The Serpent and the Pearl

by Kate Quinn

  “It’s a common enough arrangement.” Amusement still laced the Cardinal’s deep voice, but he sounded gentler, as though no longer smiling. I didn’t know; I couldn’t bear to look at him. “My last mistress had three husbands in succession, each more compliant than the last. They profited from my patronage, she had respectability—and the children she bore me had protection.”

  “Children?” My voice was a stupid echo; I gazed at the arch where the rude boy Juan had disappeared. Of course. A cardinal who didn’t blink at propositioning a wife of one day certainly wouldn’t balk at producing bastards.

  “Five children living.” He sat down on the rim of the fountain opposite me, not too close. “Four here in Rome, three boys and a girl. A daughter in Spain whom I rarely see, now that she’s grown and married.”

  And older than me, no doubt. Not that there was anything so shocking about that; Isotta Colonna, who had cried all through her wedding, had been standing next to a human sphere of sixty-four. Three quarters of the girls I’d giggled with at Mass were wed to husbands twenty years at least their senior.

  Nineteen-year-old Orsino with his blushes and his blue eyes. I’d thought I was so lucky.

  I looked the Cardinal square in the eye. “If you wanted me so badly, why didn’t you take me last night?” I made myself ask. “It’s your palazzo—no one would have come to my aid. You could have done whatever you wanted with me.”

  “My dear girl.” The amusement was back, laced through his voice like a thread of honey through cake. “I’ve never in my life had a woman by force, and I don’t intend to begin now.”

  I jumped to my feet. “Then let me go home!”

  “Certainly,” he said. “Your new home is at the Palazzo Montegiordano, with your mother-in-law Adriana da Mila. She runs a comfortable household there—my daughter stays with her; I do hope you and Lucrezia will be friends. She’s a delight, and too often lacks the company of other young girls. Your husband will stay in the country at Bassanello, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes to bleat apologies at you for being the cowardly sprig that he is. I will come too, from time to time, to pay you court.”

  I lowered my lids in scorn. “And if I say no?” Could I say no? Or would I go to hell for defying a cardinal? Oh, Holy Virgin, who ever would have thought getting married would make everything so complicated?

  “Say no, and you will be none the worse off.” The Cardinal rose in a rustle of scarlet silks, his majestic height dwarfing me again. “In fact, you will be considerably the richer. You’ll have a pliant young husband—he’s a spineless little coward, but he’s still a better prospect than most of those withered gray specimens who manage to wed girls like you. You’ll have enjoyed the pleasant sensation of being courted for yourself rather than your dowry, which all women should experience at least once in their lives.” A glance at the braided hair beneath my veil. “Before their bloom fades, that is.”

  I threw my head back and gave him a slow arrogant smile.

  His mouth curved, and he clapped a hand to his heart as though my smile had pierced it like an arrow. “And,” he concluded cheerfully, “you’ll have a casket full of sparkly things—gifts from me. I’m rather good at presents, as any of my former mistresses can tell you.”

  “I don’t want your gifts.”

  “Then throw them away,” he said carelessly, and took possession of my hand again. “All I want is to give them to you. It’s called being besotted, my dear. You should try it sometime.”

  He turned my hand over and brushed his lips across the inside of my wrist. Or would have, if I hadn’t yanked my hand away. “Don’t touch me,” I warned. Ever since I was twelve and first starting to bud from girl to woman, I’d been pinched and squeezed and eyed by men. Page boys and manservants and bravos swaggering in the street; the tutors who were supposed to teach me dancing and Dante; strange men who made a point of brushing too close when I made my way through a crowded church after Mass; the priests who heard my confession. Every man thought he could get away with a stroke and a pat, and an unmarried girl doesn’t have much choice about it all except to sidle away as fast as possible before she’s accused of leading him on. But I was a married woman now, and I didn’t have to pretend I didn’t feel the gropes and the pinches anymore. “Don’t touch me,” I warned again, a little shakily. Who tells a cardinal no? a small voice whispered in my head.

  “Never fear,” he chuckled, not at all offended, and made another of his elegant bows. “I won’t touch you till you ask me to.”

