The Serpent and the Pearl

  I liked being ordinary. Giulia Farnese again, not Giulia la Bella, not the Venus of the Vatican, not the Bride of Christ.

  Summer fell toward autumn. My Pope was well beyond angry and approaching incensed—“He ordered me back here to retrieve you on pain of excommunication,” Sandro said with a rueful wince on his next visit.

  “Which of us is to be excommunicated?”

  “Both, if we don’t present ourselves to the Holy Father posthaste. I’ve been ordered to retrieve you.” Sandro eyed me thoughtfully. “A little holiday is one thing, sorellina, but what are you up to?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. I didn’t seem to know much of anything anymore, except that I didn’t feel like jumping to Rodrigo’s side yet, just because he shouted. I did miss him—I ached sometimes at night for his warm arms around me in my big cold bed. But I still wanted time to think. I walked beside the lake with Laura, nodding to the fishermen, until they began to nod back shyly as they touched their caps. I took up my mother’s old habit of collecting food and secondhand clothes and taking them for distribution to the beggars who huddled outside the church. The church itself was in bad need of repairs—“one more stormy season,” the priest admitted, “and that tower will come through the roof!” I found myself looking at plans, speaking to stonemasons, scribbling estimates, browbeating the funds out of my brother for repairs. There was the yearly summer festival by the lake—our family had always presided over the festival, and I took my place to help bestow the prizes. When I gave out the purse for the largest catch of the season, one or two of the other women smiled at me.

  “You can’t keep lingering like this,” Gerolama warned me on her next visit. “The Holy Father won’t hang after you forever!”

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” I said tartly. “Aren’t you the one who always said I was blotting the family honor by being the Pope’s whore?”

  Her eyes flickered.

  “Besides,” I added, “I want to see the church tower shored up. It’s such a pleasure to have a project that isn’t an altar cloth. Or achieving the perfectly sun-bleached head of hair.” I felt . . . capable. Not just pretty. Good for something besides being decorative. Even more so the following day, when I heard a shriek and a string of Venetian curses from the kitchens, and ran in to find my imperturbable Carmelina crouched on top of the trestle table to get away from the serpent slithering idly over the flagstones. “It’s just a water snake,” I laughed. “They’re always getting into the house from the lake. It’s nothing to be afraid of!”

  “Kill it, Bartolomeo!” Carmelina yelled, ignoring me.

  “Are you insane?” Her red-haired apprentice scrambled right up onto the table beside her, clutching the little wooden cross around his neck. “I hate snakes!”

  “It’s harmless,” I scolded. “You two! Not fazed at all when it comes to turning those disgusting Tiber eels into stew, but you’re afraid of a water snake?” I forked the hissing thing up with a pair of Carmelina’s tongs and tossed it out into the courtyard, only to find my cook staring at me.

  “Santa Marta,” she muttered, scrambling down. “Giulia la Bella? It should be Giulia la Coraggiosa.”

  Giulia the Brave? I liked that.

  Perhaps it was brave of me to write to my papal lover and tell him I was thinking of paying a visit to Orsino before I came back to Rome. “He’s written to request that I come see him before he departs Bassanello with his troops.” Once such a letter would have taken me hours to write; I would have agonized over every word, and whether it would upset Rodrigo or not. Now I just wrote the bald truth, because I didn’t feel like lying. Though I did feel a little guilty when I got his reply, because I think my honesty nearly killed my Pope. I could hear the apoplectic roar all the way from Rome.

  We could not believe you would act with such ingratitude! he wrote in letters almost riven into the page of his next letter. After all your repeated promises that you would be faithful to Our command, and not go near Orsino! But now you are doing the opposite! Risking your life going to Bassanello—and with the purpose, no doubt, of giving yourself to that stallion again!

  “Stallion.” I ask you. I should have started trying to please myself instead of Rodrigo a long time ago. Even if he was angry, he was certainly a great deal more attentive now than he’d been when I was last in Rome!

  In the end, I didn’t go to Bassanello. Orsino came to me instead.

