The Lion and the Rose (35 page)

“
Lucrezia mia
,” Madonna Giulia was saying vainly, trying to put her arms about the young Countess. “Don’t flail and gasp like that, you’ll make yourself ill—”

“What do you know?” Lucrezia struck her away, gasping. “Have you lost a brother you loved?”

“As a matter of fact, I have.” I thought I heard just a touch of asperity in La Bella’s normally sweet voice. “My brother Angelo, remember?”

“To a fever! You lost him to a
fever
, not to a
murderer
!” Lucrezia buried her face in a velvet cushion with another howl.

“Weeping will not bring him back. Juan is at rest now.” Giulia stroked her back, and I looked down at the bandage that still swathed my hand and made cooking so awkward and difficult. The wound beneath it was either itchy or painful in unbearable turns, and I hoped Juan Borgia was burning in the flames of hell. If I was bound for the inferno myself for all my sins, and I probably was, I hoped the Devil would let me give the Pope’s son a turn or two on his own personal spit above the infernal flames. I’d sauce him down with hot oil myself, just to hear him shriek.

“Who would dare lay a hand on him?” Lucrezia was shrieking now. “Who would
dare
? My father will find them, he’ll hunt them down and then Cesare will kill them all—”

I couldn’t help a glance at Leonello, who was looking nonchalantly at the ceiling.

“I’m sure the killers will be brought to justice,” Giulia soothed.

But Lucrezia Borgia would not be soothed.

“It’s my husband, I know it is! My lord Sforza, he’s furious with Father about our marriage being annulled; he wanted to hurt us any way he could. He had Juan killed, he murdered my
brother
—”

“Now really, Lucrezia—” Giulia gave Leonello a hopeless look as Lucrezia struck her away again.

“If my husband had a hand in it, he’ll be sorry,” the Countess of Pesaro was shrieking now. “Cesare won’t wait for any annulment, he’ll make me a
widow
, and for my next wedding—” She collapsed in a wail again, perhaps remembering that Juan had escorted her at her first wedding. Though a distinctly uncharitable part of me wondered if there wasn’t a sliver of Lucrezia Borgia that enjoyed the chance to lay aside the gracious dignity required of a pope’s daughter, and have herself a good wallow.

“Should we return later?” I whispered to Leonello, but he gave his cynical shrug.

“Why not enjoy the show?
Dio
, one wonders how she’d carry on if a brother she actually liked was killed. Did she forget how Juan used to tease her till she cried about the spots on her chin, and how her feet were growing faster than her breasts, and how her first betrothals ended because no true nobleman could bring himself to wed a churchman’s bastard?”

Leonello spoke softly, but perhaps Lucrezia Borgia heard him over her own weeping and Giulia’s soothing murmurs, because she lifted her head from its tangled thicket of hair and fixed her swollen, red-rimmed eyes on the dwarf.

“Where were you when my brother was killed?” she demanded. “You’re bodyguard to our household, why didn’t you ride at my brother’s back with your knives when he needed a squire?”

“I am bodyguard to Madonna Giulia,” Leonello corrected, imperturbable. “The Duke of Gandia may have needed a guard, but my services were already required elsewhere.”

“Don’t you smirk at me!” Lucrezia cried, even though his face was entirely bland. “You never liked Juan. That little joke once where he told you to join the other dwarves in the mummer’s show—”

“I merely informed the Duke of Gandia that I do not tumble.”

“—and even if you
had
been at his back, I don’t suppose you’d have bothered to save him! Anything for La Bella, you’d walk on fire for La Bella, but when it’s my
brother
—”

“Lucrezia,” Giulia said firmly. “That is enough. There is no reason—”

“Oh, but every man is in love with
Giulia
.” There was a passing flash of spite in Lucrezia’s reddened eyes. “Even the family
dwarf
. It’s as plain as the nose on his face; I saw it when he kissed her before he jumped down into the bullring—”

I felt Leonello go rigid at my side, and glanced at him.

“—My brother died, all because Leonello couldn’t bear to leave his precious
Giulia
even for an hour, and—and—” The little Countess’s chin quivered. “Oh,
Juan
!” She went off into another gale of weeping.

