The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (39 page)

Cesare Borgia shrugged, bland and remote again, his big black horse nibbling at his sleeve. “Should I suggest you, little lion man? That would be a sight for the French.”

I wondered if I had imagined that clawing beast in his gaze, the thing whose name might be Ambition. I wouldn’t have thought a boy who could call himself a cardinal by the age of eighteen, with more benefices and properties and pensions than he could ever count spilling their bounty at his feet, could be ambitious for anything. What else in the great world was there to want?

There is always something.

“I don’t fancy commanding an army, Your Eminence,” I said at last. “I don’t like sitting at the back and letting others do my killing for me. If murder must be done, I do it myself.”

“So do I.”

And when was the last murder at your hands?
I thought. The question that had taunted me on and off, all winter, all through the turn of the year and the warming of spring, ever since I had played chess in Viterbo with a man who had tossed a mask aside to reveal he was the Pope’s eldest son.
When did you last see life fading from a pair of eyes, Your Eminence? Might it have been a tavern girl staked to a table?

If I had kept up my quest after killing Don Luis and the Borgia guardsman, hunted for the masked man with whom they had gone whoring . . . if I had found that man and pulled his mask aside . . . would that face too have been the Pope’s eldest son? As if it were a question I could ever ask, or a murder I could ever avenge, even if I had the answer.

I still
wanted
the answer, all the same. Though part of me hoped it wouldn’t be Cesare. I rather liked him, after all. I owed him my life, and my knives, and my current prosperity. And besides which, he made an excellent partner in chess.

Giulia was laughing again, and it jerked me out of my dark thoughts. “—what do you think, Leonello?”

I blinked, collecting myself. “What do I think about what, Madonna Giulia?”

“What do you think of Lord Sforza’s new sonnet, of course! The one in Lucrezia’s honor—”

Lucrezia preened. She must have doubled back to halt her little jennet beside Giulia’s mare while I stood lost in my semiheretical speculations about her favorite brother. “My lord husband compares me to the goddess Primavera,” the Pope’s daughter sighed. “So
very
romantic—”

“If you will excuse me,
madonna
,” I said hastily. Lord Sforza’s leaden little verses had made their way all over the
palazzo
, at least to those not quick enough to flee when the love-struck little Countess came looking for an audience for her lord’s latest ditty. I hunted about me for an escape and caught sight of a familiar black head at the front of another wagon rolling past. “Madonna Giulia, I think I shall ride with the cooking equipment. Better pans than poetry—”

Signorina Cuoca
gave an inhospitable sniff as I was boosted up to the boards beside her. “Ride somewhere else, Messer Leonello. Somewhere you’re wanted.”

“When I can have the pleasure of annoying you?” I propped my boots up on the board beside hers as the wagon lurched into motion again. “Never. What’s that?” I asked, as she buried her nose ostentatiously in a packet of scribbled pages. “Ciphered, I see. Witchcraft? That’s why you fled Venice, isn’t it! Falsely accused by a jealous lover, you escaped a charge of sorcery by bribing the jailor and found no option but to flee to the Holy City!”

She gazed at me, wide-eyed. “How did you know?”

My brows flew up. “Don’t tell me I’ve guessed—” Pointing at the ciphered pages. “Truly?”

“No.” Her too-round eyes relaxed into mockery at me. “They’re just
recipes
,
you dolt.”

“Ah.” I doffed my cap. “Well played,
signorina.
Pity, I liked that witchcraft theory. Fear not, I have plenty of others. Might you possibly be a Jew, fleeing Spain to escape the Inquisition?”

I chattered on, watching her her fingers drum along her thigh as she pretended to ignore me. We were passing a roadside tavern now; drinkers scrambled up hastily from their trestle tables at the sight of the glittering Sforza banners. One or two fell to their knees; the rest blinked drunkenly. I saw two tavern maids dipping curtsy after curtsy like a pair of apples bobbing in a tub, drinking in every detail of Lucrezia’s dress, Giulia’s hair, the ornate carriage with its matched Sicilian horses and its coat of arms. Not terribly pretty girls, those tavern maids, but all girls looked prettier after enough cups of wine. Like Anna, whose dimple only seemed to get deeper and sweeter the more one drank. Strange how I could barely remember Anna’s face, and yet she burned in my thoughts so constantly . . .