  Leonello

  Careful, now,” I called after little Laura Orsini. Giulia Farnese’s daughter flitted about the edge of Lake Bolsena, brown and naked as a tiny water nymph, her little shift lying in a discarded heap beside me where I sat under the shade of a tall oak keeping a vigilant eye on my small charge. It was November now, but the winter cold had yet to really settle in—still warm enough for naked frolicking by the lake, as far as Laura was concerned.

  “You shouldn’t let her run about like that,” Madonna Giulia’s sisters-in-law scolded, shocked. “It’s not decent!”

  “I swam naked in that lake too when I was her age,” Giulia said. “And I didn’t come to any harm. Let her run, there’s plenty of time to teach her to be a lady.”

  “At least make her keep that shift on in front of the men!” A dark glance at me. But Giulia overrode them, and since she was off this afternoon on one of her surprisingly frequent mercy missions to Capodimonte’s beggars, it fell to me and a few nursemaids to take her daughter along the winding path that descended from the castello like a stairway down to the lake that lapped below, where oaks had managed to sprout among the craggy rocks of the shore. I’d sent the nursemaids back to the castello, tired of their chattering, and the lake stretched blue and sparkling before me under an equally blue dome of sky; wood thrushes warbled overhead, and across the water church spires pierced up toward the sun. It might still be summer warm, but I could see leaves withering on the branches of the oak tree above me, feel their crunch beneath as I shifted on my spread-out cloak, and knew autumn was here.

  Whether La Bella liked it or not, her summer idyll was over.

  “Leo, Leo!” came Laura’s shriek from the water. “Tattels!”

  I was a fluent interpreter by now of Laura’s eccentric eighteen-month-old vocabulary. Tattels were turtles. “Don’t tell Signorina Carmelina when I take you back to the kitchens for your midday meal,” I advised over the top of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. “She’ll tramp out here with a net and the next thing you know, that little baby turtle you’re holding right now will turn up on your plate.”

  Laura giggled: a wriggling little imp of a girl, squatting on her small heels in the shallow rivulets of the water’s edge, wiggling her toes in the soft lake mud as she carefully released the turtle back into the water. Half a summer spent learning to walk and run beside the lake had turned her brown all over, the fair soft rings of her hair bleached to pale gold. “No higher than your knees,” I warned as she splashed deeper into the lake. “You know what your mother said.”

  “Iss, Leo.” Yes, Leo. Laura liked me—I was clearly an Old Person, yet one built conveniently to her size, and it fascinated her. She had practiced her toddling baby steps clinging to my stubby fingers, and I didn’t mind letting her. She was a fetching little thing, too young to know how to be cruel. I might as well enjoy that while it lasted.

  “Leonello!”

  Madonna Giulia’s voice, and even before I lifted my eyes from my book, I thought she sounded strange. Oddly stifled, and as I found her approaching figure picking its way along the lapping edge of the lake, I saw another figure behind her. A young man of perhaps twenty-one, fair-haired, blue-eyed, his youthful skinniness not quite done filling out into a man’s leanness. I fingered the little knife in my cuff, but more out of habit than fear. In my two years as bodyguard to La Bella, I’d never once been called upon to spring to her defense—and I didn’t think that first time would come now, not against a man she was willingly bringing toward her daughter.

  “Laura,” she said, bending dow
n, and the little girl hurled herself into her mother’s arms like a small brown monkey. Giulia lifted her up, smoothing the fair curls, and turned toward the young man with a smile that was . . . nervous? “Laura, may I present you to Orsino Orsini.”

  Dio. I put my book down, looking at this unexpected guest with greater interest. I had never seen him either: the young husband who had been given cuckold’s horns by the Pope himself.

  “This is she?” The boy had a pleasant tenor voice, stiffer than a board from nerves.

  “Yes. Lauretta mia, this is your—that is, he’s my . . .”

  It was a stopper as far as courtesies went. Your father; but Laura knew only the bluff merry-eyed figure of the Pope as far as fathers went. My husband; but Madonna Giulia had not to my knowledge laid eyes on him since before Laura was born. “Orsino Orsini,” La Bella said at last, curtsying with the little girl in her arms and avoiding the whole tangled mess.

