The Lion and the Rose (31 page)

Bartolomeo’s voice quivered with relief. “I didn’t kill him?”

“No.” Soundly unconscious, at least for now, but the knife wound—you could never be sure about wounds to the gut. I thumbed through calculations. Marco had recognized us, or at least Bartolomeo. If he died . . .

“What if he dies?” Bartolomeo echoed my thoughts, but almost certainly not for the same reasons. He gave a gulp of the foul night air, his hand stealing unconsciously to the wooden cross about his neck. He was a good boy, after all; he went to Mass weekly and did penance for his small sins with good cheer. He hadn’t wanted murder on his conscience, because of course he found the thought appalling—as I no longer did. “I didn’t mean—I never meant to stab Maestro Santini. I was only trying to get the knife away from him, but it twisted in his hand and I got it from him and he came at me—”

“He drew the blade on you, when you were unarmed and looking only to avenge a woman’s honor with your fists. I’d say your conscience is clear.” I rose, rubbing the cook’s blood off on my breeches. “On your feet, now. Come along before we lose
il Duche
altogether.”

“We can’t—” Bartolomeo stared at me through the dark, hardly more than a black shape. “I’m not leaving an unconscious man to bleed to death!”

“He sold your girl to be raped by a madman,” I said. “I’d leave him.” Better if he died in the street, rather than lived to identify Bartolomeo as having any part in tonight’s work.

“I won’t leave him. I wanted to give him a beating, not kill him.” Bartolomeo’s voice was still shaky, but there was steel there and it made me start cursing inside as he took a breath and began to lecture me. “Marco Santini got a beating, all right. He got more than I bargained for, and I’ll live with that, but I won’t live with abandoning a wounded man in the middle of the slums to be robbed and murdered.”

“We’ve no time for your conscience, boy!” I snarled. But Bartolomeo was already hoisting Marco Santini up over one shoulder like a dead pig bound for the spit. It would have been too much weight for most men, but the boy was fueled by fear and used to hauling carcasses through his lady love’s kitchens, and as he staggered into the dark under the cook’s heavy form, I cursed viciously and allowed myself a moment’s violent envy that I had not been born so tall and strong. If I had been, I’d need no one’s help to deal with Juan Borgia, much less a moonstruck apprentice too principled for his own good. Juan Borgia, my masked murderer, drawing farther away on his horse with every moment we wasted, approaching the trap I’d laid for him—I didn’t mean to lose this chance just to make sure some gambling fool of a cook got a bandage and a cold compress.

Briefly I considered leaving Carmelina’s apprentice to his idiotic chivalry. But like it or not, I hadn’t been born a young giant with the muscles of a Hercules. For this night’s work to succeed, I needed Bartolomeo.

It seemed an age to wait, but it was only moments before Bartolomeo came bounding back out of the dark, masked and anonymous again. “I left him at the nearest house,” he panted. “Gave a knock, then stood back—I saw them pull him inside; they were calling for water and bandages. At least they’ll see his wound tended, even if they summon the constables—” Bartolomeo bent over suddenly as though he felt sick. “Oh, Jesu, what if he dies? What if I killed him?”

“So what if you did?” I said coolly. “I’m more worried if he talks.” The plan had been to let Bartolomeo beat Marco into the required pulp, and then let Marco run off ignorant of who had ever attacked him. I knew Marco Santini; he was far too yellow-bellied not to run if he was getting the worst of a pummeling. He’d have run off, and Bartolomeo and I would have been free to follow Juan Borgia with no one any the wiser about who had made both attacks.

But since he now knew Bartolomeo was neck-deep in tonight’s work, I was improvising.

“We can’t follow the Duke of Gandia now,” Bartolomeo was groaning. “Marco will say I attacked him. When he finds out Juan Borgia was beaten, too, he’ll assume I—”

“If Marco Santini lives, or at least lives long enough to talk, all he knows is that the Duke of Gandia left him to go see a mistress.” I cut Bartolomeo off before he could panic any further. “And then you came along, and the two of you got into a fight over a girl. I’ll act as witness, and threaten to have him arrested for drawing the knife on you. I’ll threaten to get him hanged for attempting murder, unless he leaves Rome. He’ll be too terrified to open his mouth about Juan Borgia.”

