The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) (51 page)

“It’s true. I
was
attacked.” Her voice rose. “I didn’t know the French would be along the other road. How could I?”

“Oh, I believe that. Just not the part about you being attacked. Madonna Giulia, she’s a trusting soul, so perhaps she swallowed that story, but not me. I’ve seen you handle a cleaver, Carmelina. If a man tried to pry those long legs of yours apart without your permission, you’d run him off with a knife and then spit on him the next morning. Not go fleeing up the opposite road in a panic.” I contemplated the ceiling and whistled. “I like that about you, really. If I were in any condition for it, I’d challenge you to a knife-throwing contest, get you drunk, and try to coax those legs apart myself. There’s a certain height difference, but it’s surprising how that goes away once one is lying down.”

“You’re drunk,” Carmelina snapped. But her eyes were wide in that thin bruised face, and I felt a vicious satisfaction.

“It was that party of Venetians who stopped for the night, wasn’t it? I suppose you ran into someone who knew you. Cousin, brother. Maybe the Archbishop himself—tell me, did he know you from your convent?”

She went perfectly still then. The flickering light from the brazier threw a shadow off her high-bridged nose. Somewhere outside the vestry I heard a maidservant weeping, and Madonna Adriana hushing her.

“You’re wrong,” Carmelina Mangano said at last. Her voice had a rusty scrape like an old wheel. “You’re wrong, I never—”

“Spare me,” I said contemptuously. “The chopped hair? The way you avoid churches? The way you have no proper education but know all the prayers whenever any visiting cardinal starts spouting in Latin? You might call yourself a cook, but you swapped that cook’s apron with a nun’s veil. Some convent in Venice, I suppose, where your family disposed of their spare daughter. The one too plain and sharp-tongued to get a husband even if she does cook like an angel.” I stared her down. “You’re a nun, Carmelina. You ran away, and if you’re caught you’ll be hauled back and subjected to the bread-and-water penance by your abbess, and never allowed to cook anything again but watery communal stews.”

“No.” She shook her head, a frantic little jerk back and forth, back and forth. “No, I—”

“I’ve known for months. Why do you think I stopped baiting you? There wasn’t any point; I’d already figured it out. I wouldn’t have bothered to say anything, except that it’s your fault I hurt like this.” I threw the empty cup at her, with a gasp of pain for the stab that shot through my side. “You were so petrified of being hauled back to your convent that you threw us all into the hands of the French. Three guards murdered, half the bones in my body cracked like green sticks, and Giulia spreading her legs for the French general right now, just to keep us all safe. Congratulations on your fine escape.”

“I didn’t know the French army was on that road! I didn’t
know
!”

“Perhaps not, but I don’t feel very forgiving at the moment. I’m still lying here dying, you see.” Getting drunk had lost its appeal. I shoved at my pillows, struggling to lie flat again. “So now I know your secret,
Signorina Cuoca
. Or shall I call you Suora Carmelina?”

She gasped, and I felt a surge of savage satisfaction. I raised an eyebrow at her as I drew my blankets up to my chest. “Think on this,” I said. “I’m probably going to die in this bed. But if I don’t, and if we get back to Rome, I will turn you in and happily watch you get hauled off in chains back to your convent.”

She stared at me.

I saluted her with my right hand, the one with the broken fingers. “Good night.”

Carmelina

S
ignorina?”
Bartolomeo’s head jerked up as I stumbled out of the vestry. He had been praying with that quiet surety of his, lips moving soundlessly as he gripped the little wooden crucifix about his neck in one freckled fist, but now he stared at me. “What’s wrong,
signorina
?”

“What’s wrong?” I looked around our huddled little party of maidservants and guardsmen, slumped in shock and exhaustion against the stone walls. “What’s
right
, Bartolomeo? Tell me that!”

“Eat something,” my apprentice said helplessly. “You should eat,
signorina
.”

