The Serpent and the Pearl

  “Any more blasphemous than to have a harlot sit for the Madonna?” I’d countered, the Holy Virgin’s blue veil swinging about my face like a joke. I’d never asked to be a notorious woman; I’d been raised for a husband and children like any other girl of noble birth, but here I was. I’d made my own choices, and I made no bones either about what it made me—but I’d been determined to have my Laura in the frescoes along with all the other Borgia children. Maestro Pinturicchio had taken one look at the set of my chin, and begun sketching. A nice little man, ugly as the day was long, but skilled. His wife was the most notorious harpy in Rome, and I gave him a rose-quartz and crystal bracelet to give her in the hopes it would sweeten her temper. It hadn’t, but he thanked me anyway, and he made Laura look very pretty indeed in our Madonna-and-Child fresco. Though the halo certainly didn’t suit her; she was a full three years old now and a proper little imp!

  Rodrigo was still looking about the table with misty eyes, and I ceased my musing. “It’s not just Our own children here tonight,” he continued, beaming like any proud father despite the regal papal We. “Our new children as well. Sancha—”

  Young Joffre’s Neapolitan wife, Sancha of Aragon, was making doe eyes at Cesare through the candlelight, but she dropped her lashes demurely at her father-in-law.

  “—and of course Lucrezia’s Giovanni Sforza is here in our thoughts, if not the flesh. A pity he could not join Us—”

  Lucrezia giggled behind her hand, not looking very put out about that. My Pope had called her back from her husband’s home in Pesaro last winter for a long visit, declaring he could not do without his dear daughter any longer, and certainly I’d been delighted to see Lucrezia again, both of us chattering and gossiping in the Palazzo Santa Maria just like the old days when she’d been a little girl dreaming of marriage—but she had certainly not seemed inclined to go back to her new home now that she was married. I suppose Pesaro’s provincial pleasures had worn rather thin after two years of marriage. Lord Sforza had stamped off home this spring, muttering of duties that could not be put off, and he’d stamped off alone.

  “And a pity your beautiful Maria Enriques could not travel with you from Spain,” Rodrigo continued, giving Juan’s arm another pat. “We would have liked to see Our new daughter.”

  “She begged to come, but she’s breeding again.” Juan shrugged, rotating the silver stem of his wine goblet between restless fingers. “I’m happy enough to leave her behind. The cow is always weeping and praying.”

  “Now, now,” Rodrigo chuckled. “She’ll be mother to another Borgia prince soon!” He gave an indulgent shake of his head, and raised his goblet. “No matter. All of us are together again. As it should be.”

  His children raised their goblets too, but I couldn’t help noticing that not everybody looked entirely pleased to see la familia Borgia reunited. Joffre was sulking, squashed in beside Juan and ignored by Sancha, and as for Cesare . . .

  “La familia,” said the Holy Father.

  “La familia,” everyone echoed, and the look Cesare sent his brother across the table could have kindled the napkins.

  “So,” I said brightly as a stream of papal servants entered with massive silver dishes, “how was the crossing from Spain? Did the waves stay smooth for the Duke of Gandia?”

  “Smooth enough,” Juan said, eyes flickering to my breasts.

  “I suppose your Duchess will be very much distressed to have you gone.” Myself, I’d have thrown a ball in celebration.

  Juan shrugged again, clearly not interested in his wife. His eyes went to Cesare as the first dishes were laid before us on the cena table. “So, brother. Hostage to the French, were you? I hear you ran away.”

  “Escaped,” said Cesare. He was a dark shadow among the candles—in his plain black velvets he seemed to eat the light and refuse to give it back again. “The Holy Father and I arranged it all. I escaped as a groom shortly after we set out from Rome.”

  “Ran.” Juan grinned.

