The Serpent and the Pearl

  “Your Excellency?” A voice floated somewhere overhead. “Look what we’ve found!”

  “Sharp eyes,” replied a young man’s voice, and a booted foot kicked me over onto my back. I blinked at the yellow glare from the torches that now surrounded me like a witch hunt. “And what have we here?”

  In the jagged shadows of dawn and torchlight I saw a boy’s narrow amused face. A handsome face, with auburn hair and a pair of black bottomless eyes. The eyes were the last thing I saw before the dark swallowed me.

  Giulia

  I ’m a lazy creature, God knows, but I wasn’t used to such idleness as this. As an unmarried girl in my father’s house, there had always been some duty at hand: handwriting exercises to copy out for my tutor, an altar cloth to be embroidered under my mother’s exacting eye, the turns of the basse-danse to practice with my sister for a partner, songs by Machaut to finger on the lute. When I wasn’t occupied by tutors, my mother believed in making me useful: setting me to help the maids with the household mending, or taking me with her to dispense alms to beggars.

  And now? I had nothing to fill my days at all. The vast palazzo ran smoothly, servants whisking through their tasks and making their reports to Madonna Adriana, who sat in the middle of the busy web like a most competent spider. I had no tutors now to make me memorize verses of Dante, and the daily mending was done with no assistance from me. I could still embroider altar cloths, I suppose, but I hated embroidery. I could go to church, but I had only so many sins to confess. I was surrounded by more luxury than I’d ever dreamed of; I slept on silk and wore French brocades; I could eat roast peacock and strawberries for every meal if I wanted—the richness that lapped all around still took my breath away, and I won’t say I didn’t appreciate it. But I had nothing to do.

  “Tend your beauty,” Madonna Adriana said, patting my arm. “Hair like that needs daily sunning, you know. And if you don’t mind my saying so, you are putting on just a tiny bit of weight, so perhaps fewer candied cherries and some daily rides. We shall have to see about getting you a horse . . . Yes, do go brush that hair. Beauty like yours is a gift! God knows it won’t last forever, so you should get whatever you can from it while it’s in full bloom.”

  But there were only so many hours I could spend buffing my nails and brushing my hair and massaging rose-petal creams into my neck to keep it white and soft. I twanged flatly on my lute for a while, flipped through a book of verse Cardinal Borgia had sent me—but finally gave in to the temptation of the summer heat outside. I laced myself into a peach linen overdress embroidered about the bodice in spring flowers, and trailed in my bare feet down the shallow flights of marble steps leading from my chamber to one of the enclosed gardens within the Palazzo Montegiordano. Only to be accosted by a cherub in pale blue silk who flew across the garden staring at me as though I were a unicorn.

  “Is this her?” the cherub breathed, bobbing up and down like a puppy. “This is La Bella? Oh, Madonna Adriana, she’s beautiful! You said she was beautiful, but I didn’t know this beautiful!” And she flung her arms around my waist.

  “Ooof!” The child nearly took me off my feet. Righting her, I saw she was no child but a girl a year or two from betrothal age: eleven or twelve with a lively little face, pale blue eyes, and a cloud of curling blond hair just a shade darker than mine.

  “Lucrezia,” my mother-in-law chided, gliding down into the garden like a well-oared galleon. She had a boy by the hand, a few years younger than the girl, wide-eyed and curly-haired in a miniature doublet of slashed velvet.

  “I’m sorry, Madonna Giulia,” the girl said, and withdrew to make a beautiful little curtsy before me. “I am Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of His Eminence Cardinal Borgia, who said I was to make you love me if at all possible. And I very much want to make my father happy, so can you love me at once, please?”

  “Your father is very cunning,” I told her, but couldn’t help the laugh that burst out of me at her earnest expression.

  Madonna Adriana beamed. “This is Joffre, His Eminence’s youngest son,” she said, indicating the boy she held firmly by his plump ten-year-old hand. “They have been visiting their mother this past month or two, but they have finally returned home. Lucrezia has been bouncing since dawn to meet you.”

