The Lion and the Rose (17 page)

“They envy me,” he said briefly. “And I despise them.”

“Why?”

“They wish they had a place in the world. A place where they are not laughed at.” One by one, Leonello caught the fragile glass vases. “And I scorn them because they never taught themselves any skills, nothing that would raise them above laughter. Instead they took the easy path, and let the world mock them. Eventually it turns them sour, and then they turn to drink, and most of the time they die badly. And as far as I am concerned, it’s their own fault.”

I studied him. “That seems very harsh.”

“The world is harsh, Madonna Giulia. I was born as I am, and I see no reason to whine about it. At least I can make certain that I never marry, never sire children, and never pass this deformity of mine to some unfortunate infant. Stop whimpering,” he said sharply to Laura as she clamored for more of his juggling, and I bit my lip. I did like to tease Leonello, but I would not hurt him for the world.

He turned to put Gerolama’s vases back in their niches, and when he turned back I saw his eyes were glass-cool and he was done with the subject. “Maestro Botticelli’s painting of you,” he said, all business. “You did promise him you would complete your sittings while you were here in Florence.”

I made a face, grateful for the change in conversation. “I suppose if I string the sittings out, I’ll earn another few weeks here. If I want them.”

Laura was still looking hurt, and Leonello tweaked her nose in apology for snapping at her. “You’ve been putting it off, Madonna Giulia. Sitting for your painting.”

“I don’t want to do it,” I said simply.

My bodyguard regarded me, head tilted. He hadn’t spoken of the day I’d posed naked and cold in the papal apartments surrounded by leering men, and I hadn’t either. I wondered if Leonello would say something cutting and careless about it—we called ourselves friends by now, but that had never stopped him in the past from carving me up with his viper’s tongue if he was in the mood, and he was certainly in the mood now after the way I’d probed him. But his voice wasn’t mocking at all when he spoke. “If it’s any consolation,” he said instead, “you carried it off rather splendidly.”

But oh, going to Mass that first Sunday after my portrait-sitting had been agony! I was used to being stared at as I took Communion at the Basilica San Pietro—mostly it was the women who stared, craning their necks to see if my sleeves were cut in the French fashion or the Neapolitan, or if my collar was lace or marten fur. That particular Sunday it had been the men staring, trading the latest rumors in a hot whisper about how I’d stripped naked before the entire College of Cardinals and posed on my hands and knees as the Mary Magdalene, or with my legs spread and an apple in my hand as Eve. What a great many whispers had flown through Rome in just a few short days. I’d closed my eyes, cheeks burning as I opened my mouth for the Holy Wafer, and I heard one of the altar boys whisper to the other, “Do you think she goes on her knees and opens her mouth like that for the Holy Father?”

How was I supposed to carry
that
off splendidly?

Leonello was still looking at me, thoughtful. “Will you refuse to finish Maestro Botticelli’s portrait then, Madonna Giulia?”

“Maybe.” I turned Laura around, stroking a comb through her hair. She was already begging me for chamomile pastes to help it grow as long as mine. “Maybe not. Sitting for Maestro Botticelli, well, it won’t be so bad with just him in the room. I don’t mind that so much. But after the portrait’s done it will be displayed everywhere, and I don’t know if I want that.”

“Perhaps His Holiness will keep it for his private apartments.”

“He won’t.” Once, yes—Rodrigo would have been too possessive to let any other man see what I looked like under my gown, even if just in a painting. That Rodrigo would never have pressed me to strip naked before a roomful of cardinals either . . . I struggled to pinpoint the change, dividing Laura’s hair to plait. “He’ll enjoy watching them be envious. So he’ll show the painting to everyone, and all Rome is going to know exactly what my breasts look like, not just a handful of cardinals and papal functionaries.”

And then my brother Sandro really
would
put a fist into someone he shouldn’t, possibly my Pope. The only way I’d been able to calm him after all the rumors that had flown about . . . well, I’d lied completely and told him it was all just vicious gossip. How was I supposed to maintain that little fiction if there was a portrait of me in all my nakedness, and everyone in Rome had seen it?

“You may console yourself with one thing,” Leonello said at last.

“What?”

“All Rome has wondered for years what your breasts look like. If you have the painting done, the citywide suspense will at last be ended.”

