by Kate Quinn
But I said nothing of my dark private convictions to Madonna Adriana, who had served Rodrigo Borgia with such long and faithful affection. My reckless words to Rodrigo had gotten her son killed—but she wouldn’t know it. Let her have her grief and her peace of mind. I didn’t deserve either.
My fault. My fault that my husband had died. Leonello had seen Rodrigo more clearly than I: Women and children are not fitting objects for vengeance. The Holy Father may find some way to punish you, but it will not come at the end of Michelotto’s knife.
Wise Leonello. Maybe I hadn’t been the one to end up crumpled beneath a collapsed doorway, but I’d still thrown it in Rodrigo’s face that my husband had gone behind his back, had bedded me all along—and I’d been punished for it. My punishment had come all neatly tied up with vengeance against Orsino; there was a tidiness to that which I thought might have come from Cesare. I could see Rodrigo raging to his eldest son, and Cesare applying his cold and fearsome logic to the solution.
My fault. But my poor mother-in-law would never know what had truly happened to her son, nor would anyone else. That was my burden to bear. Mine alone.
“Would you look after Laura for a little while?” I had asked Adriana instead after drying her tears. “Lucrezia has required me to return to Rome for her wedding, but it’s time Laura had the comforts of home. And she’ll be such company for you.” I wasn’t taking Laura back to the Holy City ever again if I could help it. Not as long as the Holy City was under Borgia rule.
“Yes, of course I’ll look after her.” My former mother-in-law wiped her eyes. “Bless her, she’s the image of Orsino already. Those beautiful curls—”
“His true daughter,” I agreed. Cesare Borgia had once told me I could not lie, but this was a falsehood I’d gladly tell for the rest of my days.
I missed my Laura so dreadfully, but she was safe in Carbognano now. She was able to write me misspelled little letters under Adriana’s tutelage, straggling words galloping up the page and back down again, all about her pony and the ripening nuts on the hazel trees and Fra Teseo who was teaching her French but it was boring. And when was I coming home?
Soon, I thought. Soon, Laura. One more thing to do. Just one more thing, I clung to that—when it was done, I would leave this snake pit and go home.
Oh, but I was so tired.
Lucrezia’s first wedding had been a vast affair: hundreds of guests milling about the papal apartments, all the ladies going into raptures over Carmelina’s sweets. I still remembered those little sugared strawberry cakelets shaped like roses . . . a formal occasion, that first wedding, at least until wine loosened inhibitions at dawn and squealing ladies had tossed all those cakelets out the windows to the watching crowds and Rodrigo had begun dropping candied cherries down my bodice. This wedding was no formal occasion at all, or perhaps it only seemed that way to me. There had been feasting and laughing and dancing much of the day, and the guests were already merry with wine as the bride made her way into the Sala dei Pontifici, where her papal father sat enthroned. Joffre lounged at his feet, trying to look languid and merely looking sulky, and Alfonso of Aragon stood at the ready in black brocade, with eyes only for his Borgia wife. He wore a black velvet cap with a brooch like a fat gold cherub that Lucrezia had given him, and I had to admit he was a handsome youth: dark and slender, with a narrow sensitive face.
They will eat you alive, I thought as we paced across the sala.
But young Alfonso had only smiles as he took Lucrezia’s hand and bowed over it, and she smoldered at him through her darkened lashes. What a pretty pair they made as the viols struck up a lively tune and they danced for the Pope’s smiles. Orsino and I had danced to viols at our wedding. A sedate tune, dipping and turning palm to palm as I prayed silently for him to love me, and he couldn’t even summon the courage to look me in the eye. Regretting his devil’s bargain already, perhaps. His whole blighted life had run aground after that dance like a cursed ship.
