The Lion and the Rose (46 page)

“Would you confess, Signore Capece?”

“M’dear, they would not even have to hoist me up to the irons. One look at the rack, and I would thrust my hand out to sign whatever they wished.”

The crowd let out a howl when it was announced that Fra Savonarola was to be hanged before burning. The writhing and screaming as the flames began to lick at the feet; that was the part everyone wanted to see. But they quieted again as he was noosed with a length of chain. Such a thick, eager silence. I saw the man tremble, the man who had been mad enough to burn a stack of Botticelli paintings and challenge a Borgia pope.

Giulia’s voice was very quiet—she stood so close, I could have reached out and run a finger down the length of her sleeve. “I wonder if Fra Savonarola will speak.”

“Wouldn’t be allowed, m’dear. If I were His Holiness, I would have made a bargain with our good Dominican beforehand: he’ll be spared the flames, but only if he refrains from stirring up the crowd with a gallows sermon. Who wouldn’t prefer quick strangulation to slow roasting?”

For a hanging, it was a distinct anticlimax. The prayers, the condemnations read out in ringing voices. The ritual shaving of what remained of the victim’s hair, so the flames could consume his face unobscured. Then the length of chain snapped taut, and Fra Savonarola’s feet jerked once, and that was all.

Giulia had turned her face away. “I think I will go,” she said to her escort as the crowd gave a satisfied murmur and the executioners began heaping brushwood about the friar’s dangling feet for the fire. “I’ve no wish to smell burning flesh on such a beautiful day.”

She half-turned, gathering her skirts, and I didn’t slide away swiftly enough.
Fool to get so close, dwarf
, I cursed myself. But Giulia showed no surprise at seeing me. “Leonello,” she said, as calmly as though we had planned to meet each other here. “What luck. Perhaps you will be good enough to escort me back to the
palazzo
of Vittorio Capece?” A light touch to her companion’s shoulder. “I believe my host wishes to stay a while longer, and I do not.”

Evasion was one thing, but not open flight. Not a second time. “
Madonna
,” I said, and bowed.

Vittorio Capece and I had played chess a few times, but he did not seem to notice my presence; merely sent a pair of his guards with Giulia in a distracted wave. The first flickers of flame were rising under Fra Savonarola’s limp feet, and the crowd was cheering and laying wagers on when his robes would catch. Giulia’s companion did not cheer or wager, only stood with folded arms and a hard face.

“Signore Capece is very grim,” I couldn’t help noting as the guards cleared a path for Giulia back through the crowd. “Why is he your escort to the most fashionable execution of the year, and not your pretty husband?”

“Orsino gets sick at the sight of blood.”

“‘My little rose,’” I mimicked. “What does he say when he pricks himself on your thorns?”

“He doesn’t know I have any thorns.”

But she couldn’t help a faint smile at my mockery. And I mocked myself, silently, for how her smile still made my heart stop. “Evidently your host doesn’t object to seeing a little blood,” I said instead, waving a hand back at Vittorio Capece.

“Men like Fra Savonarola make life very difficult for men like Vittorio.”

“You mean sodomites?”

“His Holiness doesn’t bother persecuting such men here in Rome. He told me once that if he did, the College of Cardinals would be half empty. In Florence, Fra Savonarola did his best to put every such man to the rack.”

“A sodomite escorting a whore,” I mused. “Not such an unusual pairing, really. I have always suspected sodomites and whores find each other restful company.”

“I am not a whore anymore, Leonello. Or hadn’t you heard?”

Another roar went through the crowd as we reached the fringes of it. I looked back and saw the flames climbing hungrily over Fra Savonarola’s robes, stretching greedy fingers toward his dangling head as the kindling under his feet spread into a nest of flames. Giulia did not look, merely drew her honey-colored cloak closer about her as though she found the bright spring day chilly. The guards beat a path for her through the outskirts of the crowd, toward the Ponte Sant’Angelo, and I followed.

“Why did you come to the execution?” Automatically I fell into my old spot: to her side and just slightly behind, the place where I could best keep an eye for attackers. “You don’t like such things.”

“Perhaps I have changed since you left me, Leonello.”

“I don’t believe so.”

“I felt—” She hesitated. “Guilty.”

I laughed. “Of all the sins on your shoulders, I doubt you can count Fra Savonarola among them!”

