The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (35 page)

“Odd,” he said. “Mostly they won’t look at me. I frighten them.”

I curled my legs up around his waist, locking him against me. “Because you’re the Devil, Your Eminence?”

“Yes.” He still leaned his weight on my wrists, hurting them. “I
should
frighten you.”

“You don’t.” Lie, lie, lie—I was remembering the dagger with the sapphire in its hilt, the dagger and where it had been found and all the whispers through Rome about who might have used it. A week or a day or an hour ago I’d found the thought utterly ridiculous, those whispers about a Pope’s son murdering a tavern girl in his idle hours. Now his eyes were burning into me, and maybe I did find them frightening—but I still wanted to look at him.

He gazed back, quite expressionless. His fingers tightened in an abrupt, violent squeeze, steel bands cutting my hands off, and I cried out in sudden pain.

Then he began.

Leonello

P
assion can fill a house like smoke. I felt it every time the Pope came through the passage to visit his pearl: the glance he’d give her over the
cena
dishes as he talked with Adriana da Mila and little Lucrezia, a glance so heavy with meaning that Giulia’s lashes dropped under the weight of it; the way his thumb caressed the inside of her wrist as he took her arm to escort her from the room, as though the lovemaking had already begun; the swift, teasing smile she’d give him as the door of her chamber swung shut. Later you might hear small sounds coming from under those bolted doors—a soft cry of passion or the low bubble of laughter, and those sounds seemed to drift through the
palazzo
like fire along the nerves. Those were the nights Lucrezia turned snappish and yearning, the nights Madonna Adriana tapped her foot to some unseen music and looked dreamy, as though reliving some memory from a time when she was young, heedless, and not at all concerned with how many ducats she had spent or saved that day. Those were the nights the maids giggled and flirted with the guardsmen; the nights when the solitary men took themselves in hand with a groan for the penances the priest would make them do in atonement.

But I’d never seen passion fill a house like this.

Lucrezia Borgia’s kindling was a sweeter, softer thing, a candle flame rather than the heady firestorm the Pope and his Venus could ignite through the
palazzo
, but no less insidious for all that. Giddy, happy, laughing love—it expanded outward from her, truffle-scented and oyster-fueled, a river like sparkling wine that intoxicated first her husband and then the guests, then the whole house.

“Leonello!” My mistress smiled as she opened the door of her chamber in answer to my knock. La Bella’s hair was still piled high in the intricate coils and braids she’d worn to entertain the Count of Pesaro and his entourage, but she’d discarded her tight-laced gown for a loose fur-lined Neapolitan robe, all the fashion since the recent alliance with Naples. “It’s late,” my mistress continued. “I dismissed you an hour ago—why haven’t you gone to bed?”

Because if I went to bed now I’d lie restless under the perfume of the passion little Lucrezia and her husband were spreading through the house, the passion that had already overcome a half-dozen other shadowy pairs of lovers I’d seen entwined behind pillars and flitting into shadowed places in the garden. Everyone was in love tonight, everyone but me, and if I went to bed I’d fall asleep to uneasy dreams of women staked to tables and black-clad men hovering over me in smiling masks.

But I did not want to think of such things, so I gave my mistress a light shrug. “I could ask you the same question,” I returned. “Why haven’t
you
gone to bed, Madonna Giulia?”

“I was tending my dear mother-in-law,” she said, a bit too wide-eyed and innocent. “Her guts are griping, poor thing. It came on very suddenly.”

I snorted.

“And once I settled her, well, I found I couldn’t sleep either.” Giulia fiddled with her sleeve, tucked a stray hair behind one ear, nibbled on a thumbnail. “I miss His Holiness.”

Perhaps I wasn’t the only one in the
palazzo
confined to a restless, empty bed tonight. “Why did you do it?” I couldn’t help asking. “Disobey the Pope just to aid Lucrezia?”

“Over the table tonight, she looked so . . .” Giulia’s little face lapsed from its usual dancing merriment to a somber sadness. She’d been very quiet that night at the table, folding herself deliberately into the background to let Lucrezia blossom. “She looked so hopeful. Full of love, I suppose. I think I looked like that too, when I married Orsino, but it didn’t end so well for me. Hopefully it will for Lucrezia—but either way, she deserves the chance. She
is
married, after all—it’s no sin to keep her from her husband, if they both want each other . . .”