  “I assure you that will never happen.”

  “We’ll meet again soon,” he promised, ignoring my protest, and strode off with the vigorous steps of a much younger man. He left me so quickly, he’d disappeared up the steps into the loggia out of earshot before I realized he’d left something in my hand.

  I opened my fingers and couldn’t help a gasp. A rope of pearls sat in my palm, elegantly coiled, with a single pear-drop pearl larger than any I’d ever seen in my life.

  No necklace, dear, Madonna Adriana had twinkled as she helped dress me. You’ll soon see why.

  That old hag. My procuress of a mother-in-law had known. She’d sent her own son out of the way to the country and then dressed his new wife to go whoring.

  I clenched a fist around the necklace and stormed back to my chamber. I wished Madonna Adriana had still been there, with her creamy satisfied smile—I’d have flung that pretty pearl in her face. As it was, there was only my new maid Pantisilea, going through my boxes and chests.

  “Are you spying on me?” I shouted.

  “Madonna Adriana’s orders.” My maid looked apologetic. “Did you meet the Cardinal, Madonna Giulia? Is he handsome? I haven’t seen him up close—”

  “Get out!” I shouted. “Get out and stay out!”

  Her eyes fastened on the necklace looped through my fingers. “Oooh, that’s pretty! I like a bit of jewelry myself; it shows a man has serious intentions—”

  “Out!”

  “I’m going, Madonna Giulia, I’m going.”

  She gave me a curtsy and a comradely giggle as she scampered out, which I resolutely refused to return in kind. “Your name is ridiculous!” I yelled after her instead, slamming the door. Pantisilea, indeed. That nosy piece of string was no Amazon warrior queen; she wasn’t even a maid—she was a common spy. A spy of my very own, to keep my mother-in-law informed of all my actions, all my doings, all my secrets. I had no one to trust here at all.

  I upended the table beside the bed, taking a small mean comfort in the crash of a vase, a goblet, and a prayer book. I flung the pearl necklace down on my wedding chest and eyed it as though it were a snake. I would not try it on.

  Not for another hour, anyway.

  I held out that long.

  My Cardinal had good taste in jewels, I’d say that for him. I’d still throw his pearls at his feet if he dared call on me again. “Take that, Cardinal Borgia,” I said aloud, tugging the rope of pearls over my head.

  Rodrigo Borgia. I’d finally remembered his name.

  When a man gives you jewels, even if you’re planning to throw them back in his face, you should remember his name.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Saturn has impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.

  —FICINO

  Leonello

  H ector, son of Priam, fierce as flame. I declaimed the words silently, reading from the book in my hand as I strolled across the piazza. Thrice-noble Hector, seizing from behind, sought by the feet to drag away the dead, cheering his friends—

  A properly gloved and veiled housewife on her way back from confession gave me a dubious glance. My lips must be moving along with my thoughts, like a mumbling madman. I made her an impeccable bow and said gravely, “‘Thrice, clad in warlike might, the two Ajaxes drove him from his prey.’ Did you know that, good signora?” I showed her the book. “Thrice!”

  She crossed herself and hurried away. A blind beggar raised his sham of an eye ba
ndage to give me an incredulous glance before remembering to drool and stare vacantly again.

  Yet, fearless in his strength, now rushing on—I went back to declaiming in my head, swaggering as much as any mighty Ajax.

  Two butcher boys paused to guffaw at the dwarf striding along with his nose buried in a book and his hand clapped to his dagger hilt as though it were a hero’s sword, but for once their snickers slid off me without pricking. I was a man grown, thirty in a year or two, but the tale of Troy converted me every time back into the giddy schoolboy I’d been when I first read it. And thanks to a lucky chorus hand in a game of primiera last night, I’d finally had the coin to buy a certain battered book I’d been eyeing for a month—not just the simplified Ilias Latina I’d read as a boy, but Homer’s own version, the Greek translated into Italian. Only a woodblock print, to be sure; Priam’s plea to Achilles was lamentably smudged, and water stains all but obscured Hector’s duel with Ajax. But a book nonetheless, a new book for my modest private library.

