The Lion and the Rose (20 page)

“Rodrigo—” I could feel his mouth making its way down my neck, and I bumped him in reproof with the gilded unicorn horn of my mask. “We’ll be late!”

“Men are always willing to wait for beauty, and they are taught from the cradle to wait for God.” The white brocade gown with its sleeves and ribbons of rosy gauze slid from my shoulders under his hands. “You are Beauty and I am God, so they can damned well wait all night.”

“Blasphemer,” I accused, but smiled. My papal bull smiled back at me, a bull in truth tonight with a mulberry red doublet molding his heavy shoulders instead of his papal robes, a red bull mask with curving gilt horns crowning his head. He should have been worn to the bone after the panoply of ceremony and splendor that had consumed his days during Holy Week. There is nothing on earth more exhausting than Easter. I was so tired by the end of a week’s array of relics and parades and sermons that I dozed off in the Sistine Chapel during Tenebrae, right at the place in the Mass where my soul was supposed to be harrowed.

But my Pope had sailed through it all: Parading some truly disgusting relics through the city (the severed heads of various apostles! Really, no one would ever want to be an apostle if they knew how their poor bodies would be hacked apart after death!). Washing the feet of twelve beggars all overcome at the honor they were receiving. Bestowing charity dowries on eighteen girls who should have been overcome at the honor they were receiving but were instead giggling at Rodrigo’s roguish winks. Nothing had assailed my Pope’s poise that week, not running out of palm branches on Palm Sunday, not Burchard’s horror when Rodrigo was too busy blowing a kiss at me to come in properly with the Alleluia on Holy Saturday, not even the tense moment when one of the Spanish generals refused to take a palm from the Pope’s hand because he was still furious that Juan Borgia had received all the credit for the recent battles. No, my Pope had sailed through it all, and from the gleam in his eye I could see he was now ready to celebrate. His hands on my bare shoulders were warmer than firelight.

I stood on tiptoe, reaching behind his head for the mask’s ties, but he caught my wrists. “Leave the masks,” he whispered, and the bull and the unicorn slid entwined to the floor of my chamber. The familiar heat burned between us, our bodies moving with long ease, our mouths drinking and clashing below the masks. That at least had not changed.

We even managed not to get our horns tangled up. How I hate it when that happens!

Rodrigo gave a bull’s growl as he helped me dress afterward, lacing up my gown. “You women! How do you manage all these fiddly little ties?” I straightened his horns for him, then sat before my glass to refasten the diamond roses that had come loose from my piled hair.

“I thought you might care to wear this.” He sounded faintly anxious, and I felt something cold drop between my breasts. Looking down, I saw a brooch in the shape of a massive diamond rose, matching the ones in my hair. “Pretty, eh? I knew it would suit you.”

I met his eyes in the glass, through the eye holes of my mask. Quite a confection, that mask; all white velvet and gold embroidery and tiny winking beads of rose quartz, and perhaps hiding my face made me blunt. “It’s beautiful, truly—but I don’t need jewels, Your Holiness.”

“But I want to give them to you.” His lips touched the back of my neck as he pinned the diamond rose at my bosom. “Weigh my unicorn down with diamonds and perhaps she won’t go dashing away again.”

There was anxiety under his amusement. My Pope had been just a little tentative with me, ever since the debacle of my painting as Persephone. My long, angry silence from Florence, and then his relief at having me back—I think he was half convinced Fra Savonarola would toss
me
on the bonfire. Really, one brush of danger with a French army or a few religious fanatics, and a fond lover sees disaster lurking around every corner! Rodrigo had excommunicated Savonarola, as much for the way his Angels had treated me as for his semiheretical rantings, and showered me with presents ever since my return.

But my anger with him hadn’t truly abated until I pointed a finger at my lover some few days after my return from Florence and said quietly, “You will never put me on display like that again.”

“I was proud of you! So proud, I wanted them all to see—”

“I don’t care what your reasons are.” I’d cut him off as I never dared do before. “I am
your
mistress, Rodrigo. No one else’s. And in the future, you would do well to remember that!”

A glint of anger had showed in his eye for a moment, but I held his gaze unblinking and then I saw the anger fade, replaced by a faint chagrin. “Never again,” he agreed reluctantly, and there was no more talk of having me sit for another painter without my clothes on. “Maestro Botticelli’s painting?” he ventured, and when I gave a cold “It’s burned up, and a good thing, too,” nothing more was said about that either.

