The Serpent and the Pearl

by Kate Quinn

  She looked sad again, and I wondered about those highly colored rumors from the grooms. The argument between Orsino Orsini and his bride. “Signore Orsini is very handsome,” I murmured to be diplomatic, as I moved on to yank up a good stalk of nightshade. No good for cooking, nightshade, but it’s excellent for poisoning rats.

  “Yes,” Madonna Giulia said in a flat voice. “My husband is very handsome.”

  Another little silence. The sun was rising higher now, already drying the dew on the frilly parsley leaves I was tossing into my basket by the handful for vivarole zuppa. A clear blue sky—in another hour it would be hot, the sun laying in a haze over the garden, the smell of the herbs drowned out by the stench of the narrow crooked Roman alleys rising up outside in a waft of sulfur and baked rot with a whiff of dead fish from the river.

  “My mother used to say that a woman has three choices.” Madonna Giulia bent her head to the honeysuckle branch again. “Wife, nun—or whore. And once you’ve chosen, there’s no changing it.”

  I could hear her thoughts continue on silently. She certainly wasn’t a nun, and she wasn’t really a wife either—not with a husband she wasn’t allowed to see. And Cardinal Borgia pressing to make her his whore . . .

  “My mother said the same thing to me,” I said. “But she was wrong.”

  Madonna Giulia’s head rose. “Why?”

  “Because things never turn out as neat and final as that.” I gathered a handful of fresh rocket for the green sauce I was planning to make later, flicking a spider out of the basket. “Nuns become whores, whores become wives, wives become nuns.” I shrugged. “And some are a combination of two or three. Whichever we are, we all get by.”

  Madonna Giulia looked startled at that thought. Startled, and thoughtful. She twirled a honeysuckle blossom between her fingers, silent, and I finished filling my basket with the herbs Marco and his other cooks would need that day. Borage flowers, blue and fresh, for adding color to a salad . . . fresh chard, for a Bolognese tourte I meant to crisp up this morning on a sheet of copper . . . handfuls of spring onions to be simmered with the drippings of a spit-roasted haunch of mutton. And one last thing—I left my basket for a moment with a brief curtsy, vanished from the herb garden, and came back with an apron full of blossoms.

  “Gillyflowers,” I said, presenting them to Madonna Giulia in a waft of their clean spicy fragrance. “If it pleases you, I’ll take them to the kitchens with your honeysuckle there and simmer them in good clean water to make scent.”

  “Would you have any of those little honeyed strawberry things?” She brightened again. “To eat while we’re waiting for the scent to boil? I always eat when I’m waiting.”

  “I believe I would,” I said, and decided I liked my new mistress.

  Giulia

  I thought I’d go for a ride,” I announced when Madonna Adriana looked up at me. My mother-in-law sat drinking a cup of warm spiced hippocras and gossiping with her steward, the only member of the household required to sit and nod as long as she felt like talking about the rising cost of everything. “Have the grooms saddle my new mare for me?”

  “Rather a hot day for a ride, my dear.”

  “I don’t believe I asked your opinion,” I said evenly.

  Madonna Adriana only smiled. “At least take a proper retinue with you; the streets are seething.” She crossed herself. “It will be even worse when the Pope dies, God bless his soul.”

  My finest dress wasn’t suited for the heat—mirage pools gleamed in every piazza, and even the pigeons seemed too listless to fly upward when the church bells tolled. The scarlet figured silk with the gold-embroidered bodice wasn’t suited for riding either, but I badly needed the invisible armor that always sheathed me when I knew I was looking my best, so I threw my fine skirts across the saddle any which way and turned my mare out of the stable yard. I wasn’t much of a rider—I grew up in Capodimonte where trees and hills and lakeside paths crowded the eye instead of city alleys, but my mother disapproved of women who followed the hunt and had ensured that my riding lessons had been mostly concerned with keeping my skirts draped and my back straight while sitting pillion. But my new mare had gaits as smooth as milk and turned at the lightest touch of the rein. My guards clopped behind me, impassive in their livery with the Borgia bull, and I could see a pair of women whispering behind their hands and market baskets as my little party trotted past. The old bull’s new heifer, I imagined them saying. Her husband doesn’t even care, isn’t she lucky? My husband would cut the heart out of any man who tried to make me his whore, man of God or no!