“But—”

“No buts!” I should have been frightened—already the plan had deviated, and that wasn’t good, but improvisation in danger had always been a gift of mine, and mainly what I felt was focus. I was coming for Juan Borgia, whether the plan blew apart or not. “You want to go back and fan Marco Santini’s brow till he wakes up, boy?” I seized Bartolomeo’s arm and lowered my voice to a steel-hard growl. “Or do you want a chance to beat the Duke of Gandia bloody, like we planned? We won’t get another opportunity like this, so make up your mind!”

Bartolomeo gulped. “Blessed Mother of Mercy, forgive me,” he muttered, crossing himself, but broke into a jog beside me as I plunged into the dark after Juan Borgia.

Good boy
, I thought, but didn’t say it.

The circuitous route Bartolomeo had given to the Duke of Gandia took him looping back on his own footsteps—an absurd route, really, but young men love to feel they are being covert. “Must make sure we aren’t followed,” Bartolomeo said through his mask when he whispered the directions, and the Duke had breathed, “Of course.” Really the route was designed to buy time, time for us to deal with Marco Santini. We’d wasted more time than I liked; I had to run hard to close the gap, and the twisted muscles of my thighs stabbed like knives. But Juan Borgia rode on a long rein, taking his time on his ambling stallion, and though my heart throbbed in my throat, it wasn’t long before we caught up with him. I would have been looking about me constantly in such dangerous streets, but Juan whistled a cheery little tune and never looked back to spot me sliding along through the shadows behind him like a fish. He was a dreaming idiot, and I dearly hoped no footpads would realize what an easy mark he was and take him down before I had my chance.

I heard Bartolomeo gasping at my side, and not because he was winded. “Santa Marta save me,” he said in an unsteady voice. “I’ve never stabbed anyone before. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“That usually happens, the first time.” At least the boy was still here. He could have panicked at the unplanned bloodshed, stumbled off and left me to deal with the Duke of Gandia on my own, but he did not. I was beginning to have a certain regard for Carmelina’s apprentice, who I suppose was now
my
apprentice, albeit in a darker trade than the whipping of egg whites and the kneading of bread dough. “Clamp your teeth down on the nausea, and let’s close the gap on that horse,” I whispered in brisk tones, and he obeyed me numbly. The numbness was common too, that first time one drew blood.

I hoped he would not have a second time. Far better this apprentice stuck with Carmelina’s trade than mine.

Juan was fast approaching the place I wanted, the place where he thought he would get what
he
wanted. He was singing now under his breath, riding along on his pale horse as happy as a bridegroom to a much-desired bride, and in a way I suppose that was what he was. He had wanted her so long, after all. I’d seen the lust in his eyes as he took her in his arms in the courtyard and plastered his leech of a mouth over hers. She was the woman he couldn’t have, and that made her even more irresistible than she already was. And of course, any man as vain as Juan Borgia assumes all women want him too, even if they protest the opposite.
I know what you want
, I’d heard him breathe in her ear even as she struggled.
You’re too much for an old man, you’re wet for something younger.

When Juan Borgia broke the seal of the letter Bartolomeo passed to him in Vannozza dei Cattanei’s vineyard, he’d have felt nothing but a thrill of triumph.

My love, I cannot resist you any longer—you have finally made me realize that. If you follow the man who gives you this letter, he will bring you to me tonight. We must be very cautious—but I must have you.

Unsigned, but surely Juan would know Giulia Farnese’s easy looping writing by now, her rose-imprinted seal, the familiar honeysuckle and gillyflower scent that breathed even from the writing paper she used. Even if those details escaped him, I’d added one final touch: one of Giulia’s doeskin gloves, soft and perfumed and embroidered with her family crest, which I’d slipped into my sleeve when her back was turned and then added to the folded note.

Juan Borgia had recognized the glove the moment he saw it—Bartolomeo said the Duke had held it to his nose when he opened the letter at Vannozza’s
cena
, held it and inhaled Giulia’s scent. Not just the smell of honeysuckle and gillyflowers, but passion; the passion she brought to everything she did. It wafted from the glove, from the note she’d written; a passion to make the blood boil in any man’s veins if he read the words on that scented page and thought they were meant for him. Never mind that she’d written those words under my direction with nothing but disquiet; the passion was still there. No wonder Juan Borgia sang under his breath as he went to cuckold his father.