My eyes burned dry. I felt quick pressure on my hand as I watched the bridal couple pirouette through a lively turn, and knew my brother’s touch without turning. Dear Sandro, he had been such a comfort since Orsino died. I’d retired to his modest household upon my return to Rome, and Sandro welcomed me with one of his enveloping hugs, but none of his usual chatter. He seemed to know that for once in my life I didn’t want to talk, just sit quietly and perhaps lose a game of chess, or help his little mistress Silvia rock and croon over her babies, or listen to a chorus of pure-voiced boy singers who somehow had the power to bring tears to my eyes when the memory of my husband didn’t. Sandro had just handed me a kerchief in silence, letting me have my tears, not asking any questions. Dear Sandro. I’d worried for a time that Rodrigo’s anger at me might fall on my brother, but Rodrigo was far too practical to dispose of someone useful. Orsino had been a nothing to him, but my brother kept the peace in the College of Cardinals with his easy jests and droll capers. Rodrigo needed that, and thank the Holy Virgin he did. If he had ordered my brother murdered and not my husband . . .
Really, I was no better a wife than Lucrezia. We both placed our brothers above our husbands. Well, at least no one accused me of sleeping with my brother. However inadequate a wife Lucrezia had been to the Count of Pesaro in other ways, she didn’t deserve that charge. Ugh, but people have such twisted imaginations.
The wedding banquet. Lucrezia and Alfonso presiding over the guests for the first time as husband and wife, the new Duke and Duchess of Bisceglie, holding hands under the cloth and dispatching dishes to their most favored friends. Sandro claimed my left side, some minor Neapolitan princeling my right. “Rumors of your beauty have not been false, Giulia Farnese! A true ornament to the papal court; Naples has nothing to match you! Excepting our radiant new duchess, of course. Perhaps I might call upon you . . .”
The Pope presided at his high table, watching with benevolent fondness. He was supposed to sit alone in his papal splendor, but Caterina Gonzaga perched on his knee playing with his hair and feeding him tidbits. I was surprised he didn’t spit them out, because the food from the apathetic Vatican cooks was as terrible as ever—tough stringy capons and leathery oysters drying on their shells and oversugared biscotti—but Rodrigo seemed to enjoy licking the sugary crumbs off Caterina Gonzaga’s neck as she tittered. His dark eyes found mine, dwelling for a moment’s bitter satisfaction before he pulled Caterina into his lap and began fishing idly under her skirts with his ringed hand. Not my Pope anymore, not ever, and he hardly had a glance for me since I had been widowed. Why would he? I had insulted him; Orsino had cuckolded him; we had both been appropriately punished and were now dismissed from the Holy Father’s notice. Borgia efficiency.
Lucrezia sent me a dish of sugared almonds with a queenly wave, a sign of the new Duchess’s favor, but I waved them away.
“—a pleasure to see your radiant smile again, Madonna Giulia! You have been too long from our court!” A red beaming face bobbing before me at the table, one of the Colonna lordlings. I watched his mouth move, not listening to his words. “My deepest regrets for your lord husband, but so fair a woman cannot be allowed to molder in her grief. Perhaps you will allow me to call upon you soon—”
More dishes, more overbaked haunches of boar and sour greasy cheeses. Oh, but my head ached. “Madonna Giulia, perhaps you will allow me to meet that little daughter of yours? As beautiful as her mother, they say, and I have a young son of my own. Tell me, she is heiress to Bassanello as well as Carbognano, is she not?”
Cesare, ghosting about the tables like a black bat. Pulling all the strings for tonight’s celebration, conjuring magic for his preening little sister, whom he watched with such fondness. Michelotto trailed behind, his usual colorless shadow, but I did not see Leonello. I had not seen my former bodyguard at all since the burning of Fra Savonarola. Cesare had sent Leonello away from Rome, some dark business in Romagna, where people whispered of deaths in the night among the Borgia enemies. “Cardinal Borgia’s demon dwar
f,” people whispered, crossing themselves when they spoke Leonello’s name. “They say he grows wings and slips through cracks in walls to do his master’s bidding!” The demon dwarf had returned to Rome, or so rumor had it, but who knew for certain?
Gifts for Lucrezia—silver platters, credenza services of solid gold, frail blown glass, jewels. A necklace of rubies and wrought gold from her father, and Lucrezia squealed as Alfonso of Aragon hooked it about her neck for her. “You did not bring my daughter a gift, Giulia Farnese?” a supercilious voice sniffed behind me, and I smiled at Vannozza dei Cattanei because I knew it would annoy her.