  I eased the mare to a stop when we reached our destination and slid down from my tooled saddle. “You’re an angel,” I whispered, feeding her a bit of that so-expensive sugar I’d snitched from Madonna Adriana’s table. I dropped a kiss on her nose and turned to my guards. “Remain here,” I said, and passed through the wide palazzo doors.

  The elaborate sala where I’d danced at my wedding feast had been dismantled. The long tables had been cleared of their fine cloths and upended; the tapestries were being stripped off the walls and rolled up by busy manservants; maids trundled out the delicately carved footstools one by one. The daybed with its crimson satin cover was gone, and I saw a steward hand-packing a crate with the Murano glass goblets in which a company of guests had raised a toast to my marriage. The room was half sacked, half furnished, draped with dropcloths, bustling with activity around a man it took me a moment to recognize because for once he was not in scarlet robes.

  “Madonna Giulia,” Rodrigo Borgia said, turning from the lists he was scanning with his steward, and making me his fluid courtier’s bow. “How fortuitous. Here I’ve been locked away with a cluster of fretting cardinals for a week, and the moment I step out for a private task, you appear: water in the desert! Just stand there for a moment, and allow me to drink in the sight of you. What luck that you happened to call when I was for once at home.”

  “Not luck at all,” I said, moving out of the way as a pair of maids scurried out with a carved wall bench. “I suborned Lucrezia. She always seems to know your doings; I suspect she charms it out of your guards and servants. She told me this morning you’d come back here to do”—I looked around the chaos—“what, exactly?”

  “I thought it prudent to pack away the more precious of my belongings, now that the Pope is so close to the end.” He waved a ringed hand at the footmen trotting off with shoulder loads of rolled tapestries, the gold and silver plate being carefully packed into straw-bedded crates by maids with gentle hands. “The Pope finally is dying, by the way. One assumes his daily dram of human blood proved ineffective.”

  I didn’t care if the Pope was dying or living, or if he had drunk human blood or angels’ milk to preserve his health. I studied my Cardinal, so different in shirt and breeches and hose rather than his scarlet finery. Not a handsome man, not with that eagle’s beak of a nose and heavy chin and full amused mouth. Not a young man either; he had lines about his eyes and I saw graying hair curling crisply at his burly chest above the lacing of his shirt and on his broad forearms below the rolled-up sleeves. Weight had begun to settle in that big frame, making his shoulders heavier and his belly broader than it must have been when he was young—but he was tall enough to carry it. A bull of a man, indeed.

  “How old were you when we last had a papal Conclave?” he continued, that deep bass voice rolling about the painted vaults of the sala. “Perhaps you don’t remember that charming custom the mob has of sacking the old residence of the new Pope? One can track the rise and fall of the votes by counting what looters come to which doors . . . not that I have any likelihood of donning the papal tiara, of course, but sometimes the sacking begins before the vote is strictly over, and encompasses the losers as well as the winners.” He gestured around the rapidly emptying room. “Should any looters come to my palazzo, they will find it empty of anything worth stealing.”

  “Almost.” I threw back the cloak I’d worn in the summer heat to co
ver my rich dress on the seething streets. His necklace looped my throat, the huge teardrop pearl almost disappearing between my breasts. He stopped in his tracks, his eyes fastening on it.

  Wife, nun, or whore, my mother’s voice whispered in my ear. Once you’ve chosen, there’s no changing it. I’d become a wife, and I’d assumed my life complete: fulfilled, finished, tied up with a ribbon. Things hadn’t quite turned out that way, had they?

  My Cardinal stood gazing at me. I reached into my sleeve, taking something out and holding it in both hands, and his breath caught as he saw his pomegranate. The fruit’s rosy skin split easily, even though my hands were trembling, and I heard Carmelina the cook’s crisp Venetian voice in my ear now. Nuns become whores, whores become wives, wives become nuns. And some are a combination of two or three. Words that had echoed strangely through my head all week. Was I here because of them?

