The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (19 page)

She gave a little sigh, and I wondered if her Cardinal stood a chance of being elected Pope. And if he was, where did that leave a mistress, even one as beautiful as this? Popes had to keep up
some
appearance of virtue. Children born on the wrong side of the blanket could at least be passed off vaguely as nieces and nephews, but how did one hide a mistress? Giulia Farnese couldn’t exactly be concealed as any kind of niece.

I didn’t dare ask, though. “Very good,” I said instead for her lopsided little pile of elderflower
frittelle
, and began mentally flipping through other possible dishes for
pranzo
if they came out as ghastly as they looked.

A deep voice sounded from the doorway. “You must be the concubine.”

Giulia and I both turned our heads. Leaning against the doorjamb, arms folded across his chest, was a very small man. He wore a battered doublet and disreputable boots, and a dusty bundle sat at his feet as though he had just walked in from the streets. He had hazel eyes, deep-set under a prominent forehead, and they were fixed coolly on Giulia.

“I am Giulia Farnese,” she said, cocking her head in puzzlement and wiping flour off on her borrowed apron.

“The Cardinal’s concubine,” he said. “Yes, I know who you are. I am Leonello.” He made a surprisingly agile bow. “Your new bodyguard.”

I couldn’t help but eye him dubiously, and I saw Giulia doing the same. A dwarf for a bodyguard?

“Say it if you like.” He looked amused. “I’m a trifle short for the job.”

“Well,
I
wasn’t going to say it.” Giulia bent down and lifted up the one-eared cat, who had turned up to rub adoringly along her skirts. “It didn’t seem polite. Not that it was very polite of you to call me a concubine, Messer Leonello.”

“Just Leonello.” He picked up his bundle and moved into my kitchen, swinging himself up nimbly onto a chair. His feet dangled above the floor like a child’s. “And you
are
a concubine. Just as I, you can plainly see, am a dwarf. A dwarf, however, with a certain skill in knife play. No attacker will notice I’m here, until they pay for it with their lives.”

“You’ve killed before?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Yes,” he said casually, and helped himself unasked to an apple from a bowl I’d set aside to make a
crostata
. That was when I started to dislike him.

Giulia, however, had bent her friendly smile on him as she scratched under the tomcat’s chin. He purred and arched for her just like her Cardinal. “Did Cardinal Borgia hire you to protect me?”

“Yes, you and his daughter as well. I’ve not met the daughter yet.” He took a finger knife from his cuff and cored the apple neatly. His fingers were stubby, but deft; he flipped the knife without even glancing at it as he looked Giulia over from top to slippered toe.

“It’s not polite to stare,” I told him tartly, whisking Giulia’s
frittelle
aside and trying a little quick repair while she wasn’t looking.

“I’ve seen you before,” he told Giulia as though I were not there, crunching into his apple. “I watched your wedding procession in May—it took me a moment or two to place your face. I admit, at the procession I wasn’t looking at your face.”

I bristled at his cool rudeness, but Giulia just laughed, unoffended. “At least you admit it! Juan Borgia just lurks and licks his lips when he thinks I’m not looking.”

“I’ve yet to meet him, but I suspect I will not enjoy the experience. Have you met his elder brother?”

“Cesare Borgia? No, but I heard he’s come back from Pisa. Lucrezia adores him. What’s he like?”

“Not a lip-licking lurker, that’s certain.” Leonello crunched on the last section of apple, eyes turning from Giulia to me. “And who are you, my very tall lady, besides the cook?”

“Just the cook.” I began melting butter in a skillet, pushing the lump over the heat as it sizzled. “Not even the cook. The cook’s cousin.”

“Carmelina Mangano,” Giulia said warmly. “The best cook in Rome. Try some of this strawberry
tourte
, if you don’t believe me.”

“No, thank you.” His eyes traveled over me, speculative. “You’re a long way from home. Venice?”

“How did you—”

“The accent. I’ve played cards with far too many Venetian sailors.” He reached for the bowl of apples again.

“Stop that,” I snapped. “Those are for apple and quince
crostate
.”

“My apologies.” He tossed the apple back. “So, a Venetian. But
Mangano
, that’s surely not a Venetian name?”

