine Gonfalonier.”

“Juan is interested in nothing but carousing, drinking, and chasing after women. I know how you’ve missed him while he was in Spain, but I have to say I have
not
missed the way he ogles me.”

Or the way Juan teased Lucrezia for the spot on her chin she had tried to cover up with powder, or jeered at Joffre for padding the shoulders of his doublet in an effort to look more the man for Sancha. Or aimed a kick at my little pet goat who trailed me on a gilt leather leash. I loved that goat, had loved him since I’d rescued him from ending up in a
tourte
when he was just a floppy-eared baby kid, and Juan had put him bleating into the wall with one boot!

“Juan’s just a boy,” my Pope was saying with all his usual tolerance, unknotting a tangled ribbon at my back. “Perhaps he ogles you, but he ogles every beautiful woman he sees! He doesn’t mean anything by it.”

He’d cuckold you in a heartbeat,
I thought, but didn’t say it. To some things Rodrigo was entirely blind, and when it came to his favorite son . . . he hadn’t even noticed this evening after
cena
when Juan flung an arm about my waist, looking at my likeness in Pinturicchio’s fresco. “Our family harlot as the Madonna,” he breathed hotly into my ear, and his fingers stole down to cup my hip. “How’s that for irony, eh?”

I’d just smiled, giving his hand a good covert smack. “And this harlot will knock your ears around the back of your head if you touch her again, Juan Borgia.”

I’d been able to intimidate him when he was sixteen, but not now. He’d just given me another lingering up-and-down look, and swaggered ahead to join Lucrezia and Sancha as they studied the Annunciation fresco with its angels and arabesques.

“Did you see Juan slavering over Sancha?” I said over my shoulder to Rodrigo, feeling the last of my tight laces come loose. “I thought poor Joffre was going to pop with outrage.”

“She’s a flirt, that one.” Rodrigo chuckled, sliding the gown off my shoulders.

“And now all
three
of your sons are competing for her!” I stepped out of the circle of my gown on the floor. “If that’s not a recipe for disaster—”

“Bah,” Rodrigo dismissed, and pressed his lips to my shoulder above the edge of my filmy shift. “Take your hair down,
mi perla.
It’s a sight I never tire of seeing—one of the great wonders of the world, your hair.”

I attacked my pins, and he fell back on his elbows again, happily watching the first of my coiled plaits slither loose over my shoulder. My Pope clearly had no interest in hearing any more about the shortcomings of his sons. He had lost his eldest son Pedro Luis many years ago in Spain; a memory that still veiled his eyes in grief whenever he spoke of it, and after that old loss I suppose his indulgence to his surviving children was understandable. “A pity Lord Sforza couldn’t join us,” I said by way of changing the subject. “I know he misses Lucrezia in Pesaro.”

“Let him miss her. He’s a waffling fool, and more than that, he’s turned out to be a mediocre
condottiere
who does nothing but ask me for money. I wish I’d known
that
when I was considering his offer for her hand!” My Pope reached out to catch a lock of my loosened hair and bring it to his nose, inhaling deeply. I had expensive perfumes by the dozen in glass vials, but part of me was still a country girl, the girl who grew up in a tiny town beside Lake Bolsena and boiled flowers to make perfume, and I still preferred my old homemade scents of honeysuckle and gillyflower to all those expensive mixtures of frankincense and bergamot. “I heard from another mediocre
condottiere
today, you know,” my Pope went on, inhaling my hair again.

“Who?”

“Monoculus.”

“That’s a cruel nickname, Rodrigo. He is not one-eyed; it’s just a tiny squint.” But I couldn’t help a faint smile as I unraveled the last of my plaits. At least my Pope could joke now about my husband. Rodrigo was not jealous when other men looked at me—he just chuckled when envious archbishops ogled my bosom, or florid young lords paid me honeyed compliments. He liked being envied. But Orsino still worried my Pope sometimes. Orsino was my wedded husband; a man with the legal right to demand I return to his side, if he ever grew a spine and chose to exercise that right. Even the Holy Father could not really excommunicate a man for demanding that his wife cease committing adultery.

“That chinless little snip can’t even scrape up the courage to ask me himself when he wants money,” Rodrigo continued with a snort. “Instead he applies to his mother and gets her to ask me. This time, it’s to pay his soldiers. They don’t listen to him unless their pay is current. Or even when it
is
current. There’s one son who should
not
have been slated for the battlefield!” My husband’s family the Orsini had been among those to side with the French upon their march south—at least, the more illustrious and prosperous branches of the Orsini. Not Orsino, however, whose mother was cousin and firm friend to Rodrigo. Where his mother led, Orsino followed.

“We don’t need to discuss Orsino, do we?” I shook my hair down, rippling clear to the floor, and Rodrigo clapped a hand to his chest as though pierced through the heart by the sight. I climbed onto the vast bed, sitting cross-legged like a tailor, and pulled his feet into my lap. People think it’s all jewels and gowns and keeping yourself pretty, being a mistress, but I’ve found it’s a good deal more about peace. Powerful men, whether kings of vast nations or lords of uncounted wealth or fathers of the world’s souls, are
tired
men. A thousand voices clamor every moment for their attention, their time, their favors; everyone wants something and they all want it now. When my Pope came to me at the end of the day, he could at least relax with the knowledge that I wanted nothing but him. “Your feet are hurting you again, aren’t they?” I scolded softly, rubbing his toes. “Why can’t you sit still when you’re dictating letters to your secretaries, instead of pacing like a madman . . .”

He gave a groan of pleasure, but his eyes were serious as they looked at me. “Does Orsino still write to you, Giulia?”