by Kate Quinn
“Juan’s just a boy,” my Pope was saying with all his usual tolerance, unknotting a tangled ribbon at my back. “Perhaps he ogles you, but he ogles every beautiful woman he sees! He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
He’d cuckold you in a heartbeat, I thought, but didn’t say it. To some things Rodrigo was entirely blind, and when it came to his favorite son . . . he hadn’t even noticed this evening after cena when Juan flung an arm about my waist, looking at my likeness in Pinturicchio’s fresco. “Our family harlot as the Madonna,” he breathed hotly into my ear, and his fingers stole down to cup my hip. “How’s that for irony, eh?”
I’d just smiled, giving his hand a good covert smack. “And this harlot will knock your ears around the back of your head if you touch her again, Juan Borgia.”
I’d been able to intimidate him when he was sixteen, but not now. He’d just given me another lingering up-and-down look and swaggered ahead to join Lucrezia and Sancha as they studied the Annunciation fresco with its angels and arabesques.
“Did you see Juan slavering over Sancha?” I said over my shoulder to Rodrigo, feeling the last of my tight laces come loose. “I thought poor Joffre was going to pop with outrage.”
“She’s a flirt, that one.” Rodrigo chuckled, sliding the gown off my shoulders.
“And now all three of your sons are competing for her!” I stepped out of the circle of my gown on the floor. “If that’s not a recipe for disaster—”
“Bah,” Rodrigo said dismissively, and pressed his lips to my shoulder above the edge of my filmy shift. “Take your hair down, mi perla. It’s a sight I never tire of seeing—one of the great wonders of the world, your hair.”
I attacked my pins, and he fell back on his elbows again, happily watching the first of my coiled plaits slither loose over my shoulder. My Pope clearly had no interest in hearing any more about the shortcomings of his sons. He had lost his eldest son, Pedro Luis, many years ago in Spain, a memory that still veiled his eyes in grief whenever he spoke of it, and after that old loss I suppose his indulgence to his surviving children was understandable. “A pity Lord Sforza couldn’t join us,” I said by way of changing the subject. “I know he misses Lucrezia in Pesaro.”
“Let him miss her. He’s a waffling fool, and more than that, he’s turned out to be a mediocre condottiere who does nothing but ask me for money. I wish I’d known that when I was considering his offer for her hand!” My Pope reached out to catch a lock of my loosened hair and bring it to his nose, inhaling deeply. I had expensive perfumes by the dozen in glass vials, but part of me was still a country girl, the girl who grew up in a tiny town beside Lake Bolsena and boiled flowers to make perfume, and I still preferred my old homemade scents of honeysuckle and gillyflower to all those expensive mixtures of frankincense and bergamot. “I heard from another mediocre condottiere today, you know,” my Pope went on, inhaling my hair again.
“Who?”
“Monoculus.”
“That’s a cruel nickname, Rodrigo. He is not one-eyed; it’s just a tiny squint.” But I couldn’t help a faint smile as I unraveled the last of my plaits. At least my Pope could joke now about my husband. Rodrigo was not jealous when other men looked at me—he just chuckled when envious archbishops ogled my bosom, or florid young lords paid me honeyed compliments. He liked being envied. But Orsino Orsini, he of the tiny squint, still worried my Pope sometimes. Orsino was my wedded husband, a man with the legal right to demand I return to his side, if he ever grew a spine and chose to exercise that right. Even the Holy Father could not really excommunicate a man for demanding that his wife cease committing adultery.
“That chinless little snip can’t even scrape up the courage to ask me himself when he wants money,” Rodrigo continued with a snort. “Instead he applies to his mother and gets her to ask me. This time, it’s to pay his soldiers. They don’t listen to him unless their pay is current. Or even when it is current. There’s one son who should not have been slated for the battlefield!” My husband’s family, the Orsini, had been among those to side with the French upon their march south—at least, the more illustrious and prosperous branches of the Orsini. Not Orsino, however, whose mother was cousin and firm friend to Rodrigo Borgia. Where his mother led, Orsino followed.
