The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (29 page)

I picked my head up off the papal shoulder. “Sandro?”

“Yes, why not? He’s a jokester and he’ll never amount to much, but he’s amusing. Besides, I like offering him favors.” Rodrigo grinned. “He rather likes me, you see, or he would if I weren’t bedding his sister”—leaning down to lay kisses along the line of my shoulder—“so I get to watch him wishing he could hit me, and wishing he could accept whatever I’m offering, all as he’s saying no with exquisite coldness. Refreshing, after all the slithering sycophants I usually deal with.”

“If you really do want to offer him a red hat, I’ll make him say yes.” My brother had turned down several lucrative favors offered by my Pope, despite all my pleading and persuading. To be made
cardinal
, though . . . it would be the making of my big brother. He’d be secure for life, a great man, and I wanted that for him: success, happiness, everything in the world. Maybe because he was the only one of my family who didn’t hold out a greedy hand to me now that I was in a position to grant favors.

I didn’t
like
asking for favors, really. Rodrigo might shower me with gifts in his easy, open-handed way, and my family too, but I never requested any of it. I wasn’t a whore, no matter what the people of Rome called me—and they did call me that, alongside the prettier names like
the Venus of the Vatican
. It still distressed me sometimes. I was a girl of noble birth and good rearing, raised to adorn a man’s household and bear his children, and sometimes I had to wonder just how I’d come so far from that.

And sometimes I wondered if I’d really come very far from it at all. I
did
adorn a man’s household, after all, and I
had
borne his child, and all in all the days I spent tending my baby and getting fitted for dresses and going to Mass and presiding over the family
cena
in the evenings weren’t so very different from the life I’d expected to have after marriage.

It had all gotten very muddled.

I sighed, and Rodrigo lifted my chin on the point of one finger. “Come to me,” he whispered.

“Yes, Your Holiness,” I whispered back, and he pulled me against him.

When Rodrigo had first made love to me, I had not the faintest idea what he was doing. From everything I’d heard whispered by my mother and her various pious, bawdy, or downright ghoulish maidservants, I knew the whole process of lovemaking was at first painful, and after that it could be either pleasant or boring, but it would be brief. Men took their pleasure, and it was a straightforward business. Rodrigo was neither straightforward nor brief. “What are you doing?” I’d asked, flushing pink and crossing my arms over my breasts as he gazed at me that first time.

“Appreciating,” he said, taking my hands away. And not just appreciating the parts of me everyone seemed to notice—my hair and my breasts and the obvious bits. “The skin just inside your wrist is like satin,” he might announce one night, and slowly thumb the pulse there until it was beating like a fall of fast spring rain. “And do you know you have dimples in your knees?” Tracing them all around. “And in your elbows?” His touch sliding up the line of my ribs, around the point of one shoulder and down to my elbows. “And one more dimple at the very base of your spine . . .” I’d feel his mouth there, moving my hair aside unhurriedly as he appreciated his way up the whole length of my back, and my entire body would be thrumming, happy to be appreciated all night long.

I still didn’t know if Rodrigo was doing it all wrong, or everyone else was. But my swarthy, heavyset lover of sixty-two years could appreciate a patch of skin over my hip until it was leaping off my body in the effort to follow his hand, and in the end I decided I’d rather have that than a handsome profile or a youthful countenance. A great many young girls have to marry old men, after all—I was lucky enough to get one with power, presence, charm, and the most useful penchant for both gift giving and lovemaking; a man whose passion for me remained undimmed after a year.

Yes, I’d call that lucky indeed.

“My Papal Bull,” I teased, my lips brushing his, and his burly chest rumbled laughter against my breasts. A blasphemy and a double entendre all in one; the kind of joke that he liked, and I slid myself down over him in a long candlelit shimmer of hair and apricot-scented skin. His eyes glittered dark in the shadows, still devouring me, until passion shuttered them and he groaned. “
Mi perla
,” he whispered, one hand tracing the dimple at the base of my spine, the other cupping my neck and then roping my hair about his palm to pull me down against him. Our mouths clashed, drank, clashed again. On my painted ceiling, Europa rode her bull. Down below, I rode mine.

“Rodrigo?” I said softly afterward. “Can I ask something of you?”

