The Lion and the Rose (54 page)

“A nun cannot be released from her vows,” the prioress began.

“But she can be released from these walls,” Leonello cut in effortlessly. “Suora Serafina served the Pope’s daughter here, as you know. The Duke—you are aware Cardinal Borgia is now Duc de Valentinois, or Duke Valentino? He wishes his sister’s reputation, and those who might wish to damage it . . . more closely guarded. We are to take Suora Serafina with us.”

The prioress looked from Leonello to Carmelina and back with something like horror. “For what purpose?”

I flicked my eyes at Bartolomeo. He really was holding her entirely too gently to be credible here. I’d coached him last night in his role as brutal henchman—“More swagger, Bartolomeo, and do try to leer occasionally. Is a little brutality too much to ask?” But Carmelina’s former apprentice, I’m afraid, had no talent for mime. He stood there holding Carmelina between his hands like a bouquet of roses, and what we really needed here was a good snarl and a cruel yank on her arms. Fortunately, my clever cook produced a stifled little cry as though he
had
yanked cruelly on her arms.

“Where will you be taking her?” the prioress repeated, horrified.

My turn in the drama, and I leaned forward earnestly. “It’s been decided that I will find her suitable work in the countryside. She’ll come to no harm, I assure you.” At that, Leonello smirked behind me in amused contempt.
Naïve females.
“No harm at all!” I continued with a dim-witted little trill. “But it was thought better if she took up another name there, and Suora Serafina was pronounced dead and buried behind these walls.”

Leonello drew one of his little knives and began to clean under his nails with it, giving the prioress a silky smile.
She’ll be dead and buried soon enough
, that smile whispered, and the prioress stared mesmerized at the knife.

“And for your trouble, naturally you shall be compensated.” I produced a purse and dropped it to the table beside me with a negligent
clink
. I’d sold my diamond rose brooch for a purse that heavy. I liked the idea that Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, was so kindly funding a nun’s escape from her vows.

Carmelina managed another little cry. Leonello cleaned his nails some more, looking sinister. Bartolomeo lurked, looking not very sinister, but the prioress had no eyes for him as her gaze flicked from the knife to the purse.

“You know the reason Suora Serafina ran from her convent in Venice?” I added, careless. “It’s a shocking story.” Leonello had told me all about Carmelina’s grisly little piece of dead saint, and I’d had an idea how to use the information.

“Cardinal Borgia gave no details.” The prioress sounded cautiously interested. “I assumed Suora Serafina ran away to join a lover. It’s usually the reason, with these feckless young nuns.”

“No, it’s far worse than that!” I leaned close, lowering my voice to a horrified whisper. “A charge of
altar desecration!
She absconded with a most holy relic—”

“Surely not!” The prioress crossed herself.

“It’s a wicked world,” I sighed, and kept my eyes away from Leonello who was giving me a long stare. This line of conversation had not been part of our little playlet, but I’d thought all along that this avaricious smooth-faced prioress with her love of good wine and silk shifts might need more grease for her palm than mere gold.

And yes, she was looking very interested indeed. “This stolen relic . . .”

“As you can imagine, Suora Serafina could hardly sell it at the market!” I reached under my cloak. “My guard found it hidden in her cell.”

Everyone caught their breath as I tossed it to the table: a long braid of golden hair as thick as a man’s wrist, coiled like a lustrous blond snake.

“The hair of Mary Magdalene,” I said, crossing myself. “The hair that tumbled over the feet of Christ Himself. Can anyone doubt it? Look how it gleams after so many centuries!”

I heard a sudden explosion from Carmelina. Fortunately, with Bartolomeo’s hand clapped over her mouth, it sounded like a sob.

“A worthy relic indeed,” the prioress breathed. She took a glance at my own hair, but I’d picked a pearled velvet headdress this morning that covered my head completely.

“A worthy relic in need of a worthy resting place,” I agreed. “Caretakers more cautious than the sisters of Santa Marta in Venice. Even if they heard of it resurfacing in Rome, they could hardly look to reclaim it when they allowed it to be stolen in the first place.”

The prioress crossed herself. She was seeing lines of pilgrims, I thought: pilgrims dipping eagerly into their purses to see the braid of (my) hair all locked away in a rock crystal reliquary, bringing fame and wealth to the Convent of San Sisto.

