The Lion and the Rose (16 page)

“Yes, you do, but that’s not important. We’ll learn, we’ll both of us learn, we’ll travel!” His arms had tightened around me now, and he was gabbling faster. “We don’t have to stay in Rome, we could go to Milan; Lodovico Il Moro keeps a court there to rival the Pope’s. Then to Lombardy where I was born; I can show you how the French influence comes over into the recipes, and I know you scoff about the French and their sour spices, but there’s something to be learned there—”

“You’ve gone mad!” I had a handsome young man before me proposing marriage in all seriousness—was the world just laughing at me? What woman has to dodge marriage proposals
after
becoming a nun?
He doesn’t know that
, I thought disjointedly,
and you certainly can’t tell him, so find some other way to dodge it
.

I made myself plant a stern hand on Bartolomeo’s hard chest, pushing him back, but that might have been a mistake because I could feel his heartbeat speed up under my touch. Maybe mine too, but that was just more panic. “Bartolomeo, this has all been a mistake.” I spoke calmly, reasonably. “A very great mistake, and I do apologize for that. I am
maestra di cucina
, and you are an apprentice. I am seven years older than you, and I should never have—”

“And I’ve wanted you since I was fourteen.” His eyes burned me, bright as cinnamon. “When you threw me my apprentice apron for the first time. When you let me make smelt in green sauce for Madonna Giulia. When you put your head on my shoulder after we were captured by the French, and let me put my arm around you—sweet Christ, I nearly kissed you right then.” His voice bubbled faster, a torrent of words like wine out of a breached cask. “I get weak in the knees just watching you beat
eggs
—when you’re slinging spoons at me just because I’m the only one in these kitchens brave enough to tell you that your recipe’s wrong—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I wrenched away, feeling a film of his sweat on my fingertips from his broad freckled chest. Bad enough to handle an apprentice in lust; boys were always in lust. But an apprentice in love?
How can he be in love with me?
a small inner voice thought in wondering astonishment.
I don’t do anything but shout at him!

Never mind how it started
, I thought harshly.
Squelch it. For his own good, just squelch it.
“This is just silly moon-eyed calf love,” I told him. “All boys go a little soft for their first girl. It means nothing.”

“You didn’t think I was such a
boy
down there.” He jerked his chin at the rumpled pallet, grinning. “And as a matter of fact, you aren’t my first girl.”

I seized on that. “Then go marry her, if you’re not the kind of lad who’d bed a girl and then leave her!”

“I did offer to marry her. She laughed at me. Nicely, though, and then she kissed me and said I was a lovely boy but if she married all the boys she broke in, she’d have enough husbands for an army. I liked her, but not the way I love you, though, so all in all I was very relieved—”

Sounds like Pantisilea
, I couldn’t help thinking, but shoved the thought away. This whole argument was slipping out of my hands. “Well, I can’t marry you. You work in my kitchens”—I groped—“and you are
under
me, and—”

“Not last time, I wasn’t.” He grabbed me around the waist again, pulling me back toward the pallet. “But
this
time I’ll be under you if you like, Carmelina—”

“You do not have leave to call me that!” I shoved away desperately, trying not to look at the hard freckled length of his body against me. “We rolled about in a bed, but that does not mean you have leave to call me by name. You are my
apprentice
. And even if you weren’t, I have no intention of marrying anybody, much less you. Rolling about in a bed doesn’t change that either!”

“Why not?” He folded his arms across his chest, looking down at me in challenge. “The two best cooks in Rome, married to each other. Why
not
?”

Because I’m a nun
, I almost said.
Because the vow didn’t disappear just because I ran from it. Because you’d face charges if we were caught.
Charges of profanation, desecration, adultery—crimes meriting at the least exile, at the most death, for marrying a nun who already had her Lord for a husband.

Bad enough that we bedded once—but if that was found out, Bartolomeo could at least claim he didn’t know my secrets. Likely he’d be spared as the innocent dupe of a wicked seductress. But if I were ever mad enough to
marry
, then my so-called husband’s guilt would be assumed, and his whole future in ruins. Oh, maybe I’d shared Marco’s bed on occasion, but Marco knew my past, knew the risks and the sins attached, and he certainly knew he couldn’t marry me. Bartolomeo didn’t know anything of the kind.
You want to lay that on his conscience?
my own conscience snarled, raking guilt through me like a lion’s claws.
A boy who can’t bed a girl without offering to marry her after, and you want to tell him he’s violated a nun?

