The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (50 page)

“The might of the French army,
madame
,” the French captain ventured, noting my silence—the first silence I had allowed to fall for hours. “I’ll wager you’ve seen nothing like it before.”

“The papal army is far more impressive,” I said, bored. “What are mere gendarmes against the holy warriors of the Pope?”

“This is only the advance portion of our army,
madame
.”

I swallowed.

The French captain gave a smirk at my silence, spurring ahead. I could do nothing but spur after him. A French sergeant came to the doorway of a wine shop on the outskirts of Montefiascone, giving a salacious whistle as I passed. My skin crawled, but I straightened in my saddle and pushed my hood back to show my high-piled hair. The more men who saw me, the faster the news would spread that the Pope’s beloved had been captured. The faster the news spread, the sooner it would get to Rodrigo. And then I had better pray he was not too busy or too angry to save me.

First, however, I’d better pray that the French general proved more a
chevalier
than the men who had torn my traveling party apart like wolves.

“The Basilica of Santa Margherita,” I announced as we made our way from the sprawling French camp into Montefiascone itself, and I saw the enormous half-completed dome of the famous cathedral rising over the homely tiled roofs around it. “I wish to pause there, to offer my prayers.”

“
Madame
, General d’Allegre will wish to see you—”

“He may come to greet me here if he wishes,” I sniffed. “Giulia la Bella does not present herself for inspection like some erring servant girl.”

“The general is a busy man!”

I paid no attention whatsoever. When our party made its way through the narrow twisting streets into an open
piazza
and I saw the shallow steps rising to the basilica, I halted my horse unbidden and slid from the saddle. I had no idea if the guards in their ring around me would part when I swept toward them.

But they did.

“Bring my maids,” I called without looking back, snapping my fingers over one shoulder. “And my bodyguard. We will lay him before the altar of Santa Margherita and pray for his swift recovery.”

“Captain?” one of the sergeants protested.

“Let the bitch hole herself up in the church if she likes,” the captain said in French, and I whirled on him cat-quick.

“Perhaps,
mon capitaine
, you should ensure that your captives speak no French before you insult them so coarsely.” My French was scant, mostly culled from Lucrezia, who labored diligently at her languages with a variety of tutors, but my range of insults was impressive in any language, and I let the young captain have it in French, Italian, Latin, and Catalan. After I was done deriding his manners, his appearance, his ancestry, his manhood, and his competency, and loud enough so all his men could hear, he looked like a deflated bladder with two scarlet ears.

“
Madame
is more than welcome to wait in the cathedral,” he mumbled, and I heaved a silent breath as my bedraggled entourage was allowed to disembark from their wagons. By the time they were pushed and prodded into the cathedral and the other worshippers ordered out, I was already on my knees at the altar, crossing myself ostentatiously and including loud references to the blessings and favor of the Holy Father in Rome. The French lost no time in banging the doors shut and posting a handful of muttering sentries outside.

The instant they were gone I flung myself off my knees and flew to my daughter. “
Lauretta mia
—” I squeezed her so hard I felt her little bones creak. She uttered no word of protest, just buried her face in my neck, and tears sprang to my eyes as I kissed her golden head over and over. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” I whispered. “I swear it, I swear it—”

“You brave girl,” Madonna Adriana quavered, and hugged me for the first time in all our long acquaintance. “You dear brave girl, I won’t forget what you’ve done today—”

“No time for that.” I dashed at my eyes, looking about the cathedral. It was open to the elements, the nave littered with a handful of dead leaves like paper scraps, the scaffolding of the half-completed dome backed by a hard blue winter sky above. My people huddled shivering in the pews or on the steps of the altar, half of them muttering prayers, the other half whispering among each other with horrified faces. Laura’s nursemaid burst into tears. Carmelina sat beside a cross-eyed statue of Santa Margherita, head buried in her hands, the redheaded kitchen boy at her side fruitlessly trying to press food on her out of a hamper. The guards had dumped Leonello in a makeshift litter before the altar of Santa Lucia. I hoisted Laura to my hip and flew to him, dropping to my knees. “Holy Virgin, let him be all right. Leonello—”

My little lion was an unconscious mess of wounds. His nose was smashed to a bloody smear, his face was puffed and purpled by fists, and all the fingers on one hand were broken and distended. He curled in on himself, breathing harshly through his open mouth, and from beneath him I saw a slow trickle of blood creeping from who knew what wound. I crossed myself. “Leonello?”

