The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (20 page)

Maybe I’d be left with nothing but Orsino after all. Orsino and his clumsy hands and squinting gaze and weak voice . . . Only now, everyone in Rome would know I’d given myself first to the man who became Pope.

“Is it true,
sorellina
?” Sandro had roared at me just yesterday afternoon. I’d had a vain hope that maybe he wouldn’t hear the gossip about his little sister when he returned to Rome, but that hope had died a quiet death in my breast the instant I saw Sandro storming into the garden of the Palazzo Montegiordano where I sat sunning my hair. “Cardinal
Borgia
? He forced you, didn’t he? You never would have given in to that old whoreson. If he forced you, I’ll have his head! I’ll plant it in a pot of basil like Isabella and Lorenzo—”

“Sandro, stop shouting. This is no time for your dramatics.” I’d taken a deep breath to calm the flutter in my stomach and launched into my well-prepared explanation, but my brother continued to pace and glower and interrupt me with curses: “I never thought you were fool enough to break your marriage vows! And with a man who’s had more mistresses than
Zeus
!”

“What marriage vows?” I’d said bitterly, and Orsino’s part in everything had come out then, and my brother’s anger had (mostly) shifted off my shoulders. “That Spanish whoremonger is lucky he’s locked in the Sistine Chapel right now,” my brother had said darkly as a parting shot. “Or I’d track him down and geld him like Abelard. And that goes double for your spineless little snip of a husband.”

“You will not do anything of the kind and you know it! The Orsini and the Borgia are powerful families—”

“And if they want to collude in despoiling
my
sister, they’ll find there’s a price!”

All I could do was gulp and mutter a prayer for Sandro’s safety. Daggers drawn over a woman’s honor; it all sounds very well in the songs, but in real life I found myself sick with fear when I imagined my big brother lying dead in the street for beginning a feud with one of the most powerful cardinals in Rome.

In any event, rapiers and daggers would have to wait until after the vote.
It all comes down to that blasted vote
, I thought, and rummaged for more of the sweet roasted chestnuts. I always eat when I’m nervous.

Leonello was still looking at me, one dark brow raised as if he were reading my head clear as the words in his book. “Stop reading my mind,” I told him.

“All dwarves are mind readers. Didn’t you know that, Madonna Giulia?”

I threw the last roasted chestnut at him.

“Dio.”
He caught it neatly. “What are you, a child? The concubine of a possible pope should conduct herself with more gravity, as befits her lover’s station if not her own.”

Madonna Adriana gave a
tsk
at his rudeness, but I was already used to it. The first afternoon he’d spent in my company I’d been twanging at my lute, trying to memorize the fingering of a new song. Leonello had listened for an hour, trying to read, and finally put the book down and his thumbs in his ears. “You sound like you’re strangling a cat,” he said frankly. “But I must admit you look very fetching strumming away like that.”

I’d giggled, stilling my fingers on the strings. “I am terrible, aren’t I?”

“Torquemada would condemn what you are inflicting on that poor instrument,” Leonello told me, and I liked him for it. I had spent more than a fortnight in his company, and after all the silent obsequious servants his tartness refreshed me, like a tangy draft of lemon water on a hot day.

“You think His Eminence will give me up?” I found myself asking my bodyguard now, voice low as I fiddled with my embroidery.

“I wouldn’t.” Leonello had already gone back to his book. “But no one’s offering to make me Pope.”

I winced at that, then swore as I ran the embroidery needle into my thumb. “Oh, Holy Virgin, I give up. Lucrezia, come here.” I tossed the embroidery aside. “Let me brush your hair out. That braid is coming unraveled.”

She curled up on a stool before me. “Maybe Leonello can juggle for us!”

He kept reading. “No.”

“Not all dwarves juggle,” I told her as I loosened her plait. “Just like not all cardinals have beautiful blond daughters.”

“No, only the best ones do.” She gave a little bounce on her stool. “Oh, I wish Cesare and Juan would come tell us what’s happening! Cesare always knows everything.”