“We don’t need to discuss Orsino, do we?” I shook my hair down, rippling clear to the floor, and Rodrigo clapped a hand to his chest as though pierced through the heart by the sight. I climbed onto the vast bed, sitting cross-legged like a child, and pulled his feet into my lap. People think it’s all jewels and gowns and keeping yourself pretty, being a mistress, but I’ve found it’s a good deal more about peace. Powerful men, whether kings of vast nations or lords of uncounted wealth or fathers of the world’s souls, are tired men. A thousand voices clamor every moment for their attention, their time, their favors; everyone wants something and they all want it now. When my Pope came to me at the end of the day, he could at least relax with the knowledge that I wanted nothing but him. “Your feet are hurting you again, aren’t they?” I scolded softly, rubbing his toes. “Why can’t you sit still when you’re dictating letters to your secretaries, instead of pacing like a madman?”
He gave a groan of pleasure, but his eyes were serious as they looked at me. “Does Orsino still write to you, Giulia?”
“He does,” I said.
“What does he write?”
Still a note of anxiety in my Pope’s deep voice. “Nothing very much,” I said, kneading my thumbs into the arch of his right foot. “Read the letters any time you wish.”
“Oh, I trust you. It’s Monoculus I don’t trust. He wants you back.”
“Always,” I admitted. It had been a bargain my husband had made, or his mother Adriana da Mila had advised him to make: Take little Giulia Farnese for a wife, let Rodrigo Borgia have her for a concubine, and he will advance your career, my dear boy! Orsino had regretted that bargain since the day he saw me at our wedding, but he still took the rewards, didn’t he? A condotta to give him soldiers, a hefty annuity, a castello in Carbognano and governorship over the town to go with it . . .
My husband had been everything a girl could dream of: handsome, young, and he even said he loved me. I didn’t know if I believed that, really—he didn’t even know me. But he said he’d loved me since the moment he’d laid eyes on me, and he certainly had his heart in his eyes whenever he looked at me, and that would be enough for most girls. But it wasn’t enough. What no one bothers to tell dreaming girls is that a handsome and adoring young husband isn’t any use if he’s gutless.
Still, a gutless husband is better than a brutal one. I’d have to go back to him someday, when either my Pope died or his passion for me did, and I gave a little sigh at the thought. Hopefully the first of those fates wouldn’t happen for many, many years—and maybe the second wouldn’t happen at all.
“That’s enough about Monoculus, eh?” Rodrigo ran a hand over my shoulder, the edge of my shift sliding down my arm. “My children too. It’s making you morose.”
“That batch of quarreling pups you fathered would make anybody morose!” I said lightly, and Rodrigo brightened just as I’d intended.
“I’ll have you know my children are perfect.” He pulled me up into his arms. “Shall we make another? A Borgia prince this time, a brother for Laura.”
“Juan won’t be very happy about that,” I murmured between kisses. “He went into such a sulk when I was carrying Laura . . .” Worried any child of mine would supplant him as the Pope’s favorite. In truth Rodrigo had always been just a trifle veiled in his affection for Laura. She was his daughter, of that I was perfectly certain—you had only to look at the nose (though I did hope she wouldn’t grow up with his bull shoulders). But she’d been christened under my husband’s name, and in truth when I counted backward from nine months there had been a time when I was trying to persuade Orsino to show just a little courage, enough to fight for his wife if he truly wanted to keep her . . .
But I couldn�
�t think of Orsino, not with Rodrigo bending his dark head to plant unhurried kisses across my naked shoulders. “Come to me,” he whispered in his Catalan Spanish, and I threaded my arms around his neck and slid myself over him, making my hair into a candlelit curtain shutting out the world.
When I was a foolish virgin girl, I’d prayed very earnestly not to be married off to an old man as so many of my friends were. I dreamed of lean cavaliers and dashing poets, and what girl doesn’t? But girls are fools. Poets aren’t much good when it comes to love play, when you really think about it—all Dante ever managed to do after years of mooning after Beatrice was fantasize that she might one day give him a guided tour of Paradise. And as for lean cavaliers, well, Orsino was the picture of a dashing young suitor, and our coupling had been awkward, clumsy, embarrassing, and brief. And afterward, he had stood back and given me away.