  “I have heard so much from my father,” the girl in blue confided. “He did not exaggerate at all. Do you really have hair down to your feet? Can I see it? Do you use a bleaching paste or just the sun? I would use a bleaching paste on my hair, but Madonna Adriana won’t let me—”

  I wanted to make my polite excuses and return to my chamber—refuse to be charmed by anything connected with Cardinal Borgia—but somehow I found myself dragged farther into the garden by my would-be lover’s bastard daughter as Madonna Adriana disappeared back into the sala with little Joffre. Lucrezia went on chattering even on the in-breath, and I should have enjoined her to be silent and godly as befitted a girl on the brink of womanhood. But I remembered being twelve and bursting with words no one wanted to hear, so rather than reprove her I smiled and unnetted my hair and shook it down around my feet.

  “My father said you had beautiful hair!” She clapped her hands in admiration. “He calls you Giulia la Bella.”

  “Does he?” I hesitated, but I couldn’t resist adding, “What else does he say about me?” Not that I was interested, of course. But I had to talk about something, didn’t I?

  “My father says he loves you,” little Lucrezia said, matter-of-factly. “I want hair like yours. How do you make it grow so long?”

  “Massage your scalp every night when you comb your hair out,” I found myself telling her. “Until your head tingles, like this—” And somehow we were both sitting in the grass under the sun, Lucrezia sitting with her back to me.

  “Ouch!”

  “It’s good if it hurts; that means it’s growing.” I rubbed her scalp until she yowled some more. “For beauty, you have to suffer a little.”

  Lucrezia tilted her little chin over one shoulder to look at me. “Is it worth it?”

  “Very much. Don’t let the priests tell you differently.” I produced the little silver comb that I always tucked into my sleeve and began stroking it through her untidy curls. “So your father talks about me?”

  “Yes, he wants to have you painted for his study! With a blue dress and a dove in your lap, as the Virgin.”

  Apt, I thought a touch sourly.

  “I’m to have my portrait painted soon too,” Lucrezia confided. “For my betrothed. He wants a look at me, and I have to look pretty, I have to. If I don’t he’ll marry someone else, and my heart will break!”

  “And who is your betrothed?” Gently I teased a knot out of a curl behind her ear.

  “Don Gaspare Aversa, Count of Procida.” She pronounced the name with satisfaction. “A very noble gentleman in Spain.”

  “A good match. Have you met him?”

  “No, but my father says he’s young and handsome. I’m only to have the best.” Lucrezia gave a wriggle of satisfaction. “Father loves me.”

  “Sit still,” I told her. “You’ve got tangles.”

  “I always do.” She heaved a gusty sigh. “I wish I didn’t have curls.”

  “Yes, you do. Because you won’t need a hot poker to make ringlets, the way I do.”

  She gave a little bounce of satisfaction at that, then sat still as I worked the comb. I found I was humming and felt a twinge that I realized was contentment. I hadn’t had a companion since I came to this palazzo, not really—not someone with whom I could sit and giggle, someone who wanted nothing more out of me than a few words of gossip and my hands combing her hair. Just Madonna Adriana and her coin counting, or the innumerable Orsini cousins who came to inspect me over plates of honeyed mostaccioli and make equally honeyed inquiries about why I hadn’t accompanied my husband to the country. I ask you!

  “Since when has my cousin’s house been taken over by Greek goddesses?” A deep voice sounded behind me, a voice I knew w
ell with its thread of amusement and its Spanish burr. “Demeter and Persephone, in the flesh.”

  Lucrezia scrambled to her feet, performed another exquisite curtsy in the grass, and flung herself at her father. I expected him to reprove her—my own long-dead father certainly would have set me on my feet with a stern little lecture on the tenets of womanly dignity—but Cardinal Borgia hugged his daughter tight, lifting her in the air so her blue skirts belled.

  “No, no,” he interrupted her as she began rattling off some question in Spanish. “Madonna Giulia doesn’t speak our Catalan, remember?”

  Lucrezia dropped easily out of Spanish. “Can I be painted as Persephone for my portrait for Don Gaspare? I’ll hold a pomegranate and wear flowers in my hair—”

  “Only if Madonna Giulia will consent to be painted as Demeter.” The Cardinal’s dark eyes moved to me. “As she sits now, with her hair around her and corn in her lap. What do you think, Lucrezia mia?”

