by Kate Quinn
“You’ll know her when you see her. She looks ravishing.”
“Still trying to make a pair of us, Madonna Giulia?” Through the mask, Leonello’s eyes roamed the crowd.
“No one else I know has a tongue sharp enough to match yours, Leonello.” I’d long been convinced they were made for each other—you had only to see the way they prickled in each other’s company. Nobody prickled like that unless they were intensely aware of someone else, did they? “Wait till you see her,” I went on. “I must say, I outdid myself when it came to Carmelina’s costume.”
“Point her out, by all means. Until then, I’m watching a tiger pick a fight with a serpent. Personally, I back the serpent.”
I followed Leonello’s stubby finger over the masked and laughing beasts. In the shadow of the loggia under the vines I saw the striped outline of Juan Borgia’s tiger-patterned doublet, inches away from a lean figure in scale-embroidered green and gold. The matching serpent mask had jet fangs coming down over the taut, unsmiling mouth, but I knew who it was. “Excuse me—” But of course Leonello tracked silently behind me as I made my way through the throng.
“—you will not speak to me that way,” I heard Juan hissing inside the shadows of the loggia. “I will not tolerate such words, and certainly not from my brother in priest’s skirts!”
The voice behind the serpent mask came calmly. “You’ve made our family name a laughingstock, Juan. Bracciano? They sent a donkey to treat with you, and their counteroffer rammed under its tail.”
“I made them pay!”
“How? Bracciano still stands. Those branches of the Orsini family who sided with the French should have been made to pay in blood, and they still have everything. Including those piddling castles you originally took from them last fall.”
“I took Ostia! The last French garrison on our soil—”
“Gonsalvo de Cordoba took Ostia. You took his credit.”
“The Holy Father does not seem to agree!”
“The Holy Father believes your lies, but not the rest of Rome. They know what you are, and so do I.”
“If you think you’ll take the title of Gonfalonier from me—”
“Cesare!” I stepped into the shadows of the loggia, smiling warmly at the fanged serpent. “There you are. Your father wishes a word. Juan, you will forgive me if I steal your brother a moment?”
“Steal him to Hades,” Juan snarled, and I latched a firm hand into Cesare’s elbow and eased him away.
“Is my father truly looking for me?” Juan’s voice might have been rising in their quarrel, but Cesare’s sounded calm as ever.
“No.” We skirted the fountain, still splashing wine in ruby streams. “I thought it wise to separate you, since the purpose of this menagerie is entertainment and not bloodshed.”
“Then we should not have worn masks. Bloodshed happens much more easily when one is masked.” A nod behind me. “Your little lion understands something about that.”
I felt Leonello at my back, taut and watchful. Cesare’s eyes on him were half taunting, half amused. I pushed up my unicorn mask, capturing Cesare’s gaze again.
“Let us speak without masks, then,” I said. “Why do you needle Juan, Cesare? It angers your father, and gains you no favors from him.”
“Why do tigers scratch?” He pushed up his own mask. “Why do snakes bite?”
“They bite when they are threatened.”
“They bite because it is their nature.”
I looked at my lover’s eldest son. Twenty-one years old, a year and a half younger than me, and handsome enough now to make the breath catch with his auburn hair and inscrutable eyes and rapier-lean body. But for all I’d seen women flutter and grow silly in his presence, making fools of themselves for his favor like Sancha, I’d never felt tempted by the son over the father. Maybe it was because Rodrigo loved me, loved his children, loved life—but I wasn’t sure Cesare loved anything, certainly not a woman. I’d never seen him regard any woman as anything more than something warm into which he could periodically spill his tensions. And any woman at all would serve for that.
“You’re cleverer than people think, Giulia Farnese,” he said calmly, noting my gaze. “And you’re very good at keeping my father occupied. I like him occupied.”
“I like him happy,” I retorted. “He’d be happier if you mended your fences with Juan.”
“Stick to keeping my father happy,” Cesare said. “Not acting the peacekeeper. You aren’t a Borgia, Giulia. Don’t try to understand us.”
“I gave birth to a Borgia. Isn’t that enough?”
“Only the children of my mother are true Borgias. If my father were a prince of the realm and not of God, she would be his wife and you would still be the concubine.”