  Orsino Orsini’s blue eyes flicked over the little girl who bore his name. Looking, perhaps, for signs of his own face? Useless, I thought. One pretty little blond girl looked much like another—it’s the vanity in men that makes them insist their children are their image. Laura was simply a happy-faced child in her mother’s arms, nothing to declare her either an Orsini or a Borgia.

  “She’s beautiful,” Orsino said at last. He reached a finger out toward Laura’s cheek, but she retreated into her mother’s neck, suddenly shy. Orsino looked shy too, looking at Giulia. “You’re beautiful, too. Just as beautiful as I remembered.”

  “Thank you.” If he was expecting her to blush like a girl, he did not know how much poise his wife had acquired over the past few years. “You look well, Orsino. You’ve grown.”

  “Yes. I’m a whole two inches taller.” He squared his shoulders. “It’s all the riding I do now, it’s made me much stronger. You know I have a condotta? I ride everywhere with my soldiers—”

  Giulia cocked her head, inspecting his profile. “Did you break your nose?”

  “Yes.” He coughed. “I, um. It was, well, it was a battle—my men against some of those Milanese thugs . . .”

  I snorted, not very softly. Orsino looked down at me as though a bush had spoken. “What’s that?” he asked Giulia.

  “That is someone calling you a liar,” I remarked before she could respond. “You didn’t break that nose in any battle, my lord Orsini. Cardinal Farnese and I chat quite a bit, you know, when we play primiera, and it’s not all gossip from the College of Cardinals. He’s told me one or two other things closer to home . . .”

  Giulia raised her eyebrows.

  Orsino reddened, touching his crooked nose. “It was your brother,” he admitted to her. “Sandro laid into me. After he, well . . .”

  “After he found out you’d agreed to lend out your bride as a whore,” I supplied helpfully, “Madonna Giulia’s brother found you out hunting, dragged you off your horse, and broke your nose and two ribs.”

  “Really?” Giulia sounded rather pleased. “Sandro never told me. What are you doing here, Orsino? You are supposed to be marching on the French with your men by now; I had your last letter.”

  So they wrote to each other? Interesting. I did not think the Pope would be pleased. On the other hand, very little about Giulia or her extended absence pleased him at the moment. And that did not seem to bother her one whit, which I found even more interesting.

  “I sent the men on without me and went back to Bassanello. Then here.” He looked down at his boots, toeing a mark in the lakeside mud and smudging it out with equal care. “I—wanted to see you.”

  Giulia looked at him steadily over Laura’s curly head. Her smile had faded, along with the nervous flick of her eyes, and now she looked as bland and neutral as a marble goddess gazing out over the heads of her worshippers.

  “You’ve never been to Bassanello, have you?” Orsino continued, still not meeting his wife’s eyes. “It’s not much—just little hills and a fortress, really. It’s Carbognano that I want to show you someday—that’s beautiful. We have a castello there; it may just look rough and square and crenellated on the outside, but it’s beautiful inside. There’s a sala with a painted ceiling.”

  “Goodness, the sophistication. Pack at once, madonna! This must be seen!”

  “I’ve heard of Carbognano.” Giulia looked around for Laura’s discarded shift, stooping to retrieve it. “Is that the town you got lordship over from His Holiness, in exchange for the extended loan of your wife?” Her voice was level and fixed, not colored with anger, not colored with any emotion at all—but Orsino flushed.

  “There’s a lake nearby,” he continued doggedly. “Lago di Vico. Not so big as this one”—waving an arm over the blue expanse of Lake Bolsena—“but pretty. The breeze comes right off the lake and cools us in summer. And we make a very good olive oil, not to mention our production of hazelnuts.”

  “Not just painted ceilings, but hazelnuts,” I commented to the air. “How is such splendor to be imagined?”

  Orsino looked at me, flushing. “Look here, you can leave now.”