My Pope savored me every time he took me in his arms, tasted my skin and inhaled my hair, kissed me and cradled me and found something new in me every time to caress. “The curve of your spine is like a string of pearls,” he would muse, and trace his lips over my back until I was vibrating down to my toes. Or he would drop slow tantalizing kisses over every part of my face from my ears to my chin, everywhere but my lips, until I dragged his mouth down against mine. He liked me bold and never accused me of being wanton; he tossed me and teased me, made me laugh and made me cry out—and my husband might have given me to Rodrigo, but Rodrigo had never forced me. “I’ve never had a woman by force, and I don’t intend to start now,” he’d told me, and then stood back in utter confidence to let me choose. It’s not often a woman has a chance to choose, let me tell you. And I’d considered my options: the handsome young husband with the clumsy hands, or the ecclesiastical lover of more than sixty years who could curl my whole body up in shudders of pleasure?
Well.
“My papal bull,” I whispered, and felt the rumble of laughter deep in his chest above me.
He slept afterward, his head heavy on my breast, my arms showing pale about his swarthy shoulders in the flickering candlelight, my hair coiling over us both. “Everything will be perfect now,” he murmured, half-asleep. “You at my side, Juan returned, la familia reunited . . . the French defeated . . .” A yawn. “God has been kind, mi perla.”
Unease twinged at me again, and I didn’t know why. Not until I rose and dressed and tiptoed out, back to the Palazzo Santa Maria so the Pope would be found alone in his bed in the morning by his entourage, as was proper (even if they all knew I’d been keeping him company there). I yawned as I trailed through the darkened papal apartments, and my feet slowed in the Sala dei Santi as I looked again at the finished frescoes all the Borgia family had admired last night at cena. I looked past the frescoes this time, Juan as proud Turk and Cesare as merciless emperor and Lucrezia as pleading saint, to the Borgia bull motif repeated over and over in the floors and the walls. Not the placid grazing ox that had been the family emblem when they were merely the lowly Borja of Spain, but a massive defiant beast gazing about with arrogant eyes. In public appearances Rodrigo displayed his papal emblem of the crossed keys, the keys to the kingdom of heaven. But here there were no keys and no heaven either. There were saints on every wall, but it was the Borgias who dominated—the Borgias and their pagan bull.
“God has been kind,” Rodrigo had said. La familia united again, as they had not been for years, and the French had been swindled and outplayed by my wily Pope who had played that spotty French King like a harp, vowing eternal friendship and whispering confidential promises, and all the while he had been piecing together a Holy League to oppose them. Rome, Spain, Milan, Venice: all allied against the French, who had found themselves outnumbered and surrounded in Naples. What a victory—and with the French fleeing their shattered campaign, what enemy was there to oppose my Pope and his family?
And last night they had celebrated in these rooms, which might have an Annunciation and a Nativity and a Resurrection painted on the walls . . . but which glorified not God, but Borgia.
Carmelina
Peasant food,” I said flatly. “You are joking.”
“Would I joke?” Leonello arched an eyebrow at me. “The Duke of Gandia desires a simple repast for midday pranzo when he and his party of friends break their fast here in between hunting bouts. How did he put it?” Leonello fingered the hilt of his knife in that despicably suggestive way Juan Borgia did, and cast a leer at the nearest kitchen maid. “‘Today we hunt, and we will eat like simple peasants, close to the earth and close to God!’”
“Santa Marta save me,” I muttered. “I’ll give him peasant food. Barley porridge and boiled goat, that’s peasant food!”
“Send him that, and you will be out of a job. I assure you that whatever notions he might have about eating like a simple peasant, the Duke of Gandia does not want porridge and goat.”
“I know that!” The Duke of Gandia’s ways were more than familiar to any female servants in the palazzo; he’d come sniffing around all our skirts at one time or another, including mine. He’d been half drunk, and I’d run him off with a cleaver. There are advantages to working in a kitchen.
“I’m sure you know best, Signorina Cuoca.” Leonello sketched a bow, making sure to flourish his four-fingered hand at me. His eyes were hard and cool, meeting mine with that stare that still twisted in my gut like a fishhook. I know what you are, Suora Serafina.
But at least he had not told anyone else—more than a year and a half had passed, and no one had ever come with a rope for my wrists and a writ for my sins. Maybe that demon dwarf really was afraid I’d poison him. Or maybe he’d forgiven me, now that his wounds had healed.
Somehow I doubted that.
“One more thing,” Leonello added over his shoulder. “Madonna Adriana wants to see you in her sala. You and Maestro Marco Santini.”
