The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (46 page)

That was when I heard an autocratic voice in my doorway, sharp and pinging with a glass-clear Venetian accent just like my own. “Are you what passes for a cook in this household, girl? His Excellency my good master will require hot sops to soothe his stomach after a long journey, so you will fetch me muscatel pears, sugar, whole cinnamon, and as decent a red wine as you have in your cellars. And at once.”

I put down the packet of cinnamon I had just been pinching closed. I put the bowl of mixed spices carefully to one side and automatically dusted a few grains of sugar from my fingertips. I turned slowly, sick in my soul, to face the man in the doorway. The man with a long face and a high-bridged nose like mine, imperious height and sharp all-seeing eyes to match mine. His arms in their rolled-up sleeves were singed smooth and hairless like mine, after so much reaching in and out of hot ovens. And his hands, like mine, were marked all over with the knife nicks and burn scars that told the world,
I am a cook
.

I stared at my father, and he gave a great start and stared at me.

I wondered if I looked so different after more than two years’ absence. He looked the same, though he had grown a belly that overlapped his belt. Inanely I remembered telling Madonna Giulia that no great cook ever had the time to get fat. I suppose this meant my father was doing well—he’d never had the leisure before to get himself a belly.

“Last I’d heard,” I found myself saying, “you were working for the Doge’s great-nephew, Father. Not an archbishop.”

“Carmelina,” he said, still looking stunned.

“Is Mother with you?” I asked inanely. All my fears, working in Rome, that someday my father or someone else who knew me might cross my path—all the hiding I’d done in storerooms whenever there were Venetian visitors to the Palazzo Santa Maria—and now my father was here, not in the vast city of pilgrims where so many travelers passed, but in the backwaters of the provinces.

“Your mother’s safe in Venice,” my father replied automatically, still staring at me as though I were a resurrected corpse. “His Excellency took me with him to Florence on an advisory to Fra Savonarola. We were delayed returning, and now the French army . . .”

He trailed off. Maestro Paolo Mangano, the best cook in Venice, who had set me chopping my first onion at three years old, who had shouted at me for being slow to fetch olive oil and clouted me on the ear for dropping an egg and tanned my back with a ladle for arguing with him about the best way to make a royal sauce. Maestro Paolo Mangano, a right and proper bastard, may Santa Marta and all the saints forgive me for speaking so of my father. A right and proper bastard who had never had a fond word for me but still made me into a cook. For that at least I owed him, and I felt a child’s urge to run to him, bow my head.

Instead, I picked up the nearest knife.

“Turn on your father now, girl?” His eyes narrowed, and I could see him collecting his thoughts. My father could be counted on never to be caught off guard for long. “I’d expect no less of a faithless, talentless slattern like you. I’d assumed you were dead in some whore’s flophouse by now.”

“I’ve missed you too, Father.” He’d spoken in the crystal-sharp Venetian street patois he always used in the kitchens, if not to his distinguished clients, and unthinkingly I answered in the same dialect. Somewhere in the back of my head I was howling in panic, but my voice came out even. The days of hanging my head under the lash of my father’s tongue were long done.

He took a step forward, unfolding his massive arms. “You’re coming with me, girl.”

“No.” I took a step back, still holding the knife at my side. “Come any closer and I’ll scream.”

“Scream, then. And I’ll tell this good household they’re sheltering a runaway whore still wanted in Venice for the robbing of the church of the blessed Santa Marta.” He took another step toward me, voice rising. “You’re a sorry excuse for a daughter, but you’re still mine. And if I say you’re coming with me, then you’ll obey. I’m your father—”

“And I’m cook to Madonna Giulia Farnese,” I found myself shooting back. “The Holy Father’s concubine herself. I have powerful friends—”

“The Pope’s cunt?” For someone who could talk so smooth and pretty for the clients, he had a mouth like a gutter in the kitchen. His voice rose steadily toward the bellow I remembered so well. “I should have known you’d end up cooking for another whore. If you think she’ll protect you, well, she’ll be too busy flopping on her back for the French, once they finally arrive and turn this town into a sewer. We’ll be well gone, and you’ll be headed back to—”

“I’m not going back there!” I shouted back. “Not that place. Not ever!” The corner of the trestle table pressed into my hip, and I dodged around it.