He looked so small, curled in on himself like a sick child. No bigger than a child, and yet he’d still sprung to my defense. Shoved me behind him and taken on the entire French army with nothing but a handful of knives. “Idiot,” I told his unconscious ears, touching his bloody forehead. “You should have just let them take me.”

But if he had, would we be here now? He’d bought me time, a moment to collect myself, to announce my name and my status before the chaos and the madness drove the French beyond listening.

“I tended him in the wagon as best I could.” Madonna Adriana dropped to her knees beside me. “He was stabbed at least twice—if he doesn’t get a surgeon . . .”

“Oh, he’ll get one,” I said grimly, settling beside him. I was not going to let my bodyguard die, not after what he’d done. “In the meantime, Adriana, go soak a kerchief in that baptismal font over there for me, and wash his face. Pia, unpack one of my shifts and rip it up for bandaging. Carmelina, surely we have some wine in that hamper—”

We waited two hours before the French general came to call on me. General Yves d’Allegre: grave, bearded, iron-haired, moving with a horseman’s long stride at the head of a phalanx of officers. I felt a flutter at my stomach but lifted my chin and stared at them coolly from the top of the altar steps, where I had arranged myself for the advantage of a little more height. Adriana had chivvied the others into rows behind me: a phalanx of my own.

“A
general
?” I said before he had even finished introducing his officers. I wrinkled my nose as though he’d told me he was a stable boy. “Why am I not being received by King Charles himself? This is an insult to one of my rank, and I will not—”

“His Majesty is not here,
madame
.” General d’Allegre spoke in a grave and modulated bass, his Italian far better than the young captain’s. He looked far more imperturbable than the young captain, too. “King Charles marches with the bulk of our army, leaving the advance guard to me.”

I breathed a little easier at that. Everyone had heard the rumors of King Charles: his voracious appetite for women, willing or unwilling, and how he wrote them up in a book afterward with notes on their appearance and ratings of their skill between the sheets. I had no intention of being written up in a poxy Frenchman’s book of conquests.

“I have heard much of the beauty of Giulia la Bella,” General d’Allegre continued. His eyes went over me, slowly. “And I see nothing has been exaggerated.”

Behind him, two of his officers snickered. My pulse leaped, but I kept my cold expression. “Is it your custom to mix compliments with assaults, General? To attack helpless female travelers? Three of my guards were slain, my maids accosted, my mother-in-law and sister abused, and my bodyguard all but butchered! Not to mention the loss of my horses and anything else in my baggage your men decided to steal for themselves—”

“My apologies,
madame
.” He offered a smile with no apology at all behind it. “Had you been recognized, my men would have evinced more gentleness in making your acquaintance. I assure you that in France it is not the custom to make war upon women.”

“Then you will let me return to Rome at once.” I drummed my fingers, making sure my rings sparkled. The more expensive I looked in the finery Rodrigo had given me, the better. “
Such
an inconvenience; the Holy Father will be so annoyed—”

“I fear I cannot return you to Rome yet,
madame
.”

I tasted fear in my mouth, sour and rancid, but I pushed my lip out in a pout. “And you consider yourself a gentleman,
mon general
?”

“I do as my King commands.” General d’Allegre spread his hands in graceful apology, but his eyes were hard and cool. “It is possible His Majesty will wish to make your acquaintance before making further decisions as to your return. He has a great admiration for beautiful women, after all . . . and he would not wish to leave you with a poor opinion of French hospitality.”

