by Eric Flint
"It is the least I can do for Your Eminence," said Sinceri with a small bow of his head. With that, and a few small pleasantries, he left.
Borja passed a few moments staring out at the garden, musing on the fact that he had now taken an irrevocable step that would end in either glory or disgrace. But the possibility of disgrace was so small as not to be worth thinking about. There was a calmness in him now that he took for a sign of divine favor. Once the Holy Spirit moved, hesitation or squeamishness surely took on the character of sin.
Audacity and ruthlessness would see the matter through. The only secret that truly needed to be kept would be Borja's own willingness to shape his means to fit his end, and do so without betraying his holy purpose with so much as a hint of scruple.
Ferrigno entered silently. "Signor Quevedo y Villega has arrived, Your Eminence."
"Send him in." Borja turned away from the window. "Have wine brought. The man is an incorrigible sot, and seems unable to speak without a cup in his hand." In any event, Borja felt that a small drink of wine would not be out of order, in toast to the enterprise he was beginning.
"As Your Eminence wishes." Ferrigno bowed himself out to attend to it.
There, Borja thought, was the secret to effective statecraft. A staff who got on with the matter at hand without undue frolics of their own. Francisco de Quevedo had been pressed on him by Osuna as a useful tool in the present business. He was not a tool that would have come naturally to Borja's hand. If nothing else, the dash the man had cut at court in Madrid these past few years had offended Borja's austere sensibilities. A satirist and a humorist and a man the Spanish Inquisition had had to censure for writings once already.
Quevedo's history of wild scheming-scheming that as often as not ended in disaster-suggested that he was a tool with a mind of his own. Such were dangerous. Had he not been in Italy raising Cain because he'd had to leave Spain for a while after killing a man in a duel? And, of course, the man's most prominent failure had been the Venetian plot, which was an additional risk in using him. There was another of the Venetian plotters in Rome, a man who knew Quevedo and might recognize him.
Against that risk there was the excellent record the man had of creating complete and imaginative chaos wherever he went. It was only to be expected that that was where the man's talents would lie, since his other claims to fame were as a soldier and a poet. At once a brute and an artist, a thought that forced another bark of laughter from Borja. Exactly what Rome needed right now.
If Quevedo's plotting erupted into a spectacular debacle, that was all to the good. A descent into anarchy was what Borja wanted for Rome. If the anarchy ran out of control, so much the better. There would be a very present remedy for that ailment on hand at just the right time, provided Osuna kept his part of his bargain. There would be troops and to spare in Naples for anything Borja saw fit to use them for.
There came a knock. "Enter," Borja said. A servant opened the door to usher the spy in while another brought the wine Borja had ordered.
Quevedo was all that his reputation said he would be. An older man in his fifties, he nevertheless carried himself with the arrogance of a man much younger. Tall, imposing, doubtless of the kind who in his younger days would have been a favorite with the less reputable sort of lady, he carried the marks of both dueling and drink on his face. His clothes were outlandish to Borja's eye, but then he had spent too little time in Rome to have paid notice to the fashions prevailing. Still, for a man who had made part of his career as a secret agent, he cut a remarkably striking figure.
"Your Eminence," Quevedo said, bowing low and sweeping off his hat, a plain black wide-brimmed affair which lacked the feathers usually seen on such but which did sport a colorful hatband.
He straightened up and addressed Borja with a small half-smile causing his dark but graying mustachios to quiver slightly, "I, Francisco de Quevedo y Villega, am at Your Eminence's most humble and dedicated service."
"Senor Quevedo. You have been briefed on this afternoon's proceedings at curia?"
Quevedo tossed his hat aside, on to a couch. "I have, Your Eminence. An agent within the Vatican staff proved most informative. Am I to assume that your business in Rome is to be transacted to its most full extent?"
Borja nodded. "My plans in that regard are not fully resolved. I have great hopes that His Holiness will heed the urgings of the Holy Spirit and come to a reasonable accommodation. In the meantime, what progress can you report with the business on which you were sent to Rome?"
