The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (48 page)

“I’m sure you feel very proud of yourself!”

“Not very.” She shook her graying head. “But the world is not a place of blacks and whites, Giulia Farnese. As I think you know by now.”

I rounded away from her, toward Orsino, and took his hands in mine again. “You don’t have to listen to her. She’s wrong about you, she is. Tell her!”

His fingers were limp and cold in mine. He looked at me once, and then he stared at his boots. “Maybe she’s right.”

“What?”

A tentative voice sounded through the door just then. “Madonna Giulia?”

I whirled, tearing my hands away from Orsino’s. “
What?
” I yelled all over again.

Carmelina Mangano’s long face appeared cautiously around the door frame. “I’m sorry to interrupt,
madonna
—but do you wish me to postpone
cena
? The dishes have been ready an hour, if you wish to eat . . .”

“Thank you, Carmelina. We’ll eat shortly.” I smoothed the front of my loose Neapolitan overgown, trying to unclench my fingers, and motioned her in. “You might as well know,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “I set off in the morning.” I looked at Orsino. “For Rome.”

“We do?” My cook blinked at that.

“Yes. Dawn if we can manage—” I broke off in surprise as Carmelina straightened, turning her face toward me full-on. “Holy Virgin,” I said, distracted despite myself. “What’s happened to you?” Her right cheek was one massive livid bruise.

She hesitated. Her eyes flickered as though she were thumbing through various stories, and she finally mumbled something about one of the travelers from Venice whom I had welcomed when they begged a night’s hospitality. I didn’t know whether to believe her, but she cut me off when I asked for the man’s name. “Just one of the cooks,
madonna
. It doesn’t matter if we’re leaving tomorrow anyway.” Carmelina hesitated, eyes flickering again. “Though if it’s not too much to ask—could we leave by the Montefiascone road? The Venetians, they’re setting out tomorrow too, and one of their guardsmen told me they meant to take the other road. If we were to leave by way of Montefiascone, we wouldn’t have to travel with their party . . .”

“Of course.”

She was gone with a swift bob of a curtsy, relief in every line of her body. I turned back to Orsino and Adriana, both still regarding me. “Enjoy
cena
, both of you,” I said. “I have a great deal of packing to do.”

Adriana’s face had turned looked thoughtful. “You have gotten quite independent, haven’t you, Giulia Farnese?”

“Perhaps,” I said, and looked at Orsino. “I am twenty years old, after all—no longer quite such an ignorant little goose as I used to be.”

My husband’s whole body was hunched with misery. “Giulia—”

I looked at him, my husband in the blue doublet that matched his eyes. Eyes all soft with love, and full of tears. I’d been so touched, these days past when he was wooing me. Touched enough to imagine myself at his side, his wife in truth and not just in name.

“Giulia,” he said again. “I’ll take you back—when the Pope doesn’t—I mean, when he’s . . .” Orsino cleared his throat. “Our own life in Carbognano, and our own children—I’ll grow all the roses you want in the garden—”

“I want you to grow a spine,” I said, and slammed the door.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The French forced their way into houses, driving out the inhabitants and then burning their firewood, eating and drinking all they could find without paying for anything.

—JOHANN BURCHARD, “AT THE COURT OF THE BORGIA”

Carmelina

W
e’re safe!” Bartolomeo scrambled up into the wagon after me, toting his bundle of clothes and a huge hamper. “He was starting to stir so I gave him another whack with the skillet.”

“Tell me you didn’t kill him!” I whimpered. My eventual berth in hell was already probable; I had no desire to make it inevitable by adding my father’s murder to the weight of my sins.

“Not dead, but he’s down like an ox at the slaughter yard. He won’t stir for hours.” Bartolomeo’s eyes sparkled in the gray of dawn. “He won’t be found either, not with all this bustle of Madonna Giulia leaving. Everyone’s far too busy to notice that some guest’s private cook is missing.” My apprentice gave a flap of his hand at the throng in the courtyard: thirty guardsmen clattering about on their horses, maids carrying out one last bundle of clothing or casket of letters, Madonna Adriana climbing wearily into the carriage that had brought her here only yesterday afternoon. With all the racket my apprentice could have shouted his words and not been overheard, but he kept his voice to a dramatic whisper and leaned his head close to mine in the packed confines of the wagon. “By the time that Venetian whoreson wakes up or gets found, or someone goes looking for him, we’ll be long gone,
signorina
. And in the opposite direction, too.”

He grinned at me, alight with adventure, and I envied him his high spirits. I just felt ill. “Not a word about any of this,” I warned him for at least the fourth time, settling my small bundle of clothes more firmly between the chests I’d loaded with the skillets, pots, spices, and other cooking essentials I’d brought for what had originally supposed to be a short summer trip away from Rome. “Not a word to Maestro Santini when we get back to Rome, or to Ottaviano or any of the other apprentices. Not to the fishmonger when I send you to the market for sturgeon, or your confessor when you go to Mass. I know it goes against the grain for a good, honest boy like you, not telling your priest something like this—”

“I’m up to my neck in this too,
signorina
,” he cut me off. “I don’t want trouble any more than you do. I won’t be telling my confessor or anyone else.”