I caught a drift ahead from Giulia and Lucrezia, who had turned their mounts into the grass alongside the road to avoid the dust kicked up by the cart horses. Still going on about the Count of Pesaro’s wretched sonnet. “
Hail to thee, O springtime goddess fair—
”

You’re going mad, dwarf,
I sometimes told myself. Because I had no reason, none at all, to think my masked man was the Pope’s eldest son. Staking a woman to a table had to be the hot-blooded act of a madman—it hardly suited the cool deliberation with which Cesare Borgia moved through life. And surely any murder he committed would be murder with a purpose; the murder of someone who threatened either him or his family or his ambitions. He was so far above Anna and her ilk, they might as well have been beetles under his feet.

But wasn’t it the arrogant of the world who crushed the beetles—simply because they could? “Killing is a skill like any other,” Cesare had told me over the chessboard, speaking of his first murder. “It should be practiced until it comes easily.” Could Anna and her successors have merely been
practice
? Cesare would have been very young at the time of her death, but he claimed he had killed his first foot-pad at sixteen—and been dissatisfied at how clumsily he had done it. And each kill after Anna had been progressively cleaner.

Maybe they weren’t such hot-blooded kills after all. There was a certain lust about them, a dark deliberation in making each kill exactly the same—but Cesare Borgia had dark lusts, that I knew. I had seen for myself the black flames in his eyes when he bid our party farewell, and spoke to me of leading the papal armies. Since he hadn’t been allowed to lead the papal armies, perhaps that black lust had found a different outlet . . .

“
Roses springing in your lissome wake—
”

But if Anna and the others had merely been a cold slaking of frustrated ambition, a cool self-education in the niceties of murder—if the victims had been chosen precisely because they would never be missed—then why leave the dagger with the last body to stir up so much speculation? I did not for one moment believe Cesare would have done such a thing out of mere carelessness.

Maybe he got bored,
I thought. Hadn’t he said it himself, baiting me?

“Perhaps I was arrogant rather than stupid . . . Perhaps I wished to see how far I could go, and still get away with it.”

I suppose I should have wondered why he would ever say such a thing to me, but that was the one thing in all this murky mess that didn’t puzzle me in the slightest. Cesare Borgia liked games, games of every kind. Games played with chess pieces, games played with live pieces. Baiting me, whether with truth or with lies, was just one more game to amuse him. Perhaps the final game to finish off the string of murders, because it seemed possible to me that there would
be
no more murders. I had kept my ears open all this winter, dropping questions among the cards when I played
primiera
with Borgia guards, papal guards, municipal guards—I even tried prying my way into granite-eyed Michelotto’s confidence, though he just stared at me like a blind statue. And no more women had been found throat-slit and table-staked. Not since late last summer, when I had played chess with Cesare Borgia among the vaults of Viterbo and asked him if he was a murderer of women, watched by his discarded mask on the floor.

A question he had very carefully not answered.

“
Soft your voice, as feathers from a dove—
”

Carmelina looked up from her ciphered pages of recipes, hearing the drift of verse from the little Countess of Pesaro. “What’s that poetry Madonna Lucrezia keeps going on about?”

“Don’t ask, or she’ll recite the whole sonnet,” I said absently. “Love has turned Lord Sforza into a poet to rival Dante, to hear his little wife tell it. I could write better verse hung up by my thumbs.”

“Poetry.” Carmelina snorted, turning another page in her packet of recipes. “Thanks be to Santa Marta that nobody writes verses to common girls.”

“Poetry doesn’t move your heart?” I made big eyes at her, distracted for a moment.

“I’d be more moved if a man made me
cena
,” she said. “No one ever cooks for the cook.”

I looked at her thoughtfully as the wagon jolted beneath us. I could hear the clatter of pots in the boxes and sacks in the wagon—the kitchen equipment needed for any journey—and Carmelina turned to secure a knot on a box piled inside the wagon that had not been tightened to her standards. She was frowning, the familiar line showing between her straight black brows, but I judged she was as pleased as I to be out under the sky on a journey to places unknown. “May I ask you a question?” I asked.

“I came to Rome for the
work
, Leonello. Not because I’m a witch or a Jew or an exiled courtesan!”