“Oh, yes, you are.” My father’s voice dropped from a bellow to a silky whisper. One of his most effective tricks to terrify his apprentices, that sudden modulation from roar to murmur; I often used the same technique myself. “But I want my recipes back first, girl. Hand them over.”

“I don’t have them.” My hand felt sweaty on the knife hilt.

“Lying bitch,” he said almost fondly. “Hand them over and maybe I’ll just turn turn a blind eye rather than report you to the Archbishop as a desecrator and a runaway—”

“I don’t have your precious recipes!” I yelled. “I left them behind when Madonna Giulia took herself to the country, and you know why? Because I don’t need them anymore, Father, because I make up my own recipes now and they’re
better
than yours. Because I’m a better cook than you are now, and the Pope himself eats my food and—”

My father lunged at me across the trestle table then, giving a swipe of his massive cook’s hand, and I dodged back. He missed the whipping end of my braid, but I stumbled on my own hem, and in a heartbeat he was on me, reeling me in by the knot of my apron. I hadn’t known when I picked up the knife whether I could bear to threaten my own father with it—I’d never challenged him before when he gave me a beating, after all. Fathers hit their children, and cooks hit their scullions; it was the way of the world, and I’d never thought of fighting back, just taken my punishment like any other member of his kitchens and vowed to do it better next time, whatever
it
was: a curdled sauce or an overdone rack of lamb. But now I made a wild slash of the blade, scoring his arm deep, and felt a strange exhilaration as blood droplets sprayed in an arc across the floor. “Does it hurt?” I yelled, swinging the knife again and missing. “Or does it hurt worse that you’re stuck cooking for an archbishop while your daughter serves the
Pope
!”

My father gave a roar and batted me across the side of my head with his hard open palm. A hot explosion of sparks filled the inside of my skull.

“Turning a blade on the man who sired you?” He flung me back against the wall, and I felt the drying racks press painfully into my shoulders. The knife flew out of my hand, skittering across the flagstones. “Whatever happened to ‘Honor thy father,’ Carmelina Mangano?”

“When you’ve robbed a church,” I managed to say around the buzzing in my head, “a broken commandment or two doesn’t seem like much, Father.”

He swung a hand at me again, doubling up his fist this time, the kind of blow he dealt out to thieving fishmongers who tried to cheat him on a load of tench and lake carp; and I knew I’d have more than a buzz in my head to show for it.
No, no, he’ll knock me unconscious and then cart me upstairs and lock me up.
The thoughts flitted by in utter panic, chasing each other through my head like frightened squirrels.
I’ll wake up in chains, headed back to Venice—

But the second blow never landed. My father gave another yell, this one of surprise, and batted at the back of his neck instead. A certain small linen bag had fallen from the drying rack overhead, jostled loose by all the struggling, and landed square between his shoulders—to be followed by a cascade of little earthenware spice jars as a whole shelf gave way. My father yelled again, swiping at a crock of dried rosemary as it came down on his head, and I twisted out of his grip, making a desperate lunge across the floor for my knife. I found the hilt, clutching with sweaty fingers and scrabbling backward as my father came toward me again, blotting out the light. I had enough time to think that I’d rather die here than be hauled back to Venice to face the fate that awaited me there. I’d rather take Leonello’s option of being raped a few times by the French army.

“If you don’t let me go, I’ll spit you through the gut like a roast pig,” I snarled, scrabbling to my feet, but I never had the chance. A great dull
clang
sounded like the echo of a church bell, and my father dropped at my feet like a hundredweight sack of flour. Standing behind him, cast-iron skillet still raised, was Bartolomeo.

We stared at each other, my apprentice and I, both of us panting hard.

“
Signorina
,” he gulped, and dropped the skillet with a crash. “I heard the shouting—was he trying to force you?”

“In a manner of speaking.” My apprentice blinked confusion, and I realized I was still speaking in the thick Venetian dialect of my childhood. Good; he wouldn’t have understood much of what my father and I had been shouting at each other. I shook off my Venetian patois like an unwanted cloak, scrambling a story together. “He came down to make hot sops for the Archbishop, and then . . .” Dear God, how to explain it? I crossed myself shakily. “Never mind. None of it matters.”