Oh, how very polite we were all being. I could already see my entry in the royal book of conquests:
Number ninety-six, fair-haired everywhere, skillful hands.
Holy Virgin, save me.

“Or perhaps His Majesty will give me leave to return you to Rome at once. Who knows,
madame
?” General d’Allegre noted my silence, and his lips curved. “For the meantime, I am honored to act as your host. You will dine with me tonight.”

I didn’t think it was an invitation. “My good mother-in-law Adriana da Mila and I will be delighted to join you.” I felt Adriana lift her chin bravely at my side.

“I would not dream of parting your
belle-mere
from her duties to your traveling party,” the general said smoothly, not even giving her a glance. “My officers and I will be honored to take the task of entertaining
La Belle Farnese
alone this evening.”

More snickers from the officers behind him. One young man with a violently fashionable mustache bent to whisper to the other, neither bothering to hide the way their eyes went over me. Over the maids arrayed behind me, too: white-faced Carmelina and Laura’s buxom nursemaid and poor Pantisilea, who for once had no flirtatious winks to give back.

“If I am to be your guest this evening, then I wish comfortable lodgings for my traveling party,” I snapped. “Proper beds and food, and sentries posted to keep them safe.”

“Of course,
madame
.”

“And I want a good surgeon for my bodyguard,” I added imperiously. “His wounds must be tended at once.”

“That may be more difficult to provide.” General d’Allegre was bland. “Your little man inflicted serious injuries upon several of my soldiers. My surgeons, I’m afraid, are all occupied tending
their
wounds.”

I saw the sour looks the other French were casting Leonello and gave silent thanks to the Holy Virgin that he was unconscious. If he’d begun lacing into them with his sharp tongue, they looked only too happy to finish him off on his makeshift litter right now, holy ground or not.
No man likes to look foolish
, I remembered my bodyguard telling me once.
And that goes double when it’s a dwarf making him look the fool.

If Leonello didn’t get a surgeon for his wounds, the French wouldn’t need to finish him off with their swords.

“You
will
find a surgeon,” I informed the French general, letting my voice scale up to queenly outrage. “I
will
have my guard looked after at once. If you think the Holy Father will be pleased to hear how you have treated us—”

I went on in that vein awhile, striding up and down and jabbing my jeweled finger toward heaven and all in all throwing a marvelous tantrum. The young French captain had wilted when I raged, but General d’Allegre stood imperturbably, watching my breasts heave and not listening to my words at all. I remembered the way my Pope could play affable patriarch or wily diplomat or majestic fisher of men, switching from one role to the next as determined by his audience.
Change your tactics,
mi perla, I could hear him say in his Spanish bass, and I halted mid-tantrum. I fluttered my fingers at the base of my throat as though overcome, dashing at my eyes with a well-jeweled hand before I looked back at General d’Allegre. “Forgive me,” I said with a watery little sigh that was not faked in the slightest. My whole stomach was a mass of trembling knots. “This is all very upsetting. I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course,
madame
.” Another French bow. “We will talk more tonight.”

“Oui, mon general.”
I lowered my lashes with the barest beginning of a flutter. “Tonight.”

Tongues flickered behind thin lips as the French general and his officers looked at me, and for a panicky instant I thought I was surrounded by snakes.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

No one thinks how much blood it costs.

—DANTE

Leonello

A
ceiling. Stone arches. Cobwebs. I concentrated on them.

Warmth, coming from somewhere. A glow. I blinked till the glow turned into a brazier, shimmering with heat and giving a little warmth to the sullen cold.

Softness. Blankets, heaped over me.

Pain. The less said about that, the better.

I closed my eyes, swallowing once or twice around the woolly dryness of my tongue. “Not to belabor the cliché,” I said, and was surprised how weakly my voice came out, “but where am I?”

