The Lion and the Rose (56 page)

READERS GUIDE

The

LION

and the
ROSE

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The novel opens in the middle of the action, as the Pope’s mistress and her friends are held hostage by the French army. Did you come to their story fresh, or did you read
The Serpent and the Pearl
, which came before it? How did this affect your enjoyment of
The Lion and the Rose
? Did you have any other preconceptions about the Borgia family from legends, rumors, television, or other books?

2. The dwarf Leonello and the cook Carmelina are quickly introduced as enemies. How do their feelings toward each other change over the course of the novel? Did their relationship change in the ways that you expected, or did it end up surprising you?

3. Sancha (the Tart of Aragon) is roundly denounced for being a harlot, whereas Juan and Cesare, who behave in the same way, are not. Do you think this is fair? Why is Giulia not despised as Sancha is, though she is equally notorious?

4. Leonello’s pursuit of a mysterious killer leads him to a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Cesare Borgia, and Giulia observes that both Cesare and Leonello enjoy “needling people just to see their reactions.” What are other similarities and differences between the Pope’s son and the dwarf bodyguard? What about Leonello and Cesare’s other bodyguard, Michelotto?

5. Giulia’s affair with her Pope is filled with genuine affection at the beginning of the novel. When do you see her feelings begin to change? Did the change come from inside Giulia, or from Rodrigo’s actions, or both?

6. Kitchen apprentice Bartolomeo is the only character who can match Carmelina’s love of food and skill at cooking. How does the delicious food they make alter the course of events at various points in the novel?

7. The murderer sought by Leonello meets a vicious end. Did he deserve that end, or was there another way to stop him? What about the man acting as his squire, who was killed accidentally?

8. Did you hope that Rodrigo Borgia would reform the Church and the city of Rome after his breakdown and epiphany? Were you pleased or disappointed by the outcome?

9. Reread the conversation in which Leonello leaves Giulia’s household. Did you expect their exchange to play out as it did? Were you as surprised as Giulia was?

10. Carmelina speaks bitterly of the life that nuns lead. In your opinion, did nuns or married women lead more restrictive lives in the Renaissance?

11. Each of the three narrators has a relic or a symbol of power that defines them: Carmelina has a true relic in the withered hand of her patron saint Santa Marta; Giulia has her floor-length hair; Leonello has his knives. What power do these relics really hold for their owners? How do they feel about their respective relics by the end of the novel?

12. All the Borgias change radically over the course of the novel. Did you find their descent believable? Who do you think changed the most radically, and why? What do you think the future holds for them, beyond the end of the novel?

PRESENTING A SPECIAL EXCERPT OF KATE QUINN’S

LADY
of the
ETERNAL CITY

An Empress of Rome Novel

AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2014 FROM BERKLEY BOOKS

V
indolanda. Home—or was it? I hadn’t set foot in northern Britannia since I was eighteen, after all, when I’d left my family for golden dreams of glory in Rome. Was Vindolanda my home just because my parents had settled there in their happy exile? Or was Rome my home because it was the place I’d chosen for myself?

“Who would settle any place so cold and misty?” Mirah shivered in the red wool cloak that brought out the brightness in her cheeks and kept off the summer rains that greeted our arrival. “It’s summer, and it feels like autumn!”

“My parents are utterly mad, that’s why they settled here.”

“And you haven’t seen them since you were eighteen.” Mirah poked my side, hunting for the gap between my breastplate and backplate where she could tickle me. “You’re nervous, aren’t you?”

“I charged a Parthian army at Ctesiphon. You think I’m nervous to see my own mother and father?”

She gave me one of those looks of wifely amusement again. Maybe I
was
nervous, just a little. Would I find them unbearably changed? Worse yet, would they find
me
unbearably changed? Maybe they wouldn’t like what they saw. I didn’t altogether like what I saw in the mirror anymore, after all. Why should they?