“Sicilian,” I said brusquely, and tossed the first batch of
frittelle
into the hot butter. “My father was born in Palermo. But he made his career in Venice.”

“Another cook, no doubt.” Leonello’s eyes drifted to my kitchen-scarred hands, then back up. “Did he cut your hair just to keep it out of the skillets?”

I raised a hand to my head. I kept my short hair covered whenever Marco and the scullions were underfoot, but with the kitchens to myself I’d left off my usual scarf. My chopped black curls stood out every which way.

“I like it.” Giulia noticed my awkward silence and jumped in. “Much more practical in a kitchen, surely. And I’ll wager it doesn’t take hours and hours to dry like mine. Can I fry the next batch of
frittelle
?”

“With hair like that you’re either a cook, a nun, or a recent invalid,” the little dwarf continued, grinning at me as I ceded the skillet to my mistress. “Or you have a taste for dressing up like a man during Carnival. One hears things about Venetian women . . .”

Unease bloomed inside my chest. He sensed it, I swear, because he cocked his head as though he were trying to read my thoughts. Or my secrets.

“I had to travel alone when I left Venice,” I said at last, averting my eyes to Giulia’s skillet. She had tossed in far too many
frittelle
, and they were smoking in a way they shouldn’t. “I thought it safer to travel as a man. Give them a stir, Madonna Giulia—”

“To be sure,” the dwarf agreed, tipping his chair back on two legs. He was almost handsome, despite his stunted height and oversized head. His hazel eyes made a striking contrast to his dark hair, and his features despite the prominent brow were bold and regular. But he sat there at my table, twirling a slim knife between his oddly double-jointed fingers, and my unease swelled to fear. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his face, I didn’t like the way he was playing with that knife, I didn’t like the way his gaze fixed me—idle, curious, as though I were some anomaly to be solved. Santa Marta save me, but I could not afford to be solved. I could not afford curiosity. I could not afford to be discovered as anything other than a cook.

“I burned the
frittelle
,” Giulia said mournfully, oblivious to the looks passing between us. She gave a poke to the little scorched lumps in the pan. “Maybe we can scrape off the blackened bits . . . Here, let me try another batch.”

“Next time, Madonna Giulia!” I said brightly before she had the whole kitchen up in flames. How had she gotten those little lumps both scorched
and
raw? “Don’t you wish to introduce Messer Leonello to Madonna Lucrezia?”

“Yes, I suppose we should. She’s upstairs with Joffre and the tutor; they’re translating Homer . . .” Giulia stripped off her apron and put her arm companionably through that of her diminutive new bodyguard, leading him away. Leonello looked back over his shoulder at me, lazy as the lion he was named for.

Leave me alone
, I almost cried out.
Just leave me alone!

But I did not think this oddly dangerous little man would do anything of the kind.

Giulia

I
see it, I see it!” Little Lucrezia’s voice rose into a squeal, and she flapped her hand at me. “White smoke!”

“Where?” I rose so fast I spilled my embroidery to the ground, whirling to the edge of the balcony where Lucrezia stood leaning out so far that I put a hasty hand on the sleeve of her nightdress.

“There, just above the
Piazza
San Pietro—”

“White smoke?” Madonna Adriana began to rise from the table where she was playing a halfhearted game of chess with little Joffre, but a bored voice interrupted us all midmotion.

“It’s a cloud.”

I turned back to my new bodyguard. “How can you tell, with your nose buried in that book?”

“Because even if there’s been an election, they won’t release the white smoke until dawn.” Leonello turned a page in the book he’d borrowed without permission from Madonna Adriana’s library. “You can’t see white smoke until it’s light, so what’s the point of lighting the fire until the crowd down there will be able to see it?”

“Stop making sense,” I told him, and flopped back into my chair. Lucrezia blew out her breath, settling back into her perch. Madonna Adriana went back to her chess game, her curl knots bobbing, and little Joffre yawned hugely. The sky was still quite black, but between the sweltering heat of the summer night and the tension of the past week, not one of us in the household had been able to sleep. I was the first to leave my bed, throw a pale green silk robe over my night shift, and creep up to the loggia at the very top of the
palazzo
. But Lucrezia was soon creeping up after me, her hair still bound in its plait for sleeping, tugging sleepy little Joffre behind her, and Madonna Adriana in her billowing shift wasn’t far behind.