“Lucrezia, don’t be absurd!” Giulia exclaimed with a little smile. “Leonello certainly doesn’t—”

My eyes flicked down to her little bodyguard. I had never seen his face anything but guarded, quizzical, sometimes amused—but for one horrified instant all his defenses were gone.

Giulia looked puzzled, gazing at him as Lucrezia bawled into a cushion. “Leonello?”

Leonello’s gaze touched her for just a split second, touched her and then leaped away again like a drop of water leaping off a hot stove. His usual cool mask blinked back into place half a heartbeat later, but the agony in that one split-second glance sent a ribbon of ice crawling down my spine. I felt a great swell of pity.

Perhaps there were worse things, when it came to matters of the heart, than falling into the arms of your seven-years-younger apprentice after eating too many fried tubers.

“Madonna Giulia,” I heard myself saying as Lucrezia continued her oblivious wailing and Leonello stood expressionless and blank-eyed as a statue. “Perhaps Messer Leonello and I may be excused? We don’t wish to intrude . . .”

Leonello was gone the moment Giulia nodded, giving a wooden bow and disappearing through the door. I heard his boots retreating down the stone steps, almost running, and Giulia looked after him as if she wanted to follow.

“Don’t,” I heard myself saying. “Madonna Giulia . . . I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“Very well.” She sank back down onto the bed beside Lucrezia, who was now weeping more softly, and my mistress’s face was now stricken as well as puzzled as I bowed out. It took another hour to calm the Countess of Pesaro. I waited in the passage outside with a hovering Pantisilea, gnawing my thumbnail, Leonello nowhere in sight, until at last Madonna Lucrezia’s voice called for her maids again.

“You can’t stay, Giulia?” the little Countess was asking as we tiptoed back through the doors. Lucrezia sat up and wiped her face, limp and spent and more or less calm, her momentary flash of spite forgotten. “I’m going to weep all night if I don’t have someone to comfort me.”

“So will your father, if I’m not there.” Gently but firmly, Madonna Giulia disengaged her clinging hands. “I really must go back to the
palazzo
, Lucrezia—I shouldn’t have left them all, but I didn’t want you to hear the news from a stranger, and neither did Cesare.”

“Very well.” Lucrezia heaved a gusty sigh. “Pantisilea, fetch some rosewater compresses for my eyes. Carmelina, you go get me a plate of something—I don’t care what. Oranges, maybe. They were Juan’s favorite.” Her chin began to tremble again.

I opened my mouth, but Giulia was ahead of me without needing to be asked. “I’m going to take Carmelina back with me,” my mistress said. “She’ll be badly needed back at the
palazzo
in all the fuss that’s coming.”

“Oh, but I need her here.” Lucrezia mopped her eyes again. “I’m not going to eat that stale convent bread and gruel, am I? No, Carmelina stays here with me.”

“Lucrezia—”

“No.”
The Pope’s daughter put her chin up. “You are not taking her too—I suppose you want Pantisilea back as well? You can’t be bothered to stay with me, so no one else is allowed to either?”

Giulia looked exasperated.

“Go running back to my father if you must.” Lucrezia flung herself back into the pillows, eyes oozing all over again. “Carmelina stays here.”

“I work for Madonna Giulia,” I dared to say. “If it please you—”

“It doesn’t please me.” Lucrezia Borgia looked genuinely surprised. “And it’s pleasing
me
that matters.”

“I am taking her with me,” Giulia began, looking irritated again, but Lucrezia cut her off.

“My father pays all the
palazzo
servants, Giulia. Not you. Not to mention the fact that he endows this convent. If I tell the prioress that Carmelina and Pantisilea must stay here, then they will not be allowed to leave!”

The Pope’s daughter would not be budged. She was crying again when Giulia finally cast her eyes up to the heavens and departed.

“Oh dear, I am sorry,” Giulia whispered to me just outside the door. “I’d take you with me now anyway, but if I upset her any further, Cesare will have my head. When she calms down, I’m sure she’ll change her mind—I’ll write her a letter about it in a few days, I promise.”

“Thank you,
madonna
.” I bobbed a curtsy, and Giulia gave me her own warm glance in return. But her eyes flicked down the stairs where Leonello had fled. “You had best be on your way,” I managed to say. “Let me get you a few
biscotti
for the carriage ride.”