My mistress sounded as though she were already marshaling her arguments for future storms. “I believe you are braver than you think, Madonna Giulia.”

“I think so too,” she said, smiling again. “I’m quite delighted with myself, really. I shall try to hang on to the feeling later, when Rodrigo is storming at me and threatening excommunication.” She couldn’t resist a shiver at the thought, whether of excommunication or her Pope’s anger, but then she brushed both aside. “Come into my
sala
a moment, Leonello—you aren’t too tired? You don’t look sleepy.”

“I’d meant to find a book,” I lied. What I hoped to do, once my mistress was safely tucked away for the night, was take myself downstairs and find a girl. A maidservant in the kitchens who hadn’t yet sneaked off with some other lover, or even that long-legged sharp-tongued Venetian cook if I could get her not to hate me for an hour or two. Some girl, anyway, willing to share a flask of wine with me and perhaps something more. No one thinks a dwarf can get a woman without paying her, but if I wanted a woman I could usually find one. It wasn’t passion that brought them to my bed; it was curiosity—but that could be as strong a force as passion, in my experience. Women looked at me and they couldn’t help wondering how a dwarf played a man’s role between the sheets. They wanted to know if I looked as odd without my doublet as I did with it. Besides, I was small and amusing and made them laugh, so where was the harm?

And as long as I left before morning, when laughter and curiosity turned to acute embarrassment—as long as we pretended it had never happened—we might have a good time of it.

“You might as well come in for a moment, since we’re both awake.” Madonna Giulia gave me a pleased look. “I’ve a present for you, and you may as well have it now.”

“A present?” I blinked, following her into the warmth of her private
sala
. Two more of her maids waited up for her, one dozing on the wall bench where her mistress’s night shift had been laid out in preparation for bed, the other yawning as she stirred up the brazier. They looked up with sleepy starts of surprise, but Madonna Giulia waved them back as they started to rise. “Take your ease,” she scolded. “I can unpin my own hair!”

First, however, she padded to a wall bench where a bundle sat wrapped in the immaculate linen that usually shrouded her new gowns when they came from the robe makers. “I’d meant to have this for you sooner,” she said, putting the bundle into my arms. “But the boots took longer than expected.”

“Boots?” I said, startled.

“Your new livery.” She gave me a little push toward a dressing screen at the other end of the
sala
, lushly painted with scenes from the Rape of the Sabines. The most beautiful of the Sabine women, as was common in this room which had been so lavishly painted and decorated specially for the Pope’s mistress, looked like Giulia. “Try it all on, I can’t wait to see how it came out.”

Self-consciously I retreated behind the screen, untying the linen wrappings.
If she put me in some motley suit or belled cap . . .
On the other side of the screen I could hear her chattering to the maids, asking one how her lamed mother was faring, listening to the second confess her hopes of marriage to one of the Borgia guards. “I’ll speak to Madonna Adriana about him; I’m sure we can manage something. Is he handsome?”

I swallowed as I edged around the screen again. My mouth had gone dry, and I couldn’t stop looking down at myself. Madonna Giulia turned midchatter to look at me, the maids following her eyes, and I suddenly found my stomach fluttering.
Don’t laugh
, I thought wretchedly.
Please don’t laugh.
I had not been laughed at in so very long—I might still be a dwarf but I was respected in this household, my skills feared and whispered of, and if any guardsman or rude maidservant japed at me, I had the right to cut them down with my viper tongue with no fear of punishment because I was more valued here than they. No one had japed at me in so long. If La Bella looked down at me from the height of her beauty and gave one of her merry laughs—

She did laugh—she laughed and clapped her hands. “
Dio
,” she said softly, the sheer honest delight in her eyes stopping the sick swoop in my stomach, “Messer Leonello, I
knew
you were a handsome man!”

“Hardly.” I found my tongue again somehow as I looked down at myself. “Velvet feathers do not turn a lame bird into a peacock.”

“Hush.” She prowled around me consideringly. “Let me adjust those ties for you at the shoulder—girls, hold up my glass!”