“You women, always picking at a man when his defenses are low!” Rodrigo’s eyes were still closed, his voice drowsy now, though I could hear the smile in his words. “What is it you want,
mi perla
? Diamonds? You can have as many as you like.”

“No.” I rested the point of my chin on his shoulder. “I want our daughter to have the Borgia name instead of Orsini.”

He was silent for a moment. “It’s against all law, Giulia.”

“You could change the law.” I smiled, kissing the side of his throat. “You’re the Holy Father, after all!”

“And
Laura Orsini
is a perfectly good name.” His eyes opened in the dark. “So let us leave it there, Giulia.”

“But everyone knows she’s
your
daughter, not Orsino’s. Why not make it official?” I could charm Rodrigo into anything; surely I could have my way in this. “‘Laura Borgia,’ just imagine—”

“No!”

I stared at him through the dark. Our limbs were still entwined so companionably, my pale skin pressed against his swarthy flesh beneath the sheet, my hair coiling over us both—but his voice had snapped out with the force of a lash. “Rodrigo, surely you can’t doubt that Laura—”

“Why should I believe she’s mine, Giulia? You were bedding down at the same time with that squinting sapling of a boy!”

I felt a sick swoop in my stomach. “I wasn’t—”

His voice was curt. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” I said, bewildered. “I
told
you I bedded with my husband. I told you the day I came to you—I said I was no virgin anymore, and
you
said you didn’t care!”

Rodrigo sat up in bed, a bulky shape in the dark, and his voice was cold. “I’d have cared a great deal more if you’d bothered to mention you were bedding your husband
and
me the same damned week. I had to hear
that
from Adriana, once she got it out of that little coward she calls a son.”

Adriana. That rancid, tattling old trout. “I
told
you, it was only once with Orsino!” I said, and heard my voice scale up. How had this become a quarrel? My Pope and I had never fought before, not about anything. “Once!”

My Pope flung back the bedcovers in an angry motion and rose. “So you say.”

“It
was
.” I sat up, clutching the sheet to my breasts. “Adriana didn’t tell you that too, when she was busy telling tales?”

“Adriana always has my interests at heart.” Rodrigo reached for his robe in an angry swipe. “Clearly I can’t say the same for you.”

“You can’t possibly think— How dare you—” Angry words choked in my throat like hot sparks, but my Pope cut me off before I could string any of them together.

“Who put this foolish notion about Laura’s name into your head, anyway?”

“Vannozza,” I threw back. “She said you’d find a way around the law, if you really wanted to. And she’s right, you could!”

He let out a bark of laughter. “That wife of mine does like to meddle.”

I erupted out of bed, pulling my hair around me instead of a robe.
“Wife?”

“She was at my side for more than ten years, Giulia. She was wife in everything but name.”

“And what does that make me?” I sputtered.

“Never mind.” Rodrigo raked a hand through his hair. “The law is the law, Giulia, and I will not go bending it just to put my name on the result of your foolishness.”

“She’s not a result!” I cried. “She’s a
Borgia
. One time with Orsino, just one time against all the times—”

“
I don’t want to hear about him
,” Rodrigo snarled, and I would have flinched at the rage in his voice except that suddenly I understood it.

“You think I would ever choose Orsino over you? Just because he’s young and—” I’d been about to say
handsome
, but that didn’t seem quite tactful. “Just because he’s young? Is that why you never said anything to me, when Adriana first told you?”

He made a furious little chuff of denial, but his eyes slid away from me.

“Rodrigo.” I took my Pope’s big hand in both of mine, my sore heart softening just a little, though my pulse still pounded outrage. “Rodrigo, you know you have nothing to fear on that score, I—”

“We are Pope, Giulia Farnese, and We fear nothing.” He jerked his hand from mine, turning in a quick whirl like a bull about to storm into the arena. And oh, Holy Virgin, but it was a bad sign when the papal
We
emerged. “It is late. There is work to be done. We shall bid you good night.”

I felt like I’d been slapped. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and a tight misery clutched my chest, but I pushed it down. “And Laura?” I couldn’t help whispering.

“Will remain an Orsini.” Rodrigo looked at me over his shoulder, and I saw the glint of steel in his eyes. “Really, Giulia, you’re very lucky she was born a girl. If you’d borne a son, I’d be far more angry with you!”