All my life I’d been taught that girls grew up to be wives, or else they became nuns or whores. I’d said that once to Madonna Giulia, when we first met. But she occupied an odd limbo between
wife
and
whore
, and I occupied an even odder one myself between
whore
and
nun
. There were shadowy spaces between the stark trinity of futures I’d been offered as a girl—but however you defined me, there would be no marriage in my future. I felt a moment’s pang of regret go through me like a sword, but I hardened my heart. I’d made my choices: work, only work, and the occasional casual tumble with men like Marco who knew about my past. Or maybe lordlings who liked to bed servant girls and were too high and mighty to care about consequences.

Bartolomeo was neither.

“Is it Maestro Santini?” Bartolomeo said, as though reading my mind. “Don’t tell me you mooned after him too like all those silly maidservants, just because he’s handsome and has
curls
. He’ll waste every
scudo
he earns, and besides, he couldn’t cook his way out of a flour sack. He lost his place here, and he’ll lose his place with the Duke of Gandia too.”

“It’s not Maestro Santini,” I said at last. “It’s a vow I made—to myself.” I wished I had a shawl to cover my thin shift. His eyes were still devouring me, making my skin prickle, and I folded my arms across my breasts instead. “I don’t need any husband. I’ve a good trade and a good position in this
palazzo
—” I was talking too much, too fast. Does a cook bother to explain his decisions to his subordinates when explaining a menu? A proposal of marriage should be no different. “I do not wish to marry,” I concluded with as much finality as I could muster. “Not Maestro Santini, and certainly not you.”

“But you get lonely.” Bartolomeo reached out and touched a curl of my hair, winding it around his finger. “I can always tell. It shows in your
tourtes
first, those marzipan ones you make for Madonna Giulia. They get sweeter, and you add more ground almonds. And it takes you half the time to whip up egg whites, because you get vicious when you’re sad, and you take it out on the eggs—”

He bent his head to kiss me again, surely one of the few men in the
palazzo
tall enough to do it, not that he was really a man; he was a boy and he was seven years younger than I and sweet Santa Marta, how did I get into this mess and why was I kissing him again and why wouldn’t he just put some clothes on before I did something else stupid?

“Enough!” I pushed him away, sweeping back my hair where he’d twined it about his hand. “I will forget this, Bartolomeo,” I said sternly as he opened his mouth. “But not if I hear one more word about it, from you or anyone else, so don’t even think about boasting to the other apprentices.” Dear God, I knew how fast gossip could spread through a kitchen. A cocky boy who has just made a conquest always wants to boast to his friends, but a cocky boy I might have been able to silence. A lovelorn moon-calf of a boy who had just been rejected in his first heart-felt marriage proposal? Had I been too busy worrying about Bartolomeo’s future to worry about mine?

All he had to do was burst out bitterly to the first friend he saw in the scullery, or the first pretty serving maid who took him to bed and consoled him with what a coldhearted bitch I was. And after that, the whole household would know how a kitchen apprentice had seduced the
maestra di cucina
, and I’d have not a single crumb of authority left. The maids and the pot-boys would all be giggling behind my back, and once it got up to Madonna Adriana . . . maids in this household were dismissed if they gained reputations as whores. Pantisilea was our resident harlot, and as much as everyone liked her, she would have been packed out years ago if Madonna Giulia had not intervened. And a
maestra di cucina
would be held to an even higher standard—if she could not keep order among her underlings, she was worth nothing. How my underlings would love whispering about Carmelina, the inviolable Madonna of the kitchens, revealed as no better than Pantisilea.

Stupider than Pantisilea. She was at least clever enough to keep her belly flat using all those prudent tricks with halved limes or cups of pennyroyal extract. I knew those tricks too, but had that stopped me? Had I really been so foolish and lonely and lust-drunk that I hadn’t even thought of pushing a halved lime into myself before my apprentice pushed his way in after it? If my belly swelled, it wouldn’t even matter if Bartolomeo held his tongue. I’d be out on the streets the moment my apron showed a bulge, and even Madonna Giulia wouldn’t be able to save my position for me.

Dear God, I was going to lose everything. All because I couldn’t keep my legs closed. My father was right—I really was just a slattern.

“Not one word to anyone,” I said desperately, jabbing a finger into Bartolomeo’s chest. “You will take my orders, you will do as I tell you, and you will
never
presume to touch me again.”

“Carmelina—”

“Or call me anything but
signorina
,” I rode over him. “You are an apprentice, and you are a silly boy, and I should never have let you touch me. It was a mistake, you hear me? A
mistake
.”