“Montefiascone. The vestry of the Basilica of Santa Margherita.” A bright jeweled blur moved to my side, and I blinked again, trying to dispel the clouds. Eyes, eyes, what was wrong with my eyes? I’d been stabbed in the chest and side and the hip, maybe the shoulder too, but not the eyes, so what was wrong with them?

“General d’Allegre offered to move us to warmer quarters, but I thought we might be safer on holy ground,” the voice went on. “I had blankets and braziers and fuel brought here, and moved us all into the vestry and the smaller chapels to get us out from under those open rafters.” Giulia Farnese’s face came slowly into focus. “How is the pain, Leonello?”

“Some moments are more agonizing than others.” There was pain in my shoulder, pain in my side, pain in my hip; dull pain that chewed at my bones like a patient beast, and I could feel the stab of broken ribs with every breath. There was a rustling feeling in my chest as though my lungs were filled with parchment, and when I spat to one side I saw blood.
That is not at all good
, I thought distantly, but it was my hand that hurt the worst. I lifted it up for closer examination, and it hardly even looked like a hand anymore. The French had stamped on it, trying to get me to let go of my knives, and every finger was broken. The littlest finger skewed off at an angle so strange it hurt my eyes just to look on it: purple and mottled and queerly flattened. “How fortunate that I don’t need a little finger to throw knives,” I managed to remark. “The others might survive with a little splinting, but not that one.”

“I’m trying to get you a surgeon,” my mistress said. “The French have refused—it’s all excuses; they’re just humiliated you took down so many of their men.” She let out a flat obscenity better suited to a stable boy than a pope’s mistress, and I would have laughed but it hurt too much.
Dio
, but it hurt. “Can I make you more comfortable?” La Bella went on. “A cup of wine, another blanket—”

“No, I’m quite comfortable,” I lied. The mists had cleared from my eyes a little and I could see Pantisilea sitting against the far wall tearing up a gauze shift to make bandages. Through the vestry door I could see movement: Madonna Adriana slumped in a chair with Laura in her lap and the nursemaid fussing. I twisted my head to where my mistress sat beside my pallet and looked her over. “Are you going to a party?” She wore her finest gown, heavy cloth-of-silver girdled with a sapphire-studded chain, and every jewel she owned had been latched around throat, wrists, fingers, waist. She looked expensive and gaudy, overdressed and vain, and it didn’t suit her.

“I’ve been invited to dine.” Her smile was a twisted, tilted thing. “With the French officers.”

“They’ll strip those jewels right off you.”

“They’re welcome to the lot.” Madonna Giulia looked down at herself. “I want them to see just how much the Pope has spent on me. What he’ll be willing to spend to get me back, if they’ll just agree to ransom me.”

We hadn’t spoken so cordially in weeks, my mistress and I—not since she’d slapped me for insulting Orsino Orsini, and before that when I’d been cruel to her in Pesaro for no particular reason other than the fact that I felt like it.

“I haven’t had a chance to thank you,” Giulia said, “for defending me.”

A tongue of flame flared up in the brazier, and I focused on it. “Don’t thank me, Madonna Giulia.”

“I will,” she said fiercely. “All your injuries—why did you do it, Leonello? You couldn’t have beaten them, there were too many and you had only so many knives. Why?”

“I was hired to protect you. So I tried.” I shrugged as best I could while lying flat on my back and piled with blankets that were beginning to weigh on my chest like stones. “Besides, I don’t like the French. They’re rude, they stink, and if one small man can make a few of them wish they’d stayed on their own side of the mountains, then so much the better. Well worth a few shattered ribs.”

She looked at me. “That’s truly why you did it?”

“Perhaps I was also making amends.” I gazed up at the arched ceiling of the vestry again. A spider was spinning a web there, not caring about the little man lying below and possibly dying. “I am sorry I called you a whore, Madonna Giulia. In Pesaro.” I hate making apologies, and I fumbled the words. I hate fumbling, too. “When I get in a temper—I need to cut someone, even if only with my tongue. You were there.”