  “He was ever so brave,” Sancha cooed in her milky-sweet voice, tossing her gleaming dark head. She and Joffre had been recalled from their official seat in Naples to Rome that May, and it hadn’t taken me more than a week to start despising that velvety purr of hers. I’d only met Sancha once, at her wedding to little Joffre when he was twelve and Sancha four years older, and that occasion had been quite enough to make me think we weren’t destined to be the best of friends. And when Sancha took an idle look at my companion and bodyguard Leonello the first time she laid eyes on him, and told me, “Your dwarf is a fine specimen; have you ever considered breeding him? I have the most cunning little juggling woman—” Well, after that I’d started calling her the Tart of Aragon, and I knew I’d happily watch her choke to death on a fish bone. “Try the carp, Sancha,” I suggested, but she was talking over me and toying with the pearl pendant about her neck to draw attention to her breasts.

  “Cesare left all his baggage behind, you know.” She left off the pendant long enough to hold her wine-cup to be refilled again—she certainly could put it away! “And when King Charles went to look he saw that all those chests that were supposed to be filled with coin and silver plate had nothing but stones under a top layer of ducats! You could hear the scream all the way in Rome.”

  Juan gave Sancha’s breasts an automatic glance, but his attention was all for his brother. “I expect I’ll do better than run when I see the French, brother.”

  Cesare toyed with his table knife.

  “You’ll send the French packing, boy!” my Pope said warmly. He’d left off his ecclesiastical robes, and in his embroidered doublet and linen shirt-sleeves he could have been any merchant father or ducal paterfamilias: the proud and swarthy Spaniard surrounded by children who all looked like him. “We taught them a lesson at Fornovo; now you’ll finish them off.”

  Really, after all that fuss the French had made declaring they would annex all Naples and the Papal territories too before they were done, everything had petered out so embarrassingly. Well, embarrassing if you were French. After they got their poxy noses bloodied at Fornovo and had to flee back north, my Pope made me a present straight from the French king’s own abandoned baggage: a certain diary in execrable handwriting, detailing the ladies who had shared the royal bed on campaign, with descriptions of their skills. “No, thank you,” I’d said, wrinkling my nose.

  “Are you sure?” Rodrigo had turned the pages with great interest. “There are a few ideas here. Requiring a bit more flexibility than I’m capable of at my age, to be sure . . .”

  “Really, Rodrigo,” I’d scolded. “Dirty stories? Whatever happened to giving a woman flowers?”

  “Then flowers you shall have.” And I’d acquired a nice set of diamond roses to clip into my braided hair. Every time the Tart of Aragon looked at them I could see her little nose twitch with lust. Her little nose was usually twitching with lust of one kind or another. For the past two months it had been twitching for Cesare, in whose lap she appeared to be dandling her hand under cover of the damask tablecloth. She didn’t have a glance for poor little Joffre—he’d grown to a tall gangly youth, but he still seemed like a child to me, sulking in the shadow of his voluptuous wife and his taller, handsomer brothers. I tried to engage him in the conversation—“You’ll be next on the battlefield after your brothers, Joffre!”—but he pushed his lip out in sullen silence and I finally gave up and stabbed at my roast capon, which had been taken off the spit too soon and was now oozing red juice all over my plate like it had been wounded rather than cooked. You’d think the Pope would eat better than anyone else in the Holy City, but you’d be wrong. It wasn’t fair, this reputation he’d acquired for dissipation and luxury—my Pope was so indifferent to what he ate, he didn’t care if the Vatican cooks fed him or his guests on bread and water. Anyone who wanted a decent meal at the Pope’s table had better hope they were eating at the Palazzo Santa Maria, where I presided over the table.

  I pushed my plate away. All this la familia
tension was giving me a headache, and I always eat when I have a headache, but this food was past enjoying. Besides, I was starting to get just a bit plump again—some women might be able to stay wand-slim no matter what they ate, but my dresses got tight if I even looked at a plate of tourtes. So very unfair. At least food like this was easy to push away.

  “So you’re to be Gonfalonier?” Sancha was bubbling now at Juan. “Our bold leader against the French! I see bravery in the Borgias isn’t limited to just one brother!”

  “One might doubt that,” Cesare murmured.