  No matter. I was here. And I never looked away from my Cardinal’s dark gaze as I dug half a dozen jewel-like seeds from the pomegranate and swallowed them.

  He crossed the floor in three violent strides and seized my hand, bringing it up to his face. I felt the roughness of beard stubble as he pressed each of my pink-stained fingers one by one against his mouth. His arm circled my waist like a chain, and his thumb had slipped from the nape of my neck down inside the edge of my shift, caressing slowly back and forth between the twin points of my shoulder blades. The pomegranate fell from my hand, rolling on the stripped floor, and I twined my fingers through his black hair as I pulled him hard against me. “Out,” he said to the servants as he set his lips between my breasts just below the pearl, and as he trailed kisses upward toward my throat I heard rather than saw them fleeing with nervous stifled titters. Then I felt a hard mouth on mine, kissing me as luxuriantly as if we had all day, as if there weren’t a dying Pope and an imminent papal Conclave to take precedence, as if nothing at all could take precedence over this.

  “Bed,” my Cardinal whispered, lifting me up as if I weighed no more than his cardinal’s hat and carrying me back through the empty echoing rooms. “Fortunately there are still one or two not yet packed away—”

  “Wait,” I managed to murmur against his mouth. “Wait—” And I squirmed free of his arms.

  “What?” He cupped my face in his big hands. “What, Giulia?”

  I was breathing as hard as though I had run a race, and my mouth felt swollen from kissing. My heart hammered. I felt more naked under his eyes than I had ever felt in my bath. “You should know something.” I felt a scarlet blush mounting up toward my face, but I held his gaze steadily. “I’ve been— Orsino bedded with me—”

  I saw the snap of some emotion in my Cardinal’s eyes—anger? Outrage?—and rushed to finish. “You mustn’t punish Orsino. He’s my husband, it was his right—and it was only once. And he doesn’t—he won’t—he’s gone back to Carbognano now. He doesn’t want me. Not enough.” I lifted my chin. “But I’m no virgin anymore, and if that means you don’t want me either—”

  I stopped. Every inch of my skin was vibrating to be held, to be lifted and kissed and comforted, but I refused to look away from the big swarthy man standing so close to me. I hadn’t solved the guilt-laced mess that my marriage had become by bedding my husband—and maybe that one act had doomed anything with my Cardinal. But if I was going to break my vows, I wouldn’t do it by lying to him. If he didn’t want me now, I didn’t want him. I’d go home and cry alone.

  He considered me a long moment. Then he walked around me, leisurely, and the skin of my neck prickled where I could feel his warm breath. “My dear girl,” he said, and his fingers at my back began slowly unlacing my gown. “I don’t care in the slightest.”

  My voice came out in a squeak. “You—you don’t?”

  “Virginity is a vastly overrated thing.” My bodice loosened, he began on my sleeves. “It’s pleasure I want to give you”—one sleeve slid off my arm to the floor—“and most virgins get precious little of that.” The other sleeve joined it. He put his hands to my shoulders and slid my red dress away, down to the floor in a ripple of scarlet silk. His hands glided back up my arms, the backs of his fingers barely brushing my skin through the thin shift, and I forgot how to breathe.

  “So to answer your question,” he said conversationally, easing the shift off my naked shoulders, “yes, I still want you. I want you more than any woman I have ever met in my life, Giulia Farnese. I want you more than the Pope’s throne.”

  He set his lips against my bare shoulder for a long moment, and then he turned me so we stood face-to-face again. I stood naked and quivering, but he didn’t look at my body; he looked into my eyes. “Do you believe me?”

  For answer, I yanked the pearled net from the nape of my neck and shook my hair down around me in a billow of gold. I’d wanted to give myself to Orsino like this on our wedding night but I’d been bundled into a sheeted bed in a dark chamber instead, and hadn’t had the courage to get out of it because a wife above all things must be modest. But modesty wasn’t required in a mistress, so I faced my lover in nothing but a cloak of loose hair and a pearl.

  His eyes were full of me. He held out a hand and said something in Spanish I didn’t understand.

  I reached out, linking my fingers with his. “What does that mean?”