So when I first arrived in Vindolanda, I didn’t go to my old home. I dawdled. I had to survey the troops who kept order in these bleak windswept moors. Then there was the
praetorium
,
which I had to see enlarged into a place where the Emperor could house his entourage once he arrived, a place with proper shuttered windows, plastered and painted walls, a tiled floor. “I have to make special preparations,” I insisted when Mirah raised her eyebrows. “If Hadrian’s bringing Empress Sabina, I’ve got to see the
praetorium
made fit for an emperor’s wife.”

“Who, according to you, is quite accustomed to odd adventures, and probably wouldn’t care if her floor was tiled or not,” Mirah said. “You’re stalling, Vix.”

“You know, I am beginning to regret taking you along.” I glared. “Women don’t belong on long journeys.”

“The Emperor doesn’t agree. Not if he’s bringing Empress Sabina this time.”

“Never mind her.”

“Why do you get twitchy whenever you hear her name?”

I suppressed the urge to twitch. “Maybe I should send you and the girls back to Rome if you’re going to be this meddling!”

Mirah smiled at me. “Vix? Go see your mother and father.”

It was a gray, blustery morning when I turned off the muddy road and slid down from my horse. I knew this road. It hadn’t changed much since I’d gone charging down it at eighteen, all afire with dreams of glory. I hadn’t owned a horse then; I hadn’t owned anything except my pack of clothes and the amulet of Mars which was the very first of my good-luck tokens. Now that I was going back up the muddy slope, a man grown with more baggage visible and invisible than a pack of clothes, I wanted to be on foot again. Mirah slid down from the saddle where she’d ridden behind me, winding her fingers through mine, but the girls squealed at the mud and so they stayed on their mule. “That’s girls for you,” Antinous groaned, but he led their mule along behind me good-naturedly enough, his long legs swinging through the mud.

I saw the crowning roof of a snug little villa. Stone, not wood; better built than most of the huts in this windswept place. Wooden buildings behind—cow byres; those were new. Things were prosperous, then, since I’d left. I swallowed, and felt the quick pressure of Mirah’s fingers. Rich grass ran up the slope toward the house on either side of the road, grass thick and soft with dew, and hedges flowered against the villa’s walls. My feet took me unthinkingly around the east wall to where the morning sun came strongest, where I remembered there had been a meager excuse for a garden.

There still was one. Someone had put in a fruit tree of some sort, but it looked pinched and leafless, and the herbs in their pots weren’t much more than a collection of twigs. I smiled at that. He still wasn’t any good at gardening, then, the broad-shouldered man in a blue tunic who squatted among the herbs with a spade and a trowel.

My feet were soundless on the grass, but the man whipped about before I got a step farther, one gnarled hand dropping his trowel and drawing the dagger at his waist instead. He was up in a crouch and ready to face me in an eyeblink, and his shoulders were bent and his hair entirely gray, but that crisp
secutor
stance could have graced any arena in Rome. And had.

“You haven’t gotten slow with age,” I told my father. “But you still can’t garden worth a tribune’s arse.”

He dropped his dagger and I dropped Mirah’s hand. We’d neither of us ever admit it, my father and I, but when we came together in a thunderclap of an embrace, we were both crying.

* * *

I
t was downright frightening they way my mother and Mirah took to each other. It didn’t start quite smoothly—Mirah was unaccustomedly shy meeting my mother’s dark eyes (anyone who knew my mother’s history would be), and there was a certain awkwardness when Mirah introduced the children. My mother took one look at Antinous and smiled warmly. “How did a lummox like Vix ever sire such a handsome son?”

Mirah looked just a little stiff at that. She stood between Dinah and Chaya, one arm about each, and I could see her arms tighten protectively. Our girls were pretty things, dark-haired and pink-cheeked and dimpled, but it was Antinous everyone noticed first: his carved Bithynian face that broke into such a radiant grin, his lean-muscled height, his curling hair the color of dark honey . . . And Mirah gave a little sigh, month after month, when she saw the evidence that her own belly hadn’t decided yet to produce a boy just as beautiful.