“Lucrezia said my mere presence was a gift, since I am still in mourning and would not otherwise make an appearance in public.”
“I don’t suppose you had anything suitable to offer the Duchess of Bisceglie, anyway. Not from that little hole you live in now—Viterbo?”
“Carbognano.”
“Yes, Carbognano. Dull little place. Your daughter’s inheritance, I understand.” Vannozza smiled, her feathered fan twitching like a cat’s tail. “Well, not all our daughters can be duchesses.”
“No,” I agreed. “Not all our daughters are divorced, disgraced, and rumored to whore for their brothers, either. Whom do you count the luckier, Vannozza?”
Her smile disappeared, and since the guests were rising now to stream into the papal apartments, I found it a good note on which to leave her.
Cesare had worked his sorcery on his father’s private papal apartments as well. Tableaux in every chamber: a sala turned into a garden with real apple blossoms scattered underfoot and vines twined over the walls and serving girls dressed as nymphs in transparent gauzes; another sala transformed into a forest with green boughs hanging from the ceiling and fresh leaves covering the carpets, a fountain taking up the whole of another chamber and splashing wine instead of water. The fountain writhed for a moment as I looked at it, and I saw it had been twined all over with vipers, empty scaly skins stretched and stuffed to look alive. All those jet-bead eyes and ivory fangs seemed to coil in my fevered eyes and I turned away, flinching.
Cesare stood beckoning the guests: master of revels in his black velvet. The servants were masked and costumed like mummers; nymphs and satyrs and beasts, and Cesare wore a mask with a single twisted black horn: a dark unicorn. I’d been the unicorn at the last masquerade, where Rodrigo had ordered a guest hanged for daring to insult Juan. Why had I not realized such a man would take revenge on Orsino, for the supposed crime of cuckolding him?
My fault. My fault.
“Snakes,” a voice slurred, and Sancha of Aragon trailed forward with her reddened eyes fixated on the writhing fountain behind Cesare. “Snakes, snakes, you Borgia snake—” She hissed at Cesare, her little pointed tongue flickering, not unlike a snake herself, and she raised an unsteady hand to slap at him. She had been glaring at him all night, and she was drunker than a dockside slattern. “Borgia snake, you know what you’ve done to me—”
She fell on him, slapping and shouting, and his servants rushed forward in their masks and her servants too. A bishop staggered back with a bloody nose, Michelotto hit the Tart of Aragon so hard her neck wrenched, one of Sancha’s guards drew his dagger, and for a moment I thought Lucrezia’s wedding would see murder. Why not?
But the Pope’s guards rushed around him with their own blades, Cesare’s voice cracked like a whip, and Alfonso of Aragon came forward to put an arm about his sister and lead her off. “He gave me the French pox,” I thought I heard Sancha snarl to her brother, but Cesare just shrugged as though he could not care less. He adjusted his horned mask, and I thought I saw the disease’s livid marks spotting his sharp handsome face. The French pox would eventually rot your nose right off, or so they said, and then it drove you mad. But Cesare Borgia was already mad, wasn’t he?
“Put up your sword, you fool,” a deep voice snapped to the last of Sancha’s Neapolitan guards, and I gazed at Leonello a long blank moment before recognizing him.
“You would not wear a costume for my masquerade,” I said.
“Because people would laugh at me.” His voice was muffled behind the huge lion mask; he wore a tawny doublet and absurd clawed gloves and an enormous furred ruff. “No one laughs at the demon dwarf now.”
“You look—” I saw Caterina Gonzaga point at him and titter, and I wanted to claw her eyes out. “You look ridiculous.”
“Indeed.” His normally precise words had a blur about the edges I didn’t recognize.
I lowered my voice. “I want very much to speak with you, Leonello. Privately.”
“Do you?” He tossed down the cup of wine in his hand. “I don’t.”
He dipped his cup into the fountain for more. “Are you drunk?” I asked. I had never seen my abstemious, fastidious, dignified bodyguard drunk in his life.
“No, but I plan to be.”