Her smile definitely looked a little wan. “Yes, I always eat when I’m traveling.”

I watched out the nearest window as my former mistress set out across the convent grass for her carriage. Maybe this was my punishment. The man who had hurt me was dead, but I was still locked inside these walls—and who knew how long it would be, before I paid my penance for it, and Fate or Lucrezia Borgia released me?

I heard my new mistress’s impatient voice floating from her chamber. “Carmelina, where are my oranges?”

“Coming, Madonna Lucrezia,” I called back leadenly, and as I trudged back to the dank and dismal kitchens that were my new domain, I heard the convent bells begin to toll again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Beauty awakens the soul to act.

—DANTE

Leonello

E
ven without turning, I knew the moment my mistress stepped into my chamber. The scent of honeysuckle and gillyflower filled my nose, and I took a deep breath of it and kept stuffing shirts into my pack.

Silence built, but I would not be the one to break it. I imagined a dozen things she might say, but her first words were, “You’ve changed your clothes.”

“I think these will suit me better in future.” I pushed the sleeves back on my patched linen shirt with the ill-fitting doublet above it. I wasn’t certain I’d kept my old clothes, the ones I’d worn when I was first hired to act as bodyguard to a cardinal’s concubine, but upon returning from the Convent of San Sisto, I found them stuffed at the bottom of my chest. I put them on in place of the crisp blacks that Giulia had designed for me as my own personal livery, even down to the boots she’d had specially fitted for my twisted legs.
Dio
, but my feet already missed those supple black boots with the reinforced soles and supportive seams, now lying in an abandoned heap with the black doublet and the black hose that actually fit my misshapen legs, and everything else I was leaving behind. On top of the pile was my deck of cards—the new deck, beautifully painted and gilt-edged, that Giulia had given me to replace the cards that Savonarola’s Angels had confiscated in Florence.

I wasn’t leaving this
palazzo
with one single solitary thing that had come from her. Not so much as a shirt-lace.

“I haven’t seen your chamber since you were recovering from your wounds after our French adventure.” Her skirts rustled behind me as she turned, examining the four walls I’d called home for the past few years. “I’d forgotten how small it is.”

“A dwarf doesn’t need much in the way of space.” Except for the fact that it had a high-corniced ceiling and no rats, my chamber in the Palazzo Santa Maria was not so different from the bolt-hole I used to rent in the Borgo in my days as card player. A narrow bed, a chest of clothes, a small shelf of books, a candle to read them by. The difference was all in the details.

I’d retreated to my room the instant the carriage returned from the Convent of San Sisto. The carriage wheels had hardly stopped rolling before I was swinging down into the courtyard and making for the doors. I’d elected to ride on the jolting seat with the driver rather than inside with La Bella as I usually did; I’d been perched up high and staring ahead between the horses’ ears by the time she left Lucrezia Borgia in her chambers and come back to the carriage. “Leonello?” she’d said, looking up at me, but I stared straight ahead and she sighed and climbed in.

I’d known, however, that I would not be able to avoid my mistress entirely.

“You’re leaving us.” Her voice was quiet.

“Your powers of perception are absolutely breathtaking,” I said, and rolled up the last of my spare shirts.

“Why?” The rustle of her skirts again as she came closer. I still didn’t turn. “Because Lucrezia said—”

“That I allowed her brother to die?” I cut her off. My head was still throbbing, no longer just from the wine I’d drunk with Bartolomeo. “That it was all my fault, due to some astoundingly fuzzy logic? Well, logic is not our little Countess of Pesaro’s strongest suit, but she is correct in one particular. It is my fault her brother is dead.” I slammed the lid down on the now-empty chest. “Because I murdered him.”

I hoped for an outburst or a denial or a cry of horror—anything to make her recoil, rush away in tears,
leave
. But Giulia Farnese only said quietly, “I know.”

She sank to her knees beside the pile of my discarded livery. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, waiting for her to intone some platitude about Juan’s soul being at rest, but she was silent as she folded my black doublet.