"Satisfactory, Your Eminence. Rome is a city with, I must regretfully say, far too much time on its hands. There is a new fashion among the lower gentry to ape the manners of the Americans. Some of these lefferti, as they are known, are remarkably easy to lead into bad ways. One might express a pious regret at the ease with which the devil's work is done." Again, that little self-satisfied smile.
Although Quevedo had been a fixture at court in Madrid for a few years, he and Borja had little to do with each other. Indeed, this was the first time they had spoken directly-and Borja was finding the man disagreeable already.
"The devil's work, Quevedo?" he said, arching an eyebrow.
Quevedo threw back his head and laughed aloud. "Your Eminence seeks that the devil shall make merry that God's work be done under cover of the confusion. There are plenty of idle hands with which his infernal majesty might play, be sure of it."
"I shall thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head here, Quevedo, even if your japeries are tolerated at Madrid," Borja snapped.
Quevedo bowed again. "Your Eminence justly reproves and chastises his most humble servant, I, Francisco de Quevedo y Villega make most prostrate apology if my jesting words gave offense, which I assure Your Eminence was entirely without intent on my part."
Borja nodded acknowledgment. Clearly the man had all the polish of court, even if tarnished by incorrigible levity. "Handsomely done, Senor Quevedo. For my own part, I beg you forgive my testiness of manner. A man of my standing within the Church can abide not even jesting references to deviltry. However, do go on. The lefferti, you say?"
"Yes, Your Eminence. The American Harry Lefferts passed some months in Rome during 1633, and many of those with whom he kept company have taken to aping his manner of dress and disreputable ways. Uniformly low sorts of a kind with which Your Eminence will doubtless be unfamiliar. It takes little to bring them to brawling and license, as easy as leading pigs to the trough."
Quevedo gave a small sneer at the very prospect, although Borja knew full well that Quevedo's reputation-indeed, his all-but bragging in some of his bawdier poems-included a great many dalliances and the patronage of houses of ill-repute.
"It sounds like a most promising beginning. Senor Quevedo, your specific orders are now to raise all the foment you find yourself able to in Rome. You are unleashed to this task, and may draw on funds through my man Ferrigno. Anything and everything which may be done to the discredit of the House of Barberini and their governance of the city and the Church will be of assistance in our designs. Spare neither pains nor funds in your agitations."
Borja took up a cup of wine, noticing that Quevedo had not, in fact, done so already. "A toast, Senor Quevedo, to success in your enterprise!" he said, and drank.
Quevedo picked up a goblet for himself. "To the successful execution of Your Eminence's orders," he said, and drank in turn.
Borja set down his cup: the wine had been passable, at least, but he noticed the turns of phrase Quevedo had been using. "Let us indeed hope you are successful, Senor Quevedo," he said. "I should be unhappy to have to condemn a luminary of the Spanish Court before the Inquisition for foul deeds committed in Rome. It would embarrass His Most Catholic Majesty unduly, in a time when any embarrassment must be avoided by all of his loyal subjects."
"Your Eminence makes himself most excellently clear," Quevedo said, again with that little smile. "I, Francisco de Quevedo, assure Your Eminence of my most diligent efforts."
"See that it is so," Borja said, and dismissed the man.
It was, Borja reflected, good to know that someone who was, in the event of failure, utterly expendable was also so utterly disagreeable. Hidalgo himself to the core, Borja nevertheless recognized that the touchy honor and ferocious independence of those gentlemen of Spain who had not devoted themselves to the Church and its hierarchy was more than frequently an obstacle to the efficient ordering of affairs. Although, in this case, a certain inelegance and readiness to resort to violence would do no harm and might actually help.
There remained only one final piece to play in this first move. Cardinal Pietro Maria Borghese was a Genoese nobleman; therefore, at least nominally a Spanish client. Nevertheless, he and his cousins in the curia would have to be brought in to the fold for the upcoming enterprise as cardinals in their own right by persuasion. Since they were not directly subjects of the king of Spain, they could not simply be ordered as the Spanish cardinals were.