Frankly, I was glad neither of Rodrigo’s elder sons were underfoot. I’d finally met Juan’s elder brother when he came to visit his sister just after Pope Innocent died: Cesare Borgia, auburn-haired like Juan, but taller and more self-possessed. He’d looked me over once and dismissed me from mind.
Just another of my father’s whores
, he might as well have said, before disappearing with Juan on some mysterious business of Rodrigo’s. The Pope hadn’t been dead even a day before Juan was bragging of the urgent services he would be performing for his father during the Conclave, but Cesare told him to hold his tongue and dragged him out on some doubtless-illicit errand.

The night dragged on. I sat working my silver comb through Lucrezia’s curls, Adriana began to doze in her chair, and Joffre had fallen asleep entirely with his head on the chessboard. Leonello examined the game around the boy’s head and moved one or two pieces—“twelve moves to the win, starting with the knight to
here
”—and Lucrezia chattered to me with all her breathless unconcern.

“My father says that when he’s Pope I’ll have
princes
begging for my hand in marriage! Don Gaspare won’t be good enough for me then, my father says, though I don’t know if I want to break the betrothal. I’ve had one broken betrothal already, last year to Juan de Centenelles—”

When
her father was Pope.
When
, not
if
. I sighed, stroking the comb through Lucrezia’s hair.

“More chestnuts, Madonna Giulia?” A voice sounded from the door to the loggia, and I twisted my head to see Carmelina the cook standing with a plate in hand. She wore a robe over her night shift, like me.

“We did get you out of bed,” I said ruefully. “Go back to sleep after this! We can fetch our own wine and sweets if we want more.”

“Nonsense, I’m always up before dawn.” She came forward and set down the plate beside the chessboard, her Venetian accents as crystal-sharp as the glass they produced. “If you’ll just— Oh, Santa Marta save me!”

I heard a mournful
baaaa
, and looked to see a baby goat come pushing its way around Carmelina’s skirt. Huge-eared, woolly-white, he looked around him and gave a pitiful bleat that woke Madonna Adriana with a snort.

“What’s that?” she demanded as I giggled.

“Dinner.” Carmelina regarded the goat grimly. “It’s been escaping the kitchen ever since last night, trailing after whoever it could find. You’d think it would be smart enough to know it’s going to end up spitted and stuffed, but I suppose goats aren’t known for their brains.” Her tone turned musing. “The brains can be very tasty too—chopped up small with sweet marjoram and parsley . . .”

“You can’t kill him,” I protested. “Look at that face!”

The goat kid gave another pathetic
baaaaa
. Carmelina looked down at him, fists on hips. “Looks like dinner to me, Madonna Giulia.”

“Well, he’s not.” I scooped the goat up into my lap. Lucrezia giggled as he began to nibble on a corner of her sleeve, and I stroked the floppy white ears. “I’m granting him a reprieve from execution.”

“Where were you when I was arrested?” Leonello murmured, or I thought he murmured, but he had retreated back behind his book again.

“What else can I make for evening
cena
?” Carmelina was demanding. “We don’t have roast kid, we’ll be reduced to pottage and hot sops.”

“I don’t mind pottage and hot sops,” I wheedled, cuddling the goat. “Do you, Lucrezia?”

“No, no,
please
don’t kill him!”

Carmelina gave a dour look at the goat. “You got lucky,” she told it, and turned to go.

“Who do you favor for Pope,
Signorina Cuoca
?” Leonello looked up at her from his book. “Our Cardinal Borgia? Or one of your fellow Venetians, Cardinal Girardo or Zeno or Michiel?”

“It’s none of my business,” she said curtly.

“If we only concerned ourselves with our own business, life would be very dull.” Leonello’s smile was lazy. “I find
your
business, for example, very interesting indeed.”

Carmelina gave a scowl and vanished. My favorite cook had
not
taken to my new bodyguard. Every time he addressed her, she looked as if she wanted to scratch and spit.

“You shouldn’t needle her,” I told him as the door slammed behind her. “It doesn’t do to offend the cook—you’ll eat nothing but burned stews.”

“I can’t help it.” He looked at the door where Carmelina had vanished. “That’s a woman with secrets if I ever saw one.”

“We all have secrets. Don’t you?”