I laughed, feeling lighter somehow. “Will you stay in the room with me, if I go to Maestro Botticelli for another sitting?”

“I thought you wanted fewer men gazing on the breasts in question, not more.”

I tied off Laura’s blond plait, and sent her skipping out of the
sala
with a kiss to the top of her head. “You don’t count.”

“No, of course not.” My bodyguard’s voice had gone sharp and cutting again, and I winced because I hadn’t meant to anger him. “Dwarves are not men, to be sure.”

“Now, that’s not what I meant.” I could see him retreating behind his book as he so often did, and I put my hand out and tipped the book down so I could meet his eyes. “You were there in the papal apartments when they stripped me, Leonello, and you were the only one I didn’t
mind
being there. Because every other man stood ogling me, but not you.”

“I assure you, I ogled.”

“No, you didn’t. I know you.” That didn’t please him, I could see. Men like Leonello want to be inscrutable; mysteries unto themselves. It irritated him no end to think that I might have him figured out. But he didn’t have that look of cynical anger anymore, so I hid my smile as I went on. “So, I’d like to have you at my second sitting too. Lounging there with your book, making caustic comments about Maestro Botticelli’s use of proportion. Because I still don’t really want to do this painting, after all, and it will go easier if I have a friend in attendance.”

Leonello looked at me for a moment, and then he picked up my hand and kissed it rather carelessly before tossing it back into my lap like a discarded glove. And that was how I found myself braving the streets of Florence with a pair of guards at my back and my friend at my side, making for Maestro Botticelli’s studio.

Leonello

L
et my mistress tease the Florentines all she liked, telling them their great city was a little sister in Rome’s shadow—I did not like Florence at all. I didn’t like the furtive scurry of so many of its citizens as they hastened through the streets; I didn’t like the fervent gleam in so many eyes as they spoke of Savonarola and his latest dictates; I didn’t like the strange, heated excitement that perfumed the air like smoke: excitement laced with fear.

Maestro Botticelli’s face as he stood before my mistress in the door to his humble apartments could have been a sketch standing for all Florence: fervent and furtive, exalted and afraid.

“I am most sorry, Madonna Giulia.” He spoke brusquely in his rough Florentine accents, avoiding her eyes. “There will be no further sittings.”

“Are you ill?” Her eyes traveled behind the painter to his apartments. Normally any artist would have done my mistress the honor of calling upon her, but Giulia put no one out of his way if she could help it and had insisted on coming herself to Maestro Botticelli’s lodgings. A shabby little room or two in one of the seedier quarters of the city, stale-smelling and almost bare of furnishings. Maestro Botticelli’s lush Venuses of old might have earned him renown, but his new prim Madonnas were clearly not supporting him in comfort. “I can return on your convenience,” Giulia said. “Perhaps bring you a hot posset; this cold weather has been—”

“No.” The painter had a glitter in his eye, and not the fire of inspiration I’d seen as his chalk flew in the papal apartments and Giulia-as-Persephone emerged on the page. “I have prayed upon it, Madonna Giulia, and I cannot ignore the dictates of conscience. Even for the Holy Father, I cannot sully my paints upon”—looking at her fur-lined robe, the hair she had packed into a net so it could be easily shaken down for her sitting—“lewd subjects,” the painter finished.

“Now, really,” Giulia said, exasperated. “Why am I suddenly the lewd one? I didn’t want to be painted at all, much less with my clothes off, but now suddenly it’s all my fault?”

“I do apologize,” Maestro Botticelli mumbled. “I will write to the Holy Father in explanation—excuse me—” And he shut the door in our faces.

“Artists,” Giulia huffed, and kicked her robe out in a swirl as she stamped away from the rickety overhanging apartments with their crooked rooflines and the gutters with a dirty crust of old snow. “It’s a very fine line with them, isn’t it? Either you’re a great artistic inspiration, or you’re a tempting menace!”

“Why the pique?” I didn’t bother speeding my steps to keep up with her stamping; Madonna Giulia always slowed without being asked when she realized she was outpacing me. Two stolid guards tramped behind us, looking quite disconsolate that they weren’t to see the Bride of Christ shed her clothes this afternoon after all. “You didn’t want to finish the painting in the first place, after all.”