A far better bribe than a mere bag of coins. She already had no eyes at all for Carmelina, standing pinioned in the not-really-very-brutal grip of Leonello’s red-haired henchman.

“I am sure Cardinal Borgia—that is, Duke Valentino—has the wisest possible plans for Suora Serafina.” The prioress gave a glittering smile, and the golden braid of hair disappeared into her sleeve faster than I could blink. “I shall send him word myself that she has died of a fever and has been buried upon these resting grounds, God rest her soul.”

“God rest her soul,” I echoed piously, and it really was a miracle that we all got into the coach before exploding in laughter.

Carmelina

I
brought a hamper,” Bartolomeo announced, and then my red-haired lover looked puzzled when everyone burst out laughing all over again. “What? I thought we might want a bit of a nibble on the road—”

“Of course you did,” I choked against his shoulder. The Convent of San Sisto was already behind us, and so was Rome. The coach was a hired vehicle, and it racketed along the dry summer road with none of the cushioned comfort of the conveyances La Bella had enjoyed as Pope’s mistress, but I had never been so happy in my life to be jolted about like an apple rattling around in an empty basket.

“What did you put in that hamper, Bartolomeo?” Leonello poked at the woven basket at our feet. “It’s moving.”

“I almost forgot.” Bartolomeo untied the lid. “That’s not for eating. Though Carmelina always threatened to put him in a
crostata
—”

My old notch-eared kitchen cat put his head over the basket with his rusty
mrow
.

“He should go into a
crostata
,” I said. “I’ve no use for cats who won’t catch mice!” But I lifted the cat up out of the basket and settled him on my lap.

“She wasn’t so happy to see
me
,” Bartolomeo complained.

“Thank you,” I whispered, and kissed the cat on the nose and then Bartolomeo on his.

“There are other ways to thank me.” My former apprentice looked meditative. “Do you still have that giraffe costume?”

“I take all credit for that,” Giulia said. “Now, let’s see this hamper you keep talking about. I’m starving!”

Bartolomeo dragged another basket out from under the seats, and my former mistress dove right in. “Sicilian olives, oh, I adore Sicilian olives—almond
biscotti
, they’re a little crumbly, so we might as well eat them right now—grapes, sugared violet blossoms, candied orange peel, oh, and marzipan
tourtes
! Bartolomeo, you’re marvelous.” Giulia popped a little
tourte
whole into her mouth. “I always eat when I defraud convents.”

“For myself, I feel the need of a drink,” Leonello announced, and managed to decant the flask of French wine into the four cups Bartolomeo had also packed into the hamper. The four of us grinned at each other over the jolting rims: Bartolomeo with his lean-muscled legs hopelessly too long for the cramped space; me curled up against his shoulder while the cat purred against mine, Leonello with his boots swinging above the floor and his hazel eyes sparkling, and Giulia as beautiful and glowing as ever with her velvet skirts filling half the coach. I felt a pang, looking at her. “Madonna Giulia, your hair—”

“Wasn’t that clever of me?” She stripped off her pearled headdress, showing us a still-considerable coil of plaits. “I’ve been wanting to cut it for ever so long, so I just lopped off the bottom arm’s length this morning. Can I tell you what absolute heaven it is to have short hair? Only down to my hips! And speaking of hair—” She pressed a little vial firmly into my palm. “Use daily.”

“Thank you,” I said, and not for the vial of hair rinse. It was a beautiful summer morning, blue and gold and cloudless overhead, and the dusty outlying villages around Rome were beginning to give way to dry yellow plains dotted with grazing sheep. There was color and warmth and noise in the world again, not bells and grilles and cold. I wanted to stretch, I wanted to dance, I wanted to sing, and I wanted to cry.

Suora Serafina was dead and buried. Most officially.

“It was all Leonello’s plan.” Giulia dropped a kiss on her bodyguard’s brow, looking so very wifely that I had to wonder one or two things. “But thank me if you like, Carmelina. I hope you feel grateful enough to come be my cook in Carbognano forever?”

Bartolomeo and I looked at each other. He’d been buttering bread and laying out little slices of marbled
prosciutto
and whisking napkins into impromptu baskets for the grapes; he had a smear of butter in his hair already and he had been muttering under his breath about the lack of a proper
credenza
. We grinned at each other, and looked back to our former mistress.