  His free hand slid around the smooth skin of my waist, up to my breast. “‘Come to me,’” he whispered, and he lifted me up and carried me back through the empty, echoing rooms. I was too breathless to reply, but not too breathless to look around as he laid me down on a carved bed with a striped cover of black and white velvet. The same bed I’d lain in alone on my wedding night, now moved out of its chamber for dismantling, and I had a fleeting moment of wonder. Just what had I done?

  Then he was kissing me again, mixing Italian and Spanish with every other word as he pulled me to the velvet bed beneath him.

  “Rodrigo,” I whispered. And let it happen.

  Leonello

  Ipassed my imprisonment calculating the mathematical odds of imminent death. Frankly, my gift for analysis was proving not at all helpful. The odds of survival were decidedly against me.

  Murder is a small enough sin, providing the victim is no one of great value. No one had fussed about searching for Anna’s killers, after all. Who cared for the death of one common tavern maid? A cardinal’s steward, that was a more serious matter, but not insurmountable. In the end, most courts of law prefer money to blood. Had I been a rich man, I would have laid a judicious bet that my punishment for knifing a man through the throat would be a hefty fine and a sentence of banishment from Rome. One could live with such a punishment; there were other cities besides Rome to make a living, and they all had drunken men waiting to be relieved of their money by a man who knew what to do with a deck of cards.

  But I had no money for such a bribe, no assets worth seizing. And a dwarf could hardly be sentenced to the galleys to pull an oar or exiled to some ragtag army to fight Turks. Besides, if there was anything a court of law liked better than coin, it was a spectacle of public punishment to give the mob. The hanging of a dwarf, now that was an event to draw a crowd. Better than a play any day.

  I looked around my dank little cell. Not much bigger than the room I rented in the Borgo. The difference was all in the details. My rented room was meticulously clean, the floor swept and polished instead of riddled with rat droppings; the bed an impeccable square of clean linens instead of this pallet of moldy straw. My room had a window with a tiny sliver of a view out onto the domes and spires of the Vatican, a bracket for tapers that gave cheerful yellow light when I stayed up too late reading as I always did. My room had a modest chest of clothes and my even more precious cache of books, mostly purchased from the printing shop downstairs. That printing shop survived chiefly on cheap smeary broadsides and scurrilous pamphlets, but over the years I’d culled a fair collection out of their shelves: Marcus Aurelius, even though I thought him a poxy bore; some plays by Sophocles; Dante and Boccaccio an
d Ovid. My books. For my days I had cards, but at night I had books. And now I was stuck in a cell darkened to perpetual twilight, and I doubted I would ever read a book again.

  My eyes stung.

  I didn’t even know how long I had been held here, wherever here was. A few days? Maybe I’d be saved until after the Pope died, whenever that was. Rome always erupts into violence when a pope dies—what better way to keep the mob calm than to give them a dwarf’s bloody execution?

  Perhaps I had another week. Or perhaps only a few days. However long poor old Innocent could hang on.

  I almost wished he’d hurry up and die. There were only so many hours I could pass massaging the cruel aches of my shackled legs and running mental odds on my method of execution. My battered deck of cards and the worn volume of Cicero’s letters had been taken from my doublet when the guards searched me. Providing the boredom didn’t kill me first, I’d soon be marched out through a jeering crowd, up a crude flight of steps to a gallows, and feel a rope snugged about my neck. Or perhaps I’d be lucky. Perhaps they’d let me go after lopping off my hands, or my nose, or my ears. Cut out my viper tongue; gouge out my eyes. Then let me go, as an example of Christian mercy.

  Dio. Sometimes I wish I were a stupider man. A clever imagination is no blessing in a cell.

  So I was almost glad when a guard with the Borgia bull on his chest came and took me away.

  I could barely walk after being kept shackled so long. The third time I tripped, doubled over with knifelike pains down my exercise-starved legs, the guardsman simply hauled me up by one elbow and dragged me along so my toes trailed the floor. I was content to be dragged, bumping up a series of stone staircases, through a long passage and then a richer series of anterooms. Elaborate carpets, gorgeously dyed tapestries, gold and silver plate proudly displayed to gleam on an intricately carved credenza . . . Where was I?