PRAISE FOR
Empress of the Seven Hills
“Power and betrayal were never so addictive than in this gorgeously wrought tale of star-crossed lovers caught in the turbulent currents of Imperial Rome. Kate Quinn deftly contrasts the awesome splendor of torch-lit banquets with the thunder of the battlefield. Empress of the Seven Hills is a riveting plunge into an ancient world that is both utterly foreign and strikingly familiar—where you can feel the silken caress of an empress and the cold steel of a blade at your back.”
—C. W. Gortner, author of The Queen’s Vow
“[An] epic, sexy romp—the long-awaited sequel to Daughters of Rome . . . Readers will delight in the depictions of historical figures like Hadrian and Trajan, as well as the engrossing and dramatic relationships that drive this entertaining story.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Kate Quinn outdoes herself with a story so compelling that the only complaint readers will have is that it ends. From the moment Vix and Sabina appear on the page, readers are taken on an epic adventure through Emperor Trajan’s Rome. No other author brings the ancient world alive like Quinn—if there’s one book you read this year, let it be this one!”
—Michelle Moran, national bestselling author of The Second Empress
“Quinn handles Imperial Rome with panache.”
—Kirkus Reviews
PRAISE FOR
Daughters of Rome
“A soap opera of biblical proportions . . . [Quinn] juggles protagonists with ease and nicely traces the evolution of Marcella—her most compelling character—from innocuous historian to manipulator. Readers will become thoroughly immersed in this chaotic period of Roman history.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fascinating view of four women during the year of the four emperors . . . Regardless of whether you already have an interest in Roman history, Daughters of Rome will fascinate you from beginning to end.”
—Book Loons
“The two sisters are fascinating protagonists . . . Ancient historical fiction fans will enjoy this intriguing look at the disorderly first year after Nero’s death.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Ancient Rome is wonderfully portrayed in this book, with awesome details of first-century Roman political culture . . . I love a complex plot, however, and this one is layered with great characters, engrossing historical facts, and a little romance.”
—PrincetonBookReview.com
PRAISE FOR
Mistress of Rome
“[Quinn] skillfully intertwines the private lives of her characters with huge and shocking events. A deeply passionate love story, tender and touching, in the heat and danger of the brutal arena that was ancient Rome . . . Quinn is a remarkable new talent.”
—Kate Furnivall, author of The White Pearl and The Jewel of St. Petersburg
“Equal parts intrigue and drama, action and good old-fashioned storytelling. Featuring a cast of characters as diverse as the champions of the Colosseum, Mistress of Rome is destined to please.”
—John Shors, bestselling author of Temple of a Thousand Faces
“Stunning . . . a masterful storyteller . . . It is no mean feat to write a novel that is both literary and a page-turner.”
—Margaret George, author of Elizabeth I: The Novel
“Full of great characters . . . So gripping, your hands are glued to the book, and so vivid it burns itself into your mind’s eye and stays with you long after you turn the final page.”
—Diana Gabaldon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Outlander series
“[A] solid debut . . . Quinn’s command of first-century Rome is matched only by her involvement with her characters; all of them, historical and invented, are compelling . . . Should make a splash among devotees of ancient Rome.”
—Publishers Weekly
“For sheer entertainment, drama, and page-turning storytelling, this tumultuous debut novel is well worth reading.”
—Library Journal
Books by Kate Quinn
MISTRESS OF ROME
DAUGHTERS OF ROME
EMPRESS OF THE SEVEN HILLS
THE SERPENT AND THE PEARL
THE LION AND THE ROSE
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
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penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
Copyright © 2014 by Kate Quinn.
Excerpt from Lady of the Eternal City copyright © 2014 by Kate Quinn.
“Readers Guide” copyright © 2014 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63624-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Quinn, Kate.
The Lion and the Rose / Kate Quinn.—Berkley trade paperback edition.
p. cm.—(A novel of the Borgias)
ISBN 978-0-425-26876-6 (pbk.)
1. Borgia family—Fiction. 2. Rome (Italy)—History—1420–1798—Fiction. 3. Nobility—Papal states—Fiction. 4. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3617.U578Q56 2014
813'.6—dc23
2013032104
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / January 2014
Cover design by Danielle Abbiate.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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Contents
Praise
Books by Kate Quinn
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Dedication
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Historical Note
Characters
Readers Guide
Discussion Questions
Special Excerpt from Lady of the Eternal City
For another remarkable grandmother
Virginia Quinn
reader, critic, and cheerleader extraordinaire
Special acknowledgments to my wonderful team at Berkley Books for being so willing to think outside the box in publishing Giulia Fa
rnese’s ever-sprawling story. Further acknowledgments, thanks, and hugs to all my hardworking beta readers: Stephanie Dray, Eliza Knight, Christi Barth, and Kristen Stappenbeck-Baker, some of the smartest and most insightful readers ever to burn the midnight oil, reading this book’s rough draft pages and helping me make them better.
