The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (40 page)

“Please no more,” I begged, wrenching my mind away from its useless whirlpool of speculations.
Dio
, no wonder the matter of murder had been weighing so heavily on my mind this winter—otherwise, it had been nothing but bad poetry.

“Caterina Gonzaga wants to visit us in Pesaro,” Lucrezia was telling Giulia now, leaning over from her velvet saddle with a dark look. “We must be sure to have all new dresses; I will
not
be outshone in my own home—my new home, I mean—and you know she’s always putting herself forward as though she were a queen! I’ll bet her husband never wrote poetry to
her
—”

“Kill me,” I pleaded. “Please, kill me at once before you begin talking about clothes again.”

But no one ever listens to the dwarf.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Beside you, she is a lantern compared to the sun.

—RODRIGO BORGIA, COMPARING CATERINA GONZAGA TO GIULIA FARNESE

Carmelina

W
here are we going,
signorina
?”

“The fish market. Hurry up, Bartolomeo!” I quickened my steps, tugging my cloak closer about me as my apprentice sped to a trot. All around us, Pesaro was just waking up to a pewter-colored dawn. Rome would have already been bustling: workers hurrying off to open their shops, drinkers staggering home from a night of revels, beggars staking out the likeliest corners to beg.

“Why are we going to the fish market,
signorina
?” Bartolomeo obediently toted the enormous basket I’d shoved at him as we left the
palazzo
kitchens. “The steward at the Palazzo Ducale said he’d order sturgeon for you, delivered fresh to the door—”

“That means the steward gets a bribe from the vendor who sells sturgeon. I’ll see for myself what’s on offer, thank you.” Madonna Lucrezia was used to eating the best, and I’d make sure she kept getting it now that she was settling into her new home. A young bride should at least have a well-filled stomach as she learned how to manage her husband’s household. Roast pigeon with blackberry sauce, perhaps, and flat crisp Roman
pizze
to remind her of home . . .

“It’s a fine day,
signorina
.” Bartolomeo ventured. He was fifteen now and had grown a good hand-span taller than he’d been when I first tossed him an apprentice’s apron. He was still so milky pale that his freckles stood out across his face and neck like a dark sprinkle of cinnamon, but his arms had a layer of wiry muscle from so many hours of whipping egg whites and hefting sides of beef ribs. Ever since poor Eleonora the fruit seller had died so gruesomely in her own market stall, I’d seen the wisdom of taking a strong young apprentice with me to market when I did my shopping. Far better tall, alert Bartolomeo than the useless Sforza cook with his potbelly and his stale wine breath. “Looks like we’ll have a sunny morning,” my apprentice went on.

“Looks like fog to me.” We had just passed the town’s central
piazza
, where a few beggars and drunks huddled against buildings sleeping off a night’s despair or drink. Not even a third the size of the Piazza Navona in Rome, but everything in Pesaro was small to a Roman’s eyes. I’d seen Madonna Lucrezia’s face fall just a little when she first laid eyes on her new home. “Oh!” she’d exclaimed. “It’s very . . .” To a girl accustomed to all the glories of the Holy City, the clamor and the pomp and the spectacle, Pesaro might have seemed just a bit provincial. Nor did it help that we arrived in another storm of summer rain, winds buffeting flat both Madonna Lucrezia’s careful confection of curls and all the banners that had been brought out to welcome her. Still, the skies cleared as the days passed, and Madonna Giulia waxed staunch enthusiasm in favor of Pesaro’s beauties: the blue bay and winding river mouth, the heavy Romanesque cathedral with its altar dedicated to some gloomy and mustachioed saint, the Palazzo Ducale.
We’ll see if their fish market measures up
, I thought, and quickened my steps through the
piazza
.

“They say the French will be invading soon,” Bartolomeo volunteered, crossing himself. He had an easy, devout sort of soul; the kind of boy who makes cheerful confession to his priest every week and never has anything terribly sinful to confess, either; the kind who accepts the Borgia Pope and all his worldly sins as something far lofty and above him, and puts an easy faith in God the Father instead. The kind of untroubled, unstained conscience I'd long since left behind me. “That’s what I hear from Lord Sforza’s men, anyway, and they have all the news about the French, straight from Milan.”