“We’ll stay in Carbognano for a little while, Madonna Giulia,” I agreed. “But we want to move on soon to Milan.”

“The court of Il Moro,” Bartolomeo said, nudging the cat’s curious nose away from the
prosciutto
. “What do those Milanese know about proper food? We’ll take it by storm.”

“We?” Leonello looked between us, and sharp-eyed Giulia clapped her hands and squealed.

“A
ring
!” Seizing my left hand to look at the band of delicate filigreed gold. “Let me see—”

“
Dio
,” Leonello said. “Women!”

It wasn’t a true ring, not the kind passed between husbands and wives when they recited their vows. “I still can’t marry you,” I’d said to Bartolomeo last night in the convent storeroom, pressed so tight between barrels of bad flour that my only option was to lie along the hard freckled length of him with my nose up against his. It was exquisitely uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t have moved for the world. “Even if we manage to get me pronounced dead, I’ve still given vows. Any vows we said afterward would be invalid.”

“In a new city where no one knows you, who’s to know about the vows?” Bartolomeo pointed out. “Either the ones you took to God, or the ones we didn’t say to each other?”

“God will know.” I couldn’t help crossing myself. “Don’t pretend that doesn’t trouble you.”

“I think God looks a little more kindly on oath-breakers than we like to believe. Cesare Borgia got released from his vows as a holy cardinal, after all, and the Heavenly Father didn’t smite him for it. And Cesare Borgia does more evil in a day than you have in a lifetime!” Bartolomeo laughed. “God smiles on you every time you so much as break an egg into a bowl, Carmelina.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you didn’t have some kind of divine approval, then how do you keep getting away with everything?” Bartolomeo’s eyes were merry and serene. “How did you end up guardian of your patron saint’s hand? How did you escape unscathed from not one but two convents? How did you not get caught by
anyone
, over all these years?” Another laugh. “Haven’t you heard our Pope say it to Madonna Giulia? ‘God means as much by his inactions as his actions. If He doesn’t act, He approves.’”

“You’ve turned cynic,” I said accusingly.

“On the contrary.” Bartolomeo kissed my knuckles. “Maybe it’s not the usual way of things, but in every way that counts, you’re my wife.”

My throat felt thick. “I’m also a bride of Christ. After Marco died, well, I kept thinking it was because of me. That any man who beds me is doomed—”

“Ah, but you’re wrong. We have as much heavenly blessing as anyone could want. Here’s proof.” Bartolomeo’s hard chest moved against mine very pleasurably as he squirmed to get hold of something from the tangle of clothes at our feet. “A blessing from our very own patron saint.”

“That’s Santa Marta’s ring!” I looked at the little band of gold, horrified. I knew it as well as I knew my own nose, as long as my patron saint and I had been together. “You can’t steal a ring from a saint!”

“We already stole her whole hand,” Bartolomeo pointed out. “Besides, she wants you to have it. She’s spent the last few weeks dropping it on me every time I opened the pouch.”

I must say, it fit me very well. I put my hand into the sunlight outside the coach’s open window, admiring the gleam of old, old gold, and I thought I felt Santa Marta twitch her approval back in her usual place beneath my skirt. Madonna Giulia had emerald and pearl and sapphire rings, enough of them to sink a ship, but I preferred something plain like this. Something I wouldn’t have to take off to knead bread dough.

“That nun’s habit is absolutely ghastly,” Giulia was saying, looking critically at my convent wool. She had eaten all the marzipan by now and was starting in on the almond
biscotti
. “We’ll have to be sure you get some new gowns before you go out to Milan—”

“Do you even have the money to support yourselves in Milan?” Leonello was asking Bartolomeo. “Of course Giulia never thinks of money—”

“We’re the best cooks in Rome,” my Bartolomeo said with the arrogance I was glad I hadn’t managed to smack out of him as an apprentice. “We won’t lack work for long.”

“Then here’s something to fund a new career,” Giulia said, and unhooked her huge teardrop pearl from around her neck.

My mouth dropped open like a fish. “Madonna Giulia, I can’t possibly—”

She was already shaking her head, brushing
biscotti
crumbs off her skirts. “I don’t want it. The rest of my jewels I’m saving for Laura, but that—” She looped it carelessly about the cat’s furry neck when I refused to let her put it into my hand. “That was the Holy Father’s first gift to me. It feels like a noose, now.”