The Serpent and the Pearl

  “So—” Madonna Giulia fixed me with a pointed finger, dark eyes merry. “Who gets the benefit of your experience with halved limes, Carmelina? Do you have a sweetheart?”

  “Do tell, do tell!” the cry went up.

  “Certainly not.” I patted my stiff face. “Surely it’s time to wash this mask off?”

  “Don’t be evasive!” Giulia uncurled her baby’s little fist and waved it at me. “Wait, I’ve got it. It’s Leonello, isn’t it?”

  I had been reaching for a towel to wipe my face, and I nearly dropped it. “Leonello?”

  “He can’t take his eyes off you, you know. Every time you come into a room, he stares and stares until you leave again.”

  Because he’s trying to figure out all my secrets, that’s why. “Not Leonello,” I said instead, and began to scrub at my cheeks with the towel. “I can’t stand the little wretch.”

  “He’s stunted.” One of the other maids wrinkled her nose. “Besides that, he’s fair cruel. Said I had a nose like a hook, and made up jokes about it for days until all the stewards were laughing too. All because I asked if dwarves were really born with hair all over them like bear cubs—”

  “And he’s got all those knives. Stab you as soon as bed you, I should think.”

  “But he’s clever,” Giulia overrode them. “And funny; he can always make me laugh—”

  “I’ve had him,” said Pantisilea. “He’s short, but that doesn’t make such a difference, lying down . . .”

  “Better you than me,” I said. I wouldn’t take Leonello in a thousand years.

  “It’s that good-looking cousin of yours, isn’t it?” another maid grinned, cracking her own drying mask. “You’re bedding Maestro Santini on the sly, admit it—”

  “Certainly not.” Tell these laughing maids anything, and even if they did inhabit a different world from the scullions and undercooks, there still wouldn’t be a scullion or undercook who didn’t know everything by next week. I wasn’t about to tell a soul here that I’d begun keeping a prudent store of those Neapolitan limes on hand in my chamber, for those rare occasions when Marco won at the dicing table instead of losing, and came home victorious and amorous. Those were the nights he nuzzled at my ears and told me I was pretty even if I was as tall as a man, though I suspected most of my appeal came from the fact that I couldn’t pester him for marriage as any of the other maids would have done. I’d been putting off his attentions since I came to Rome, as was prudent, but I’d needed a favor out of him if I wanted to keep Bartolomeo on as apprentice . . . and after Marco tumbled me back onto my bedclothes like an eager hound, beaming from a recent win at the zara board, it had been easy to pick my moment and murmur just how we could slide a new apprentice past Madonna Adriana without the fees. And after that, if Marco came prowling at my door every now and then when he felt like a bit of a romp, at least he understood the need to do it discreetly.

  “No pinching my bum or sneaking a kiss where anyone can see us,” I’d said sternly that first time, putting my nose right up against Marco’s on the pillow. “I’ll get nothing but snickers and sly jokes from the scullions if they think I’m giving it to the maestro di cucina. And if the maids find out, they’ll think you’re only keeping me on for a whore, and then won’t I have a time getting any work out of them.”

  “Sworn to secrecy,” my cousin grinned. There would be no such condemnation for him, of course, if he were to be caught bedding me—an unlimited supply of pretty maidservants was one of the great privileges of a maestro di cucina’s position. But that was the way of the world, and there was no sense wailing about it, so at that point I’d just yanked my shift over my head and enjoyed myself. It counted for sin, I suppose. Certainly the priests would all say so. But Marco had done me a favor in taking me in, not to mention fudging the kitchen accounts for Madonna Adriana so it looked like Bartolomeo’s apprentice fees had been paid. It seemed wiser to keep him happy when he wanted a bedmate. Not to mention the fact that he was clean and sweet-smelling between the sheets, and more than pleasant to look on without his clothes.

  That, I suppose, was the sinful part. Though when you’ve robbed a church, fornication seems like fairly small change as far as sins go.

  One of the maids crowed, pouncing on my small involuntary smile. “It is Maestro Santini you’re bedding, Carmelina, admit it! I don’t blame you; he’s near as handsome as Cesare Borgia—”

  “I’ve had him,” Pantisilea volunteered.