“You know, I’m disappointed you figured it out,” I said, stuffing the last rolled-up shirt into my old pack. “I covered my tracks so carefully.” Even at the end, when I’d had Bartolomeo put on his mask and hire a few street drunks to help us load Juan’s swaddled corpse onto the horse and then into the river, I’d kept myself anonymous. The men had been drunk, and to disguise my height I’d swung myself into the horse’s saddle in front of Juan’s corpse, and wrapped myself well in a cloak to hide my short legs. Neither the men we’d paid nor the wood seller who saw us toss the body into the river could have recognized the man on the horse for a dwarf. “How did you know it was me, Madonna Giulia? The note I had you write?”

“Of course.” There was anger in her voice, muted but powerful like a deep-flowing stream. “You involved me in the murder of my lover’s son, Leonello.”

“No one will ever know.” I strode across the chamber to my bed and began stripping the linens. I would at least leave my room tidied when the servants came to clean it out. “I burned the note once it served its purpose. I gave you my word on that.”

“That isn’t what worries me! You always keep your word—you think I don’t know that?” She stared at me a moment longer, but I refused to look at her, just kept stripping the bed. “
Why?
Why would you risk yourself, risk
me
, to kill him?”

I shrugged. “It isn’t important. Suffice to say the bastard deserved it, a thousand times over.”

I watched her sidelong as she lowered her eyes to the floor, crossing herself. “I believe you,” she whispered, and pressed at her temples with her fingertips as though her head hurt. “And I give you my word, too,” she said even more guietly. “No one will ever know who truly killed Juan. Not from me.”

“I’m touched. I didn’t think you kept anything from His Holiness. Not when he’s grunting inside you, anyway.”

That brutal tone usually worked well for me, when it came to keeping Giulia Farnese at bay. Say something cutting and she retreated with quiet hurt like a swan folding her wings. This time she merely smoothed my discarded sleeves and added them to the neat pile of black clothing. “Do you really feel you must go?”

“Oh, I think it’s time.” I finished stripping the bed, heaping the linens together. “Better if I’m out of the Borgia orbit, or I might be tempted to kill off a few more of them.” I’d nearly planted a blade in Lucrezia Borgia’s long white throat today for her careless offhand spite.

But it wasn’t really the little Countess’s fault. If I’d just kept better control over my face, shrugged, laughed it off . . .

My mistress’s voice again. “Why are you really leaving?”

Don’t
, I begged La Bella silently.
Oh, don’t!
“Perhaps I’m bored with bodyguarding,” I said lightly. “It’s a dull business, after all, sitting about while you go to confession or get measured for dresses. Besides, I must have read every book in the Borgia collection by now. Time for new pastures.”

“Leonello—what Lucrezia said—”

“Leave it, Madonna Giulia.” I strode to my small shelf of books, the last things to be packed. The old books I had brought with me: the tattered Cicero, the well-thumbed Ovid and Boccaccio, the ill-printed copy of Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
. And the new books: the
Chanson de Roland
I had bought from the printer with my first payment as bodyguard, the marvelously translated and illustrated
Iliad
my mistress had given me at Christmastide last year . . . I left the
Iliad
and began sweeping the rest into my pack atop the clothes.

“But Leonello—”

“
I said leave it!
” I roared, and whirled to face her for the first time. Giulia Farnese had dutifully put on black in mourning for Juan, and her skirts pooled around her like the petals of a black rose as she knelt on the floor gathering and folding my dark livery. She always had a way of finding some tactful excuse to kneel or sit when we spoke together; any way she could fit herself to my height so I would not have to crane my neck at her. Her flesh glowed white against the black velvet; her hair gleamed gold in its netted mass, and her eyes were full of tears as she looked at me. Because she was the greatest whore in Rome (hadn’t I said that myself once, when I was being cruel?), and the best whores know men to the tips of their fingers. Even better than that, Giulia knew
me
. My face could hide to all the world that I had murdered a pope’s son, but it could no longer hide to Giulia Farnese how much I loved her.

“Oh, Leonello,” she said softly.

I had dropped my armload of books. I bent to retrieve them, turning away so she would not see the prickle of tears in my own eyes. My heart boiled.