He stood there with his hands hanging at his sides, still naked except for the cross about his neck, looking at me. He flushed slowly, so dark his freckles disappeared all the way down his chest. He turned away from me, fumbling for his breeches, and I felt a pang. But I kept my stony expression. I’d suffered calf love too when I was his age—painful though it was, it went away quickly. He’d forget about me with the next maidservant to bat her lashes at him. Far better for his future if he did.

If he would just not ruin
my
future by talking . . .

“Good night,” I added in the same severe tones, and turned for the door. My cold and empty bed now seemed very welcoming indeed. Though before I collapsed into it, I’d have to rush for a jar of the strongest vinegar we had, and rinse my body out with a prayer that it wasn’t too late to keep myself from quickening . . .

But even in all my confused fear, I couldn’t stop myself from hesitating as I opened the door and smelled the waft of olive oil and coarse salt from the plate of now-cold tubers in the kitchens. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that Bartolomeo had not moved, still standing beside the rumpled pallet with his arms folded across his chest and his bare feet looking rather pathetic below his flour-dusted breeches.

“Bartolomeo,” I said. “You were right about one thing. Those fried things you made, whatever that vegetable is—they’re delicious. I’ll have you cook them for Madonna Giulia as soon as she returns.”

“Go to hell,” said my apprentice, and slammed the door in my face.

CHAPTER FIVE

Evil is often spoken of me, but I let it pass.

—RODRIGO BORGIA, POPE ALEXANDER VI

Giulia

I
f there’s anything you must never say to a Florentine, it’s that Florence is the little sister of Rome. Any Florentine citizen will puff up like a toad and then proceed to list all the glories of their fair city, from the enormous dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore (“
Far
finer than the Basilica San Pietro!”) to the bridges over the Arno (“Far fewer dead cats in
our
river than in your Tiber!”). So unless you have a great deal of time to spend listening to a huffy lecture on all of Florence’s admitted glories, it’s better just to keep from making any comparisons at all. But Florence
is
a little sister to Rome, and in more than just her size. Rome is a courtesan in her prime, ripe and perhaps decaying a little under the façade of her cosmetics, but flaunting herself in spite of it: luscious and foul-mouthed and funny, praying and swearing and laughing all at once, speaking a dozen languages and spreading her skirts and her arms wide for all the pilgrims and travelers of the world. Florence is a girl just come from a convent: beautiful but self-contained, a little wary, a little prim. Rome is the hub of all Christendom; you can see a thousand new faces a day and never repeat a one, and Romans react a thousand different ways to any dilemma. In Florence everyone seems to know each other, and whether for good or ill, they all react as one.

And in January when I went to visit my sister, Florence was not only an insular city but a frightened one. Frightened, but strangely exalted, and what a mix it was to see on people’s faces.

“It’s all the fault of that wretched Savonarola,” my skinny and acerbic older sister fretted. But even in the safety of her own cozy
sala
, she gave a quick glance to make sure the maids were busy clearing the
credenza
at the other end of the room, and the servers occupied decanting the wine rather than eavesdropping on our conversation. I hadn’t been in Florence a day before I knew about Savonarola’s Angels: the young men and boys of Florence who had answered all that Dominican thundering from the pulpit to join God’s militia. That nice young page with the chestnut curls—who knew if after
cena
he might slip out of the house, don a white robe, and join bands of fellow Angels in singing hymns and roaming the streets looking for sinners to reprimand? Best to be careful; Savonarola had a great many Angels. Much like God Himself, I suppose, though I doubted God’s angels were quite so obnoxious and pimply.

“So it’s not enough now that we’ve been instructed to forswear sloth and luxury and idle pastimes,” Gerolama complained as she passed me a cup of warmed wine. “We’re now to be
inspected
, to make sure our houses contain nothing ungodly! It’s all for that wretched bonfire Fra Savonarola’s determined to build—you can already see the pyre being built in the Piazza della Signoria. We’re to toss everything vain onto it—jewels, lip rouge, perfumes, cards—”

“Then Madonna Giulia will return to Rome with no baggage at all,” remarked Leonello from his corner. It did not matter whether the room my bodyguard entered was my private chamber, the great Sala dei Santi in the Vatican, or my sister’s overdecorated little chamber with its too-ornate
credenza
and garishly embroidered wall hangings—Leonello’s hazel eyes always flicked briefly in each direction, measuring angles of attack in the event of any assassins lurking about, and then he took the corner with the best view of the room regardless of who might already be seated there, propped up his black boots, and took out a book. Currently the book was some salaciously illustrated volume of tales from the Orient that he had borrowed from Cesare Borgia’s collection, and Leonello flicked the pages with great interest. “Such utter rubbish,” he remarked. “I must be sure to finish it quickly, as I’m sure this city’s dirty literature will all be required as fuel for Fra Savonarola’s bonfire.”