I wanted to spear him on my mask’s horn, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. It was Cesare’s way, needling people just to see their reaction—he was like Leonello in that, and the best way to foil either of them was to wear a different kind of mask, one of utter indifference. I gave a faint smile, tilting my head and looking over the green-and-gold velvet that fit the lithe boneless grace of Cesare Borgia’s body like a coat of scales. “A serpent,” I said. “How apt.”
He plucked an apple from a silver bowl nearby and offered it to me. “A bite, my fair lady Eve?”
“No, I’ve already fallen far enough from grace.” I gestured at the mossy green paradise around me. “I don’t need to be expelled from Eden too.”
“Besides, what need do you have of apples?” Cesare lobbed the apple into the wine fountain with a splash. “My father already seduced you with a pomegranate. Or was it a pearl?”
He tugged his fanged mask back down over his face and slid off through the crowd.
Leonello
I don’t like masks; no bodyguard does. The falsity, the restriction in vision, the notion that anyone at all could approach our charges behind a harlequin’s false smile. And what was the use of a mask for a dwarf? The thrill of a masquerade is that identity is disguised. My identity shouted itself loud and clear whether my face was visible or not.
Besides, the world looks very different through a mask. The eye holes limit the sight; you can see straight ahead, but everything to the side is shadows, and half the shadows at this party were beaked or toothed, menacing until you looked at them straight and then that threatening shape turned into Cardinal Zeno, stiff and embarrassed behind a coxcomb’s half mask. But just behind Zeno would be something else not quite seen. Maybe just the Count of Pesaro, perspiring crossly behind a dog’s head. Or maybe something that would bite you.
Or in the case of Cesare Borgia behind his serpent fangs, something that would bite you with his mask or without.
I lowered the snarling gold lion’s mask Madonna Giulia had ordered for me despite my protests. A lion’s mask for a little lion, so what did the serpent mask make Cesare?
Tell me. Months now my eyes had been begging him. Tell me the killer; tell me, tell me.
No. His eyes stayed amused, and he no longer sought me out for games of chess. Why should he? He had a far more amusing game to play with me now, and it required no effort from him at all except silence. Only a small game, of course—the young Cardinal Borgia had bigger games to play by far, weaving alliances for his father in the chambers of the Vatican, weaving other alliances in private with Spanish generals and Neapolitan ambassadors against his brother. But this little game of keeping me dancing in my suspense had its mild amusements. As long as it did, I supposed, he would refuse to tell me a thing.
I’d resumed questioning his guards, but not one of them would talk with me. I’d tried his servants, but they were silent, too. I’d even tried buying a drink for Michelotto, the granite-eyed condottiere who kept to Cardinal Borgia’s side like a shadow, but Michelotto was all but mute. Unless Cesare Borgia decided to begin the game again, my trail was dead.
And so was one more girl—a tavern maid in the Borgo, three weeks ago.
In one
hand, I held a goblet of green glass; it turned the wine inside black. I swirled it but did not drink.
Shrill laughter. Ladies lolling on silk cushions in the grass, the men curling up on their skirts, laying masked heads in velvet laps. More wine splashing. Giulia in her white brocade with its touches of rosy gauze, like a unicorn viewed in the pink light of dawn, dancing with her favorite brother Sandro Farnese. The cheerful young cardinal had discarded his red hat for a bright-feathered mask as a parrot, and had been annoying his superiors all night, parroting anything they said with great glee behind his beaked mask. Behind their graceful figures I glimpsed the massive red bull that was our Pope, holding easy court in his seraglio-turned-Eden among a circle of lesser beasts who were his uneasy cardinals. “We have issued warning to the Florentines. They will give Us Savonarola on a platter, or face Our displeasure—” Scheming and dealing even in a menagerie.
I took a swallow of wine, swinging my lion mask. I’d not have picked a lion—too grand for me. Of course everyone picked the beast they most wanted to be. Mostly savage swaggering beasts for the men: tigers, dragons, bulls. Poor little Joffre with his stuffed codpiece, pining to be a stallion—I remembered him as a boy of ten, pop-eyed and blinking, giving me a nervous smile when I offered to teach him how to throw knives. Now I saw him backhand a page boy who didn’t fetch his wine quickly enough, trying for the effortless arrogance of his big brothers but achieving only petulance. Someone should have told him arrogance doesn’t come from a mask.