“And you were right.” She was quite calm. “I am a whore. I used to pretend I wasn’t, because I never asked for presents or payments, and I never asked to be anybody’s mistress in the first place. But after a while it doesn’t matter what you
ask
, does it?” She looked down at herself, all the gaudy jewels and the low-cut silver gown. “Don’t I look like the most expensive harlot in Rome?”

“Never,” I said.

“No need to defend my honor, Leonello.” Her tone was light, social. Talking of anything, I suppose, as long as she could distract me from the pain in my body. “I’m a whore now, and I’ll play the part for the French. But I won’t always be one. This summer with my family . . . it showed me something.”

“Which is?” I raised an eyebrow. Even that hurt. “The idyllic pleasures of Carbognano, as painted by your good lord husband?”

“Yes.” Giulia reached to a table behind the brazier and uncorked a flask of wine. “Someday I’ll have that. An ordinary life again.”

“Do you want such a life?”

“Someday. Even if it comes with Orsino.”

“He’s not so terrible,” I found myself saying.

“No,” Giulia acknowledged. “But he’s gutless. You were right about that.”

“He loves you,” I found myself saying. How had I found myself speaking of love with the most expensive harlot in Rome?
Dio
, but I wanted a drink.

“Orsino doesn’t love me.” She poured me a cup as though she had read my mind, helping lift my head so I could sip without spilling. “If he did, he’d spit in Rodrigo’s eye and say he’d rather be excommunicated and damned than give me up. He’d hear I was being held captive by the French, and he’d come riding to rescue me.” Giulia shook her head. “I don’t think I inspire much love in men. Just passion, and the passion isn’t really for
me
.” She made a matter-of-fact gesture at her own face, her golden hair, her perfumed breasts. “The passion is for this.”

“The Pope will harrow heaven and hell to get you back safely,” I said. “Isn’t that love?”

“More passion.” She held the cup to my lips again; rearranged my blankets. “One day it will fade, and he’ll tire of me, and I’ll go back to my gutless husband. I’m not so afraid of that happening as I used to be, oddly.” A shrug. “You know why silly women moon over Petrarch and Dante, Leonello?”

“Why?”

“Because we like to pretend that we’re Laura or Beatrice. Women who inspire both passion
and
love, and in verse too.” Giulia’s tone turned wry. “But women like me aren’t idols for poets. Laura and Beatrice were both chaste—no one writes poetry to harlots.”

“Count yourself fortunate,” I said. “Great love makes for terrible poetry. Remember Lord Sforza’s unspeakable little sonnets about Lucrezia? ‘
Hail to thee, O springtime goddess fair—
’”

Giulia let out a laugh, and I thought a genuine one. It did my heart good to hear it. “Don’t think I’m complaining too much about this life of mine, Leonello. Passion is more than most women get, after all. And His Holiness is burning hot enough for me right now to challenge all France, and that’s more than Orsino would ever do.”

I had no answer to that.

My mistress arranged the blankets closer around me and rose. “Until His Holiness sends an offer of ransom, however, I’d better go dine with General d’Allegre and do my best to keep us all safe and sound.” A sigh as she gave a pat to her hair and her gleaming skirts, and arranged her huge pearl more prominently between her breasts. “Holy Virgin, but it’s bound to be unpleasant.”

I felt cold despite the blankets and the brazier. “Surely the general wouldn’t lay a finger on a prisoner.” Leaving me to die of my wounds was one thing; a dwarf guard was nothing. But the Pope’s darling—

“I’ll encourage him to lay a finger on me, Leonello,” Giulia said quietly. “The whole hand, if he wants. If it will keep my daughter safe and my maids unraped, and get a surgeon in here to keep you from bleeding to death, I’ll let that French general lift my skirts and ride me like a mare.”