  “Maestro Santini, or Cesare Borgia?” I asked. Anything to divert the subject away from me and my possible bedmates.

  “Both. And I can tell you, Marco Santini’s handsome, but the Archbishop . . .” Sighs all around from the maids. We were all mad for the young Archbishop of Valencia—I had to admit, even my sensible knees had buckled when he aimed that one passing grin at me, up on the loggia when I’d gone to shout at Leonello. I felt a moment’s envy of Pantisilea, but Madonna Giulia was shaking her head.

  “I don’t see what all of you see in Cesare,” she scolded us. “Really, all your heads turned by a handsome face! He’s cold as a corpse, you know. After I saw how he reacted to that nasty business—”

  “What nasty business?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “That poor girl in the Borgo who was found killed?” Madonna Giulia grimaced. “The one found staked down, with a blade through each hand.”

  We all shivered and crossed ourselves.

  “Now, I heard this direct from the Holy Father—I wouldn’t be telling you, but it’s going to be all over the city in a week anyway.” Madonna Giulia snuggled baby Laura closer, as though suddenly feeling a draft. “His Holiness had the papal guards clear that poor girl’s body away, since there was so much uproar. And one of the blades through the girl’s hand was just a common kitchen knife, but the other was a good dagger. Toledo steel, with a filigreed hilt and a sapphire the size of a pigeon’s egg.”

  We looked at each other, blank. There wasn’t a one of us who didn’t know that dagger by sight. We’d all seen it with our own eyes, resting on Cesaer Borgia’s hip whenever he abandoned his ecclesiastical robes.

  The day was still warm, but suddenly I felt chilled.

  Little Pia said what we were all thinking. “Well, surely it doesn’t mean . . .”

  “Of course not.” Madonna Giulia waved the uneasy unspoken suggestion away. “Someone stole it to slander him; I don’t doubt that. But it was his reaction to it all. Any man would be furious, wouldn’t he, if he thought someone was spreading such foul implications? The Holy Father was certainly angry—he doesn’t care if anyone starts nasty rumors about him, but let anyone make an attack against his children—” Giulia shook her head. “Even Juan was raging up and down, swearing vengeance on whoever had done it. But Cesare, he just smiled and put the dagger back at his belt. And when Juan asked him how he’d lost it, you know that snide way he likes jabbing people, Cesare just said, ‘I didn’t lose it.’”

  We looked at each other again. The cold little chill spread to my stomach and sank in. I could just hear the young Archbishop’s cool voice, the way it never held any emotion at all.

  “So what kind of man doesn’t care if the whole city thinks he’s a murderer?” Madonna Giulia asked. “His Holiness wanted to cover everything up—as much as you can ever cover up something like this, anyway—and Cesare just said, ‘Let them talk.’ It’ll be all over Rome in a week, the news about the dagger, and Cesare doesn’t care. He’s handsome,” Giulia concluded, “but he’s a snake.”

  “About as limber as one,” Pantisilea agreed. “I don’t mind telling you, he likes some very odd things. Between the sheets, I mean. Not that there were sheets involved, with me. It wasn’t anything I’d really want to do again, truth be told. You can’t imagine the places I got bruised—”

  Giulia covered her ears. “No more details, please!”

  “I wouldn’t mind a few more,” one of the other maids said, and the odd uneasy silence cracked. Guilty giggles rippled th
rough our little circle as the chatter began to flow again. Madonna Giulia tilted her head back, damp blond hair sliding on its wide hat brim, and began wiping the flaking mask off her face with a damp cloth.

  “Let’s get ourselves prettified for Viterbo, shall we?” she suggested in a brighter voice. “It’s just the place for a romantic tryst—love among the summer breezes, with the scent of flowers everywhere! Pia, you need a good thyme and fig mask to cool that sunburn you got at the market . . . Pantisilea, the mint and rosemary bleaching paste if you really want to whiten up those teeth against that lovely olive complexion . . . and Carmelina, cucumber-parsley milk with a hot towel compress, infallible for soft skin . . .”

  My mistress sounded relieved to be moved on from the thought of grim things like daggers in the night. But I looked up then and I saw Leonello, standing halfway down the steps into the garden as though he’d frozen in place. He was not smiling.

