The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (42 page)

“Fra Savonarola,” I murmured from my obscure wall bench. The name gave me no disquiet at the time, though it should have.

“Seems a great waste of a painter like Maestro Botticelli,” Giulia shrugged. “For tonight, anyway, I shall have to make do with Maestro Raphael.”

She turned her back and dropped to her knees, the yellow light from the tapers gleaming on her coiled hair. With slow grace she reached up to unlace her dress, and I felt the men in the room stop breathing. La Bella slid one arm from her sleeve, tugging her dress down on one side to reveal a naked pearly shoulder, and lifted her bare arm in supplication. Her head turned to profile and she froze, lashes down.

No one made a guess. They all seemed content to stare—except the Countess, who suddenly looked more peevish than queenly . . . and Lucrezia, I noticed suddenly, who began fiddling with her flowered skirts with an almost inaudible sigh.

Giulia held her pose a moment longer and then lifted her lashes and looked back at us over her shoulder. Somehow with the one bare shoulder and naked arm and half-exposed back, she looked far more nude than the Gonzaga bitch had in her transparent shift.

“None of you will know the painting, I’m afraid.” Giulia dropped her pose, sliding her naked arm back into its dangling sleeve. “I doubt it’s even started yet. Maestro Raphael came to paint my portrait last year, but he persuaded me to sit for another sketch as well, posing just so. He wants to paint a
Transfiguration
, and he had me in mind for the beseeching mother. There will be angels and apostles and saints too, of course.”

Giulia laced her dress back up and rose, returning to her chair. She picked up the slumbering goat, dropping a kiss on its nose, and looked up. The men were still staring, and Caterina Gonzaga looked as though she had eaten a lime.

“So which of us wins?” Caterina said rudely. I saw Madonna Adriana cast a disapproving glance from her embroidery. “Me, or Giulia Farnese?”

Lucrezia’s face fell again, and I swung quickly off the wall bench.

“Perhaps the dwarf may prove the best judge of the contest?” I interjected quickly, striding to the front of the company. “Who, after all, can judge beauty better than one as ugly as myself?” I spread my arms at the little murmur of laughter. Lord Sforza guffawed. “I think, in all fairness to La Bella and to our beauteous visitor”—a bow in their direction—“we must award the crown to our fair Countess of Pesaro. Lovely as is the golden orb in its full glory, a dawning sun must always be counted the most beautiful.”

“I think dawning suns are pale and scrawny,” the Countess remarked
sotto voce
, but she was drowned in the prudent burst of applause led by Madonna Adriana. Lucrezia’s face brightened a little, and I was glad to hear the subject of the French invasion raised again. Altogether a safer topic than the comparative beauty of women who are all present in the same room.

“Excellent, my dear,” I heard Madonna Adriana murmur to Giulia as the men called for wine and maps and began loudly arguing over which route the King of France would choose in his march on Naples.

“You really think she got that ring from Rodrigo?” Giulia whispered back. “I saw how she made eyes at him at Joffre’s wedding—”

“Maybe, but that ruby’s nowhere near the value of your pearls. If he tumbled her, I assure you it was a tumble quickly forgotten . . .”

“And they say women know nothing of politics,” I remarked as Madonna Adriana patted Giulia’s arm and bustled off. “Is it so important, keeping the Holy Father’s favor?”

Giulia blinked. The other ladies were starting to yawn; any moment now they’d go trailing off to bed, leaving the men free to argue about the French until dawn. I took the stool at Giulia’s feet, leaning back on my elbows, and she looked down at me, puzzled. “What do you mean, Leonello?”

“The Holy Father is more than forty years your elder. He has a short temper, an unfaithful heart, and a girth that will keep right on expanding until he looks like a sack of millet.” I reached up to the goat in her lap and gave its silky ear a flick. “So why do you fight to keep him?”

She shrugged. “He’s all I have.”

“That’s rot, my dear lady. You have a husband, you have a child, you have a family. You could let His Holiness’s wandering eye wander off to someone new, and retire to that quiet married life you always told me you grew up wanting. But you sit here campaigning like a French general to get your papal lover back, and I wonder why.” I cocked an eyebrow at her, wondering why I was talking like this, not caring enough to stop myself. “Is it the jewels? I doubt that young husband of yours could keep you in the kind of sparkly baubles you’re used to. Can’t bear the thought that another birthday might pass without a string of sapphires to mark the occasion? Or perhaps it’s the Holy Father himself you’ll miss—he may be aging and fattening, but that tongue of his must have some talent in it, judging from the sounds I hear you make behind your chamber doors. I assumed it was all performance and pretense, but perhaps not.”