“Hmph.” I was far less concerned about the French than my new kitchens. Lord Sforza’s Palazzo Ducale was grand enough on the outside with its fountains and arcades and festooning coats of arms, but the kitchens were unspeakable. The apprentices were still banging into the low beams trying to find space for all the cauldrons and spits and ladles we had brought from Rome, and I had no idea how I was going to make milk-snow without a proper cold room to keep the cream from curdling. Still, Madonna Giulia had insisted on bringing us along, so we would all make do until we could get out of this backwater and back to Rome where the morals were depraved but I at least had space for my spoons.

My very first time as
maestra di cucina
—somehow I’d thought it would feel more momentous than this. Perhaps it would have in a kitchen with proper drainage. Still, these kitchens were mine to command until we returned to Rome; Adriana da Mila had not deemed it necessary to take two cooks to Pesaro, and Madonna Giulia had insisted it be me, so Marco had been left in Rome to mind the Palazzo Santa Maria while I accompanied the ladies to Pesaro. “Don’t see why they passed me over,” my cousin had humphed when he heard the news. “My
tourtes
are every bit as good as yours, little cousin!”

“You know I didn’t ask for it,” I pointed out. “Besides, now you’ll have a summer free to dice as much as you like, without my nagging.”

“There is that,” he admitted, and felt sufficiently mollified to come knocking at my chamber that night for a last romp before I departed. “I’ll miss you,” he murmured afterward as he rolled away from me, just before falling asleep.

“You’re just too lazy to find yourself another bedmate,” I said tartly. Not that he couldn’t find one, a man as handsome as Marco, but finding one who didn’t start angling for marriage was another matter. Marco couldn’t marry me, and we both knew that full well, so as a bedmate I was highly convenient.

“Do you think the French will invade,
signorina
?” Bartolomeo was saying. “They’re savage, the French—they spit babies on pikes and desecrate churches, and salt the fields—”

“Salt,” I mused as we wheeled the last turn around a gibbet where they’d hanged a local robber last week. His carcass still swayed from the noose, mostly picked clean by now, though a solitary crow still pecked at a thigh bone. I’d need to find a good salty cheese after visiting the fish market, and a wheel of Parmesan too. I could not live without Parmesan. My immortal soul, yes—that was probably lost to me, considering I desecrated churches just like the French. My morals, yes—those were certainly in tatters too after all the time Marco and I had spent under the blankets. Not to mention that dark and
very
strange hour I’d passed with Cesare Borgia . . . that had probably tacked a good century of hellfire onto my soul all by itself. But I’d far rather live without soul or morals than Parmesan.

I’d had no further visits from the Pope’s eldest son, but I hadn’t expected it. I was only a serving girl, after all; he had not bothered to learn my name at the time, and once he was done he’d left me with nothing more than a calm nod and a few bruises in odd places. I didn’t even really want him back in my bed again, beautiful though he was. Coupling with Cesare Borgia had been an entirely different thing from Marco’s friendly rumples under the sheets. More like coupling with a hurricane—something to leave you exhilarated and frightened, bruised and worn out. Something to remember with a certain private smile, but no particular desire to repeat the experience.

Cesare Borgia—now there was a man with no morals!

“Signorina.”
Bartolomeo’s voice cut off my inward smile. “What if the French—”

“Bartolomeo.” I cut him off, brushing my thoughts away. “What do you plan to do if the French invade?”

“Um, well—”

“Nothing, that’s what you’ll do. Because it has nothing to do with either of us.” I pulled my cloak closer around my shoulders as the breeze off the river began to nip. “If they invade, then they invade, and that’s that. Personally I hope they keep themselves and their horrendous food on their side of the mountains. Baby-spitting French soldiers are bad enough, but they’ll bring their rancid butter and their overdone roasts with them, and then Santa Marta help us all.”

That stilled my apprentice’s tongue, at least until we plunged into the tumult and noise of the fish market. “It’s bigger than I thought.” Bartolomeo blinked.

“Bigger,” I agreed, “but fish markets all look the same the world over. Smell the same, too.” The same reek of salt and rotting flounder, the same fish scales turning the ground iridescent in the gray dawn light, the same sights of live carp lashing away in buckets and dead ones hung up for display. A spicy mix of accents rose up from the fishermen who bickered and bargained in surly tones and the vendors who cried their wares like they were hawking pearls. “Oysters, fresh from the sea bed!” “Red mullet, first of the season!” “Sea bream, sea bream!” The sky was just starting to show pink along the edges, but the vendors were already in full cry.