“There is that,” she conceded, and paused to let me catch up, smiling. Her fits of exasperation never lasted long. “Goodness, a free afternoon instead of sitting naked in a cold studio. Shall we go buy some of those tasty little roast pigeon things from the vendor by the old bridge? I always eat when I’m at loose ends. Or shall we catch a look at this pyre they’re building in the Piazza della Signoria? I hear it’s going to be twice as tall as a man!”

“It will have to be.” All through the past fortnight, Savonarola’s Angels had been swaggering up and down the streets of Florence, collecting “donations” for the great bonfire that was to come. Anyone who found themselves unwilling to part with their Murano glass goblets and their statues of a naked David might just find that the Angels had tipped the statue over on the way out the door, or broken the goblets with a misplaced elbow, so really it was better just to give and have done with it. Madonna Giulia’s sister and her sticklike husband had contributed a few ugly vases, one truly hideous
credenza
in gilt-edged oak, and a pile of silk gowns and velvet doublets that were not only outlawed under the new sumptuary laws, but also thoroughly out of fashion. “Let the men agonize about luxury and sin,” Giulia had said, winking at me as we peeked through the shutters to watch those gawky young Angels staggering away under the weight of Gerolama’s unwanted junk. “The women will just see an opportunity to clean house!”

I tossed my mistress’s copy of the Avernus sonnets into the pile for the bonfire when everyone’s back was turned. But Giulia rescued it before the Angels arrived, giving me a look. “Damn,” I sighed, and she replied demurely, “Good try, Leonello.”

“I do wish I could hear Fra Savonarola preach,” my mistress was saying now as we turned back across a narrow
piazza
in the direction of her sister’s house. “He’s supposed to be thrilling—my sister says you can really
feel
the fires of hell when he’s on a good rant. Gerolama does enjoy that sort of thing. She must have been crushed when he started forbidding women to attend his sermons. Really, I don’t see why we can’t go. It’s mostly us he’s preaching about, after all. Why don’t you go, Leonello, and have a listen for me the next time he gives a sermon?”

“I have no intention of being trampled by the fervent masses,” I informed her, and I must have been shielding my face from a gust of freezing February wind because I didn’t see the white-clad figures until the rough voice hailed us.

“Ho there!
Madonna
, you’d better have a good reason to be wandering these streets! A virtuous woman keeps to her household.”

Giulia’s guards braced, and I let my hands drift down toward the daggers at my belt as three swaggering young men in dirty-hemmed white robes approached us. Murkier tales of Savonarola’s Angels were told besides their devotion to their master and their singing of hymns—whispers of women harassed, of drunks and gamblers or simply those marked as “sinners” found beaten in the streets. I crooked my wrist at the angle that would bring my finger knife slipping into my hand with another twitch, but Giulia merely bowed her head in deepest greeting as the Angels arrayed themselves before her. “Good sirs,” she said, casting her lashes down piously. “I would not have strayed from the protection of my home at this time, but my sister took to her sickbed and required my care. I am only now hastening home.”

Apparently Savonarola’s Angels were no more immune to a woman’s beauty than any common guardsman. Their eyes flicked over her, and she stood meekly with her head bowed. I wondered what they might have said if she’d admitted she was returning from a failed rendezvous with an artist who had reneged on his promise to paint her as a naked, pagan goddess. I suppose there would have been a fight. Maybe my mistress was wise in her pious lies, but I wished she’d told the truth because I could have used a fight. First I’d take on the one in the middle, the stocky leader with his thumbs hooked into his belt and the rash of blemishes on his chin.

He was eyeing Giulia now, and with an interest that I doubt would have pleased the good Dominican friar he served. “I think we have a lady here who has missed contributing her due to the bonfire,” he told his fellow Angels, who both laughed. “That’s a fur collar I see,
madonna
—”

“
Signora
Gerolama,” Giulia said instantly, clever girl. “Wife to
Signore
Puccio Pucci, may God keep him always.”

“Well,
Signora
, that’s a fur collar I see, and stilt clogs under that hem. You think God does not see vanity, just because it’s hidden under your skirts?”

“I wear them only to keep my shoes from the mud—”

“Our Lord walked in mud. You are too good to follow in His footsteps?”