“No, not that.” I tried a smile on her, but our spiky-natured cook just got suspicious whenever I started being charming. Caught on to that, had she? “The maids in the Palazzo Santa Maria—I know they’ve had their, ah, difficulties with the Duke of Gandia—”

“Not now that he’s in Spain,” Carmelina snorted. “Every maid in the
palazzo
went about singing for a week.”

“I can imagine.” Juan Borgia regarded the papal seraglio as very much his own personal harem when it came to the maids. I wondered from time to time if
he
might be my masked man; he certainly had a taste for both low women and unwilling women, and he was certainly hot-blooded. But he didn’t have the patience to hunt, kill, and butcher a deer properly, much less a woman. Idly putting his sword through stray dogs in alleys; that was about as much effort as he was willing to expend on violence. And though he might rape a girl, I didn’t see him cutting her throat afterward. He’d toss her a coin and think himself magnanimous for honoring her with his attentions. “Have the maids had difficulties with Cesare Borgia?” I asked instead.

If anything, Carmelina looked even more suspicious. “Why do you want to know?”

“No reason.” If Cesare Borgia truly felt that dark unspeakable lust that had led to Anna’s death and all the others, perhaps there were warning signs among the maids in the Borgia household. “Do they flee Cesare’s attentions as they do Juan’s?”

“No.” Carmelina hesitated. “Yes.”

“Which is it?”

“The Duke of Gandia, he’s a lout, but he might give you a coin afterward if you pleased him.” As I’d thought, yes. “And he’s quick,” Carmelina added with a snort. “Beatrice the laundry maid said it took longer to wring out a wet shirt.”

I couldn’t help a laugh. Definitely not the style of my painstaking, pain-taking murderer. “And Cesare?”

“He doesn’t pay, not ever. And he’s not quick.”

“Is he rough?” A man who liked blood might also like bruised flesh, in his milder moments.

Carmelina’s hand circled her own wrist unconsciously, rubbing it. “How would I know?”

I studied her. “Are you blushing?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She had the recipes up to her nose again, hiding her face. I nudged them down.

“You
are
blushing. Don’t tell me you’ve had a roll in the hay with Cardinal Borgia,
Signorina Cuoca
.”

“Why would he look at the
palazzo
cook when he has the most expensive courtesans in Rome?”

“Why are you dodging the question?” I grinned at her glower. “Besides, all highborn lordlings like a low woman now and then, young Cardinal Borgia included. A deliberate roll in the mud, such filthy pleasure to be found . . .”

I said it crudely, with a certain obscene gesture, and Carmelina’s eyes flared again. “Is that what you’re keen on, Messer Leonello? Hearing all the details?” A disgusted shake of her head. “Don’t bother me with your perversions.”

“I have a reason for asking,” I said, and felt a pang of alarm that surprised me. No smiles now. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.” She looked me right in the eye. “He was gentle as a lamb.”

“You’re lying.” I felt the tautness in me again, the hunt. “What did he do? Hit you? Tie you?”

She smiled. “You know, I think I feel like walking for a while.” With an arrogant flip of that pointed chin, she left me in possession of the field, sliding down the side of the wagon and marching ahead to join her red-haired apprentice where he was kicking a stone through the dust.

Gentle as a lamb
, I thought, and kicked one boot against the boards underfoot.
Liar.
That gesture, circling her own wrist unconsciously. Marking a bruise that had long healed? The kind of bruise that would come, say, from having the arms pinned down.

What does it matter?
I told myself.
Even if she told you Cesare Borgia likes to bruise his bedmates, it proves nothing. Even if he likes to wear a mask and take himself off alone on God knows what solitary adventures—even if his dagger was found slammed through the hand of the last girl, and he was the one to put it there—even if he
confessed
to you, what could you do? He is the Pope’s son; he will never be brought to justice.

But I wondered sometimes if I really gave a fig for justice either. It was knowledge I wanted: the answer to the puzzle that had filled my mind this winter. I wanted that masked man to take off his mask and show me his face, whatever face it might be, as he flicked his chessboard king on its side in defeat.

“Leonello!” Giulia had turned her little mare back to me again, trotting alongside the wagon. “Leonello, listen to this line the Count of Pesaro wrote.
“‘O Primavera bright and fair—’”