The women in this mossy Eden, they aimed for loveliness as the men aimed for savagery, swans and butterflies and other beasts of beauty dominating among the masks. Bolder ladies like Sancha of Aragon were foxes or cats, though one tall beauty with a touch more originality had come as something foreign and exotic that I couldn’t quite identify: a long-nosed, long-lashed mask and skin-tight dappled hose like a man’s, the better to show off endless slender legs that were anything but masculine. The Duke of Gandia was already eyeing her through the slitted eye holes of his ferocious fanged tiger’s mask. But this tiger had the glassy-eyed sway of a common gutter drunk.
Lucrezia lolled in the grass beside the fountain, giggling behind her peacock feathers as she watched little Laura take a sip of wine from her cup and sneeze at the taste. “Isn’t she darling? Try again, Laura, you’ll get to like the taste! And another, that’s it, swallow it down, it makes you feel dizzy and marvelous—” I moved toward Laura, who was holding the cup in both little hands and taking another game swallow as Lucrezia and Sancha laughed above her, but Giulia swooped in with a swirl of white-and-rose skirts, knocking the cup of wine aside. “Lucrezia!”
“My dress,” Lucrezia complained as the wine went flying over her peacock-patterned hem.
“I told you to watch out for her!” Giulia dabbed wine off Laura’s chin, glaring. “How dare you!”
Lucrezia heaved a put-upon sigh: so soft and slender in her jewel-colored feathers and velvets, but the eyes behind the mask were cool.
My mistress looked as though she were about to say something else, but her lips sealed in a hard line and she moved a hiccuping Laura to her other shoulder. “Time for bed, Lauretta mia.” She stayed me with a gesture, making for the stairs. Lucrezia shrugged, looking at Sancha, who whispered in her ear as they filled their wine cups again and Giulia vanished upstairs. Her pet goat trotted after her with a baaaa, turned into a unicorn himself for the night with a pearly horn tied on to match his mistress.
A certain supple green-and-gold serpent caught my eye again as he offered some woman an apple. Tell me, I sent my thoughts howling after him, tell me, oh, tell me, you bastard!—but he shifted to one side and I saw that the girl before him was the long-legged beauty in the dappled hose. Something about her brought me up short. The way she looked away from the masked serpent to critically rearrange the candied nuts on a tray . . . I raised the lion’s mask to my face again and made my way through the crowd to her side.
“You are familiar,” Cesare Borgia was saying, his interest seeming to me more curious than lustful. “Have I made your acquaintance?”
“One could say that,” said Carmelina Mangano, muffled through her mask.
“Surely not. I would remember you.”
“I wasn’t memorable, Your Eminence.” Her tone was discouraging, and Cesare Borgia gave a languid shrug and glided off without further ado. I saw her give a little sigh of relief as he disappeared, and stiffen all over again as I spoke.
“Signorina Cuoca.”
Carmelina’s head jerked as she looked down at me. “Is it so obvious?” she said, exasperated.
“Not at all. Unlike Cardinal Borgia, I recognize the way you can’t help assessing all the food.” I lowered my mask for a long stunned glance over the palazzo’s cook. “What are you supposed to be?”
“Something Madonna Giulia called a giraffe.” Plucking at her own mask, which had golden and white dapples over a long nose, a pair of stubby horns, and an outrageous fringe of lashes with which her own darkened lashes mingled. “I have no idea what a giraffe is—some kind of rare exotic desert creature, she said. One of the Milanese lords managed to import one for his private menagerie, and Madonna Giulia saw an engraving. She said it had long legs and a long neck, so it would be perfect for me. Personally, I think she might have just made it up to get me into this costume.”
“Then it was a lie worth telling.” In her usual woolen work dresses and enveloping egg-stained aprons, our scowling Venetian cook generally looked lanky, flat-bosomed, overtall, and cross. But in a man’s doublet cut to expose an unexpectedly supple throat, with skintight hose hugging every taut inch of legs almost as long as I was . . . Dio.