He halted his horse, eyes searching through the dark for the door that Bartolomeo had described from behind his mask. A door with faded green paint, marking the entrance to a tall building with a sagging roof. Perhaps once a merchant’s dwelling with a shop below and a place for wife and children and a servant or two above, but this quarter of the city had deteriorated, and now the house was divided into small apartments rented by the week, by the day, by the hour to whoever wished to flop there among the fleas. If Juan had a brain in his head, he’d wonder why Giulia Farnese had arranged an assignation in such a sinkhole, but fortunately for me, Juan Borgia did not have a brain in his head. And even if he did, I doubted his head was his primary working organ at the moment.

I saw a beggar limp past on a crutch, half visible in the light of the torch over the door. I’d put that torch there myself when I rented the room—or rather, when I paid a half-drunk fellow at a wine shop a few coins to rent it for me, as I had no intention of being remembered by the man who rented out the rooms.

“Giulia?” Juan called hopefully toward the door, halting his horse. “Are you already wet and waiting for me in there, my girl? You like it dirty, flopping down in a slum like this? If you want it filthy, wait till you see the things I can do to you—”

I hissed to Bartolomeo through the darkness.
“Now.”

* * *

B
artolomeo bounds forward with a great leap to Juan’s side, seizing the Duke’s booted leg in its stirrup. The knife he borrowed from me makes a slash in the dark and cuts the stirrup leather clear through, slashes the leg too from the surprised cry that rises from Juan. The stirrup falls, clanking on the slimy stones underfoot, and the Duke’s balance is gone with it. He falls heavily, almost at Bartolomeo’s feet, and Bartolomeo scrabbles to get a grip on his arms, but Juan is quick and lithe-muscled even if he is an idiot, and he is already rolling and reaching for the sword at his belt. Even Juan is not fool enough to go unarmed into these squalid streets; he sent Marco to bring his half armor before he even set out from his mother’s villa on this journey that he assumed would end between the thighs of his father’s mistress. He parries Bartolomeo away, staggering to his feet, and Bartolomeo’s answering slash of the knife clangs off the breastplate beneath Juan’s cloak. “Attack the Duke of Gandia, will you?” Juan hisses, and his sword whips toward Bartolomeo again.

Juan’s torso might be well protected, but half armor does not cover the legs, and I am already moving around the startled horse in the crablike scuttle that carries me with much speed if very little dignity. I hit Juan from behind with both blades drawn, slashing twice across the hamstrings and slashing deep.

Juan’s voice scales upward in a howl as he collapses, blood spurting down his boots on each side. He does not know it, this arrogant young killer, but he will never walk again.

“Take his arms,” I snap to Bartolomeo. “Drag him inside while I tether the horse and douse the torch. And
Dio
, will you stop his screaming?”

Darkness turns to light as we drag our victim inside the little rented room. Plans turn to action. And
can we do it?
turns to
it is done
.

* * *

W
henever I thought back to that little room afterward, I saw only the flare of light from the cheap tallow tapers I’d brought. Light flaring yellowly over an open hole of a mouth, and the bright spill of blood dripping steadily to the floor from the Duke of Gandia, who sat roped into the chair I’d brought at the same time as the tapers and the rope. Juan Borgia, terrified and furious and already in utter agony.

“
You twisted little bastard, I’ll see you dead!
” he howled when he saw me come around the chair from checking Bartolomeo’s knots and look him very deliberately in the eye. “
How dare you lay a hand on the Pope’s son—
”

“What are you doing?” Bartolomeo whispered fiercely at me from behind his mask. “Bad enough Marco saw me—you insisted we couldn’t show the Duke of Gandia who we were! You said we’d lure him here and blindfold him and give him a beating, but he couldn’t know who it was. He recognizes you now, are you mad? He’ll have you killed when we let him go—”

I spoke softly, under cover of Juan Borgia’s raving. “Here’s the part where I tell you I lied.”

Bartolomeo reared back. “About
what
?”

“About letting him go.”

Bartolomeo just stared at me through his mask, and I could see the white around his eyes through the eye holes. I looked at him a moment longer, waiting to see if he’d bolt and leave me now, but he continued to stand in horrified silence, and I shrugged and pulled up a chair before Juan Borgia. I listened to the Pope’s son rant for a while, idly flicking my little finger knife back and forth, and when he showed no signs of stopping I slapped him casually across the face like a lackey. That seemed to shock him more than the blood flowing from his legs. He stared at me, and then he began to froth and threaten again. This time I whipped the blade about in a slash that opened a shallow six-inch cut across his thigh; Juan gave a scream, and I motioned Bartolomeo.