“He denounced the Pope and his family and his church as a nest of vipers. It was not true once, perhaps, but it is true enough now. Fra Savonarola speaks truth, and for that—” She twisted her head, looking back at the commotion around the pyre. The flames were rising high and bright now, visible even from here, sending a plume of black smoke into the air just as white smoke had been sent up when Rodrigo Borgia was elected Pope. Giulia crossed herself.

“If you hate this nest of vipers so much, why stay?” I couldn’t help asking. “You were always singing the beauties of country life, and now you have Carbognano. Green hills, simple pastimes, and a handsome young husband to enjoy them all with. Eden before the fall; not a viper in sight. Why not go back to it?”

“Lucrezia has requested that I stay for her wedding.” Giulia fiddled with a tie on her sleeve. “His Holiness would be just as happy to see the back of me now, but he won’t deny Lucrezia anything. So, I’ve been ordered to remain in Rome.”

“Why should that stop you? You’ve gone journeying before without the Holy Father’s permission.”

“Orsino wishes to stay too, for the moment.”

I laughed. “Surely you can maneuver that weedy, chinless sprout wherever you want him to go!”

“My husband has become very stubborn.” Her voice was careful, expressionless. “I must pick my battles these days, and I’m doing my best to discourage him from the notion of sending Laura to be fostered in France for a French marriage.”

I thought of sunny little Laura being brought up in the stiff formality of the French court and kicked a loose stone out of my way.

“I think I may win on that front,” Giulia went on. “I’ve quarreled very badly with the Holy Father, so he isn’t so keen on giving Laura a dowry anymore. I don’t see any French
comte
making an offer for her now.” A faint smile. “And no son of Adriana da Mila will want to put up the coin for that kind of dowry, either. But Orsino is still hoping some grand match will present itself.”

“What has any of that to do with not leaving Rome?” I still didn’t like the thought of Laura being raised to speak French. That sweet, laughing child who had clung to my stubby fingers as she took her first steps . . .

“The Holy Father has made it clear he can’t stand the sight of me—and Orsino likes that. He takes me to a great many parties now, so all the other men can watch the Pope snub me, and envy Orsino instead of pitying him as the cuckold.” Exasperation colored Giulia’s voice. “Though really, I don’t think that particular plan is going as well as Orsino hoped. He can introduce me all he likes as
the Rose of Carbognano
—I ask you!—but no one will ever think of me as anything but the Bride of Christ. Men don’t honor him for having me for a wife; they just despise him for reclaiming soiled goods. They tell him he should have thrown me out like the whore I am, and then usually they come around and try to seduce me. Men!”

“Your husband is a fool,” I said.

“And he is my husband, so of course I obey his wishes in all things.” Giulia’s voice went flat again. “We’re to stay at least until Lucrezia’s wedding. I pass my days sewing with Lucrezia, new gowns for her bridal chest. She chatters away like nothing ever happened, mostly about her new husband-to-be. Apparently he’s young and handsome.”

“Ah, yes, Alfonso of Aragon. I wonder if he’ll last any longer than Lord Sforza.”

“Poor man.” Maybe Giulia meant Giovanni Sforza, or Alfonso of Aragon, but she was looking at me. “Why did
you
come to see Fra Savonarola’s execution, Leonello? You don’t have any reason to hate him.”

I studied my former mistress. She had not guarded her skin in Carbognano; she’d come back to Rome with a faint golden tang to her face and bosom. Most ladies would never have gone out in public without covering themselves in white powder for the proper fashionable paleness, but she didn’t bother, setting her golden skin off instead with a pale gold gown just a shade darker. She looked like one of her favorite golden roses, and now of course all the ladies of Rome would be leaving off their sun hats, hoping to look so ripe and beautiful. I remembered Savonarola’s Angels attacking her for no other reason than that. They’d taken Botticelli’s incipient portrait of her, they’d tried to take her hair, they’d even taken a kiss in all the struggling. I remembered the black pang of jealousy that had stabbed me when my mistress kissed that lout, even if it was only to push him over backward. No, I did not like Savonarola’s Angels or the master they served. Perhaps that mad Dominican spoke truth of the Pope but his was an ugly truth, and I found him an ugly little man.

Perhaps it takes one such man to know another.

Giulia was still waiting for my answer.

“I came today because I like watching people die,” I said at last. “Didn’t you know that,
madonna
?”

“No. You don’t like it at all.”