Two bright spots of color flared high in La Bella’s cheeks, but I didn’t let her speak.

“Or perhaps you just aren’t suited for married life, even if you were raised to it.” I gave her goat’s ear another tweak. “The worst wives, one hears, make the best whores.”

“Are you finished?” she said quietly.

“Oh, you know me. I can talk forever.”

“You certainly can when it comes to being cruel. How good you are at it.” She regarded me, giving a faint shake of her head. “Why, Leonello?”

“Because you’re here,” I said baldly. “And I’m bored, and I have to follow you about all day in this provincial mud hole when I’d rather be—”

Finding a murderer.
Lately I’d begun to think it couldn’t be Cesare Borgia at all. Surely a pope’s son had better things to do than chase down low women to murder? If there was anyone in the Borgia service to suspect of dark deeds, blank-faced Michelotto was a far more likely candidate. From everything I’d heard, the man snuffed out human lives as casually as a cat killed mice. But Michelotto was his master’s dog; he never said a word or made a move unless Cesare instructed it. Did he have the drive to commit murder at his own initiative rather than his master’s? Perhaps not . . .

“When you’d rather be what?” Madonna Giulia asked.

“Nothing,” I said, airy. “Twisted little men have twisted little souls, that’s all. Didn’t you know that, my lady whore?”

“I think I will go kiss Laura good night and then retire to bed.” Giulia set down the goat and rose, smoothing stray white goat hairs off her velvet skirts. “I’ll have no further need of you, Leonello.”

“Tonight?” I challenged. “Or ever? I suppose you’ll have me dismissed now. I must say, I shall miss your Pope’s library.”

“Why should I dismiss you?” She turned her head over one shoulder, the same angle of her bare-shouldered tableau of transfiguration. “Just because you’re vindictive for no good reason doesn’t mean I have to be. Thank you for awarding the crown of beauty to Lucrezia, by the way. It was kindly done.”

“The least I could do,” I said. “After that bare-armed simpering of yours made her husband hard as a pikestaff.”

La Bella glanced toward Lucrezia, stricken, and it made me furious. All my insults just so many pebbles bouncing off her grave face, and the thing to pierce her was some hurt to Lucrezia.

My mistress glided off quietly, and I grimaced down at the goat. “Someone should have made you into pie long ago,” I told it, and the wretched creature gave a
baaaa
and began nibbling my black velvet sleeve.

“Has Giulia gone to bed already?” I heard Lucrezia ask Madonna Adriana, rose-patterned skirts rustling.

“Yes, and in a very poor humor.” Adriana glanced at me disapprovingly. “Leonello was rather unkind to her.”

“It is not polite to eavesdrop,” I remarked to the air, and Madonna Adriana sniffed and drew Lucrezia away from me toward the hearth.

“I didn’t know any man in the world
could
be unkind to Giulia.” Lucrezia ignored me, leaning her head in to Adriana’s ringletted one. “Even my father—even when he’s furious, all she has to do is wrinkle her nose at him, and he melts. It’s not
fair
.”

“Nothing’s fair, my love.” Adriana smoothed her former charge’s hair.

The little Countess of Pesaro picked at a painted rose on her skirt. Her voice was very low, but I heard well enough as I took my deck of cards from my pouch and pretended to be absorbed in a complicated shuffle. It might not be polite to eavesdrop, but I was very good at it. “Hours I spent preparing this dress, and did anybody look at me?” Lucrezia demanded, and Adriana sighed. “No, they all looked at her. They always look at her. I’m taller than she is, and my eyes are blue which is much better than dark, and maybe my hair isn’t as long but at least
I
don’t get plump from eating too many
biscotti
—but she’s still the one they look at. Even though I’m the Pope’s daughter, and I’m the Countess of Pesaro, and this is
my
home.”

“Of course it is,” Madonna Adriana soothed. “And Giulia is your friend.”

“I know.” Lucrezia fiddled restlessly with a lock of her fair hair. “I’d never be here with my lord Sforza if not for her. But I wouldn’t mind people looking at
me
now and then. Especially in
my
home.” A resentful note entered her voice. “I’ll write my father and tell him Caterina Gonzaga won our beauty contest. I’ll tell him she’s far taller and fairer than Giulia, too.”