My anger had faded since then (well, mostly), but Rodrigo still seemed anxious with me sometimes.

“A whole chain of diamond roses couldn’t keep this unicorn from escaping,” I said lightly after I thanked him, rising from my mirror. “Don’t you know the stories, Your Holiness? Only a fair young virgin may bind a unicorn. Usually with a golden bridle.”

I called for my maids, and Rodrigo broke into a laugh as Laura ran into my chamber. She wore her best gown, pink velvet sewn with seed pearls, and she waved a length of gold ribbon. “A fair maiden to bind me,” I explained as Laura clamored to tie the ribbon about my wrist for a leash. It was the best way I could find to leash
her
, really. “She so begged to see the spectacle, I promised her she could come. For a short time only,” I added to Laura. “Then it’s to bed with you. Masquerades go on far too late for little girls.” Not to mention the fact that people in masks seem to get up to all kinds of behavior they’d never dream of indulging in bare-faced. The kind of behavior no little girl should see.

“Yes, Mamma.” She added a deeper curtsy for Rodrigo. “Your Holiness,” she piped, “you match Mamma. You have
horns
!”

“Indeed,” he said, looking fond through the eye slits of his mask. “And I do believe you have my nose, little one.”

“Are you the Devil?” Laura said interestedly, still looking at the horns.

I laid my hand on Rodrigo’s arm as he roared with laughter. “Shall we?”

The guests made a great roar as the Bull and the Unicorn descended the steps into the throng. The spring nights had grown warm and so the Menagerie Ball had been cast outside, in the Palazzo Santa Maria’s largest garden. An Eden for the night: all green moss and starry flowers underfoot, tiny twinkling candles scattered below to echo the scatter of stars above. Small tables and sideboards brought outside and draped with mosses and garlands; food laid out on broad vine leaves rather than silver trays; wine circulated not by servants but flowing freely from the fountain where anyone might dip a cup—or simply lap it up on hands and knees, as I saw one young fellow in a hawk mask doing. Eden, but an Eden peopled with beasts rather than Adam and his Eve. I saw bird masks with huge cockades of feathers; panthers and cheetahs with fanged masks; fantastical masks in the shapes of griffons and manticores and dragons. I saw Sancha in red satin trimmed with fox fur, avid-eyed behind a vixen mask with pointed ears and laughing muzzle. Juan as a tiger, all orange and black stripes across his tight doublet with ivory fangs framing his own mouth, whispering in Sancha’s vixen ear.

“Too many of Juan’s soldiers here tonight,” I whispered to Rodrigo as he led me down into the throng of beasts.

“How can you tell?” The Holy Father lifted his goblet in greeting to someone in a maned horse’s mask across the garden.

“Juan’s men are the ones who are drunk already.” Juan had brought far too many soldiers back from his supposed victory at Ostia. They’d swarmed all over Rome, drinking and whoring and smashing windows—“celebrating their victory,” people said at first, but then it had been “celebrating Carnivale.” And then it had been “celebrating Lent,” even though you weren’t supposed to celebrate Lent with anything more showy than a fish bake, and now Lent was done and people were inclined to mutter and hasten across the
piazza
if they saw any of Juan’s men approaching. Or anyone in the Borgia colors either, for that matter, but Rodrigo only laughed. As he was laughing now, behind his bull mask.

“Bah,” my bull said. “High spirits!” And I could have mouthed the words right along with him, so often did he trot them out in Juan’s defense. “They’ll liven up the masquerade, mark my words. Ah, is that Cardinal Zeno behind that cockerel mask? Excellent costume for him; I really must have a word about those letters to the Florentines he thinks I don’t know about . . .”

I watched his bull horns forge their confident path through the crowd until the ribbon leash on my wrist tugged. Laura was gazing wide-eyed at the Eden below her, bouncing up and down in her pink velvet. “So
pretty
,” she breathed, and then gaped as a glittering peacock went to its knees before her in a pool of mottled blue-and-purple velvet skirts.

“May I steal her, Giulia?” a voice laughed, and behind the jeweled mask with its extravagant cockade of peacock feathers I saw Lucrezia’s lined and painted eyes. “I think our Laura can get an even better view by the fountain! And if she’s only to stay a short time, she should see everything. Shouldn’t you,
Lauretta mia
?”