“Oh, many.”

“Tell me one. More than a fortnight you’ve been my shadow, and I don’t know anything about you.”

“Are you sure you weren’t switched at birth with a peasant baby, Madonna Giulia? Girls of your birth and rearing do not care to know about the lives of their servants.”

“All right, keep your secrets.” I stroked the goat in my lap, distracting him from nibbling on my sleeve. “At least tell me what you’re reading.”

“Homeric hymns.” Leonello ran an appreciative hand over the finely tooled leather binding. “If I stay in this household much longer, I will be very spoiled for books.”

“I like poetry. Petrarch especially. In some moods anyway.”

“I’m never in the mood for Petrarch.”

“What’s wrong with Petrarch?”

“Inchoate longings in saccharine verse for a blond bore.”

“You do not have a poetic soul,” I started to say, but a cry came from Lucrezia, who had risen from crooning over the goat in my lap and flown back to the balcony.

“White smoke! It
is
white smoke this time, I see it!”

Madonna Adriana flew out of her chair so fast the chessboard overturned. Little Joffre woke with a start and tumbled to join his sister, tripping over a scatter of black and white pawns. Leonello looked up from his book and I hoisted my new pet under one arm and rushed to the rail, craning my neck toward the vast shadowy shape of the basilica.

The sky had gone from black to gray, the faintest line of pink showing in the east. Just enough light to see the plume of white smoke venting upward from the basilica.

Habemus Papam.
We had a new pope.

“
Deo gratias
,” said Leonello. He sounded amused.

“Leonello.” Madonna Adriana’s voice was sick with tension. “Go to the guards and have them send someone to the square immediately.”

No one had to ask what for. As we spoke, the new Pope was being robed in the prepared papal vestments, readying himself for his first appearance at the window where he would give his first papal blessing.

What pope?
The words pounded in my ears as I followed a squealing Lucrezia and a bouncing Joffre down the stairs toward the entrance hall to wait.
What pope?

I had no idea what to hope for.

In the end, Rodrigo returned before Madonna Adriana’s messenger could fight his way back through the jubilant thousands who had flooded the streets of Rome. We waited in the anteroom, all of us. Joffre bounced so incessantly that Adriana slapped him; Lucrezia was alternately praying and bubbling. Leonello stood throwing his knives over and over into a wall, making star patterns and circle patterns and crucifix patterns with the blades. I put on my pearl and the scarlet gown I’d worn when I went to Rodrigo’s bed, and I paced nervously before the windows looking at that plume of white smoke. The goat trailed after me nibbling at my hem, and the servants clustered whispering, not even pretending to work.

A thunder of noise and people crashed through the double doors of the anteroom. A flood of pages and guards and stewards and churchmen suddenly filled the
palazzo
, all jabbering and gesticulating at once. A pair of handsome young men, both proud and auburn-haired, one in a bishop’s gown and the other in a soldier’s half-armor, stood flanking an imposing broad-shouldered figure in sweeping layers of gold-embroidered white.

Cesare Borgia lifted his hand as Juan grinned, and tossed a flutter of handwritten paper scraps into the air. They had drifted down from the window into the crowd when the Holy Father gave his first blessing:

“We have for Pope, Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia of Valencia.”

“I am Pope!” my former Cardinal shouted, his deep voice a bull’s roar of triumph.
“I am POPE!”

He started forward with that swift stride of his, embroidered cope fluttering behind him like a conqueror’s banner. Servants, churchmen, relatives, children all converged, but he bulled through them and came to me. I sent my little goat slithering to the floor and rose, mouth dry.

“
I am Pope
,” he repeated, and grabbed me up in such an exuberant embrace that my feet left the floor and flew out of my slippers. He laughed, a sound like warm bubbling wine, and I laughed with him, lowering my head to kiss him before God and congregation and hangers-on and all. I heard whispers begin to ripple around the anteroom, but why should I care for that? Rodrigo didn’t care, and his opinion was now the only one that mattered.

I pressed my lips against my lover’s ear in the middle of all the tumult. “Your Holiness,” I whispered, and bent my head to kiss his ring.

PART TWO

June 1493–November 1494