Adriana da Mila, cousin to the Pope and duenna of the papal seraglio here. She was also Madonna Giulia’s mother-in-law, and I still didn’t understand exactly how that worked because most women would object to seeing their son’s wife flit off to become the mistress of another man, much less His Holiness the Pope, but Adriana da Mila seemed entirely placid about the whole arrangement. Then again, the only thing that seemed to make Madonna Adriana lose any sleep was the prospect of losing money, and there was no doubt her son had been well compensated for his sacrifice.
Losing money . . . was she going to ask sharp questions about Marco’s absences again? The mistress of the household would not be pleased to know just how much of Marco’s twenty-five ducats a year went to the dicing tables in riverside taverns while I supervised the kitchens.
“Madonna Adriana will have to wait.” I tied on an apron, already marshaling possible excuses as to why the maestro di cucina wasn’t to be found when it was time to prepare the noonday meal. “My cousin has gone out.”
“Cards this time?” Leonello examined one of his sharp little throwing knives, balancing the damascened hilt on the very tip of one stubby finger. He wore his usual livery, which Madonna Giulia had designed especially for him—black doublet and hose and boots—and she had a clever eye because all that stark unadorned black emphasized the green in his hazel eyes, and a miracle of tailoring masked the oddities of his body, making his shoulders look broader and his head less oversized. He didn’t look like a figure of ridicule; he looked cool and remote and more than a little frightening, and I wished sometimes that my mistress had left him in the disreputable patched castoffs in which he’d first arrived in this household. “So, is our cook off playing cards again, or zara?” Leonello went on. “Zara’s a game for idiots, and that cousin of yours is a curly-haired fool.”
“Certainly not,” I lied. “He’s at the fish market, checking a new vendor who promised him a choice load of sturgeon. He is very conscientious.” I could almost hear Bartolomeo roll his eyes behind me at the other apprentices. “None of that,” I said without turning, and gave Leonello a curt nod. “Please inform Madonna Adria
na we will both be along when Marco returns.”
He sheathed his throwing knife in his boot top again and sauntered out without a farewell. We never spoke one solitary word to each other beyond the necessary.
“And in the meantime,” Bartolomeo snorted, “we’ve got peasant food to make. Santa Marta bung me with a spoon.”
“None of that either,” I warned, and flapped my apron at the lazy notch-eared kitchen cat who was batting a paw up toward a kettle of chicken bones I’d set to simmering. “Now, for pranzo—”
I reeled off dishes, and they stood waiting their orders in serried rows: the undercooks, the apprentices, the carvers, the scullions, the pot-boys; all my obedient soldiers. Well, mostly obedient. Bartolomeo snorted when I gave directions for a dish of lake trout bathed in truffle sauce. “Sweet Santa Marta,” he said with a derisive shake of his head. “That is not how peasants eat. Does the Duke of Gandia really think your average Tiber fisherman slathers his trout in truffles?”
“This is how lordlings think peasants eat,” I retorted. “Alfonso, you’ll take the pork shoulder, I want a red wine glaze and plenty of capers—Giuliano, the capons, a splash of lime and rose vinegar—”
“It should be venison.” Bartolomeo interrupted me again.
I glared at him this time. “What?”
“Venison,” Bartolomeo repeated, raking an impatient hand through his red hair. “The Duke of Gandia bagged a stag yesterday. I saw when he had me bring out one of my hampers for his guardsmen on the hunt. He’ll want to see venison on the table today, not pork shoulder and capons.”
“Hmph.” I eyed my apprentice, who had passed seventeen and passed me in height as well, and he stared right back instead of dropping his eyes obediently. My gawky eager-to-please apprentice boy had shot up over the past year and a half into a tall young man: standing before me with his freckled arms akimbo in their rolled-up sleeves, and his gaze near as prideful as a Borgia’s. Seventeen—a dangerous age for a young cook. It’s right about then that most apprentices decide they know better than whoever taught them to boil their first egg. Bartolomeo was showing all the usual signs lately: moving just a touch slowly when I gave him an order, slouching instead of jumping when I called his name, “forgetting” the occasional respectful signorina when he addressed me. The last thing you ever want to do is tell an arrogant young cook like Bartolomeo that he’s right about anything.