“Pesaro has both a sea coast and a river mouth,” I explained, looping my skirts up to keep my hem out of the fish scales. “Makes for a good fish market. Sea fish are better than freshwater fish, but sea fish that come into fresh water to feed make the most delicate eating.”

“Why?”

“Because they do.” Didn’t everybody know that? “Bring that basket.”

“Yes,
signorina
.”

“And pay attention!” I added over my shoulder as we pushed our way into the throng of fishermen and vendors. “Every cook should inspect the markets himself, so he knows just what he’s dealing with.”

“Maestro Santini doesn’t. I’ve never once seen him go to a butcher’s yard or a fish market.”

“He is
maestro di cucina
, so he can afford to send me in his stead.” In truth, Marco never went to the fish market or the butcher’s yard because he was lazy. My father had refused to give any fishmonger, cheese maker, or vintner his business until he vetted each premise himself, testing every single order to be sure it was the best, the freshest, the highest possible quality. Even after that, he’d make surprise inspections to be sure he wasn’t being palmed off with second-best—and as my father did, so did I. But Marco would rather stay in a nice warm kitchen at dawn than go trudging down to a chilly, smelly dock to look at fish. Marco would have taken the steward’s word that the sturgeon was the best on offer in Pesaro. The only times Marco stirred himself to make his own examination of a butcher’s offal or a new pressing of olive oil, you could be sure there was a card game or a horse race somewhere nearby.

Just because I shared the man’s bed from time to time didn’t mean I couldn’t see his faults.

“Sturgeon.” I paused by the display of glassy-eyed fish, piled in a gleaming dark-green stack. I fixed the vendor with a scowl as he oozed toward me with a gap-toothed smile and a proffer of a hairy slablike hand covered in fish scales. “Caught yesterday or today,
signore
? Get a sturgeon fresh, Bartolomeo, and if you store it properly it will keep all year. No, I don’t know why! Give a sniff, are they fresh?” That discerning nose of my apprentice’s was very handy in a fish market, where the vendors were always trying to palm off dodgy fish under a layer of new-caught.

I gave the sturgeon a dismissive slap on Bartolomeo’s recommendation, made an obscene gesture back at the vendor when he swore at me, and elbowed my way to the next set of buckets with my apprentice trailing behind. “Now, that’s red mullet,” I told him, pointing. “In Venice, they call red mullet
barbari
. No, I don’t know why. You remember the recipe for grilling them? . . . Very good, but a mullet is left scaled, and
then
floured. That’s turbot; excellent for making fish jellies. They don’t have to be scaled either, but you do have to buy them live. I don’t know; the jelly tastes better the more recently the turbot was killed. Horse mackerel—sniff it for me. Fresh? Good. These are too big. Of course fish can be too big; for grilling and frying they have to be smaller—ask
why
again, Bartolomeo, and I shall hit you!”

“Yes,
signorina
,” he grunted, staggering along behind me with the now-heaping basket, the tips of his ears flushed red as his hair. I stopped abruptly and he fell over my foot.

“Pay attention. These are something special.” I bent and gave a rapturous sniff to the display of tiny, tiny, nearly transparent fish. “Smelt, and good ones. Probably brought in from Lake Bolsena. We’ll buy them for Madonna Giulia.”

“Why?” Bartolomeo asked, and then hastily went on. “Why for Madonna Giulia, that is. She doesn’t like red mullet? She eats everything.”

“She was born at Lake Bolsena, and she’ll have grown up eating smelt like this. She’ll be reminded of home, and she’ll smile, and those are the kinds of meals that get compliments sent down to the kitchens afterward.” I paused, looking at my apprentice. He had a cook’s nose; I’d known that almost at once. But there were other things a cook needed, and it was time to find out if he had them. “Do you want to be a cook, Bartolomeo?”

“Yes,
signorina
.” No hesitation.

“Why?”

A third of my apprentices said their father would beat them if they failed this apprenticeship. Another third said it was better pay and better work than being a butcher or a candle maker. The final third said they wanted to cook for the Duke of Milan someday and be rich. Bartolomeo looked pinioned, shifting from one foot to another. “I want to live all my days with good smells,” he said finally.