Madonna Adriana clicked her tongue in disapproval. The men shared lascivious grins, and Lucrezia jabbed an elbow into her husband’s ribs. No one seemed inclined to make a guess, but the Countess did not seem to mind anyone taking their time.
“The Birth of Venus,” I said at last into the small silence. “Also Botticelli. Though you are lacking a seashell to stand upon, Madonna Caterina, and you should have taken off that ruby on your hand. Venus came from the sea without the benefit of jewels.”
“Oh, this?” the false Venus said artlessly, breaking her pose to display her hand (and as much as she could of her bosom), letting the ruby sparkle in the candlelight. “I couldn’t bear to take it off, that’s all. I treasure it—a present from His Holiness, you know. He was a very generous host when my husband and I were last in Rome.”
Her eyes went to Madonna Giulia, alight with triumph, and I saw Lucrezia and Madonna Adriana give quick looks as well. My mistress never blinked; just lifted a hand from the pet goat sleeping in her lap and idly fingered the huge teardrop pearl about her neck. “I’ve never cared for rubies,” she murmured. “So easy to fake these days, with all those clever glass copies coming in from Venice. Why, I’ve heard one can fake a good ruby for a handful of ducats, and no woman would be any the wiser! Pearls, now, those are far harder to palm off on the ignorant . . . Goodness, is it my turn already?”
That shut the Gonzaga bitch up, and she flounced off behind the screens to change back into her dress—making plans, I was sure, to present her ruby to the nearest jeweler for inspection. I thought I saw Giulia blink rather hard as she shifted the goat from her lap to rise, and wondered if she was fighting back tears. Letters from His Holiness, I knew, had been rather few.
“I’m afraid the best of Maestro Botticelli’s work is taken already,” she said. “A pity he doesn’t seem to be painting anymore—I heard there was a mad monk preaching simplicity in Florence, and now half the artists in the city are renouncing paint as secular frivolity—”
“Fra Savonarola,” I murmured from my obscure wall bench. The name gave me no disquiet at the time, though it should have.
“Seems a great waste of a painter like Maestro Botticelli,” Giulia shrugged. “For tonight, anyway, I shall have to make do with Maestro Raphael.”
She turned her back and dropped to her knees, the yellow light from the tapers gleaming on her coiled hair. With slow grace she reached up to unlace her dress, and I felt the men in the room stop breathing. La Bella slid one arm from her sleeve, tugging her dress down on one side to reveal a naked pearly shoulder, and lifted her bare arm in supplication. Her head turned to profile and she froze, lashes down.
No one made a guess. They all seemed content to stare—except the Countess, who suddenly looked more peevish than queenly . . . and Lucrezia, I noticed suddenly, who began fiddling with her flowered skirts with an almost inaudible sigh.
Giulia held her pose a moment longer and then lifted her lashes and looked back at us over her shoulder. Somehow with the one bare shoulder and naked arm and half-exposed back, she looked far more nude than the Gonzaga bitch had in her transparent shift.
“None of you will know the painting, I’m afraid.” Giulia dropped her pose, sliding her naked arm back into its dangling sleeve. “I doubt it’s even started yet. Maestro Raphael came to paint my portrait last year, but he persuaded me to sit for another sketch as well, posing just so. He wants to paint a Transfiguration, and he had me in mind for the beseeching mother. There will be angels and apostles and saints too, of course.”
Giulia laced her dress back up and rose, returning to her chair. She picked up the slumbering goat, dropping a kiss on its nose, and looked up. The men were still staring, and Caterina Gonzaga looked as though she had eaten a lime.
“So which of us wins?” Caterina said rudely. I saw Madonna Adriana cast a disapproving glance from her embroidery. “Me, or Giulia Farnese?”
Lucrezia’s face fell again, and I swung quickly off the wall bench.
“Perhaps the dwarf may prove the best judge of the contest?” I interjected quickly, striding to the front of the company. “Who, after all, can judge beauty better than one as ugly as myself?” I spread my arms at the little murmur of laughter. Lord Sforza guffawed. “I think, in all fairness to La Bella and to our beauteous visitor”—a bow in their direction—“we must award the crown to our fair Countess of Pesaro. Lovely as is the golden orb in its full glory, a dawning sun must always be counted the most beautiful.”