  “I think she needs flowers for her hair too,” Lucrezia decided, and dashed at once to the rosebushes lining the rosy stone walls of the garden courtyard.

  “Clever, Your Eminence.” I threw my comb at Cardinal Borgia as he settled into the grass beside me and tossed his square cardinal’s hat carelessly beside the fountain. “Sending your daughter to help seduce me!”

  “Is it working?” He gave a lazy blink, leaning on one elbow like a Roman emperor.

  I smiled involuntarily, watching Lucrezia gather rosebuds into her skirt, her hair a bright aureole in the sun. “She is very charming.”

  “She is that.” He watched his daughter with undisguised fondness. “I breed beautiful daughters, Madonna Giulia. Would you like one?”

  “I want sons, thank you,” I said with a sniff worthy of my straitlaced sister. “Sons from my husband, not from you.”

  “Don’t parrot your duenna,” the Cardinal said amiably. “Women say they want sons, because they know their husbands want them. But beautiful women always want daughters.”

  I blinked. All right, so perhaps I’d dreamed of a daughter once I was married. A little girl with my fair hair and dark eyes, and Sandro’s outrageously long lashes which I somehow hadn’t inherited along with the eyes (which was injustice on a grand scale, but hopefully my daughter would be luckier). A little girl I could sit with in the sun, just as I had been sitting with little Lucrezia Borgia.

  Cardinal Borgia lay watching me. “She’d have my name,” he said, “if that daughter you bore was mine. And a nobleman for a husband, just as Lucrezia will.”

  “While I’m reviled as a whore and an adulteress, and my daughter is raised by Madonna Adriana instead of me?” I jerked my chin up. “Just like Lucrezia and her brothers? Little Joffre, who I just met, and Juan the young lecher, and that other one who just returned from the university in Pisa. Where is their mother now?”

  “Happy proprietress of three prosperous Roman inns and a slew of property along the Tiber,” the Cardinal said promptly. “All gifts from me. Vannozza has no cause to complain. We had ten years and four children together, she and I, and remain good friends. Her latest husband did not care for a slew of Borgia bastards in his home, so—” A Spanish shrug at the rosy walls of Madonna Adriana’s garden, followed by a chuckle. “And I can tell you Vannozza is not reviled by anybody, as an adulteress or anything else. They wouldn’t dare.”

  “Even though her children are all bastards?”

  “My dear girl, no one cares for such things! This isn't France, you know, or England, where everyone is either straight-laced or provincial.Our lords here, the Duke of Milan, the Duke of Ferrara, the King of Naples; they raise all their children together in luxury, and no one cares which child came from which womb! They're men of the world, and so am I.”

  “You put yourself equal with the King of Naples and the Duke of Milan, then?”

  “I put myself equal with any man living.”

  “Madonna Giulia, look!” Lucrezia ran up happily, spilling a skirtful of roses into my lap. “All red; they’ll be beautiful in your hair. May I?”

  “If you like.” I lifted my mass of hair from its pile on the grass and began to bundle it back into its net, but the Cardinal’s hand stopped me.

  “Leave it.” Was his voice a trifle hoarse? “I’ve not seen it loose before.”

  I pulled my hand away from his but let my hair drop around my shoulders again. Lucrezia whirled around me, a blue butterfly tucking a rose here, a bud there, exclaiming in delight as her father looked at me—and looked—and looked—

  I flushed. Most men have the good grace to drop their eyes when you catch them gaping, or at least feign interest in the Pinturicchio altarpiece or flowing fountain or dogfight or anything that they can find to look at just past your shoulder. “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare, Eminence?” I said tartly.

  “Yes.” But he went on looking, and his eyes were black and full of fires.

  “There!” Lucrezia stood back, satisfied. “Now you look exactly like Demeter, all peach and gold and red.”

  “Gather some more flowers, then.” I smiled up at her. “And I’ll weave them into a crown for you, Persephone.”

  “Blue flowers,” she decided. “To go with my dress—” And she skipped off in search of violets and hyacinths among the roses.