“And then maybe he’ll take her for a mistress instead,” Adriana said. “Do you really want to share his attention with that prancing Lombard instead of our Giulia, who is such delightful company over
pranzo
? Who lends you her jewelry whenever you ask? Who taught you how to manage the train on your wedding dress?”

The Countess of Pesaro sighed again, and Madonna Adriana put an arm about her shoulders. “To bed, my love,” she said, and they rustled off without another word, leaving the men to the serious business of speculating on the French invasion.
Speculating
sounds so much more serious than
gossiping drunkenly
. Giulia’s goat looked up at me, swallowing the tassel it had just eaten off a chair cushion, and gave another
baaa
.

“Don’t you bleat at me,” I told it. “I am not feeling guilty.”

But maybe I was. Perhaps I
had
been rather hard on my poor giggly little mistress—who, quite truthfully, had never been cruel or dismissive or even thoughtless toward me in her life. Not even very giggly anymore; she’d turned quite quiet and introspective this summer in her worries over the Pope.

Twisted little men do indeed have twisted little souls.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Where my treasure is, there is my heart.

—EXCERPT OF A LETTER FROM GIULIA FARNESE TO RODRIGO BORGIA

Carmelina

C
armelina! Carmelina, listen to this.” Water splashed from the huge blue-veined marble bath as Madonna Giulia beckoned me into the hot
bagno
. I set down the dish of
tourtes
I’d brought for the Pope’s mistress to nibble as she had her hair washed. She sat alone in the enormous marble bath, half visible in the clouds of steam that filled the little blue-and-green marble chamber, wet tendrils of golden hair floating on the surface of the hot water like blond seaweed. Her naked shoulders gleamed pink above the water, and a maid stood behind with rolled-up sleeves, scrubbing at her scalp. I approached the bath carefully, watching my step on the steam-slick floor with its Roman-style mosaic of twining fish and mermaids, and Madonna Giulia beamed at me. “I’ve had a letter from His Holiness.” Waving a very thick packet of pages. “Just listen to this!”

She cleared her throat, dropping her voice to an imposing bass and imitating the Pope’s Spanish burr. “‘
Everyone says that when you stood beside her
’—he means that nose-in-the-air tart Caterina Gonzaga—‘
she was nothing but a lantern to your sun
.’”

“Very good,” I approved, trading a grin with the maid massaging Madonna Giulia’s hair. Podgy Count Ottaviano da Montevegio had offended nobody during his brief stay at the Palazzo Ducale, but his wife was another matter entirely. Madonna Caterina Gonzaga had turned up her nose at the
palazzo
, complained that my lemon-fried sardines were too salty, and left her chamber a sty. Had she not rustled north with her husband for their estates in San Lorenzo, the maids would have begun spitting in her wine. “I praised her to the skies when I wrote Rodrigo about her,” Giulia said with relish. “It doesn’t do to look too envious of other women. Men are already quite vain enough thinking we fight each other like cats for their attention, aren’t they? Even if we
are
fighting like cats for their attention. Goodness, but love is complicated. If it weren’t so enjoyable, no one would do it at all.” Giulia kissed her letter, heedless of the water splashing from her bath to smear the ink. “I got a letter back, very next messenger. He calls himself ‘
the person who loves you more than anybody in the world
.’ Isn’t that lovely?”

“His Holiness turns a pretty phrase.” A year or two ago I’d have been shocked to my bones at the thought of discussing the style and content of the Holy Father’s love letters. Somehow, the shock had worn off. “He doesn’t mince his affections, does he, Madonna Giulia?”

“He never minces anything he feels. And
some
people wonder why I want to keep him.” Giulia la Bella gave a snort that was half anger, but her smile returned as she scanned the letter again. “He goes on to give me all the gossip from Rome. Juan is nagging to come home from Spain now that his wife is pregnant—can you imagine
Juan
a father? I ask you!—and the Tart of Aragon is making poor Joffre’s life hell. She and Caterina Gonzaga would certainly get along . . .” Giulia rifled through more pages. “Here it is. My Pope accuses me of being heartless for enjoying myself without him.” Her eyes glowed softly. “He misses me.”

“I don’t think anyone would miss me if I went absent,” I said candidly, picking up the majolica plate of
tourtes
again and bringing it to the bath. “At least not until it came time to eat.”

“What about that mysterious fellow of yours?” Madonna Giulia’s eyes gleamed. “The one on whose behalf you learned about the many uses of limes? What was his name again?”

I suppressed a smile. “I never told you in the first place, Madonna Giulia.”