“I think dawning suns are pale and scrawny,” the Countess remarked sotto voce, but she was drowned in the prudent burst of applause led by Madonna Adriana. Lucrezia’s face brightened a little, and I was glad to hear the subject of the French invasion raised again. Altogether a safer topic than the comparative beauty of women who are all present in the same room.
“Excellent, my dear,” I heard Madonna Adriana murmur to Giulia as the men called for wine and maps and began loudly arguing over which route the King of France would choose in his march on Naples.
“You really think she got that ring from Rodrigo?” Giulia whispered back. “I saw how she made eyes at him at Joffre’s wedding—”
“Maybe, but that ruby’s nowhere near the value of your pearls. If he tumbled her, I assure you it was a tumble quickly forgotten . . .”
“And they say women know nothing of politics,” I remarked as Madonna Adriana patted Giulia’s arm and bustled off. “Is it so important, keeping the Holy Father’s favor?”
Giulia blinked. The other ladies were starting to yawn; any moment now they’d go trailing off to bed, leaving the men free to argue about the French until dawn. I took the stool at Giulia’s feet, leaning back on my elbows, and she looked down at me, puzzled. “What do you mean, Leonello?”
“The Holy Father is more than forty years your elder. He has a short temper, an unfaithful heart, and a girth that will keep right on expanding until he looks like a sack of millet.” I reached up to the goat in her lap and gave its silky ear a flick. “So why do you fight to keep him?”
She shrugged. “He’s all I have.”
“That’s rot, my dear lady. You have a husband, you have a child, you have a family. You could let His Holiness’s wandering eye wander off to someone new, and retire to that quiet married life you always told me you grew up wanting. But you sit here campaigning like a French general to get your papal lover back, and I wonder why.” I cocked an eyebrow at her, wondering why I was talking like this, not caring enough to stop myself. “Is it the jewels? I doubt that young husband of yours could keep you in the kind of sparkly baubles you’re used to. Can’t bear the thought that another birthday might pass without a string of sapphires to mark the occasion? Or perhaps it’s the Holy Father himself you’ll miss—he may be aging and fattening, but that tongue of his must have some talent in it, judging from the sounds I hear you make behind your chamber doors. I assumed it was all performance and pretense, but perhaps not.”
Two bright spots of color flared high in La Bella’s cheeks, but I didn’t let her speak.
“Or perhaps you just aren’t suited for married life, even if you were raised to it.” I gave her goat’s ear another tweak. “The worst wives, one hears, make the best whores.”
“Are you finished?” she said quietly.
“Oh, you know me. I can talk forever.”
“You certainly can when it comes to being cruel. How good you are at it.” She regarded me, giving a faint shake of her head. “Why, Leonello?”
“Because you’re here,” I said baldly. “And I’m bored, and I have to follow you about all day in this provincial mud hole when I’d rather be—”
Finding a murderer. Lately I’d begun to think it couldn’t be Cesare Borgia at all. Surely a pope’s son had better things to do than chase down low women to murder? If there was anyone in the Borgia service to suspect of dark deeds, blank-faced Michelotto was a far more likely candidate. From everything I’d heard, the man snuffed out human lives a
s casually as a cat killed mice. But Michelotto was his master’s dog; he never said a word or made a move unless Cesare instructed it. Did he have the drive to commit murder at his own initiative rather than his master’s? Perhaps not . . .
“When you’d rather be what?” Madonna Giulia asked.
“Nothing,” I said, airy. “Twisted little men have twisted little souls, that’s all. Didn’t you know that, my lady whore?”
“I think I will go kiss Laura good night and then retire to bed.” Giulia set down the goat and rose, smoothing stray white goat hairs off her velvet skirts. “I’ll have no further need of you, Leonello.”
“Tonight?” I challenged. “Or ever? I suppose you’ll have me dismissed now. I must say, I shall miss your Pope’s library.”
“Why should I dismiss you?” She turned her head over one shoulder, the same angle of her bare-shouldered tableau of transfiguration. “Just because you’re vindictive for no good reason doesn’t mean I have to be. Thank you for awarding the crown of beauty to Lucrezia, by the way. It was kindly done.”