“Well, I still do a great deal of it. Juan Borgia, Pantisilea—”

“Was that you?” Giulia’s voice rose, and I saw grief flash through her eyes. “They pulled her body out of the river, and I thought—”

“No, she was Michelotto’s. I don’t like killing women, so when it came to parceling out the victims, I picked Perotto and he picked her.”

“My poor Pantisilea . . .” Giulia’s voice trailed away; she crossed herself and I saw tears in her eyes.

I still saw her face in my dreams, poor silly girl, but I couldn’t say that. “She didn’t suffer,” I said instead, and kicked another stone out of my way. “I’ll say that for Michelotto; no one suffers when he kills them. Better than me; I botched Perotto. He ran straight for the Pope as soon as he saw me coming. Am I perhaps getting a reputation?”

“Is it a reputation you deserve?”

“I am a killer, Giulia.” I said it brutally. “I am small and amusing and you like me for that. But I am not your jester, or your bodyguard, or your poet.”

“You are a man who understands Virgil and translates Homer and can hold a child spellbound with a story for hours,” Giulia replied. “A man who once told me he dreamed of having enough time someday to translate the
Odyssey
into Italian, and study the verses of the Provençal troubadours.”

“Spare me your sentimentality,” I said. “My skills lie elsewhere. I am a killer of men, and now I do the work I am so good at.”

“Spare me your brooding dramatics,” Giulia shot back, and gestured to my knives. “There is much more to you than
this
!”

“Cesare Borgia knew what I was the moment he laid eyes on me.”

“Cesare Borgia is empty inside.” Giulia held my eyes in hers. “You are not.”

“I tortured Juan Borgia and I enjoyed every instant of it.” I spat the words at her, venomous and soft so the guards would not hear. “I staked Lord Sforza’s hand to the letters of impotence until he signed them, and I enjoyed that too. Cesare Borgia told me to kill Perotto, and I never hesitated. I saw Michelotto sink a knife into your Pantisilea, a silly bawd of a girl who never did anyone any harm, and I didn’t lift a finger to stop him.” I swirled a hand about my face. “Do you see me now? Or will you bleat more idiotic questions at me?”

“Just one. Did you kill Carmelina too?”

The silence stretched.

“I didn’t think so,” said Giulia. “Tell me why.”

I wound my hands through my belt.

“You didn’t kill her because you
like
her. You always have. So when you got your orders, you saved her instead.” I heard hope in Giulia’s voice. “That makes me very glad, Leonello. For her sake, and for yours.”

“Don’t be sentimental.” I began walking again, walking fast, but Giulia kept pace with me as we crossed the center of the Ponte Sant’Angelo. The guards tramped ahead, oblivious. “I didn’t kill her, but she might as well be dead. I walled her up in that convent, and I assure you she would
rather
be dead.”

“But you spared her life! Would Michelotto have done that? Or Cesare—”

An explosion rocked the city behind us. My hand dropped to my dagger, even though I knew what it was, and Giulia spun.

“The flames must have reached the gunpowder on the pyre.” I let go of my dagger hilt, but my heart was still racing, and not just from the explosion. “They always salt the brushwood with gunpowder, just to give the crowd a bang. Though most people will still hang about for a few hours, making bets on how long it will take the good friar’s arms and legs to roast and fall off.”

“You never used to be callous.”

“And I believe we have established that you do not know me as well as you think.”

“But you know
me
.” She hesitated. “Leonello—am I in danger?”

“From me?” My stomach twisted despite myself. “Didn’t I say I dislike killing women?”

“And you said Michelotto doesn’t mind.” She shuddered. “Will he come for me, or for Laura?”

“Why would he? The Pope is done with you. It’s that haughty bitch Caterina Gonzaga he’s mounting now, and a stable of others besides. You don’t matter.”

Giulia brushed my barbs aside. “I angered him. When I saw Perotto die, I—” Her steps speeded, outracing the memory. “I just wanted Rodrigo away from Laura. I wanted
all
of them away from her, especially with all that talk about sending her somewhere far away—” A deep breath. “So I said Laura was Orsino’s daughter. I threw it in the Pope’s face and taunted him with it, as soon as we were alone.”

Apparently it wasn’t quite gone, my old habit of fearing for her safety. Maybe it never would be. “How could you be so reckless?” I demanded, and my heart kicked in my chest.