“That’s your solution? Food?” All the strength had left my legs; I melted down to sit beside him on the floor. “You really are a cook, Bartolomeo.”

His freckled face glowed. At least someone could find a ray of light in this black hell we were trapped in.

Because of me.

My hands doubled into fists, but they still shook. My head was one great mindless yammer of words; two words over and over.
He knows. He knows, he knows, he knows.
That malicious little man dying in the next room. Torn half to pieces, but still tearing
me
to pieces.

Suora Carmelina. Only half right, really. Suora Serafina was the name I’d been given, when I knelt on a stone floor in smoldering resentment and took my vows in the Convent of Santa Marta as a nun.

He knows, he knows, he knows.
Though he didn’t know how truly he had the power to destroy me. He’d report me only as a runaway nun, and for the most part runaway nuns were simply handed back to their convents for whatever private punishment their superiors deemed fit. But if I was exposed as a nun run from her convent, it would soon be known
what
convent—because if inquiries were made around Venice, the story would surely surface of the lay sister who had robbed her order of a relic, not just any relic but their patron saint’s hand, and then fled. Desecrators faced a gruesome enough punishment: hanging upside-down on a public gallows as the crowds jeered and threw stones. But as a desecrator who was also a nun, I’d be returned to Venice to face a far worse fate.

“
Signorina?
” Bartolomeo ventured at my side.

I turned and buried my face in my apprentice’s shoulder, winding my cold hand into his sleeve. A
maestro di cucina
should never show weakness before underlings, but I wasn’t a
maestro di cucina
. I was a fraud. They called Giulia Farnese the Bride of Christ, but I was a true Bride of Christ, and there would be no forgiveness for any of my sins. Nuns were never forgiven; their misdeeds were counted twice as black because their souls belonged to God and must therefore be stainless. If a nun turned her back on her convent, she turned her back on God Himself. If a nun took a man to her bed, she committed adultery against God Himself. The punishment for a nun’s sins would always be crueler—and my spiteful prioress from the Convent of Santa Marta, with her velvety voice and her highborn connections into all the powerful families of Venice, would see to it I suffered the worst possible punishment offered for altar desecration.

She’d make sure I had my hands and my nose chopped off.

Maybe after that I’d be strung upside-down on a gallows to die, or maybe I’d simply be returned to my convent, but it wouldn’t matter. If I had no hands to stir and chop, no nose to smell, I’d never cook again. I’d had a long time to consider that fate, after I fled my veil and my convent walls. Maybe it was foolish of me to think so, but I knew I’d rather be dead than a noseless, stump-fisted horror.

My eyes stung; I was shaking all over, and I didn’t protest when my apprentice put a hesitant arm about my shoulders.

“We’ll be all right, Carmelina,” Bartolomeo said, and I didn’t protest when he called me by name, either.

Pantisilea had gone into the vestry with a tray, and now she came back out shaking her head over the untouched food. “Leonello won’t eat,” she said. “And he’s spitting up blood again—I’ve got his wounds bandaged, but it’s inside where he’s bleeding.”

One of the guards said it, brutally. “He’s dying.”

Not fast enough
, I thought. I’d never in my life prayed for a man to die, but I was praying now.
Die, you spiteful little bastard. Just die and take my secret with you.

“If Madonna Giulia can just get him a surgeon—” Pantisilea gnawed her lip. “Do you really think she’ll have to—that nasty French general . . .”

Adriana da Mila spoke bleakly into little Laura’s curls. “If she does, the Pope will never hear about it from me.”

I flinched. The yammer of words in my head changed, from
He knows
to
My fault. My fault, my fault, my fault.

“She’d better get that surgeon soon.” Pantisilea dashed at her eyes. “He’s trying so hard not to cry at the pain, he’s got
me
crying. That much pain for such a little man, it’s like to kill him.”

I hoped it did kill him. It was him or me—perhaps it had always been him or me, since the day we met.