“The least I could do,” I said. “After that bare-armed simpering of yours made her husband hard as a pikestaff.”
La Bella glanced toward Lucrezia, stricken, and it made me furious. All my insults just so many pebbles bouncing off her grave face, and the thing to pierce her was some hurt to Lucrezia.
My mistress glided off quietly, and I grimaced down at the goat. “Someone should have made you into pie long ago,” I told it, and the wretched creature gave a baaaa and began nibbling my black velvet sleeve.
“Has Giulia gone to bed already?” I heard Lucrezia ask Madonna Adriana, rose-patterned skirts rustling.
“Yes, and in a very poor humor.” Adriana glanced at me disapprovingly. “Leonello was rather unkind to her.”
“It is not polite to eavesdrop,” I remarked to the air, and Madonna Adriana sniffed and drew Lucrezia away from me toward the hearth.
“I didn’t know any man in the world could be unkind to Giulia.” Lucrezia ignored me, leaning her head in to Adriana’s ringletted one. “Even my father—even when he’s furious, all she has to do is wrinkle her nose at him, and he melts. It’s not fair.”
“Nothing’s fair, my love.” Adriana smoothed her former charge’s hair.
The little Countess of Pesaro picked at a painted rose on her skirt. Her voice was very low, but I heard well enough as I took my deck of cards from my pouch and pretended to be absorbed in a complicated shuffle. It might not be polite to eavesdrop, but I was very good at it. “Hours I spent preparing this dress, and did anybody look at me?” Lucrezia demanded, and Adriana sighed. “No, they all looked at her. They always look at her. I’m taller than she is, and my eyes are blue which is much better than dark, and maybe my hair isn’t as long but at least I don’t get plump from eating too many biscotti—but she’s still the one they look at. Even though I’m the Pope’s daughter, and I’m the Countess of Pesaro, and this is my home.”
“Of course it is,” Madonna Adriana soothed. “And Giulia is your friend.”
“I know.” Lucrezia fiddled restlessly with a lock of her fair hair. “I’d never be here with my lord Sforza if not for her. But I wouldn’t mind people looking at me now and then. Especially in my home.” A resentful note entered her voice. “I’ll write my father and tell him Caterina Gonzaga won our beauty contest. I’ll tell him she’s far taller and fairer than Giulia, too.”
“And then maybe he’ll take her for a mistress instead,” Adriana said. “Do you really want to share his attention with that prancing Lombard instead of our Giulia, who is such delightful company over pranzo? Who lends you her jewelry whenever you ask? Who taught you how to manage the train on your wedding dress?”
The Countess of Pesaro sighed again, and Madonna Adriana put an arm about her shoulders. “To bed, my love,” she said, and they rustled off without another word, leaving the men to the serious business of speculating on the French invasion. Speculating sounds so much more serious than gossiping drunkenly. Giulia’s goat looked up at me, swallowing the tassel it had just eaten off a chair cushion, and gave another baaa.
“Don’t you bleat at me,” I told it. “I am not feeling guilty.”
But maybe I was. Perhaps I had been rather hard on my poor giggly little mistress—who, quite truthfully, had never been cruel or dismissive or even thoughtless toward me in her life. Not even very giggly anymore; she’d turned quite quiet and introspective this summer in her worries over the Pope.
Twisted little men do indeed have twisted little souls.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Where my treasure is, there is my heart.
—EXCERPT OF A LETTER FROM GIULIA FARNESE TO RODRIGO BORGIA
Carmelina
Carmelina! Carmelina, listen to this.” Water splashed from the huge blue-veined marble bath as Madonna Giulia beckoned me into the hot bagno. I set down the dish of tourtes I’d brought for the Pope’s mistress to nibble as she had her hair washed. She sat alone in the enormous marble bath, half visible in the clouds of steam that filled the little blue-and-green marble chamber, wet tendrils of golden hair floating on the surface of the hot water like blond seaweed. Her naked shoulders gleamed pink above the water, and a maid stood behind with rolled-up sleeves, scrubbing at her scalp. I approached the bath carefully, watching my step on the steam-slick floor with its Roman-style mosaic of twining fish and mermaids, and Madonna Giulia beamed at me. “I’ve had a letter from His Holiness.” Waving a very thick packet of pages. “Just listen to this!”