I made a private note to keep my jewels in their boxes during this visit. I didn’t really see any reason why God would want me to burn up my teardrop pearl necklace or my diamond hair roses. Besides, according to Fra Savonarola and his ilk, a woman of my stature was thoroughly damned anyway, so why not at least go down to hell in all my finery? And how can you
burn
diamonds, anyway?

“I’m already storing away a few things,” my sister confided. “My better gowns, of course, and the good silver, and the pendant my husband gave me on our wedding. Though I may just let those hideous earrings from his mother get into the pile,” Gerolama added thoughtfully. “Not to mention that ghastly
credenza
from our great-aunt Lella . . .”

“Mamma, Mamma!” My Laura dashed into the
sala
in a whirl of bouncing blond curls. “Giuseppe the cook gave me a sugar lump! And he says there are
angels
in Florence, angels on every street corner—”

“Not the kind of angels you want to meet,
Lauretta mia
.” I lifted my daughter up into my lap, dabbing at the sugar on her cheeks. Nearly four years old now, plump and golden and giggling, and every time I looked at her my heart squeezed utter happiness. Even with the rest of me so unsettled.

“You’d better put her in a wool dress when you take her out.” Gerolama sniffed at Laura’s apricot velvet gown with the sleeves trimmed in fox fur, a miniature copy of mine. Laura had at last outgrown the stage of wanting to run about naked; these days she took a very keen interest indeed in her dresses. “Swirly skirts!” she always demanded of my robe makers. “With
sparkles
.” Sparkles were all she thought about now—Laura had wanted earrings for her last birthday, and so I relented and let Leonello pierce her little ears with a heated needle. She’d been so determined to have pearl eardrops of her very own, she hadn’t made a peep at the pain. “You spoil that child, Giulia,” my sister scolded as I kissed the top of Laura’s blond head.

“Of course I do,” I said without shame, and tickled my girl until she shrieked laughter. She had exactly the same ticklish spot at her waist as my Pope.

Gerolama eyed her: a shrewd farmer’s wife pricing a lamb to see how much it will fetch at market. “Still an Orsini, is she?”

“In name at least.” But in blood—well, blood was beginning to tell. Laura’s face was emerging from its infant roundness into a character and shape of its own, and from certain angles I thought I could see a chin that might turn out like Lucrezia’s, or an arch of eyebrow exactly like Cesare’s. And she definitely had Rodrigo’s nose.
Laura Borgia?
I wondered, and thought I could see my Pope wondering too lately as he looked at my daughter.

“Has His Holiness spoken of a marriage for her?” Gerolama pressed. “That would seal the connection for our family, you know.”

“She’s not four years old,” I protested.

“And you told me yourself Lucrezia had a betrothal at seven. It’s never too early to start planning a daughter’s future, Giulia.”

Says the mother of none
, I thought unkindly.

“Besides, you’ll lose your looks someday, and the Pope’s favor with them, and then where will we all be? But if you’ve managed to betroth Laura to an Este or a Gonzaga, well, that’s something we can all fall back on.”

“I am touched by your concern for your niece,” I said tartly.

“I only want her properly married,” Gerolama retorted. “A countess or a duchess, think of it! Or are you going to groom her to take your path instead?”

My voice slid from tart to freezing. “My daughter will
never
be an old man’s plaything.”

The words startled me, coming out so fast and unthinking. Perhaps because it wasn’t quite the fate I had pictured for myself, when I was a little girl who also loved sparkles and swirling skirts.

Laura soon slid off my lap and bounced away to go play with the new litter of kittens in the kitchens—“Can I have one, Mamma? Can I, can I?”—and Gerolama was soon complaining of the insolence of her maidservants and the difficulties of keeping dust off her carpets. Eternal topics among respectable women, and perhaps there were more benefits to being a harlot than I’d previously thought, like the fact that most respectable women refused to talk to me. They rushed to copy any item of clothing I wore on my sinful body, but my sinful conversation was entirely shunned.