We all lapsed into silence again. Bartolomeo’s arm still circled my shoulders, but I felt too frightened and exhausted to shrug it away. I wanted to howl and scream and hide, like a child afraid of the dark, but there was no hiding from this.
He knows, he knows, he knows.

Bartolomeo kept trying to press food on me, rummaging in the hamper. Napkins piled up, cheeses and bread loaves, cold sliced meats, spoons, twists of dried herbs, the little stoppered vial of hemlock tincture that I kept to kill rats. My eyes fell on the vial.

“Have you got more wine, Bartolomeo?” Pantisilea joined my apprentice, rummaging in the hamper. “If we haven’t got a surgeon yet for poor Leonello, at least I can get him drunk and numb the pain a little.”

I knew something else that would numb the pain altogether. I stared at the little vial of hemlock tincture until it twinned itself, dancing in the haze around my vision. I could feel Santa Marta clicking her tongue at me in disapproval, if a severed hand in a pouch really had a tongue to click.

It’s him or me.
I could smell old blood and splinters; the smell of the executioner’s block. I’d smell it when they forced my head down on it, right before they chopped off my nose. The last thing I’d ever smell, all thanks to a dwarf’s malice.

Panic rose sour and nauseating in my throat, and I palmed the little vial into my sweaty hand.

EPILOGUE

Fear is the daughter of death.

—OLD ITALIAN PROVERB

Rome

T
he girl is terrified. Michelotto can see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, and if he puts his lips to her skin he knows he will be able to taste it. Fear in all five senses; it’s always been his gift. He puts a gloved hand on her throat, stroking it. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he promises, and he speaks truth. He would hurt her if he was ordered to, but he wasn’t ordered to.

“Kill this one quickly,” Cesare Borgia had told him. “She’s just a whore from the Borgo, after all—she doesn’t deserve this.”

Michelotto shrugs as he takes the girl’s wrists one at a time, roping them down wide and spread-eagled on the battered table. He doesn’t bother thinking about the ones he kills, whether they deserve it or not. He is Cesare Borgia’s dog, and like a good dog, he does what he is told. No more, no less.

“The dwarf’s been asking questions.”

“I know.” Cesare Borgia had been amused.

“He won’t stop.”

“No.” And when Michelotto had suggested throwing the little man off the scent, the Pope’s son had seen the sense of it.

“You may kill this one, then,” Cesare had said. “I shall be occupied elsewhere, with many witnesses. Not that there isn’t enough to do,” he added. “It seems La Bella has gotten herself captured by the French. If I’m not there to stop him, the Holy Father will end up declaring war on France.”

The girl whimpers. Michelotto surveys the room: the details. Yes, it looks right. The little man won’t know. Michelotto had offered to kill the little man—it would be simpler—but Cesare Borgia likes him.

“I’m sorry,” Michelotto tells the girl. “This is unfair, I know.” He puts his hand over her eyes so she won’t see. A moment or two later he is gone, adjusting his borrowed mask and flicking drops of blood from his gloves as he disappears into the Holy City.

HISTORICAL NOTE

T
he Borgias dominate the Renaissance, fascinating across time with their power, their charm, and their unsavory reputations. They have inspired countless books, movies, scholarly works, and rumors, and the one thing everyone can agree on is just how difficult they are to pin down: corrupt churchman and his incestuous brood, or loving paterfamilias and his misunderstood offspring? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle—and pure gold to a historical novelist.

It’s fashionable to blame the Borgias for corrupting the Church, but the institution was already corrupted long before Rodrigo Borgia took the throne of St. Peter as Alexander VI. Benefices, pardons, and indulgences were openly bought and sold; vows of chastity and poverty among the clergy were blatantly ignored, and the Pope was politician and king over his unruly papal states just as much as he was Father of Christendom. Priests like Savonarola preached of the dangers of sin and hellfire, but it was understood by even the lowest on the social scale that there was no sin that could not be pardoned with the appropriate penance or payoff. The Borgias have become the poster children for this cynical system, but their real sin appears to be their lack of hypocrisy: Rodrigo Borgia was hardly the first Pope to aggrandize his family, keep a mistress, or sire illegitimate children; he simply refused to hide any of it under the usual cloak of lies. Such honesty about his various sins might be rather refreshing to a modern perspective—not so to his contemporaries.