Laura ducked her head shyly. She always went wide-eyed at the sight of Lucrezia—the young Countess of Pesaro, too glamorous for words as she blew in and out of the
palazzo
in her whirl of silks and laughter and ladies-in-waiting.
Lucrezia used to look at me that way
, I thought, and wondered what had gone wrong there. It wasn’t just Lucrezia’s new sophistication or her flirtations—she had an edge now in her sweet voice when she spoke to me these days.

“You think it’s easy for a girl growing up next to you?” Adriana da Mila had said bluntly when I asked her as much.

“But I adore Lucrezia,” I’d protested. “And we’ve always gotten on so well—”

“Yes, but she’s never been able to compete with you. At least until now. And now—” My mother-in-law had shrugged. “You’re the nearest thing to a sister she’s ever had. And sisters always compete with each other.”

Lucrezia’s eyes behind her peacock mask seemed to have more of their old bubbling warmth, and certainly Laura’s eyes were all stars as she took Lucrezia’s hand. “Don’t take her too far,” I said, untying the ribbon that had kept Laura tethered to my wrist. “And keep hold of this; she can disappear in an instant!”

They fluttered off, the peacock and the little girl, and I wondered if it was lack of babies making my Pope’s daughter so hard about the edges. Three years of marriage and she’d never even quickened—and at least in the early days, there had been no lack of trying. My eyes found Lord Sforza, trying to drink wine through the snarling muzzle of his dog’s-head mask and watching Lucrezia whirl Laura about the garden pointing out her favorite costumes.
Those two need babies
, I decided.
Babies, and lots of them.

A fresh array of vine-wrapped dishes streamed out for the table, along with another swirl of guests. A new swarm of beasts: a fish mask, all glittering silver scales, babbling compliments at me—“Behind cover of our masks, my fair unicorn, I may admit how much I have always admired you? Perhaps you’d consider meeting me inside the
palazzo
later, if the Bull over there seems occupied . . .” Poor young Joffre, wearing a maned stallion mask and swaggering about with a stuffed codpiece, but snickers followed him: “The little gelding!” as eyes tracked his vixen wife who was letting a tight-hosed, heron-masked soldier go fishing for cherries in her bodice with his long bill. I waved at my little maid Pia in her blackbird feathers, keeping to the side and sipping timidly at a cup of the exquisite wine. Juan’s soldiers were lunging for the new influx of food, gobbling down the artful servings of Carmelina’s oil-drizzled olives, her blood-rare curls of beef skewered on rosemary spears, the chilled milk-snow heaped in seashells for bowls. I smiled behind my mask, wondering if my cook had made her entrance yet, and reached back for my little bodyguard who stood in my shadow in his customary black velvet. “By the way,” I murmured to Leonello. “You should keep watch for Carmelina tonight.”

“Our
Signorina Cuoca
?” His voice was cool as ever behind the gold lion’s mask with its cockade of scarlet feathers—the
only
concession he would make to a costume. I’d lost the battle over the tawny leonine doublet that was supposed to go with it. “Our prickly cook is to join us? Dressed as what?”

“You’ll know her when you see her. She looks ravishing.”

“Still trying to make a pair of us, Madonna Giulia?” Through the mask, Leonello’s eyes roamed the crowd.

“No one else I know has a tongue sharp enough to match yours, Leonello.” I’d long been convinced they were made for each other—you had only to see the way they prickled in each other’s company. Nobody prickled like that unless they were intensely aware of someone else, did they? “Wait till you see her,” I went on. “I must say, I outdid myself when it came to Carmelina’s costume.”

“Point her out, by all means. Until then, I’m watching a tiger pick a fight with a serpent. Personally, I back the serpent.”

I followed Leonello’s stubby finger over the masked and laughing beasts. In the shadow of the loggia under the vines I saw the striped outline of Juan Borgia’s tiger-patterned doublet, inches away from a lean figure in scale-embroidered green and gold. The matching serpent mask had jet fangs coming down over the taut, unsmiling mouth, but I knew who it was. “Excuse me—” But of course Leonello tracked silently behind me as I made my way through the throng.

“—you will not speak to me that way,” I heard Juan hissing inside the shadows of the loggia. “I will not tolerate such words, and certainly not from my brother in priest’s skirts!”

The voice behind the serpent mask came calmly. “You’ve made our family name a laughingstock, Juan. Bracciano? They sent a donkey to treat with you, and their counteroffer rammed under its tail.”