I’d told her it didn’t matter; I wasn’t one of those arses who divorced their wives if they couldn’t pump out heirs. But Mirah wanted to give me a son of my own blood, and she prayed daily to her God asking Him to put a miracle in her belly. I was starting to think it might take a miracle—she’d conceived our two girls easily, one after the other, but Chaya’s birth had come very hard indeed, and my wife hadn’t quickened since.

My mother must have seen the little flicker of disappointment on Mirah’s face, because she turned with all her quiet warmth to the girls and clasped them against her. They were shy with strangers, but she addressed them in fluid Aramaic, and Mirah smiled and in the same language offered the traditional greeting of a daughter to a mother-in-law. My mother had a low, melodious voice that could charm shy children and savage emperors in any language, and soon my daughters forgot their fear and my wife her diffidence, and all four of them were chattering away.

“More than thirty years with your mother,” my father mused. “And I still don’t speak a word of that odd tongue of hers.”

“I’m not so quick at it myself,” I admitted, and we traded quick grins and looked immediately away because we were damned if we were going to cry again.

“Vix!” Mirah exclaimed, switching out of Aramaic. “No wonder our girls both turned out dark. They look like their grandmother!”

“I am now officially old, if my firstborn has given me grandchildren,” my mother announced with a smile. She was really only fifty or so, and barely looked it: a tall woman with threads of silver through dark hair, and in her red linen gown and tooled sandals she had the same serene elegance I remembered from the days she’d worn silks and pearls. She
had
worn silks and pearls, my mother, and yet she’d ended up here in this cozy villa on a hilltop in Britannia. Never mind how; I’ll tell that story another time.

The conversation had changed to Aramaic again, and Antinous was chiming in now, warming cups of wine for Mirah and my mother so they wouldn’t have to get up. “I see you’ve raised this boy well, Mirah.” My mother approved as Antinous served her. “Even though you’re clearly far too young to have borne him! Tell me . . . ”

“Our women want to chatter,” my father announced. “Let them.”

We went wandering, my father and I. Past the garden and up the slope, to another wooded hill thick with flowers. “Apple trees,” he said, ducking under a branch. “Blooming very late this year—we had a long winter. The fruit isn’t much, not this far north, but I still walk here every morning with the dogs.”

“When did you finally lose that old three-legged bitch of yours?”

“God love her, she lasted a long time. These are all her descendants. Grandpups, I suppose.” Three dogs frisked at his heels: two curly-haired, one sleek and black. “Maybe your boy would like a puppy? We’ve got a new litter.”

“He’d love that. He’s always collecting animals. Mirah keeps telling him she’s not keeping a menagerie, but it doesn’t stop him.”

We walked in silence a little ways, trading glances now and then, and we both grinned when we noticed I was walking just like him: hands clasped behind me at the small of my back. He was as gnarled as a badger now, my father, his shoulders bent but still burly. He’d never been sure of his age, but he had to be sixty at least, and unlike my mother, he looked older than his years. Well, he’d lived hard. The last few decades might have been easy, but the ones before hadn’t been. The ones in Rome, full of arena fights and blood, chains and whips and sand.

I showed him my campaign tokens; told a few stories of my campaigns in Dacia and Parthia. He told me of my younger brother and my three sisters; all grown now, living with families of their own in Vindolanda. “Your brother’s a stonemason. Never wanted the sword, not the way you did.” Another flick of a grin. “They none of them gave me trouble the way you did.”

“I turned out all right, didn’t I?”

“That you did.” He turned and walked backward, appraising me. “Praetorian Prefect, eh?”

I shrugged. “It’s a pisser of a job.”

“It’s still high for a boy like you to climb.” There was pride in his voice, but a certain wry sharpness too. “Son of a gladiator and a slave. I killed Romans, and now you serve them.”