“You children should be in bed,” she reproved, but soon enough she was ordering tapers and wine and plates of soft-roasted chestnuts to keep us in comfort as we kept vigil over the view toward the Basilica San Pietro. I winced as the tray of chestnuts arrived, thinking of poor Carmelina the cook rousted from her bed downstairs just to feed us, but perhaps she was awake too. These past six days, with the Sistine Chapel and a college of twenty-three cardinals locked inside it in Conclave, the servants had been every bit as prone as I to hanging out the nearest window in search of that plume of white smoke. Three days in a row it had been black smoke, and a disappointed shout had gone up each time at the sign that yet another round of votes had been burned with no majority to show for it. White smoke, now—that meant we had a new pope.

More than ever, I worried just who that pope would be.

“Six days,” I fretted. “Is that usual, for a Conclave?” It had been eight years since the last papal election, and frankly I remembered nothing about it. What was a pope to a girl of ten growing up in sleepy little Capodimonte?

“The last Conclave took only four days.” My little bodyguard turned another page of his book. “And of course there was one that took two years, but that was seen as a trifle leisurely. The cardinals were finally locked in and the roof taken off the voting room, and they were told they would sit there in the open weather until they’d picked a pope. A few showers of rain concentrated their attention wonderfully.”

I could never tell when Leonello was joking. His educated monotone never varied no matter what he was saying. Only a certain gleam in his deep-set hazel eyes indicated when he was laughing on the inside. After six days of his company, I must admit, he mostly laughed at me, but I liked my new bodyguard too much to mind. He sat now with his feet propped on a small table, short fingers flicking through the pages of a volume of verse by the light of a branch of tapers. Someone had found him a clean shirt and a secondhand doublet with the Borgia bull, both hastily altered to fit his small body, but his boots were still disreputable.

“This Conclave had better not take two years.” I picked up the embroidery I was far too nervous to work on. “I can’t stand much more of this suspense.”

Leonello looked up at me over the edge of his book. “Do you want Cardinal Borgia to win?”

“Don’t we all?” I said lightly. Madonna Adriana did; she could hardly concentrate on her chess game what with all her glances at the black sky over the basilica. Lucrezia and her brothers certainly did; they could do nothing but whisper about how their papa would soon be
Il Papa
. Even now Lucrezia was hanging over the rail of the loggia again, scanning the sky.

“I doubt you want him to win,” said the dwarf. “Popes don’t have mistresses, do they?”

“They can have children!” I put my chin up. “Pope Innocent had sixteen.”

“Oh, youthful indiscretions are one thing. A young man is expected to keep a mistress or two when he’s first starting his way up the ladder. And further up the rungs, well, a cardinal can get away with keeping a seraglio like this.” Leonello waved a hand at the bower of women and children. “Installing that same seraglio in the Vatican, however . . .”

Rodrigo won’t give me up.
Not after those hours we’d spent in his emptied
palazzo
on the black and white daybed . . . and on the floor beside it . . . and in the summer-warmed grass of the garden with bees stumbling drunkenly between blowsy heat-fried roses. Not after the way he’d coiled my hair around his hand and murmured to me in Spanish, telling me I was beautiful. How he’d made me
feel
beautiful, when his leisurely hands skimmed my naked shoulders or took their time exploring the tender skin on the very inside of my elbow.

But I hadn’t seen him since that day, when he put me on my new horse and kissed my hand and sent me back to the Palazzo Montegiordano. The Pope had died just a few days later, and my Cardinal had disappeared into the Vatican for the papal funeral rites, and then into the Conclave. All I’d had was one brief note:
Don’t leave the
palazzo
until the funeral and the voting are both done
, he’d written in curt haste.
The streets are dangerous, and I won’t have you or the children harmed. I’ll send a bodyguard.
Surely that meant he wouldn’t give me up, even if he became Pope?
“I want you more than the Pope’s throne.”
Those had been his own words.

What do you know about men?
a cruel little voice said in my head.
The last man you staked your future on was Orsino Orsini, and he sold you for advancement. Who’s to say Rodrigo will do any differently?
A pope’s throne was the greatest prize in Christendom, after all. Surely worth one ordinary golden-haired girl, no matter what promises were made in the heat of passion.