Love. None of the philosophers had it right; what a vile and bitter brew it could be. The ache that had so often swamped me when I sat outside Giulia’s chamber after she’d retired with her papal lover, hearing her laughter through the door, and her muffled cries of passion. The jealous bile that filled me when I saw the casual kiss Rodrigo Borgia liked to drop on the nape of her neck in greeting, so I had to hold my hand back from stabbing the Holy Father through the heart out of sheer all-consuming envy. The fury that had swamped me when Juan Borgia and those French soldiers and that thug of an Angel dared lay their hands on her; the raw, clawing determination to sacrifice every last finger and limb I had to keep her from harm. The lust, oh God, when she dropped her gown and stood naked for Maestro Botticelli, and I knew myself no better than those cardinals who ogled her, even though I wanted to beat them all bloody for the humiliation I saw rising red in her cheeks.

Everything in me lifted upward when she laughed, when her voice rippled on in its cheerful breathless chatter, when she dug into a plate of
biscotti
with unabashed zeal, when she shot me one of her teasing complicitous glances as a dull guest droned on at
cena
—and then the shaft of pleasure was always followed by a tang of bitterness, because what in this world can be more trite, more humiliating, more utterly laughable, than the sight of a stunted little man like me pining for a glorious golden beauty like her?

You are a joke.
Don’t think I didn’t know it; don’t think I hadn’t told myself many times to leave this household, take myself back to the Borgo and my card games. Don’t think I didn’t rake myself, long and savagely, when I held Giulia’s note that had trapped Juan Borgia over the candle flame and found myself unable to burn it. Unable, that is, until I closed my eyes and put my head down on the page that still wafted her scent, and allowed myself to pretend—for ten precisely measured heartbeats—that those words were written for me.

The words that began with
My love, I cannot resist you any longer.

Laugh at me if you wish. I won’t grudge you. I have laughed often enough, long and bitterly, at myself.

My eyes burned as I gathered my books up and stuffed them into the pack, but no tears fell and for that at least I was grateful. Giulia was silent, and for that I was more than grateful; for that I could have kissed her. As if I had not been kissing her a hundred times a day for years, in my imagination. The one kiss I had ever dared plant on her had been a poor excuse of a thing; a comic smack of my lips at the barest corner of her mouth that hadn’t in the end been quite comical enough to escape Lucrezia Borgia’s sharp eyes, God rot her.

One of my books had fallen face down, the pages crumpled, and she picked it up wordlessly. Too late I saw which book it was. “Don’t—!” I lunged, but the collected sermons of the world’s dullest Dominican friar had already disgorged their secrets, scattering a handful of loose papers. Giulia looked down at the pages covered in my writing—normally she would not have been able to read my hasty scribble so quickly, but these pages had been bound for the printer and so I had taken great care to write a clear hand. The signature of
Avernus
at the bottom was large and distinct.

Poetry. The final refuge of lovelorn fools. I’d penned all those sonnets in one savage fortnight, after we had been ransomed from the French and I had been recovering from my wounds. Every day Giulia had tended me, seen my bandages changed and scolded me into drinking foul medicines and read me books to pass the time. She’d been kneeling beside my bed one afternoon, deftly adjusting the pillows under my head, talking in her sweet way of anything that would distract me from my pain, and she’d been so close . . . I’d nearly reached out to tilt up her chin with one hand, nearly captured her eyes with my own and said—God knows what I would have said. Horror at that near miss had made me cruel to her instead, snarling at her till she withdrew in hurt bewilderment, and then afterward I wrote poetry for her. She’d once said ruefully that no one wrote poetry to harlots, but I did—a dwarf’s pathetic homage to his unchaste muse. Poetry in the name of Aurora; the dawn bringing light to my darkness, oh God, how unbearably
trite
. I’d mocked myself viciously with every line, but all the scorn I’d heaped on my own head hadn’t stopped the words coming.

I’d had one copy printed under the name of Avernus—the entrance to the underworld! How very dark and mysterious!—and I’d hoped I could inveigle her into reading it. Cheap thin verse on cheap thin paper, hardly readable considering I’d had it done up by the half-drunk printer in the Borgo who made most of his living printing scurrilous pamphlets, the printer whose spare room I used to rent before I came the Borgia household.
She’ll laugh at it
, I’d thought when I looked at my poor offering.
Good.
Hearing her laugh at it would surely cure me.