Giulia Farnese was one of the great beauties of the Renaissance, already famous for her vivacity and her floor-length hair by the time she married wealthy young Orsino Orsini. It isn’t known precisely when Giulia caught the eye of the womanizing Rodrigo Borgia, or if her marriage to Orsino was arranged from the beginning as a cover for an illicit affair—Rodrigo arranged several such compliant husbands for his previous mistress, Vannozza dei Cattanei. But by the time Cardinal Borgia was elected Pope, Giulia Farnese was his official mistress, installed in a cheerful domestic arrangement with her apparently compliant mother-in-law, Adriana da Mila, and the young Lucrezia Borgia. The deftness with which Giulia handled her volatile Pope throughout their long and evidently passion-filled affair indicates that the woman nicknamed the Bride of Christ had some brains under all that hair.

Giulia’s daughter Laura has no certain birthdate or father. Gossip of the day believed her to be the Pope’s child, but she was christened under the name Orsini. Giulia’s husband was well rewarded for the loan of his wife, but he was never as compliant about the arrangement as were Vannozza dei Cattanei’s husbands. Giulia nearly did rejoin Orsino once, after her flight to her family in Capodimonte to attend her brother’s deathbed, but the Pope’s furious letters (quoted in the book) soon sapped Orsino’s resolve to reclaim his wife. All the delay caused Giulia and her traveling party to fall into the hands of the invading French army—and the French salivated at the power they had gained over the frantic Pope.

Carmelina is a fictional character. Most of the professional cooks in illustrious houses would have been male, but cooks of the day were trained without the strict oversight of a formal guild—a cook’s daughter with talent might well have trained under her father. The Renaissance was a golden age for food as well as art; the recipes from this book have been taken almost exclusively from surviving Renaissance cookbooks. There was a convent of Santa Marta in Venice that boasted the reliquary hand of Santa Marta, the patron saint of cooks—but we have no record that the relic was ever stolen. Desecration of a church or altar was one of the more severe crimes of the day, punishable by such tortures as throttling, upside-down hanging, or the chopping of hands and ears. But justice in the Renaissance was always an arbitrary thing, punishments being handed out according to the social status or financial contributions of the offender.

Leonello is also a fictional character. Dwarves were hugely popular among Renaissance nobles as entertainers, jugglers, and companions; they were even bred like pets. Conversely they could be feared and abhorred by the ignorant as demons, changelings, or simply as cursed by God.

I have taken some liberties with the facts in order to serve the story. Giulia’s marriage to Orsino occurred somewhat earlier, at the respective ages of fifteen and sixteen; I moved the occasion up to coincide with the papal election. I altered traveling plans so that Cesare could be present for Carmelina’s aphrodisiac banquet, so the Pope could stand witness at his son Joffre’s wedding in Naples, and so Orsino Orsini could visit Giulia at Capodimonte rather than merely writing her letters. Several unconfirmed portraits of Giulia exist, including the
Portrait of a Young Woman with Unicorn
by Raphael which hangs today in Rome’s Galleria Borghese (the blond beauty in the picture not only sports a huge teardrop pearl necklace but has a baby goat in her lap painted as a miniature unicorn). Raphael’s unfinished
Transfiguration
, currently hanging in the Vatican Museum, also supposedly features Giulia as the kneeling blond figure, in
the same scene described in Pesaro’s beauty contest. Both paintings, however, would have been painted much later, since Raphael was still very young during the events of this book.

The adventures of the Borgia family have only begun with the French invasion. Giulia and her friends will face many dangers to come, as the saga continues.