“Well, tell me now. And do sit down, won’t you, and eat some of those
tourtes
for me. I’m getting plump again, and I’ve got to take some of this fat off before I get back to Rome, so no sweets for me. Which is a shame, because I always eat when in the bath.” Giulia looked envious, watching me help myself from the plate. Quince and ricotta
tourtes
—straight from page 412, Chapter:
Dolci
. “Why aren’t you the one who’s plump instead of me? Cooks are supposed to be fat!”

“They never are,” I told her. “Real cooks are too busy running back and forth with kettles and spits and bread paddles to ever eat. We all survive on a taste of this and a spoonful of that and a nibble of something else. Never have anything to do with a fat cook, Madonna Giulia. Either he’s too successful or too lazy to get off his rump.”

“Good advice, I’m sure, but I want to hear more about this man of yours. Is he a cook? Is he handsome—”

“Under the water and rinse, Madonna Giulia,” the maid ordered.

“No one say anything interesting until I’m rinsed,” Madonna Giulia warned, setting her letter aside, and sank bubbling under the surface. She wriggled under the water, the occasional elbow or knee emerging as she swished the soap out of her hair, and surfaced like a mermaid. “If you won’t tell me who your lover is, Carmelina, then listen to the letter I’m writing mine. He likes a good dramatic love letter, and I’m not sure I’ve got the tone quite right. ‘
My happiness depends upon Your Holiness, so I am unable to take delight in these pleasures of Pesaro—
’”

A gust of cool air blew into the clouds of steam before she could finish, and I looked over my shoulder to see the square velvet-skirted figure of Adriana da Mila coming into the scented heat of the
bagno
. I rose hastily from my stool—the Pope’s mistress thought nothing of chattering with servants, but her mother-in-law did not care to see the time she paid for being wasted. But Madonna Adriana hardly spared a glance for me or the suddenly industrious maid who had wiped the grin from her face and busied herself hauling Giulia’s mass of wet hair from the bathwater. Madonna Adriana looked at Giulia, and in her hand she held another letter.

“From His Holiness?” Giulia laughed. “I’ll swear he’s written every other day!”

“No, from Capodimonte. Your family.” Madonna Adriana’s face was unexpectedly grave. She looked at the maid and me and said, “Leave us.”

I curtsied silently and retreated. “Let’s listen,” the maid whispered, and we both lingered beside the half-open door.

“It’s bad news from your family, my dear,” Madonna Adriana’s voice continued. “I’m afraid it’s your brother.”

“Sandro?” Giulia whispered, so low I could hardly hear her. “Oh, no—”

“No, not Cardinal Farnese. Your older brother, Angelo. He’s contracted a very bad fever. Your family thinks . . .”

I heard a great splash of water in the bath. “
Carmelina
,” Giulia called. “
Pia!
Come back; I know you’re both listening out there!”

I flew back inside with another curtsy, in time to see my mistress levering herself up out of the bath. Water shed in all directions, and the plate of ricotta
tourtes
flew with a
crack
to the marble floor. “Pia,” she said to the maid, “fetch Laura’s nurse and have them both readied.”

“My dear, you can’t think of going to Capodimonte,” Madonna Adriana protested. “His Holiness will never allow it, not with the French army coming farther south every day—”

“This has nothing to do with Rodrigo.”

“Of course it does. You think he will allow you to take a sudden journey unattended and without permission?”

“Carmelina, will you be good enough to find Leonello for me?” Madonna Giulia’s eyes fell on me where I’d stooped to the floor to pick up the broken fragments of plate. “I know you can’t stand the sight of him, and frankly right now I can’t either, as nasty as he’s been to me lately, but I’ll want his protection on the journey. My usual guardsmen and grooms as well, of course; please tell the steward.”

“Yes, Madonna Giulia,” I said at once.

“You’re coming too. I don’t intend to stop at inns, so I’ll need someone to cook on the road. Bring that apprentice of yours if you need someone to help with the heavy work.”

“Giulia, please.” Madonna Adriana’s broad face had already begun to perspire in the steam still coming from the bath. “You really cannot—”

“—miss my own brother’s deathbed?” Giulia flared at her, standing straight and naked on the mosaic floor, wet hair uncoiling in clinging strings over her back. “No, I quite agree. Please give Lucrezia my love, and tell her why I did not have time to thank Lord Sforza for his hospitality.”