I had never seen him dance either, but he danced tonight. All the mummers in their masks danced for the Pope and the bridal pair and the laughing guests, and Leonello did a grave jig under his huge ruff that had everyone guffawing. I turned my eyes away, and promptly my hand was claimed by an eager-eyed lordling from the Piccolomini family. “Dear Giulia, your beauty dims even your black! Perhaps I can call upon you soon?”
Why did everyone want to call on me? Leonello in his lion mask was chasing after the mummer dressed as a stag now. Lucrezia giggled helplessly into her husband’s shoulder.
“Madonna Giulia, surely you will open the dancing with me?” Another shiny-eyed man, taking my hand and giving it a squeeze. “I have so long admired your grace in the turns—”
Go away, I thought, just go away, all of you. But I had a cluster of men about me, and they didn’t seem to care how little I spoke.
The farce with the mummers drew to a close, and applause rippled. The mummers descended in their masks into the ranks of guests, and the viols struck up a dance.
“Madonna Giulia—”
“Surely you will partner me—”
They were all vying to grasp my hand, and one fellow tipsier than the rest even gave my waist a moist squeeze. “May I rescue you?” Sandro murmured, and my little crowd of suitors looked on in disappointment as I gave my hand to my brother.
Lucrezia was whirling palm-to-palm with Alfonso of Aragon, one of her squealing ladies had seized Cesare’s hand, and Caterina Gonzaga was dancing with the mummer masked as an elephant. I swept around to face Sandro and made the opening reverence. “Thank you,” I managed to say. “They were pressing rather hard.”
“They’ll press until you marry one of them.” Sandro’s normally mischievous expression had gone quite serious as he made his bow to me. “You had better give some thought to a second husband, sorellina.”
“I’m only three months widowed!”
“And a very tempting prospect to any unmarried man, as well as a good many of the married ones.”
“As a soiled wife? It’s been made very clear that’s all I am.”
“Orsino’s soiled wife, Giulia. Now you’re a wealthy widow free to marry another man, and you’ll bring that lucky man a number of profitable little country properties and the loveliest face in Rome.” Sandro raised his hand toward me with the first flutter of viols. “Most men will now find it quite possible to forgive you your reputation.”
“What Orsino left me belongs to Laura.” I put my hand against my brother’s, gliding into the first pass. “Carbognano, the castello, it will all be Laura’s dowry.”
“And there is not a man in this room who does not hope to marry you, get sons on you, and take Carbognano and the rest for his own heirs.” My brother made a turn about me with all his usual grace. “Be careful, Giulia. Choose your second husband wisely.”
A little flame of resentment burned in my stomach. “I don’t want a second husband!” Or sons either . . .
“You will need one whether you wish it or no, if you wish to safeguard Laura’s inheritance.” Sandro’s voice had a bleak matter-of-fact
ness. “An older brother, even if he is a cardinal, isn’t enough to protect a wealthy young widow in this wicked world.”
I made a turn of my own, seeing my black skirts flare and seeing the eyes of men flare too as they looked on me. Of course. I was a prize now. Foolish of me not to have considered it sooner, in my frozen state after Orsino’s death. I was a prize, and Laura was an even bigger one—and my brother looked at me with immense sympathy as he saw me realizing it. “When did you turn so cynical and wise, Alessandro Farnese?” I managed to ask.
“When I accepted a cardinalate from the Borgia Pope, Giulia. It’s deep water I’ve learned to swim in, and there are serpents under every ripple.”
I’d persuaded him to take the red hat, when Rodrigo offered it. I should have left well enough alone; should have let my big brother scamper on through life as a notary. Should have let him stay a scamp and a jokester, instead of this handsome, serious churchman who spoke so knowledgeably of serpents and dangerous waters.
“‘Serpents under every ripple,’” Sandro mused, perhaps turning his voice back to its old airy amusement because he saw the look on my face. “Do you like that, sorellina? Perhaps I have a gift for rhyme. Everyone agrees I don’t have any gift for church business.”
“Oh, Sandro—”
“Now, Giulia, don’t look so stricken.” Sandro put his palm against mine again for a final turn. “I’ll manage, and so will you. Just think about it, eh? What I said about marrying again.”