  Then up rose Achilles, dear to Jove—I whistled through my teeth, resuming my stroll toward the tavern where Anna worked. I’d need to play a game or two more at the tables if I wanted any food this evening, since I’d spent all the coin I had on the book. Then I could go home, back to my tiny rented room above the print shop in the Borgo, and pass the rest of the evening sprawled on the cot, mug of wine in my hand, reading by the clear light of the beeswax taper I brought from its box only when I had a new book to read . . .

  But when Achilles’ voice of brass they heard, they quailed in spirit . . . “Anna?” I called as I came into the tavern, tucking the worn volume back into my doublet just before the death of Patroclus. “Anna, my good lady, have you any easy marks for me tonight? Let me—”

  That was when I saw the tables empty of customers; heard the odd and eerie silence, except for the muffled wailing of the tavern maids weeping into each other’s shoulders.

  “What?” I looked at the maidservants, from face to tear-blotched face. “What’s happened? Where is Anna?”

  “In—in there,” one of them quavered. I flung open the door to the kitchen, and my buoyant book-fueled happiness popped like a bubble.

  * * *

  A nna had died fighting. There was that, at least.

  “When did you find her?” I asked the tavernkeeper around lips gone numb.

  “Early this morning,” the man complained. “One of the maids, she comes to light the fires and set the pots boiling at dawn, and what do I hear upstairs? A great wail, and by the time I’m down to take a look, the stupid girl’s gone and emptied her stomach all over the floor!”

  Enough to make anyone lose her stomach, I thought. Anna lay on the long trestle table of the kitchens, head tipped back, skirts mussed about her bare legs. Her hands had been spread wide like the figure of Christ on a crucifix, spread wide and staked down to the table with kitchen knives through the palms. She’d still managed to tear one hand free, making a desperate lunging attack. I picked up her free-dangling hand, stiff and cold, and saw blood congealed in dark crescents under her nails. She’d raked her attacker hard.

  Good girl.

  “This’ll put business off for weeks,” the tavernkeeper grumbled. “Who wants to drink their wine and throw their dice at a tavern where a dead girl’s been staked, answer me that?”

  Though maybe if she hadn’t scratched her attacker, he might not have cut her throat. It wasn’t the knives through her hands that had killed my friend—it was the messy slash across her neck, amid half a dozen shallow panicked ones as if the murderer had never cut a throat in his life.

  I could have taught you better, I thought. One hand to grasp the forehead, pull the head straight back, and drag the knife across the throat in one straight deep stroke. Dragging it across the throat, that was key—drag it around, and the cut wouldn’t score deep enough. You found that out, didn’t you, whoever you were? Took you four tries before she died.

  “Who did this?” I asked quietly.

  “What’s it to you? It don’t matter, no one’ll catch him.”

  No, probably not. A common girl found in a tavern with her throat slashed—the Tiber filled up nightly with bodies like that. Mostly they were raked up, carted off, and dumped unclaimed into anonymous graves. Who cared? Not the priests, who wouldn’t say a Mass for the dead unless they were paid by some member of the living first. Not the constables, those corrupt swaggerers more interested in loot and bribes than in finding murderers. No one would bother calling a priest or a constable in, not for someone like Anna.

  I reached out and closed her eyes, half-open and staring at the knotted rafters. “Who did this?” I asked again.

  “How should I know?” The tavernkeeper shrugged heavy shoulders, eyeing the blood that had run from the table to pool and dry on the floor. Behind the kitchen door at his back, I could hear the other maidservants twittering and wailing. “One of the other girls said there were three men in for a bit of fun late last night—throwing dice, spreading money around, eyeing the girls. Maybe Anna stayed to wait on them.”

  “You were here?”

  “I went to midnight Mass,” the tavernkeeper said virtuously.

  “You went to fuck that carter’s wife you like to visit when her husband leaves Rome with his mules, but no matter. These three boys—did your girls say anything else about them?”

  “Well dressed. Anna could have turned a pretty profit, pulling up her skirts for something better than dwarves and fishmongers. Things got out of hand, I imagine.”