“Swear it,” I insisted.

“On Santa Marta’s head.”

“Swear on her hand.” I produced the little bag from where it hung at my waist again. He peered inside and recoiled.

“That’s what you’ve got in there,
signorina
? A saint’s
hand
?”

“Likely it’s a fake,” I lied. “Swear on it anyway. She’ll hear you.”

He put a hand gingerly on the bag and swore.

“Good,” I said, and barely managed to put the withered hand away again before I had to lean over the wagon’s tailboard and void my empty, roiling stomach into the courtyard.

“That withered thing in the bag is enough to make anybody throw up.” My apprentice sounded so cheerful I could have killed him. “A nice soothing meal, that’s what you need,
signorina
. I packed us a hamper!” My apprentice patted the big basket he’d hauled in along with his clothes. He’d gotten very fond of packing meals for the outdoor repasts by the lake that the Farnese were so fond of here in Capodimonte. Myself, I preferred a good sturdy
credenza
rather than a picnic basket when it came to laying out food. My stomach churned, and I retched all over again.

“You’re sure you don’t want a little
zabaglione
?” Bartolomeo sounded hopeful. “I whipped it up this morning: good Milanese almonds through the strainer with some egg yolks and a little sweet white wine—”

“I hope you used the Trebbiano from Pistoia,” I said, wiping my mouth. “That’s the best vintage for
zabaglione
.”

“Of course I used the Trebbiano from Pistoia! And a little cinnamon, fine sugar, a little rosewater—”

My apprentice was patting my back now as though I were a nervous horse. I should have brushed him away—a cook should never show weakness before underlings—but I felt too worn. My throbbing face was as swollen as a nut that had soaked in cold milk all night, and I’d slept sitting up at the trestle table outside the storeroom, straining my ears in my sleep for some sign my father was stirring. I kept waking up with the dream that he’d somehow unbolted the door from inside and was coming for me again. Coming to take me back to
that
place.

Even if you get away now, he could still come take you back
, a little voice whispered in my head as Bartolomeo nattered on, listing ingredients like a demented auditory shopping list.
As soon as he’s discovered in that storeroom, he’ll report you. And he knows who you work for now. You could get back to Rome, and a month or two later you might find guards at the door waiting to arrest you for desecration.

I’d worry about that later. I’d
have
to worry about that later—I had far too much to worry about right now to even think about adding anything else to the list.

Madonna Giulia appeared in the courtyard then: her breath misting white on the chill dawn air; Pantisilea tramping behind with the bundles; little Laura slumbering in her nurse’s arms wrapped in a spare furred cloak; her sister, Gerolama, following behind in a long stream of complaints. Giulia ignored her, looking as drawn and tired as I did, worn under the eyes as she went to join Madonna Adriana in the carriage. Leonello followed, La Bella’s eternal small shadow in black, and handed her in before scrambling up himself. As she disappeared inside I thought I saw the velvet gleam of the Pope’s huge teardrop pearl about her neck again. She hadn’t worn it all summer, but she wore it now. Somehow I didn’t think Orsino Orsini would be accompanying his wife in that carriage. He was there in the courtyard, bareheaded despite the chill, and Giulia looked at him out the window of the carriage as though asking him a question. He opened his mouth, but just closed it again and looked wretched. Giulia pulled Laura into her lap and didn’t look at her husband again.

The captain of the guards kicked his horse into a trot, spurring out of the courtyard toward the Montefiascone road. From the windows I thought I saw servants watching, and the rest of Madonna Giulia’s family, but I didn’t pay any attention to the faces. All I wanted to see was the road, the road, the road stretching ahead, leading me farther and farther away from the man locked in the storeroom.

By midmorning the roiling in my stomach had subsided almost entirely. The air was dry and cold, the sun shone overhead, and we rolled along briskly enough on the dusty road. Bartolomeo had grown restless and hopped out of the wagon to go loping alongside the wagons for a while, tossing a pebble up in the air and catching it again. The guards called back and forth to each other on their horses; Madonna Giulia sat gazing out the window of her carriage up ahead with her chin propped in her hand; I could hear the servants in the other wagon chattering. I could have ridden with them, but a good cook always rides with his equipment when traveling.

My father taught me that.

I leaned my head back against the wooden crate of skillets and plates and the good knives without which I never traveled. With every roll of the wheels taking me farther from my father, my fog of blind panic had started to clear. Surely my father wouldn’t pursue me down into Rome? It must have stirred up talk when I ran away in the first place, especially when you considered just what I’d taken with me in the way of stolen goods, but the whispers would have blown over by now. Dragging me back to Venice as a desecrator of altars to be publicly punished before cheering crowds—
that
scandal would be enormous. What archbishop would keep my father on as cook then?