She glided from the vestry like an actress making her way onto the stage.

I heard Pantisilea’s voice from the corner, cautious. “She told me to look after you, Leonello. I could get you some food—”

I shut my eyes. “Get out.”

The vestry door thudded again, leaving me in the silence. I took a ragged bubbling breath and spat blood again. My hand throbbed like it was being crushed in a vise, and the wound in my hip had broken open under the bandages and soaked the bedclothes beneath me. At least I hoped it was blood. From the smell, I was very much afraid I had pissed myself. Piss and blood and rage; the room stank of it—and for what? I’d been hired to keep the Pope’s mistress safe from danger, and I’d given my pathetic stunted body over to do it, and I’d still failed. She’d go play whore to the French and I’d lie here and die, and none of it mattered at all.

Failed. Failed.

Since I was alone, I let out one gasping sob between clenched teeth, cradling my maimed hand against my chest.
Dio
, but it hurt. I’d never known anything could hurt so much.

“Leonello, let me help—”

Carmelina Mangano’s Venetian accents came from the door as it creaked open again. Quick footsteps sounded, and then I felt her wiry arm sliding under my head, raising me up so I could breathe easier. I hurt too badly to refuse the help, and resentment stung my mouth. How dare she offer it when I couldn’t fling it in her face?

“Here, take some wine.” She propped me up halfway so I was almost sitting, then went racing about the vestry poking up the brazier and uncorking the flask again. How she had so much energy at the end of the day we’d just endured, I didn’t know. It was all I could do to take a few shallow breaths around my bubbling lungs and get my face under control again. My flattened little finger had begun to throb on an entirely different level from the rest of my mangled hand, pain sinking in like a ring of teeth.

“I think I’ll have some wine too,” Carmelina said over her bony shoulder, rummaging for another cup. “Madonna Giulia told us all to try to sleep while she was gone wining and dining the French officers. But I don’t think any of us maidservants can even close our eyes, not after the things we’ve heard the French sentries call in at us.” A shudder.

I looked up at her as she passed me a wine cup. “Thank you.”

Her eyes flicked away. That bruise along the side of her face was nearly as spectacular as mine. On top of the bruising she had shadows of exhaustion under her eyes, and her wiry black curls had escaped their plait and bobbed at the middle of her back. Grown out to a respectable length now, that hair.

“Do you want something to eat?” She tugged at a straying thread on her sleeve. “The French gave us some provisions, and I’ve still got the remains of a nice
zabaglione
from Bartolomeo’s hamper—”

“I’m not hungry.” I managed to wrap my broken fingers around the cup, feeling the joints grind as though filled with molten-hot sand. “Besides, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to digest your
zabaglione
.”

She winced, looking at the bulky lumps of my bandages under the blankets. “Is it so bad?”

“No, it’s marvelous.” I made a flamboyant gesture at my bruises, my bandages, the air around me that smelled so rank. I had definitely pissed myself. “Better than a massage, a hot bath, and a soft bed with Giulia Farnese in it, all rolled into one.” I drained half the cup of wine. I drank sparingly most nights, but a dying man has his privileges. “Good vintage. That pale wine from Chiarello?”

“Yes, I uncorked the best wine we had before the French found it and stole it.” She tossed down a great gulp. “I’d say we’ve earned it.”

“I have, anyway.” I managed to lift the flagon, topping up my cup. I felt rage kindling deep in my torn chest, and I nurtured it like a small flame. Rage felt much better than pain. “You,
Signorina Cuoca
, have much to answer for.”

Her voice was wary. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s your fault we traveled the Montefiascone road into the hands of the French. I was standing guard outside Madonna Giulia’s chamber the night before we left Capodimonte. You brought her a plate of
biscotti
, and you trotted out some pretty story about a man giving you that bruise on your face”—I gestured—“and asked if we couldn’t travel a different way, just to avoid him and his party.”