  “No, she wasn’t raped.” I tugged her rumpled skirts down to cover her ankles. She had no blood under her skirts or bruises on her thighs. Bruises on her knees, as though someone had tried to force them apart, but Anna must have fought too hard. The knives through her hands, I guessed, had been to hold her still . . .

  “Who’s going to take care of this mess, I’d like to know?” The tavernkeeper went back to his complaining. “I’ll have to pay double to those maids, just to get them in here to clean that floor! And they won’t go touching that body, not a whore who’s died unshriven.”

  “I’ll tend the body.” I crossed the kitchen, climbing up on a chair to reach the box where the tapers were kept. I took a handful and hopped down from the chair. “I’ll pay,” I said, forestalling the tavernkeeper’s sputtering, and began setting the tapers about Anna’s still body. Cheap tapers, made of rancid-smelling tallow. She deserved beeswax for her death vigil. Of course, Anna had deserved a great many things. A silk dress, like that lovely young bride we’d watched in her wedding procession a fortnight ago. A caring husband, a loyal family. A kind death in a soft bed at sixty, not a horror of a death staked to a kitchen table at twenty-five.

  “Close the tavern today,” I told the tavernkeeper, who had started to fuss again. “I’ll stand vigil for her tonight, and see her buried on the morrow.”

  “I believe the dwarf’s in love!” The man raised an eyebrow, starting to grin.

  “Keep that filthy tongue in your head before I saw it off,” I said evenly. “She has no family to bury her, so I will.”

  “Well, it’s your money.”

  “Money won at a very lucky hand of primiera,” I told Anna’s still body when the tavernkeeper had tramped heavily out. “A chorus, four cards of the same kind! A rare hand, that one. I bought a book with it, but I’ll take it back. Should be enough to see you properly buried in a churchyard. Maybe even a Mass or two for your soul . . .”

  Anna lay still. A thick drop of congealing blood collected at the tip of her finger. Just an ordinary tavern maid, I thought. Plain-faced, limp hair a little grimy; illiterate, hard-used, and old at twenty-five. A hundred like her in every piazza in Rome. Nothing to set her apart from any of the others—except maybe that sweet dent of a dimple at the corner of her mouth when she gave her kind smile.

  “‘Around him stood his comrades mourning.’” I quoted Achilles’s lines of grief when he lost his friend Patroclus at Troy. “‘With
them, Peleus’s son, shedding hot tears as on his friend he gazed—’” Yanking the remaining knife out of Anna’s still-staked hand. “‘Laid on the bier, and pierced with deadly wounds . . .’”

  “Who’re you talking to?”

  I turned to see two of the maidservants standing in the doorway, peering with nervous swollen eyes. “She’s not talkin’ back, is she? They say ghosts hover around the bodies of them who died violent—”

  “Just saying a prayer for her.” I saw their eyes dart away from Anna’s, which had reflexively slid open again to stare glassily at the ceiling. I smoothed down her eyelids, weighting them closed this time with the last two scudi from my purse.

  “God rest her soul,” one of the maidservants quavered, crossing herself. A girl not so different from Anna, but lacking that dimple and the streak of kindness that had gone with it. This girl been known to bump me with her hip as she passed, just to see if she could knock the cards out of my hand, but now her eyes were bloodshot and her chin quavered. “God rot those who did this to her!”

  “The tavernkeeper says you two saw them.” Casually I straightened the folds of Anna’s skirts. “Three men, wasn’t it? What did they look like?”

  “What do any of them look like?” the other maidservant shrugged. An older woman, harder of face and tight about the mouth. “Men out for a good time, that’s what they looked like.”

  “One had a mask.” The first girl gave a watery snort. “You know how these young bravos are. It’s all so terribly entertaining to dress up like it’s Carnival and go to the slums!”

  “So he was young.” I took some care smoothing the hair back from Anna’s blood-mottled cheeks. “How young? A boy, or a young man?”

  “Who can tell behind a mask? He was young, that’s all, and he had money. Splashing coin all about while he played zara.”