  “I’ll hate to lose her to a husband,” Cardinal Borgia said as naturally as if he had not been gazing at me a moment ago with his heart in his eyes. “She’s my comfort. Sons are always trouble—”

  I thought of leering sixteen-year-old Juan, and agreed.

  “—but daughters are a man’s delight.” He watched Lucrezia gathering flowers, and shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder why I chose the Church, Giulia. Scheming and whispering and plotting, and that College of Cardinals like a nest of chattering red hens . . . when I could have this.” He gestured around him. “Sunlight. Flowers. Children. You.”

  “You can’t have me,” I told him. “And I don’t believe you at all, Eminence. You like scheming and whispering and plotting. Don’t try to tell me otherwise just to tug on my heart.”

  He grinned, and it surprised me. His eagle’s nose and watchful black eyes took on a different cast above that youthful white grin in the swarthy face. “I do have some regrets. You, for example.”

  I raised skeptical brows. “I suppose if you weren’t a cardinal you would have married me?”

  “No, I’d probably have some rich wife as square as a four-poster bed,” he said candidly. “But I’d have the time to devote a week to seducing you properly. Thanks to the College of Cardinals and their dithering about the Pope dying, I’ve hardly been able to devote any time to you at all.”

  “A week?” I batted a rose out of my eye that had come loose from Lucrezia’s twining. “Is that how long it usually takes you to seduce a woman? What a sorry opinion you must have of female virtue.”

  “On the contrary. What I have is a high opinion of my own skills. But even I need time,” he complained. “Normally one begins with a necklace, then there is a banquet with the right kind of music and light conversation. Then perhaps a trip to the countryside where I could show how magnificently I sit a horse. A few more gifts—perhaps a perfume that I had mixed for you specially; I have a very good nose for a woman’s scent. What’s that you’re wearing now, honeysuckle and gillyflower? I thought so. Then a more intimate cena, on a pleasure boat along the Tiber, if one can find a place where the mud doesn’t stink to the heavens and ruin the mood . . . yes, usually it takes a week.”

  He sighed. “And yet here we are, nearly two months later: you still laced into that dress when you should be naked in the grass right now with a golden-haired little girl already growing in your belly, and I have the College of Cardinals to thank for it.” Rodrigo Borgia cocked an eyebrow at me. “One thing to be thankful for if the Pope hurries up and dies. I’ll finally have time to devote to you.”

  My face flamed the same color as the roses in my hair. I didn’t know where to put my eyes, or my h
ands, and I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say. All I could think was that I’d had plenty of men look at me as though they wished they could see me naked, but this was the first time I’d had one tell me so. It wasn’t poetic, not at all. Did Petrarch ever say a word about Laura lying naked in the grass? No, because it wasn’t poetic, and it wasn’t romantic, and it certainly wasn’t seemly either, so why did my skin feel warm all over? I fumbled for words, any words, around a tongue gone suddenly thick. Oh, Holy Virgin, my mother’s instructions on the art of polite discourse had never prepared me for a conversation like this! “So the Pope is dying?” I finally managed to say, inanely.

  “Yes, quite soon. Of course he’s been dying for years, so who knows if he means it this time.”

  The Cardinal turned on his back in the grass, putting his dark head into my lap.

  I leaned over him, glaring. “Did I say you could do that?”

  “No.”

  “Move at once!”

  “No.”

  “Now, really, Eminence—”

  “Spill me out by all means.” His eyes sparkled. “Lucrezia’s feelings will be hurt, of course—she is very protective of me, especially when I’m tired.”

  I studied his face upside down, the dark eyes sunken and the swarthy skin grained under them. “You do look tired,” I admitted, grudgingly.

  “Dying popes mean more work for everyone else. And since it’s me who will call the Conclave once he’s gone, well, the bribes begin to fly. Do you fancy an emerald bracelet? Cardinal Piccolomini slipped it under my plate just yesterday. He wants my vote to make him Pope, of course. They all do. Cardinal della Rovere is ready to stab me on sight just for the way I’ve been nodding when Cardinal Carafa whispers in my ear. I nod as much as possible. Irritating della Rovere is one of my chief pleasures in life.”