Madonna Giulia turned away, tugging her wet hair over one shoulder and beginning to weave it into a hasty plait as she called to the maid—“Just a riding dress and a few spares, Pia, nothing else!” But Madonna Adriana’s hand fastened on her arm. She spoke in a low voice, one I shouldn’t have heard, but I spent all my days tuning to the
sotto voce
mutters of my sulky scullions.

“Giulia, my dear, Rodrigo was very angry with you when you disobeyed him before, in the matter of Lucrezia’s marriage. You think he will be forgiving again, when he’s just gotten over his temper at your last disobedience? At least ask his permission first. Then you can go to your brother with a full papal guard.”

Giulia took a deep breath, and I wondered if the flush from her cheeks came entirely from the bath’s heat. “Carmelina,” she said quietly, and I found myself hurrying to her side. “Go find Leonello now, and the stewards. We will all leave in one hour.”

Giulia

I
wasn’t a half second out of my saddle before Sandro grabbed me up tight, lifting me clear off the courtyard’s dusty stones. “
Sorellina
,” he whispered. “I didn’t think the Pope would allow you to make the journey, with the French—”

“The Pope does not own me.” I felt my eyes prick and buried my face in my big brother’s shoulder. “Angelo, is he—”

Sandro’s lean handsome face was drawn tight about the eyes. “The fever took him this morning.”

My heart squeezed. I’d half killed my poor gray mare on the ride to Lake Bolsena, I’d lashed at Carmelina and Leonello and the rest of my entourage whenever they proposed a stop for sleep or water or rest—and for what? My big brother was dead. I hadn’t seen him since my wedding; I’d hardly given him a thought except to feel irritated when he wrote asking me to wheedle money or favors out of my Pope—but now he was gone, gone for good, and I’d never have a chance to mend things between us.

“Shhh, don’t cry.” Sandro ran a thumb under my welling eyes. “You came, and that’s what matters.”

So strange to be home—so very strange. Back in the drafty octagonal
castello
of my childhood, worn and just a little crumbling about the edges, washed by the lake on three sides so the sound of lapping water reached the ear from every room. The chilly chamber I had shared with Gerolama as a girl was the same: a curtained bed where I had wrestled her for my fair share of the blankets and dreamed about who my future husband would be. The smell of the lake was the same, and the dusty streets where old women in black gossiped on their steps and children ran shouting and clacking sticks together, and mules trudged past with loads of fish still flopping their death throes. An old dress I found in my girlhood clothes chest was the same, last worn when I was a virgin girl who had never even heard the names of Orsino Orsini or Rodrigo Borgia.

So strange.

“How long should we make preparations to stay?” Leonello asked me.

I looked at him oddly. He was foreign to me, a piece of one life entirely out of place among another very different existence. He stuck out like a harlot in a church, or an obscenity in a prayer, or a French army in Rome. “I don’t know,” I said in a blank voice, and moved to join my family.

I had never been close to Angelo, not as I was with Sandro. My older brother had been almost a man grown when I was born, too busy and important to take notice of another sister who would only have to be dowered and married off. He’d never had time for me, not until I became the Pope’s mistress and thus a person to be asked for favors. I’d never quite forgiven him for that, and I hadn’t wanted to come back to Capodimonte to visit him. Time enough to forgive him later, I’d thought—only now there wasn’t.

He’d gotten fatter in the past two years; the folds of a premature double chin pressed stiff and waxy behind his collar as he lay on his bier surrounded by candles. His wife wept softly, clutching her two little girls. My sister, Gerolama, sat beside her, red-eyed and exhausted, and she rose to give me an unexpected hug instead of her usual scolding.

So strange.

I sat vigil beside my brother as Sandro and our other brother greeted the guests of Capodimonte who came to pay their respects. Familiar faces, faces I had known since childhood, so why did they look at me so avidly? “They’ve all heard of you, you know,” Gerolama said with a touch of her old asperity.

Heard of me—of course. I was little Giulia Farnese, who had left home to be married, as all girls did, but then became the Pope’s harlot. I was notorious. I’d been notorious for nearly two years, really, but I hadn’t been home in all that time to see my neighbors gossiping and whispering as they looked at me. The following day during the funeral procession, more people looked at me than at Angelo’s bier as it advanced slowly through the streets. I’d walked the Pope’s daughter to her wedding in the Vatican, but I didn’t walk behind my brother’s body with Sandro—that wasn’t how things were done here. I waited in the church in a borrowed black dress that didn’t suit me, head decently covered, watching the priests and then the coffin and then my brothers trail past, and still people stared at me like I had two heads.