  “Taking up eavesdropping now?” I demanded, scraping the last of the mask off my face. But he looked at me expressionlessly, and then he turned and reversed out of the garden.

  Leonello

  The masked man melted toward me from the vaulted shadows.

  I jerked upright on my stone wall bench, breath freezing behind my teeth. He found out, I thought inconsequentially. He found out I was asking questions, heard I was making inquiries about the women who died staked to tables. Curiosity was said to kill cats; what would it do to dwarves? Dio.

  I wondered if the masked man would pin my palms to the floor with knives too, before he pulled my head back by the hair to bare my throat.

  My thoughts might have frozen, but my hands did not. The finger blade at my wrist cuff popped into one hand and the knife tucked into my boot top leaped into the other as the man in black came padding noiselessly toward me, eyes glittering behind the half mask.

  “Don’t kill me, little lion man,” Cesare Borgia said from behind the mask. “My father would not thank you for that.”

  The Pope’s son tossed his mask aside, revealing the familiar lean Borgia face. Even with the mask, I should have recognized the neatly clipped auburn beard, the lithe serpentine grace, the ever-present shadow behind him who was blank-eyed Michelotto. Just Cesare Borgia, I thought, but my hands would not relinquish the Toledo blades. I had to force the knife back into its boot sheath, and when I looked down I saw my fingers were trembling.

  “It is unwise to approach an armed man while wearing a mask, Your Excellency,” I said, and heard my voice come cool and remote into the odd echoes of the arched windowless chamber. “Your Eminence, that is. My apologies; I’m not yet used to the red hat.” Nor was Rome. The Pope had elevated a batch of his supporters to cardinals in order to bolster his votes in the College; that was business as usual in papal politics—but for one of those cardinals to be his own bastard son, and a boy of a mere eighteen years . . .

  And when there were such strange and violent rumors beginning to circulate through the city about that same boy.

  “I’m not used to the red hat myself, yet.” The new Cardinal Borgia looked around the stone vaults, lit by long beeswax tapers and casting odd flickering shadows over the wall benches. “And I come masked because I like a long lone ride from time to time. Better if my father’s enemies don’t know they can find me unattended.”

  “What about your own enemies?” The question came unbidden.

  He smiled. “I have no enemies.”

  Of course not. “You’ve just come from Rome, Your Eminence?”

  “Yes. Some news for my father, from the French and Spanish ambassadors.”

  “Miles on a horse, just to give some news?”

  “I did say I liked a long lone ride.”

  Yes, he did. He was frequently alone, Cesare Borgia, taking only Michelotto for a guard when he went out. Unlike his brother who had never gone anywhere without a pack of thugs and toadies, and young Lucrezia who was always surrounded by Giulia Farnese and Madonna Adriana and a half-dozen other giggling women in the papal seraglio. But the Pope’s eldest son seemed to prefer his own company.

  So did I, of course. But if there was anything I knew about the solitary men of the world, being one myself, it was that they kept their own company so they would not have to explain their actions to others.

  What do you do in all those lone hours, Your Eminence?

  He was stripping his riding gloves off now, tossing them down on the wall bench as he dismissed Michelotto. “Is His Holiness within?”

  “With Madonna Giulia. He complained it was too hot, but she persuaded him to take the waters for his health, to ease his humours. They may be . . . some time.”

  My mistress’s low rippling laugh bubbled from the other side of the door, and the sound of splashing. The hot springs of Viterbo were famous—the ancient Romans had bathed here, quipping in their clipped sonorous Latin instead of our lazy vulgar Italian as they soaked in the healing sulfur springs under the sky. Pope Nicholas V had ordered massive baths erected, and now instead of sunny skies and arching trees overhead we had a battlemented, crenellated pile of marble and stone. Now the bathers tripped down shallow flights of stone steps and flitted along vaulted halls in their towels to reach the same steaming-hot springs. Giulia Farnese had tugged her papal lover through the arched doors with a wicked little laugh, flicking his entourage back with one small white hand, and the doors had closed on her shriek as the Holy Father tossed his shirt aside to reveal a swarthy bull’s chest and tossed her bodily into the bubbling pool. There had been some quarrel between them after the Duke of Gandia’s departure, but all appeared to be mended.