My head was still buzzing from the blow and the shock; I was trembling head to foot and my ears roared, but I forced my thoughts into some kind of working order as I threw a panicked look back at the half-open doors behind Bartolomeo. If he’d come running at the sound of all the crashing and shouting my father and I had done, others wouldn’t be far behind.
Sweet Santa Marta, don’t abandon me now
, I prayed, and reached down to seize one of my father’s limp arms. “Bartolomeo, get his other side, quickly—help me get him out of the way!”

Bartolomeo never blinked, just reached down and hauled my father’s massive arm over his shoulders. Between the two of us we dragged him on his knees to the farthest of the storerooms, where the Farnese steward stored the spare jars of olive oil and various other odds and ends. “What if he wakes up?” Bartolomeo ventured. “If he starts to shout—”

“Gag him.” I twisted my apron into a rope, knotting it between my father’s teeth. Was it more of a sin to gag your father than knock him unconscious? It felt sacrilegious, somehow, but that didn’t stop me from tying up his hands and ankles too, with loops of the sturdy twine I used for tying up game birds. If you’ve trussed a chicken, you can truss your father.

“Leave him,” I panted, and we left the greatest cook in Venice in an ignominious heap on the cold floor. A lump the size of a melon was already rising on the back of his head where Bartolomeo had whacked him, but his breathing was steady. It would take more than a skillet to kill my father.

“Shouldn’t we report him to—” my apprentice began as we retreated from the storeroom.

“No time.” I shot the bolt, dragged a barrel of salted herring in front of the door for good measure, and whirled back to the kitchen. “Help me clear up, quick!”

“But his archbishop will be expecting those hot sops from his own cook’s hands—”

“I can make them. He’ll never know the difference. Hurry!”

The steward arrived an instant later, followed by a trail of curious manservants and maids, but Bartolomeo was mopping up the very last of the blood drips from my father’s arm, and I’d retrieved the fallen pouch with the hand of Santa Marta and begun sweeping up the spilled spice crocks. “Nothing, nothing,” I said airily to the steward’s suspicious look. “Just giving this disobedient apprentice of mine a good clout for knocking over the spices. We’ll have everything ready in time. And,” I added in a whisper to Bartolomeo as soon as the steward waddled away and the maids flitted into the kitchen to help, “I’m doubling your pay.”

“I don’t get any pay,” he pointed out.

“That’s about to change.”

“No need,
signorina
.” Bartolomeo grinned, stuffing the bloody cloth he’d used to wipe the floor into his sleeve before anyone could ask questions about it. “Anytime you need someone hit on the head with a skillet, I’m your man.”

“Good boy.” The hot shivers of fear and excitement that had kept me moving so fast were draining away now, replaced by a cold sickness. For the first time I felt pain in the side of my face, and winced as I touched my cheek where my father had backhanded me. It was swelling already—within a few hours I’d have a black bruise. I’d better have an explanation to go with it.

I’d have to explain more than a bruise if anyone found out I had my father locked up with the spare olive oil.

Tonight at least, I was surely safe. I could keep my own people out of that storeroom for an evening, and if my father woke up, the gag would keep him from shouting. The Archbishop wouldn’t miss his cook as long as the food still arrived on time, and I’d wager the Archbishop’s other servants wouldn’t miss my father’s presence either. They wouldn’t be coming down to the kitchens, after all—my father never associated with a household’s other servants; he held himself a cut above a mere manservant or guardsman, and thus strictly aloof from their company. No, no one would miss my father until tomorrow when the Venetian party prepared to leave.

Santa Marta
, I prayed as I began numbly assembling the muscatel pears and red wine for that Venetian archbishop’s damned hot sops. He couldn’t have timed his return from Florence some other week?
Santa Marta, just get me out of this. You’ve already helped me once tonight
—really, I had to wonder just how the shelf of spice crocks had managed to tip over at such an opportune moment.
Now if you can, please
please
get me out of here before my father wakes up and tells them all who I am.

Giulia

T
ell me about it again,” I urged. “Carbognano.”

Orsino’s eyes crinkled at me in that nice way I liked. “I’ve told you half a dozen times.”