She cleared her throat, dropping her voice to an imposing bass and imitating the Pope’s Spanish burr. “‘Everyone says that when you stood beside her’—he means that nose-in-the-air tart Caterina Gonzaga—‘she was nothing but a lantern to your sun.’”
“Very good,” I approved, trading a grin with the maid massaging Madonna Giulia’s hair. Podgy Count Ottaviano da Montevegio had offended nobody during his brief stay at the Palazzo Ducale, but his wife was another matter entirely. Madonna Caterina Gonzaga had turned up her nose at the palazzo, complained that my lemon-fried sardines were too salty, and left her chamber a sty. Had she not rustled north with her husband for their estates in San Lorenzo, the maids would have begun spitting in her wine. “I praised her to the skies when I wrote Rodrigo about her,” Giulia said with relish. “It doesn’t do to look too envious of other women. Men are already quite vain enough thinking we fight each other like cats for their attention, aren’t they? Even if we are fighting like cats for their attention. Goodness, but love is complicated. If it weren’t so enjoyable, no one would do it at all.” Giulia kissed her letter, heedless of the water splashing from her bath to smear the ink. “I got a letter back, very next messenger. He calls himself ‘the person who loves you more than anybody in the world.’ Isn’t that lovely?”
“His Holiness turns a pretty phrase.” A year or two ago I’d have been shocked to my bones at the thought of discussing the style and content of the Holy Father’s love letters. Somehow, the shock had worn off. “He doesn’t mince his affections, does he, Madonna Giulia?”
“He never minces anything he feels. And some people wonder why I want to keep him.” Giulia la Bella gave a snort that was half anger, but her smile returned as she scanned the letter again. “He goes on to give me all the gossip from Rome. Juan is nagging to come home from Spain now that his wife is pregnant—can you imagine Juan a father? I ask you!—and the Tart of Aragon is making poor Joffre’s life hell. She and Caterina Gonzaga would certainly get along . . .” Giulia rifled through more pages. “Here it is. My Pope accuses me of being heartless for enjoying myself without him.” Her eyes glowed softly. “He misses me.”
“I don’t think anyone would miss me if I went absent,” I said candidly, picking up the majolica plate of tourtes again and bringing it to the bath. “At least not until it came time to eat.”
“What about that mysterious fellow of yours?” Madonna Giulia’s eyes gleamed. “The one on wh
ose behalf you learned about the many uses of limes? What was his name again?”
I suppressed a smile. “I never told you in the first place, Madonna Giulia.”
“Well, tell me now. And do sit down, won’t you, and eat some of those tourtes for me. I’m getting plump again, and I’ve got to take some of this fat off before I get back to Rome, so no sweets for me. Which is a shame, because I always eat when in the bath.” Giulia looked envious, watching me help myself from the plate. Quince and ricotta tourtes—straight from page 412, Chapter: Dolci. “Why aren’t you the one who’s plump instead of me? Cooks are supposed to be fat!”
“They never are,” I told her. “Real cooks are too busy running back and forth with kettles and spits and bread paddles to ever eat. We all survive on a taste of this and a spoonful of that and a nibble of something else. Never have anything to do with a fat cook, Madonna Giulia. Either he’s too successful or too lazy to get off his rump.”
“Good advice, I’m sure, but I want to hear more about this man of yours. Is he a cook? Is he handsome—”
“Under the water and rinse, Madonna Giulia,” the maid ordered.
“No one say anything interesting until I’m rinsed,” Madonna Giulia warned, setting her letter aside, and sank bubbling under the surface. She wriggled under the water, the occasional elbow or knee emerging as she swished the soap out of her hair, and surfaced like a mermaid. “If you won’t tell me who your lover is, Carmelina, then listen to the letter I’m writing mine. He likes a good dramatic love letter, and I’m not sure I’ve got the tone quite right. ‘My happiness depends upon Your Holiness, so I am unable to take delight in these pleasures of Pesaro—’”