PROLOGUE
Men demonstrate their courage more often in little things than in great.
—BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE
December 1494
Leonello
This is all terribly anticlimactic,” I complained to my mistress. “Captured by enemy forces, and where are the dungeons? The torturers? The chains? At the very least, you should have been sold into the harem of a Moorish merchant prince. That would be a story worth telling.” I hurt too badly to laugh at my own joke, so I gave a shallow sigh instead. “There is no literary scope in spending a few nights drinking French wine with French generals, listening to French compliments, then being escorted back to Rome in luxury.”
“I think it was a trifle more harrowing than that.” Giulia Farnese looked across the carriage at the bandages wrapping my chest and shoulder and hip, the splints a French surgeon had strapped to my broken fingers, the black bruises that covered nearly every visible inch of my flesh like splotches of pitch. “How is the pain, Leonello? And don’t just grit your teeth at me stoically, please.”
“Why, it’s a very splendid pain,” I said airily. “We’ve gotten to know each other very well, really—perhaps I shall give it a name and keep it for a pet when this is all over.” I had been beaten to a pulp by French pike-men, for daring to defend my mistress when French scouts descended like wolves on her traveling party as she made her way toward the Holy City. More precisely, I’d been beaten to a pulp because I’d killed three of those French pike-men and wounded two more before they brought me down, and such men do not like to be humiliated by a man like me.
I am a dwarf, you see. The kind you see in motley at fairs, juggling wooden balls, only I do not juggle and never have. I have the short bowed legs and the oversized head and the broad torso of my kind, but I also have uncommon skill at throwing knives. I can core a man’s throat like an apple at ten paces, and it was for that skill I was hired as bodyguard to Giulia Farnese, the Pope’s golden mistress. If she’d had a strapping youth for a guard, the French would have killed him at once—enemies fasten first on strapping youths when they look for those who might prove a threat. No one bothers to notice the dwarf. Not until I kill them, and then it’s too late.
Though in the end, I suppose it didn’t matter that I’d sprung to her defense. Giulia Farnese hadn’t escaped the French because of my knives. She was going home because His Holiness the Borgia Pope had paid three thousand scudi for her release. The purse had arrived last night, delivered by a messenger who had flogged his horse at a gallop every stride from the Vatican. Just two days in captivity and now we were rumbling back to Rome, a carriage and two wagons escorted through the barren winter countryside by four hundred suddenly gallant French soldiers.
“Are you sure you’re comfortable?” Madonna Giulia was studying me, her dark eyes uncommonly serious. She was the most beautiful woman in all Italy, or so they said: Giulia la Bella, the Venus of the Vatican, the Bride of Christ (when people were feeling rude). Reams of bad poetry had been written to her white breasts, her rose of a mouth, her famous golden hair that cascaded all the way to her little feet when loosed. Men from the Holy Father on down trembled at the sight of her—but I had dogged her footsteps day and night for the past two years; I had seen her squint-eyed with sleep and sneezing from sickness; whimpering in childbirth and cream-faced under her cosmetic face masks of bean flour and egg white, and I rarely noticed her beauty anymore.
“We should have delayed longer, Leonello,” she was fretting. “You aren’t fit to travel yet, no matter what the surgeon said!”
“Two days of that swill the French call food was quite bad enough, Madonna Giulia. More would have killed me.” It took every ounce of concentration I had to speak coherently around the sluggish, pain-filled exhaustion. My tongue might as well have been made of stone.
“Was it really only two days?” Giulia stroked her daughter’s golden head where it slumbered against her shoulder. Little Laura wasn’t two years old yet, but even she had felt the tension of the past few days, clinging to her mother like a limpet. “It felt like a year.”
“Thanks be to the Virgin, I spent most of it unconscious.” Or perhaps it was Santo Giuliano the Hospitaller I should thank in my prayers; he had a soft spot in his heart for killers like me. I’ve killed more than Frenchmen in my day, and for darker reasons than the defense of the Pope’s mistress.
The carriage felt stuffy, and I reached out my splinted fingers to nudge open the shuttered window. A wave of pain flashed through my hand, and I had to bite down savagely on the inside of my cheek. French boots had stamped on that hand, trying to get my knife away—every finger was broken, and the littlest finger gone altogether. The French surgeon had made a clean, cauterized stump of the mangled thing at the same time he had splinted my other fingers, probed and cleaned my wounds, drained blood and excised bone splinters, purged and bandaged and did whatever else surgeons did to keep their victims alive. It must have worked, whatever he did while I was unconscious, because I was no longer bleeding from every orifice. Most of my hurts had faded into a dull roar of pain limping along below the surface—all except the hand. It was the chest wound that nearly killed me, but somehow it was my mangled hand that hurt the worst, a bright white-hot flash of agony every time I moved.