The two maids brought the mirror over, tilting it down at an angle so I could see, and I swallowed at the sight of my own reflection. The livery Madonna Giulia Farnese had chosen for me was stark unadorned black velvet, a severely plain doublet tailored like a glove to the contours of my odd torso. The tabs at the armholes were cunningly tailored, extending my silhouette to make my shoulders look broader, my head less oversized. The shirt was crisp snowy white, just a thread of blackwork embroidery at the wrists—“No lace,” Giulia said behind me. “I did promise. And see, there are
two
sheaths sewn inside each cuff for those little wrist knives of yours.” I had warm black hose that fit my stunted legs without bunching, black boots to the knee, a belt of supple black leather with several more stitched sheaths for my Toledo blades. The household emblem of the Borgia bull and the papal keys was confined to a discreet badge on one sleeve.

“The boots were the hardest,” Madonna Giulia said, retying the laces of my sleeves so that just a touch of the shirt’s blinding white showed at my shoulder. “I had the boot maker copy them from your old pair, with a few improvements. The soles are reinforced with extra support under the arches, and there are struts to stiffen the inner seam up to your knee.”

My feet, I could already feel, would have to walk a good many hours before they began to hurt in these supple boots.

“There, test the arm—too binding? I know you’ll want full range of motion through the shoulder if you’re to throw your knives.” Madonna Giulia stepped back, nodding as I swung my arm. “I’ve had four doublets made for you. This black velvet for lavish occasions, a good stout black linen for everyday summer wear, black wool for everyday winter—and a black leather for travel, or times you want more protection. I remember you saying sturdy leather is a good ward against a blade.”

My eyes stung, blurring the image in the mirror. That image showed a cool shadow of a man, stark and unsmiling, somber and dangerous, eyes shifting from their undistinguished hazel to a startling green when contrasted against so much black. I looked—I looked—
Dio.
“‘Handsome’ seems a stretch of the truth,” I managed to say.

“I don’t think so.” Giulia tilted her head in the mirror. “Your father must have been a good-looking fellow, I think.”

“No, not really.” My father had been far too worn and frayed about the edges, too battered by life for good looks.

“Your mother then—did she give you that dark hair?”

“I don’t know. I never met her.”

“I’m sorry.” Giulia’s voice was instantly contrite. “God rest her soul.”

“She didn’t die. She might live yet, for all I know.” There were gloves to go with the rest of my outfit; softest leather embroidered again with the bull and keys. “My mother was a whore, you see, and normally she wouldn’t know which of her clients put the baby in her belly. But by the time I was a few months old, she could see it must have been the dwarf, the one who juggled apples and walnuts in the mountebank show in the Borgo. He paid her double, see, to look past his deformities and give him the occasional tumble . . . She left the freakish baby with its freak father, and then she left altogether.”

There was a little silence. I didn’t meet my mistress’s eyes in the mirror, just pulled on my new gloves one by one. They fit perfectly, sewn to configure with the odd tridentlike setting of my stubby fingers.

“Your father must have been a kind man,” Giulia Farnese said at last, quietly.

“Why do you say that,
madonna
?”

“Because you have too much kindness to have been raised entirely without it, Leonello.”

I gave a bark of laughter, flexing my fingers in the new gloves. Such soft leather; it wouldn’t stiffen my fingers when I needed them nimble on a knife hilt. “No one has ever called me kind before, Madonna Giulia, but thank you. And yes, my father was a kind man.”

Too kind for this world, really. I remember his eyes, worn blue unlike mine, sad and anxious under the belled cap he wore for performing. He drank too much, I suppose, and it made him drop his walnuts and balls when he juggled, but people laughed all the harder so it didn’t matter. And he never raised a hand to me, even when he drank. He’d been the one to insist on schooling for me, though he could hardly manage to pay for it and I was an ungrateful little bastard who didn’t want to go in the first place. “They’ll torment me,” I’d protested. “The other boys!”

“Boys will torment you anywhere you go,” my father said, dragging me along. “And that brain of yours is too clever to waste, Leonello. You could be a tutor someday, or a clerk!”

I wondered if he would be proud of me today. On the whole, I thought not.

Madonna Giulia had dismissed the two maids—“Go see to Madonna Adriana, will you? Tend her if her guts are still grumbling.” The door clicked behind them, and she knelt on the fine woven carpet, her furred gown pooling around her as she sorted through the discarded pile of my old clothes in search of my Toledo blades in their hidden sheaths. “Where is your father now?” she murmured, and began passing me the finger knives one by one.