“Your Holiness,” I managed to say, flat-voiced, trying to hide how very much that hurt me. He gave an angry jerk of his chin, not quite a farewell, certainly not the fond kiss with which he usually left me, and I stood clutching myself, cold and naked and miserable as the door banged behind him. I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the tears burn my cheeks. My Pope gave me pearls and diamonds and velvet gowns; he gave me a silver teething ring for Laura and a cardinal’s red hat for my favorite brother—but he wouldn’t give a name to my daughter.

Not that.

Apparently even the Venus of the Vatican cannot have everything.

CHAPTER TEN

It is better to be feared than loved.

—MACHIAVELLI

Carmelina

Y
ou,” I told Bartolomeo, “are a disgrace. You are unfit to do so much as sweep a floor in my kitchen. You bring shame to the skill of good cooks everywhere, and you will die a miserable failure unable to even boil an egg.”

Needless to say, I was delighted with my new apprentice.

“What’s wrong with it?” Bartolomeo stared crestfallen at the toughened egg lying before him like a little stone. “I’ve seen my mother do this—”

“Seeing and doing are far different things.” Maybe little boys watched their mothers in the kitchen as they grew, but they didn’t pay attention, and why should they? Most boys did not grow up to be cooks. When they came to me as apprentices, they had no store of basic knowledge such as a girl would, since any girl knew from infancy that the management of her future husband’s kitchen would be her domain. I insisted all
my
apprentices start with the basics. Or rather, Marco’s apprentices, but since I was the one who taught them while he took care of the household’s menu planning, I could do it all my way. (Half the time I planned the menus too.) Young Bartolomeo looked mortified to be shown how to hold a knife or beat cream into peaks, especially with the other apprentices his age rolling out pastry dough and whipping up sauces and snickering at him, but a little mortification was good for the soul. I was sure Santa Marta would agree with me. She’d been reduced to a withered hand that lived in a spice box, and she didn’t seem to mind her demotion at all.

“An egg should be boiled for as long as it takes to say the Credo, and no more.” Straight from my father’s book: page 303, Chapter: Lenten Dishes. I tossed Bartolomeo another egg, and he scrambled to catch it against his flour-grimed shirt. “Try again.”

He blew out a breath and dropped the egg into the pot to boil.
“Credo in unum Deum—”
One of the other apprentices sniggered into a pan of bubbling orange sauce, and Bartolomeo faltered. He’d been bouncing and full of questions when he was just a pot-boy, but now that he was the lowest of all the apprentices, shyness had come with a rush.
“Credo in unum Deum—”

“I can’t hear you!” I thundered.

“Patrem omnipoténtem, factorem cæli et terræ—”

“Passable,” I said as his next egg came off the fire soft and perfect. “Now do it again until you don’t have to disrupt my kitchen by shouting a lot of prayers, you pottage-brained, boil-beaked lout.”

“Why do you shout at me,
signorina
?” he burst out. “You don’t shout at any of the others!”

Because none of the others showed his promise, that was why. By the end of Bartolomeo’s first full day as kitchen apprentice, I went down on my knees before the severed hand of Santa Marta and thanked her for softening Marco’s heart enough to let me keep Bartolomeo on. Not only did my former pot-boy have a cook’s nose, he had a soft wrist that boded well for his future sauces and a natural eye for how long to sear a piece of meat. I would never, however, dream of telling him so.

“You question my methods?” I pointed at the door toward the kitchen yard. “If so, you are free to leave now, Bartolomeo. Back to your uncle’s tannery yard and the smell of piss. Is that what you want?”

He set his jaw at me in a resentful look. “No,
signorina
.”

A little defiance—good. Cooks with pepper in the soul fared better than those without. “Boil another egg,” I told him, “and kindly do not question my instructions again.”

“Yes,
signorina
.”

I gave his knuckles another whack and moved on, barely hiding my grin as I heard a steely, determined mutter of “
Credo in unum Deum
” start up again behind me. I do like breaking in a good apprentice! It cleanses the palate, like chewing mint leaves in between courses of a long banquet.