The interview with Borghese nevertheless promised to be a simple and uncomplicated one. At Urban VIII's election the other cardinal who had been regarded as papabile had been a Borghese, and the somewhat odd chain of circumstances that had left a Barberini on a papal throne that the Borghese had regarded as theirs was still a source of mild resentment. They regarded themselves as eminently papabile in the event of another vacancy in the Vatican, so they would be inclined to assist in any scheme that might create one. And, of course, they could read one of those so-called future histories as well as anyone else, and see the surname of the pope who would have been.
For the moment, though, Borja would be meeting with the youngest of the Borghese cardinals. Pietro Maria was a man in his early thirties placed in the church more out of dynastic convenience than any real commitment to religion on his part. There was a distance to be maintained in the early stages of a plot such as this. Not that the man's youth would be any indicator of his easiness to deal with. Like all scions of the great houses of Italy, he had imbibed politics and chicanery with his mother's milk.
Borja took up another cup of wine and composed himself to await Borghese's arrival.
PART TWO
March 1635
Chapter 4
Rome
"You know, Ruy, this guidebook is next to useless," Sharon Nichols remarked. She'd had the thing sent all the way from Grantville, one of a very small number of guides to foreign cities the Appalachian town had had before the Ring of Fire. It was, if anything, worse than useless. Apart, that is, from the slightly amusing coincidence that the USE's new embassy in the eternal city was just up the street from where the up-time embassy of the United States had been. Or would be. Or something.
"My lady speaks the truth, as ever. What need have I of maps and rutters and"-he sneered, as magnificently as only Ruy could-" Guidebooks, when I have but to know I am in your presence and can therefore never be lost?" He composed his face in a smile of such seraphic contentment that it was all Sharon could do not to crack up there and then.
As it was she chuckled, and hugged his arm where it was through hers. "There are times, Ruy, when you verge on the impossible." She looked up into his face again, and saw the beatific countenance had returned to the usual impish grin. A grin that made it difficult, sometimes, to remember that he wasn't just old enough to be her father, he was actually a couple of years older than her father. And was still recovering from a severe abdominal injury to boot. Technically, at least-the most she'd ever seen was him wincing a little getting up.
That was Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz. Somewhere close to sixty years of age, he still thought getting into a sword fight against six-to-one odds was a perfectly reasonable proposition. Of course, he'd spent most of those sixty years fighting in Spain's wars and skirmishes on three continents and had survived everything that had been thrown at him. Come right to it, he'd put four of his six opponents down before they got him, leaving the other two for Sharon and Billy Trumble to deal with.
She'd found his courtship hard at first, perfect seventeenth-century gentleman though he was in that as in all things. She still found the memory of Hans painful, even now nearly a year and a half after his death, and with all the things that had happened since. Life did, indeed, go on, but at its own pace, and she hadn't been ready. And there, if you wanted to see a bright side, was the real beauty of Ruy. Old enough and scarred enough himself, he'd understood perfectly and been patient. Then, just as she was being relieved of her duties at the Venetian embassy by the new resident down from Magdeburg, the Day had come. A Day that merited a capital letter when she thought about it. The Day that fell a year and a day after Hans had died protecting Wismar from the Danish invasion fleet. The day she'd promised Ruy an answer to his marriage proposal.
By the Day there had been no doubt. By then she'd found a new life of her own, as a trader, diplomat and-as she thought of herself-medical missionary to the surgeons and physicians of down-time Italy. She'd also had months of Ruy's charming company to make her answer a foregone conclusion.
That just left the wedding to plan. Which reminded her, they'd come for this walk out of the new embassy-recently upgraded from a consulate by Sharon's arrival as ambassador-for a reason. The fact that Rome had been remodeled in the time between now and the future date at which this dog-eared guidebook had been written had somehow let her get sidetracked. In fact "Ruy? Are you trying to distract me?"
Innocence personified, cherubic this time. If, that is, you could imagine a cherub with conquistador mustachios. And wasn't that a laugh-almost the first thing Ruy had done in his military career was a term of service as an actual by-God conquistador.