  “Not on your orders,” I replied. “You don’t pay my wages. And if you try to force me, you’ll find me much harder to move than my size would indicate.” I hoped he’d try.

  Orsino opened his mouth, but Giulia intervened. “Leonello, please don’t. He is a guest here.” She sent me a quelling look, then turned back at her husband. She looked almost encouraging. “You were saying? Lago di Vico, and Carbognano . . .”

  But my scorn seemed to have taken whatever courage he had. He just gazed at her, pleading, and she gave a little sigh and dropped to her knees so she could tug the discarded shift over Laura’s blond head.

  Orsino shuffled. The silence grew. Giulia drew Laura’s arms through the armholes of her shift; Laura struggled with her and scowled. “Don’ like,” she said mutinously. “Don’ like.”

  “Doesn’t like what?” Orsino asked.

  “Clothes.” Giulia at last wrestled her daughter’s arms into their sleeves. “No matter what I put on her, she either takes it off at once or goes plunging into the lake, clothes and all. A shame, really, because half the fun of having a daughter is dressing her up in pretty gowns, isn’t it?” Giulia straightened, taking Laura firmly by one hand.

  “She’d like the lake in Carbognano,” Orsino hedged. “If she were ever to see it, that is. Good swimming there.”

  “Is there?” Giulia’s flat mask softened with the faintest of smiles. “Perhaps you’d care to walk with us, then, and tell me more about it.”

  He looked as though his breath had stopped in his chest.

  Giulia looked back over her shoulder at me. She’d given up her elaborate coiffures here in the country; her hair was bundled at the back of her head in a net, and she had even more freckles across her nose and bosom like a dusting of gold sand. “Perhaps you could wait for us here, Leonello?”

  “No,” I said, tucking Marcus Aurelius into my doublet and rising. “It’s Borgia coin that pays my wages, Madonna Giulia, and the Pope will not care to see his concubine stroll off into the sunset with her husband unchaperoned.”

  I spoke deliberately, looking at Orsino. He flushed, looking at the lake again. Giulia came closer to me in a rustle of dusty woolen skirts, lowering her voice.

  “What harm will it really do, Leonello? He wants only to talk.”

  “He wants his wife back,” I said. “Not that he’ll do anything about it. It takes guts to go up against a Borgia, far less a pope, and that boy hasn’t got the guts of a plucked chicken. I take it back, you know—what I said in Pesaro. I can see now why you abandoned the handsome lad for the aging cleric, and it wasn’t for the jewels.”

  “Orsino Orsini is my husband.” A spark of anger lit Giulia’s eye as she looked down at me.

  “But not Laura’s father, I think, despite the Pope’s doubts.” I cocked an eyebrow, grinning. “If I were you, I’d be on my knees praying she turns out a bastard Borgia rather than a true-born
Orsini. Bad enough having a gutless husband without getting saddled with his gutless offspring.”

  Giulia Farnese slapped me. Not one of those dainty slaps I’d seen women deal out to disobedient maids or pouting children either—she got her arm and all her weight behind it, and her hand crashed against my face like a clap of thunder. I staggered sideways and fell, barely catching myself on my elbows.

  “Follow us or not, you twisted little bastard,” she said. “As you like.”

  She turned and swept back to the puzzled Orsino, who had been crouching on his haunches to speak with a still-wary Laura. “There’s a lovely view of the town a little way down the shore,” Giulia announced, reaching to take Laura’s hand. “Shall we?”

  Orsino looked as though he wished he could take her hand too. But he took Laura’s other palm instead.

  I sat up slowly as they walked away, brushing off my muddy palms. I had lake slime on my fine black breeches. Dio, how I missed Rome. Give me stinking alleys and noisy wine shops and foul city smoke over the joys of the country any day.

  Once I would have thought Giulia Farnese agreed with me—the Pope’s elegant concubine in her velvets and jewels, dancing till dawn and reveling in parties and parades and masques. But after a summer spent in sleepy little Pesaro, sleepier little Capodimonte where the greatest event of the week was Sunday Mass . . .