No. My father’s first instinct when he laid eyes on me might have been to seize me, but when I was far away and no longer quite so easy to lay hold of . . . well, I thought it far more likely he’d swallow his rage and mumble some hasty excuse when he was found trussed in that storeroom. Who wanted to wreck a painstakingly built career as one of Venice’s finest cooks, just to punish one disobedient daughter?

Not Paolo Mangano.

I couldn’t help a smile. At least I’d had the chance to tell my father to his face that I was a better cook than he. Who cared if he’d never believe me? I knew it was true.

I was still smiling and dreaming, thinking that a dish of
zabaglione
with almond milk really sounded quite tasty after all, when the first screams sounded.

“Bartolomeo?” I poked my head over the wagon tailboard, looking for my apprentice. “Did a horse fall, or—”

Bartolomeo stood rigid, eyes stretched wide. I followed his gaze and saw something I hardly understood: two of the guards at the head of our small column, slumped and bloody in their saddles. Another clutched at his shoulder, screaming—and a wolf pack of soldiers in dirtied armor was leaping down upon us from all directions, spurring their horses with shrill cries.

I saw the captain of the guard where he had been riding alongside the carriage, bending down in his saddle as he attempted to flirt with Madonna Giulia—he jerked upright, head twisting wildly in all directions. He began to shout orders, but two more men were already toppling from their saddles in the rear, and inside the carriage I heard Madonna Giulia’s sister begin to shriek. The maids were shrieking too in the wagon behind, and I saw a foreign sergeant with a grizzled face and a missing ear reach grinning into the wagon and drag one of Giulia’s maids out by the hair. Her scream spiked my ears, and then I was knocked back into the wagon as Bartolomeo vaulted up, pushing me out of sight. Not before I’d seen the banners, though; banners flapping on the morning breeze as the soldiers closed around us like a vise. Banners flying the lilies of France.

“Stay down,” Bartolomeo shouted, “stay down,
signorina
, stay out of sight!” But he was ripping the nearest crate open, pawing for the knives we’d packed away so carefully, and I clawed right along with him. I could hear more women screaming, and French voices cawing in that revolting flat language of theirs that grated the ear like a wire, and I wanted a knife in my hand. I heard the captain of Madonna Giulia’s guard still shouting orders, and then his voice choked off in a rattle and I didn’t know if it was a blade or a blow that had silenced him, but without seeing I knew he was choking on his own blood. “
Get down!
” Bartolomeo shouted again, shoving at me, but the wagon darkened suddenly and I saw a French soldier clambering over the tailboard like an ape.

He grinned, seeing me, saying something in that horrible French tongue, his own tongue lolling like a serpent, and all the panicked voices outside were shrieking in my head now, mixed up with all the rumors I’d ever heard of the French army. How they burned churches full of praying nuns, how they dashed the infant brains of babies out on altars, how they raped women and then cut off their fingers to pry the rings away from their hands—

Bartolomeo made a desperate empty-handed lunge, but the French soldier backhanded him almost casually out of the wagon. I saw the glint of armor outside, soldiers dismounting, soldiers everywhere, and I made a last frantic fumble in the crate, but my knives, my cleavers, my sharpened spits and basting needles all slid through my sweating fingers. I lunged with my nails instead, but the Frenchman backhanded me too, on my already swollen and black-bruised face, and the blow made the inside of my head light up with sparks. Dimly I felt a rough hand seize my hair, then collapsed as he dragged me forward, felt the tailboard at my knees, and collapsed again into the dust of the road as he shoved me out of the wagon to the ground.

Half the maids had tried to flee the cart ahead, and a trio of French soldiers hemmed them in like dogs herding sheep, pricking them with pike points and laughing as they screamed. The other soldiers were picking more professionally through the wagons or herding back the guards they’d subdued, directed by what I assumed was a captain in blue plumes and mirror-bright helmet. Three or four of our guards still fought in a ragged line before Madonna Giulia’s carriage, but her horses had already been slashed loose from the harness and goaded away, leaving the carriage stranded like a ship run aground on a rock. The captain of our guard lay crumpled by one canted wheel, blood still pulsing slowly from the great slash in his throat. Bartolomeo lay facedown in the dust not an arm’s length from me.

The soldier who had shoved me out of the wagon gave me one cursory glance but just spat in the dust and went back to rummaging among the crates.
Perhaps I should thank my father for hitting me
, I thought idiotically, feeling the throb of my swollen face.
He’s made me so ugly even the French don’t want to rape me.
So much for Leonello’s prediction.

Leonello had made other predictions, too. That the French were close, only a short distance away on the Montefiascone road. The road we’d taken only because I’d talked Madonna Giulia into traveling a different way from my father’s party.
My fault, all of this, God forgive me, it’s my fault, it—