“I think you had better leave,” I couldn’t help saying. “You are going to attract entirely too much attention to remain anonymous.”
“I wasn’t going to stay,” she admitted. “It was Madonna Giulia’s idea—she sneaked all her maids in, too. That’s Taddea over there in the swan mask trying to eavesdrop on the Pope, and Pantisilea is the gray cat flirting with Angelo Colonna.” Carmelina peered about. “I thought all this would be more entertaining. Is this really what they do, all the people I cook for? Loll about drinking wine and giggling and ignoring the viol players?”
“Mostly,” I said.
“I think I’d rather be cooking.” Carmelina glanced down at me through her mask’s outrageous eyelashes. “Are you going to tell anyone I’m here?”
“Why should I?” I crossed my arms across my chest, leaning against a pillar of the loggia.
“Because you’ve threatened to tell a lot of things about me.”
“So I have.”
“Why haven’t you told any of them?”
“Well,” I pointed out, “you did threaten to poison me if I tried.”
“Is that really why you haven’t told?”
I swirled the wine in my cup, pondering an answer. But a slurred voice slid itself between us before I could find the words.
“Well, well, what can this lovely lady be?” The Duke of Gandia pushed his tiger mask atop his head, the ivory fangs framing his eyes crookedly as he grinned up at Carmelina, who at once looked wary through her eye holes. He still bore a livid mark by one eye where he had been wounded at Soriano—not much of a wound, but he had picked at the healing scab and dabbed it with lime, to ensure it would leave a scar. He thinks it makes him look like a warrior, Giulia had snorted to me privately. I ask you!
“Perhaps you’re a doe,” the Duke continued, pushing a cup of wine unasked into Carmelina’s hand. “Is it a doe, with those eyes? Or a gazelle?”
“A giraffe,” Carmelina said uneasily.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know, your lordship.” She looked for somewhere to put the unwanted cup, and Juan Borgia took hold of her shoulder.
“So, giraffe lady. Who are you? I thought I knew all the lovelies here tonight, but I’ve never seen you. One of the Princess of Squillace’s new flock?”
“No, I—Madonna Giulia invited me. Um.” Carmelina did a fair imitation of Madonna Giulia’s more educated accents, and Juan was too drunk to notice the occasional Venetian clip when her mimicry faltered. “Giovanna, ah, Serrano.”
Juan lowered his voice. “I don’t like women who are taller than me,” he confided.
Carmelina looked relieved.
“But for you,” he slurred, “I’ll make an exception. If you’ll promise to fold those legs around my neck when I—”
“If you please, your lordship.” Carmelina yanked her shoulder out of his grip. “I’m not staying.”
“You are if I say you’re staying.” He wrapped a hand around her wrist and gave another hard-edged grin. “You see the bull down there? You know who he is, don’t you? Then you should know who I am, my long-legged lovely.”
“Your lordship—”
“Why don’t we slip away, you and I? You want to find out how much cock a tiger has—” He yanked her hand forward, clapping it on his codpiece. Carmelina jerked against his grip, but his fingers tightened. “Back behind the loggia with you. I want to see if that bum looks just as ripe peeled out of that hose—”
“I do believe it’s the hero of the hour,” I broke in loudly. “Our Gonfalonier, the hero of Ostia. Or Bracciano. Hero of somewhere, anyway.”
“Eh?” Juan squinted muzzily down at me. “Don’t tell me you’re sniffing around my giraffe, dwarf. Need a ladder to get all the way to her cunt—”
Carmelina yanked hard against his grip on her wrist, and at the same time I dropped my goblet on his foot. Wine spattered up to splash his fine curly-toed shoes, he let out a loud curse, and Carmelina was free. I flicked my eyes at her, and she was gone into the loggia. “What a shame,” I clucked as Juan Borgia hopped on one foot, looking about for her. “It appears giraffes can outrun tigers. Perhaps just drunken tigers.”
Juan leveled a finger at me. “I know who you are behind that mask!”
“Oh, do tell. What gave me away? The eyes? The hair? Or could it be the fact I’m not even up to your chin?” I bowed. “Good night, Gonfalonier. I suggest you set your eyes on a slower mount than a giraffe. Or at least a drunker one.”