"Don't give me that look, Ruy! You've been trying to duck out of planning our nuptials ever since I said I would marry you."
He had the good grace to look abashed. "Sharon, I confess, it is true. I am a simple man. For me it is only you that matters. Alas for my unpretentious nature."
Sharon snickered, and Ruy responded with a look that was old-fashioned even for the seventeenth century.
"Alas, as I was saying, for my unpretentious nature, it is only proper and right that all proper ceremonies should attend such a beautiful bride. Alas, for my grasp of these matters is not all it should be. I am but a poor, untutored Catalan country gentleman-"
"Ruy!"
"It is true!" His face was a study in wounded innocence. "What do I know of protocol and precedence and, what is the word you use, showers? Sharon, my love, truly I would also like to see the day of our marriage executed with all proper ceremony. But I have every confidence that, even as far as we are from both our homes, we can secure the services of very good people-"
Sharon raised her eyebrows. This was a new one on her. She'd thought he'd been being his usual testosterone-driven self and trying to duck out of Gurl Stuff.
He paused and grinned. "Sharon, the sacrament of marriage is simply the outward sign of the grace of God. Like all outward signs there are people who make an art of it. Neither of us is without means, let us simply have-" he gave a languid wave, the perfect courtier for a moment-"Everything."
"Not quite everything, Ruy," Sharon chided him. "That would be tasteless."
Another joke that had quickly grown old and comfortable. She was so much more restrained than he was, more moderate. Putting Ruy and "moderate" in the same sentence just wouldn't do at all. She suspected that if he truly did let rip on their wedding plans, well-she had visions of cardinals, probably even the pope, dragged in at gunpoint to officiate. A lightning raid on the Vatican, to secure St. Peter's for the ceremony. And Ruy, grinning at the altar rail with a ring he'd stolen for her from She quashed the thought. They had come to the Piazza di Spagna, which to Sharon's disappointment had yet to have the Spanish Steps installed. Then she realized that thought had led to another. "Ruy? I've been talking about who I can get here to our wedding. How about you? Who will you want to invite?"
He stopped, remained silent, and turned around on the spot taking in the view
of the piazza. He sighed gently. "This is a thing of some sadness for me, Sharon. I have passed many years in this world and made many enemies and many friends. And many of those friends, too many as I now recall, cannot come to our wedding."
Sharon realized, not knowing quite how for nothing showed on the old soldier's face, that Ruy was close to tears. She stepped closer and hugged him. His embrace in return was fierce and strong, like everything about Ruy. And yet there was that core of grief and burden, at being what he was not and the pretense that made his life possible. On top of which, the friends he must have buried, and the wives. Somehow she felt it would not be right to cry for him, though. Don Quixote-on-steroids that he was, a weeping Dulcinea did him no justice at all.
"And I suspect most of the enemies couldn't come even if they wanted to, hey?" she said, quietly. Ruy could see through flattery, and took it in the spirit in which it was intended.
He stepped back, holding her at arm's length by the shoulders, grinning fiercely. "Those few that live would not dare!" he sneered, surfing over a moment's melancholy on a wave of braggadocio. "But there are some few friends remaining who might yet come to see me marry again. I shall write letters, a chore I have, I confess, avoided until now. The pen may indeed be mightier than the sword, but I find it considerably more tedious to wield."
And wasn't that the truth. It wasn't until they were living under the same roof on a semiformal basis that Sharon had discovered that there was more to being a swordsman than just owning a sword. Or, even, a couple of swords. Ruy's career had seen fashions in dress and military swords change several times. He had kept up with fashion, but seemed unable to bear to part with old weaponry. Racks of the things, and other weapons besides. Had Sharon not known that Ruy hailed from a rural region, she'd have pegged him for a hillbilly from that alone. His collection of lethal hardware was eye-popping stuff that was cousin in spirit to the racks of guns one still saw in the backs of trucks around Grantville and the arsenals many of the townsfolk maintained beyond anything they could ever actually use.