The kitchens hummed today at a lower key, half the volume of any normal afternoon. Madonna Adriana had announced last week that Rome was still far too sultry for October, and she intended to retire to take the waters in Viterbo for a few weeks until this unseasonable heat finally broke. Madonna Giulia had pouted her cherry mouth at the Pope until he agreed a week in the country at her side would be most agreeable, and the whole household had been thrown into a frenzy. Marco had already gone ahead to Viterbo with half the scullions, maidservants, and pastry cooks and the lightest of the essential cooking equipment: skillets and mortars and cauldrons loaded into wagons or lashed to mules as he called back at me to bring those copper oil bottles or the straining cloths. I was to follow with the rest when Madonna Giulia and her mother-in-law and young Lucrezia finally set out. I was already fantasizing about the cool green quietness of Viterbo: fresh breezes to wash away the city’s stinking-summer smell of dead cats and baking bricks and sweating bodies. Lighter summer menus would be called on, to cool the blood and tempt heat-dulled appetites: snow-chilled wine and fresh-pressed infusions of mulberry or tart peach; salads of endives and caper flowers; chicken served cold with limes and just a splash of rose vinegar; featherlight omelets with goat’s milk and chopped truffles . . .

“Signorina?”
One of the stewards paused in the archway, not quite putting foot into my kitchens. I had them all well trained now, ever since an understeward had jostled me as I was shifting a kettle off the fire and spilled a very nice pottage all over the floor. I’d chased the man out, whacking him over the head with a salted tench at every step, and I hadn’t had any trouble with the lot of them ever since. “
Signorina
, Madonna Giulia has sent down for you—she needs a packet of saffron for her hair rinse.”

“Every time she washes her hair, there goes my saffron.” But I didn’t mind so much—I didn’t have to pay for the saffron, after all, and besides, I was fond of Madonna Giulia. The way she consumed entire basketfuls of my
frittelle
in one sitting would have melted the heart of any cook on earth. “I’ll take it to her myself,” I called, stripping off my dirty apron and seizing an unopened packet of saffron.

The Pope’s concubine lounged comfortably on a pile of velvet cushions in the grass of the central garden, wrapped in a series of towels with her little white feet bared under the sun. The top of her head protruded from a crownless straw hat the size of a wheel, her wet hair draped out over the vast brim to dry under the noon heat. Her face had been frozen into complete immobility behind a stiff white mask of some mysterious claylike substance, and she was buffing her nails with a piece of soft leather, occasionally leaning over to blow kisses at the baby who gurgled at her side in a little basket rigged with its own sunshade. Maidservants bustled back and forth, bees around their queen: one maid working at the soles of her mistress’s little feet with a pumice stone, another maid plucking at her hairline with a pair of tweezers to heighten the smooth white forehead, a third maid hunching witchlike over a jar of bubbling hair potion and shooing away that wretched pet goat.
What a lot of bother it is to be a beauty
, I thought. Myself, I would rather devote the passing hours to a complex sauce than to my own hairline and cuticles.

“Carmelina!” Behind the stiff mask, Madonna Giulia’s lively dark eyes lit up as though she’d been yearning all day to see me and only now could her life be called complete. I’d seen other women with that trick of worshipful welcome—my sister used to practice it before a mirror—but Giulia Farnese’s was too spontaneous and all-encompassing to be anything but sincere. “Have you brought my saffron?” she asked. “You won’t believe what it does for my hair—I put together a rinse of saffron, cinnabar, and sulfur, or rather Pia here does, and it gives me handfuls of pale gold streaks. Little red-gold ones too, which looks
very
well.” She gave a little bounce of pleasure. “I’m sorry I keep using your supplies, though. It would be very sad if you had to stop making those little saffron
biscotti
. I adore those
biscotti
. Did you bring any?”

“I’m afraid not, Madonna Giulia.”

“Good. I’m getting plump again. Sit down, sit down!”

“I should return to my kitchens, Madonna Giulia—”

“Oh, nonsense, you can take an hour.” She passed the packet of saffron threads back to the maid with the pot of hair potion. “I always eat when I’m sunning my hair, after all, and since I can’t eat until I take a bit of weight off, you might as well keep me company.” She tilted her little head on one side, assessing me as I sat. “No sense putting saffron in beautiful dark hair like yours, though. What shall we try instead . . .”

“A tincture of quicklime and lead,” the maid named Pia contributed, giving the hair rinse another good stir. “Good for dark hair,
madonna
.”