  “My husband wanted to lead the papal forces, you know.” Lucrezia laughed. “Can you imagine? He has trouble enough with those Pesarese captains of his, and now he wants papal soldiers! He thinks he’s Alexander the Great, you know; too ridiculous—”

  Sancha tittered and Juan guffawed; even Rodrigo had a chuckle at his son-in-law’s expense and I couldn’t blame him either because Lord Sforza had gotten very sour this past year and spent most of his last visit pestering my Pope for money. But I couldn’t help looking at Lucrezia—sixteen years old now but as poised as a woman of twice as many years, wearing a purple-and-crimson gown cut as low as Sancha’s, rubies in her ears and rouge patted on her cheeks and a ring on every finger. She looked eager and glittering, greedy for every eye to be on her, and I thought back to the gently glowing girl who had first blushed at her new husband over my cena table.

  Well, such girls grew up. And Lucrezia had acted alongside me as her father’s hostess this past winter, finally old enough to take her place as the star of the papal court—perhaps it had gone to her head just a little. It certainly would have gone to mine at her age. I had only twenty-two years to my name, but sometimes I felt distinctly world-weary.

  They were talking of that mad priest Fra Savonarola now, the one preaching and frothing at the mouth in Florence and getting everyone to give up their cards and their fine clothes and all their other luxuries. “Only in Florence,” Juan snickered. “That would never work in Rome!”

  “My Giulia might give up cards,” Rodrigo said, giving my cheek an affectionate tweak. “But never her pearls!”

  “As if anyone would go about in sackcloth just because one sour old man said puffed sleeves were heretical!” Lucrezia laughed.

  “I don’t know about heretical,” I said, sipping my sour wine. “But puffed sleeves are certainly unflattering. And really, what’s more heretical than that?”

  Sancha plucked at her puffed sleeves, shooting me a nasty look.

  “You’d be the only one safe under Savonarola, eh, brother?” Juan cast an eye over the unadorned black Cesare usually wore instead of his red cardinal’s robes. “Maybe you should have been a Dominican! I’ll fight the French and you’ll preach hellfire.”

  “Careful, brother,” said Cesare. “Or you might taste it.”

  Juan just beckoned in invitation, laughing. The two brothers should have looked alike—both tall and lean, both auburn-haired, both handsome—but they didn’t. Not at all, and Juan’s jittering overbright eyes met Cesare’s still, black-steel gaze like a cross of swords. Sancha looked between them with parted lips, and Lucrezia cast her eyes up to the ceiling and said, “Really, you’re both such children!” But I felt a twinge of disquiet.

  “You’ll have seen the new frescoes, Juan,” I jumped in brightly. “But surely not examined them yet? Perhaps we can take a closer look, before the biscotti are brought in. Your figure shows to great advantage . . .”

  I took my wine-cup in one hand, tucking the other into Rodrigo’s broad arm, and we all rose from the cena table and flocked to the walls. “I love me as Santa Caterina,” Lucrezia sighed over her own beseeching golden-haired figure. “I still have that dress . . .”

  “I don’t see why Joffre and I were just figures in the crowd,” Sancha pouted. “I could have been a saint too, you know!”

  “Or Salome,” Juan leered. “The Dance of the Seven Veils—we’d get to see what you look like under the last one, new sister—”

  “Juan!” Joffre burst out, flushing, but Sancha laughed and struck Juan a playful blow with her fan. One of those tiresome girls who is always doing something flirtatious with her fan. How I longed to smack her with it.

  “My likeness is to be in the Resurrection fresco,” my Pope was saying, oblivious. “When I have time to sit for it, that is—”

  “And you really should make the time,” I scolded. “Poor Maestro Pinturicchio has already finished everything else!”

  “I don’t like being painted,” Rodrigo complained. “An utter waste of time!”

  “But part of a pope’s duty is to be preserved for posterity. You’ll look magnificent, just wait and see.” My Pope was sixty-five now, and he had put on weight now that he had no more time for the hunting and riding that had long kept him lean. But his massive shoulders were imposing as ever, his swarthy hawk-nosed profile just as confident, his vigorous dark hair only threaded with gray. The papal bull at the height of his powers.