It doesn’t matter, I reminded myself whenever I looked at my remaining splinted fingers. You don’t need a little finger to throw your knives. My knives had been returned to me—with elaborate French compliments, of course, for my bravery. May God rot them all.
My mistress caught the flash of pain across my face. Of course she did—she was a whore, after all, even if she did have only the one illustrious patron, and she could read men as easily as I read the pages of my favorite books. “Your hand—”
“Leave your fussing, madonna,” I said irritably, pushing back the blackness that threatened to swamp my vision. “I assure you, I haven’t traveled in such comfort in all my life. I feel like a sultan.” Madonna Giulia had her carriage back; the French general had tactfully returned the stolen horses and even added a wicker-bound flask of his own wine should La Bella find herself thirsty on the day’s ride to Rome. My mistress had displaced her sister and mother-in-law to ride with her maidservants, and insisted I take the whole second seat for myself so I could make the journey lying down in comfort. But my pride demanded that I sit upright, and La Bella scolded me for being a stiff-necked fool, and pride and pain and scolding together had me half-lying and half-sitting, and altogether half-comfortable. It was still better than being crammed into the wagons with all the rest of the servants, and for that I had to thank her.
“I wasn’t going to have you bumping all the way back to Rome in that jolting wagon,” she returned. “Not after what you did for me.”
“It doesn’t matter.” I drank in the cold air from the open window, the wind coming in to slap at my unshaven cheeks. The dry brown hills were empty of passersby—one look at the mass of swaggering soldiers and the French lilies on their rippling flags, and every villager within eye or earshot went to ground. We might as well have been riding through a land of ghosts. “Though it was quite an impressive tantrum you pitched this morning until they moved me,” I conceded. “All that shrieking and stamping of feet.”
“Yes, I’ve gotten very good at tantrums, haven’t I? It may only have been two days, but I think the French are quite glad to see the back of me.” My mistress had a temper sweet as honey and a nature as easy-flowing as a running stream; in ordinary days her servants doted on her and took shameless advantage of her—but for the French, she played an entirely different role. She had put on a splendid performance as the Pope’s pampered mistres
s: throwing fits, hurling insults, and exploding into tears at the slightest provocation. She looked very grand in her sumptuous traveling furs, and when she moved to wrap Laura more soundly in her own cloak, I saw the gleam of a huge pearl at her throat.
I tilted my head. “They let you keep that?”
“Yes.” Madonna Giulia looked down at the enormous teardrop pearl that had been her Borgia Pope’s first gift. “I spread a good many of my other jewels among the French officers—goodwill gifts, you know. But I did keep my pearl.” She patted it like a pet.
I kept my voice neutral. “What else did you have to give the French, besides your jewels?”
She wrinkled her nose, wry. “Why, surely you know they were all perfect gentlemen. So I intend to tell everyone, should I be asked.”
“Including the Holy Father?”
She looked out the window. “Especially the Holy Father.”
“I don’t remember much,” I said, and fumbled the words. I hate fumbling. “That first night. You went to dine with General d’Allegre . . .” And returned very late, her gown creased, two spots of color burning high in her cheeks, with a surgeon in her wake to tend my wounds, and food and blankets and lamps for her cold and shivering servants. “They refused to send me a surgeon until then. The French general, did he—”
She looked at me calmly. “He was a perfect gentleman.”
The creak of wheels and shuffle of marching feet came to me through the window, and the ever-present French smell of onions and stale sweat. I suddenly couldn’t bear the stench and struggled to close the shutter again. Giulia reached over to latch it for me. “Leave it!” I snapped. “I may be nine-fingered, madonna, but do you think I am too feeble to manage a bolt?”
She sat back, lashes veiling her eyes as she stroked Laura’s head again, and I bit my lip. I had a viper’s tongue that liked nothing better than to sting people when it was in the mood, and my mistress was easy prey for my temper, having none of her own. I could say it was the pain in my hand and my bandaged chest that made me sharp, but in truth I was always sharp. In the old days when I made a precarious living in the Borgo district fleecing sailors out of their money over card games, I’d thought it was poverty made me ill-humored. Surely steady money and a safe place in the world would make my tongue lose its edge. But for over two years now, I’d had steady money and as secure a place as could be wished as Giulia Farnese’s bodyguard; I had good food to eat and all the fine books in the world to read while I hung about waiting as my mistress went to confession or got her dresses fitted—and none of it made any difference. Kindness, apparently, had been left out of my makeup along with that extra foot of height that would have put my mistress’s eyes level with my throat instead of my eyes level with her collarbone.