Still, I was glad I’d come to Florence, even if my sister did grate against me. I could play with Laura all day long now, brush her curls and tell her stories and applaud her as she took up her miniature lute with great seriousness and fumbled through her first simple song with every bit as little musical talent as her mother. All the time with my daughter that I wanted, without being interrupted by some obsequious archbishop murmuring about how much he would appreciate a new benefice from the Pope. In Florence I could relax my morning routine, leave off dressing my hair in those elaborate plaits and curls that took hours and left my neck rigid, without having the Tart of Aragon make some pointed comment about how sad it was when a woman stopped taking trouble with her looks. I could rise early to watch the dawn if I liked without being exhausted from some endless banquet the evening before; I could throw on any gown I liked for Mass because nobody cared if I had worn the same thing to Mass two weeks ago; I could go riding without Lucrezia always trying to make sure her riding dress was just a little finer than mine. I could spend an entire morning in my shift if I wanted, savoring my way through Avernus’s sonnets and reading bits out loud just to annoy Leonello. “Listen to Sonnet VIII; surely even you have to admit it’s marvelous. He compares his Aurora to Helen of Troy—”

“No more, I beg you.” Fingers in ears.

I just read louder, giggling.
“‘A golden Helen for a golden war—’”

“Kill me, please. Kill me at once.”

It was all just another of my forays into the ordinary world, I suppose. And even if Florence felt small and fearful under Savonarola’s rantings and his Angels, it was a foray I enjoyed.

A respite away from my Pope.

“I shall have to give His Holiness a good excuse if I wish to stay longer,” I told Leonello one morning as I was lacing Laura’s little dress up her back.

“No, you don’t. He doesn’t own you, after all, and I’ve heard you say so yourself.”

“True,” I agreed. “But the letters are getting irate. He started out apologetic, begging me to come back soon and saying he’d die a slow and horrible death if I was still angry at him. But now
he’s
getting angry that I haven’t answered any of those letters, so I’m getting missives about how I’m an unfeeling minx for leaving him so long.”

“Tell him Fra Savonarola refuses to let you leave until you have given all your jewels over to his bonfire.” Leonello distracted Laura from her wriggling by picking up one of Gerolama’s prized glass ornaments from Murano and balancing it on the very tip of one finger. “You’ll get another week in Florence,
and
the Holy Father will finally excommunicate our good fire-and-brimstone friar.”

Laura clapped her hands at Leonello, crying, “Make it dance, Leo, make it
dance
!” Leonello would juggle for no one but my daughter. He set three of Gerolama’s fragile vases to whirling above his stubby hands as I recaptured Laura’s little wrist and stuffed it into her sleeve. My daughter had nursemaids, of course, but I would far rather dress her myself. Left to her own devices, Laura would beg the maids to steal my rouge for her cheeks and my pulverized malachite to smear around her eyes. Just because I was a harlot did
not
mean I was going to let my daughter start painting herself like one at the age of not-quite-four.

Laura squealed delight as Leonello tossed one vase high and caught it with a hand behind his back, and I tilted my head at him. “You’re so good with children, Leonello. Why on earth don’t you marry and have a few of your own?”

“What woman would have me?” His eyes followed the dance of the vases in the air. “A stunted little fellow who only comes to her waist?”

“Nonsense, you’re not so small as that.” I’d seen many dwarves; jesters and tumblers in the Duke of Gandia’s household or the Tart of Aragon’s, and Leonello overtopped them all by at least a hand’s breadth. He really stood only half a head below me. “A great many women would consider you handsome,” I informed him. “If you’d only make yourself pleasant to them!”

He turned a circle, still juggling for Laura, and I saw that the back of his neck reddened as it always did when he was exasperated. I did adore exasperating him. “Women like to point at men like me, Madonna Giulia. That does not mean they find me handsome.”

“Why not choose a woman like you, then?”

Leonello gave a snort of derision. “Because one dwarf is an oddity, but two together are a freak show. No.”

“You aren’t very nice to your own kind, you know.” I’d seen him watching Juan’s Spanish dwarves when they bounded out to entertain after
cena
. They looked at him in curiosity and envy, my bodyguard in his rich blacks standing so proud with his dark head thrown back, and he gazed back at them with no expression at all. “You’ve found yourself a soft billet,” I’d once heard a wizened little woman in motley tell Leonello, eyeing his livery cynically, and he gave her a smile of slow scorn. “Why don’t you ever seek their company, Leonello?” I persisted. Surely there was companionship to be found among those like him, but I’d never once seen him look for it.