  “Where are the others?” Cesare Borgia asked, looking around the vaulted antechamber. “The Holy Father’s entourage?” Doublets and shirts, discarded shoes and belts, a stack of snowy towels, and a chessboard and a flagon of wine lay scattered along the wall benches. I sat alone on a folded cloak under a silver branch of candles, a book resting facedown over my knee.

  “Taken themselves to the next set of springs, since His Holiness indicated he did not wish company in this one.” Idly I moved a pawn on the chessboard beside me. The last players had abandoned their game partway through; black was eight moves from winning.

  “You do not care for the baths, Messer Leonello?” Cesare Borgia discarded his cloak in a careless shrug, dropping it to the floor beside his mask.

  “I killed my first man in a steam room,” I found myself saying. “I’ve never cared for them since.”

  “Steam rooms, or killing?”

  “Either.”

  He flopped to the wall bench beside me. I moved another pawn on the chessboard, and he studied the pieces. “Black is nine moves from winning.”

  “Eight.”

  “Play me.”

  It was not a request. “With pleasure, Your Eminence.”

  The bass rumble of the Pope’s laughter sounded through the bolted doors to the bathing rooms, and I sat outside with the Pope’s son as he swiftly reset the chessboard. “Black or white?” I asked, and found my mouth inexplicably dry.

  The gleam of his teeth showed in the dim room. “Black.”

  I rotated the board. Carved ivory pieces standing in their ranks against carved ebony . . . but all I could see was blood welling in the dimple of a sweet, dead girl . . . and a black mask lying on a stone floor . . . and a dagger with a sapphire in its hilt.

  I took a deep breath and moved my first pawn. “Go on,” I said. “Ask.”

  “Ask what?”

  “Did I truly kill my first man in a steam room?” Cesare Borgia was clever; I’d never get this conversation where I wanted it unless I made him curious.

  “All right, Messer Leonello.” Cesare Borgia moved a black pawn to meet mine. “Did you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was seventeen. He stalked me there after a card game. I’d won the last scudi out of his purse, and he was angered.”

  “You used a knife?” Another black pawn advanced.

  “Poorly—the man slip
ped on the wet floor, down low enough for me to strike.” I moved a knight out onto the checkered field of battle. “I stabbed until he looked like a cut of cheese.”

  “Sloppy,” said Cesare. “Only a clean kill is a good kill.”

  “Surely any kill one can walk away from unscathed is a good kill?”

  “No. Killing is a skill like any other. It should be practiced until it comes easily.”

  “And what was your first kill, Your Eminence?”

  “I am a man of the cloth, not the knife.” Cesare moved his bishop toward me, giving its little carved miter a caress.

  “But you have killed.” I kept my eyes from straying to the mask on the floor. But I could see it, oh yes, I could see it very clearly. “I know the look.”

  He looked at me across the board a moment, then shrugged. “A footpad. He wanted my purse.”

  “And did you use a knife too?”

  “Poorly.” The gleam of teeth again. “It took me four tries to cut his throat. But I was only sixteen.”

  “Young.”

  “We Borgias age quickly.” He advanced his queen. “We have to. We all die young.”

  “Your father has not.” Another rumble of laughter came from the bolted doors as if in answer, accompanied by Giulia’s throaty murmur. Rodrigo Borgia sounded very vigorously alive indeed.

  “The exception to the family rule.” Cesare dismissed his father. “My older brother died young—Pedro Luis. And one of my halfsisters in Spain.” He sounded remarkably unconcerned by their fates. “I imagine I’ll be next.”

  “The thought doesn’t seem to trouble you.”

  “Better to die young and in a saddle than in bed as an old man.”

  “Perhaps.” I fingered my own queen; moved a bishop instead. “Tell me, why did you kill your footpad? Surely you could have chased him off.”

  “He angered me. Besides, I wanted to know what it was like.”

  “Killing?”

  “Yes. I knew I would have to do it one day or another. And I thought, ‘Why not now?’” He took one of my pawns.