“I order them around! In fact, I’d have had a legion of my own to command if not for the Emperor.”

“And that’s an improvement? Romans made me fight, and now you’re fighting for them?” But his grin had more pride in it this time. “Legionary commander; how did you manage that?”

“The Tenth Fidelis was supposed to be mine.” My old legion. Emperor Trajan had promised it to me at the end of the Parthian wars, said he’d find me a spineless legate with the right bloodlines who would look official if I’d just do the real work and step on a Chatti rebellion for him. I’d gotten drunk in celebration, and had a victorious X tattooed on my shoulder, for “Tenth.” Then Trajan’s collapse in Selinus, and then Hadrian, and you know the whole blasted rest of
that.
I told my father, briefly.

“Hadrian’s a bastard,” I concluded.

“Most emperors are.” My father ducked around a sapling without looking.

“You’d have liked Trajan.” I had loved him dearly, that grizzled, grinning, swearing giant of a man—I’d wept like a baby at his death, and not because I was losing my legion. I’d wept for him, for the best man I’d ever known outside my father and maybe Titus Aurelius. “Even you would have liked Trajan.”

My father gave a slanted smile at that, but didn’t contradict me.

“Emperor Hadrian, though . . . ” I hesitated. “He’s different. He’s my enemy.”

“You’ve had emperors for enemies before.”

“Not like this.”

We’d reached the top of the hill, coming out from the flowering trees. There was half a crumbling stone wall at the top, marking the border of the land, perhaps. The view behind it was more thick trees, more hills, the glitter of water somewhere from a stream, but my father turned his back on the view, leaning against the wall, his dogs settling themselves panting about his feet, and he folded his broad arms across his chest and looked at me. “Tell me then.”

I told him. Hadrian, making me his bodyguard and his desk-man. Hadrian, making me butcher his enemies. Hadrian, for whom I’d cast off most of my friends and lived separate from my wife. “I hate him,” I concluded. “But sometimes . . . sometimes I forget that I hate him. When I’m riding along behind him on the Rhine as he’s surveying the legions, or when he tells me to do what I like with training the Praetorians because he knows I’ll make a fine job of it—that’s when I forget.” It was worse since we’d begun traveling—in Rome I could keep the hatred stoked, during those long idle watches where I did nothing but watch the bastard’s back as he worked at his desk. Nothing like idleness for hatred. But on the road, so many new things to see, so much to do, his energy subsumed by movement instead of idle viciousness—that’s when I forgot.

It wasn’t just for the sake of seeing Mirah more often that I pressed to travel ahead of Hadrian’s court, out of his company, to make his preparations as he journeyed while Boil held the bodyguard watches. I was more comfortable out of range of the man, where I could keep what he was clearly in mind. Because I was a dim, rock-headed bastard who apparently couldn’t keep his grudges straight, and it made my eyes prick with shame. “He once threatened to have Mirah and the children killed if I didn’t do his bidding,” I said, “and yet sometimes I forget that I hate him.”

My father said nothing.

“Did he
break
me,” I managed to say, “and I’m only now noticing?”

“No one could break my son,” my father said calmly. “Not the Young Barbarian.”

My old gladiator name. How foolish it sounded—so foolish I almost laughed. “Not so young anymore.”

“And grown more stubborn, not less.” My father looked at me. “Nobody’s broken you, boy. Not the Emperor, not anyone.”

I wasn’t altogether sure he was right, but I still felt a violent relief pierce me like a spear. Fathers do that to you—here I was, thirty-eight years old, the Emperor’s protector, commander of hundreds, and I still felt relief because my father had told me things weren’t so bad.

Or maybe it was just relief at admitting my secret guilts and shames at all; my fears of what I had become. How long had it been since I’d been able to speak like this? At one point my confidante had been Titus, but I’d buggered that up to Hades and gone. My eyes pricked, and I dashed a fist across them angrily. “Dust,” I growled, but my father wasn’t fooled.