“But I never like putting metal in my hair, do you? A rinse with rosemary and sage, that’s what we used in Capodimonte.” Madonna Giulia gestured at the maids, who bustled behind me with giggles and began unpinning my hair. “And you must have a mask—it feels very strange and stiff, but it whitens the skin no end.”

“I don’t need white skin,” I protested, trying to swat away the maids. I’d never had a maid to do my hair in my life; my sister had always been the one to yank a comb through my curls and complain about the tangles. “I’m no fine lady, Madonna Giulia, I don’t—”

“Here, hold still.” With her own hands, the Pope’s mistress began smoothing cream over my cheeks. “Don’t screw up your nose like that; I know it smells, but it’s just bean flour, egg white, goat’s milk, and one or two other things. Some people like to add a dove’s entrails to the mix, but I never like putting bird parts on my face, do you? Goodness, but beauty can be a disgusting business. Men think it’s all Venus-in-her-bower, dabbing lotions and sprinkling perfumes, but they have no idea.”

“Better to keep the masks and the smelly bits out of their sight, I always say,” another of the maids agreed. Madonna Giulia sat back, tilting her head as a maid began combing the new saffron and cinnabar mix through her damp hair, and one of the other maids was working something herbal-smelling through mine. My wiry curls had grown out to my shoulders again, long enough to plait. Leonello still made a point of offering outlandish theories about it whenever he saw me. “Let me guess,” he said yesterday when we crossed paths in the courtyard. “You’re a runaway nun fleeing the cloister!” Two days before that his guess had been, “A singer of plainchant, passing herself off as a boy to continue singing in a boys’ choir! You’re certainly flat enough for it.” A week before that: “Ah, I have it! You’re a Venetian courtesan who titillates her clients by dressing up like a man! The things one hears about Venetians . . .”

“I traveled to Rome alone,” I always replied coldly, “and to keep myself safe, I traveled in men’s disguise. As you already know, because I’ve told you Santa Marta knows how many times!” But little Messer Leonello always gave me a knowing grin. Ever since he’d sniffed out the fact that I’d fled Venice with my father’s recipes, he wanted the rest of my story. Santa Marta help me if he found out just what I was fleeing. He’d turn me in just for the pleasure of seeing if he was right, the horrid little man.

Well, serve
me
right for lowering my guard around him. Up in the loggia I’d been thinking he wasn’t so bad at all. Perhaps even likeable. And then he’d struck, biting me like a snake lying in wait.

I wouldn’t be so careless again. Madonna Giulia might like her bodyguard, but I’d keep my lips sealed in his presence from now on. He was far too clever for his own good, and I didn’t need his cleverness focused on me.

All the maids were settling down now, creamed and painted with pilfered cosmetics and looking ready for a good gossip. “Is this usual?” I whispered to scrawny Pantisilea as she plopped beside me, unashamedly scraping out the remains of her mistress’s face mask from its pot and patting it over her own cheeks. I didn’t know Madonna Giulia’s maids near as well as I knew my kitchen girls and maidservants—in the strict hierarchy of servants in the
palazzo
, we inhabited an entirely different world than this perfumed and feminine one. But I’d never seen a noble-born lady of any household sharing her beauty supplies and her gossip with the maids before.

“You would not believe how the College of Cardinals is fussing,” Giulia Farnese was chattering. “You’d think we were about to be invaded by devils . . .”

No, I decided as the whispers began to fly, this was
not
usual, at least outside this enclosed world Leonello called the papal seraglio. My father had served a great many highborn Venetian ladies, and some might be willing to confide in their maids on occasion, but they were far less willing to hear any confessions in return.
That
was only for equals.

Then again, perhaps the Pope’s mistress didn’t really have equals. Women of her own birth and station never came calling on her now that she was the most notorious woman in Rome—the only people who called on her were petty lords and suave churchmen and their various functionaries, people who wanted to wheedle favors from the Pope, and they certainly didn’t bring their wives and daughters along. If she had been a courtesan she might have had friends among the other women of easy virtue, but such women would never be allowed into this house where the Pope’s virgin daughter dwelled. Giulia Farnese occupied a gray territory, I realized: too sinful for ladies and too virtuous for whores. No wonder she befriended her maids and came tripping down into my kitchens for
tourtes
and cooking instruction. Were there any other women she could talk to?