  “This marks the beginning of everything.” My Pope beamed all about him: his children painted on the wall, his children clustered around him. “La familia reunited! Let’s drink to it again.”

  His eyes were once more full of emotion, but I saw Cesare still glaring at Juan, saw Lucrezia biting her lips to make them redder, saw Sancha aiming hot looks at both her brothers-in-law, and Joffre stare vengefully at Sancha. I saw it all, and all I could think was a horribly, woefully inadequate Oh, dear.

  But Rodrigo was looking at me expectantly, so I raised my goblet. “La familia reunited,” I echoed and drank in a prayer along with the wine.

  * * *

  Such gloom, Giulia!” Rodrigo leaned back on his elbows against the pillows with their papal crest embroidered in gold. “When did you turn doom-cryer?”

  “I’m only saying that it’s vastly overrated, having all one’s family together.” I plucked the diamond roses out of my hair and began unlacing my moss-green velvet sleeves. “Holy Virgin knows, it’s a disaster whenever my family are all in the same room. In no time my older brother is telling Sandro he’s a prancing lightweight even if he is Cardinal Farnese now, and my sister is telling me I’m a harlot. And your children are even worse! Juan and Cesare looked ready to draw daggers over the biscotti.”

  “Brothers compete. It’s what they do.” My Pope waved a hand, dismissive, and his massive papal ring glinted in the soft light from the tapers. “It brings out the best in both of them.”

  “I’ll remind you of those words when the blood hits the walls,” I said tartly, letting both my sleeves drop. “Why ever did you settle on Cesare for the church? Anyone can see he’s born to lead armies and swing swords—”

  “But he’s cunning, and one needs that in the church.” Rodrigo poured out a cup of wine for the two of us to share. “To survive in the College of Cardinals, you have to be able to outplot a spider.”

  “But he’s not suited for priestly vows. Not in the slightest!”

  Rodrigo laughed, gesturing around him. “Are any of us?” His private chamber was dim and rich, the walls hung in painted canvas that had been laid over in elaborate gilt designs, the bed elaborately curtained in crimson velvet embroidered with the papal crest again, silver brackets everywhere lighting the room with sweet-smelling beeswax tapers. My Pope used to visit me in my official domicile at the Palazzo Santa Maria, by way of a certain passage so very private that all Rome knew about it. But his wave of protectiveness after my return from the French army still hadn’t abated, and now I slept more than half my nights at the papal apartments here in the Vatican, where Rodrigo had the sheets scattered with petals from my favorite yellow climbing roses, which he claimed looked like me. I looked around at the silks, the rose petals, the gilt and the glass and the velvet, all overlaid by that somber papal crest, and had to concede that it was not really very papal at all.

  “Is your conscience bothering you?” Rodrigo made the sign of the cross over my forehead with his thumb. “Ego
te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. There, you are washed clean of all your sins. Come kiss me.”

  I smiled and kissed him. The state of my soul had bothered me a great deal when I first became a harlot, a fallen woman, a foul adulteress, take your choice of epithets. But it’s difficult to worry about the fires of hell when I get my divine forgiveness expressly from the Holy Father whenever I want it. I kissed him again, and then turned my back so he could unlace my moss-green velvet gown with the gold vines embroidered about the bosom and hem. “So you chose Cesare for the church—”

  Rodrigo groaned, his fingers deft on the laces down my back. “Let it be, Giulia!”

  I persisted. “—but why ever did you choose Juan for the military life?”

  “Because that’s how it always is.” Rodrigo tickled the back of my neck with one of my golden bodice ribbons, making me squeal. “One son for the church, one for the battlefield.”

  “You men!” I couldn’t help saying. “Slotting your children into various spaces the moment they’re born, as if they were vases to be put into a niche! Just because you have two sons doesn’t make them automatically fit for the Church or the battlefield, you know.”

  “Juan’s full of fire. He’ll make a fine Gonfalonier.”

  “Juan is interested in nothing but carousing, drinking, and chasing after women. I know how you’ve missed him while he was in Spain, but I have to say I have not missed the way he ogles me.”