I should have pulled away. I should have pulled away at once, but he had ambushed me as neatly as the French army, my apprentice boy who had somehow stopped being a boy when I wasn’t looking. I wound my hands into his bright hair—to pull his head back, to shake some sense into him—but my bed had been empty such a long time, and now I had a pair of smooth hard-muscled arms about me again, and a kiss that tasted as good as those fried golden things. I was lonely and hungry and cold, and my apprentice smelled of wild thyme and his flesh was warm as a kettle on rolling boil. “Bartolomeo—” I managed to say.
“Mouths shut,” he murmured against my lips, “and hands moving.”
His big kitchen-scarred hand slipped up to span my breasts, and my whole body juddered at the touch. It was all he needed. He scooped me up so my legs wrapped his waist and it was only a few short steps to his tiny cubbyhole beside the wine cellars. If it had been farther, if he’d put me down to walk—if we’d had to stop and fumble with boots and ties, apron knots and a gown’s laces—but my shift billowed to the floor half a heartbeat after he kicked the door shut with one bare foot, and his breeches followed another heartbeat later, and there was no time to think, no time to think and no desire to think either. Just hunger, a ravenous tearing hunger as though the flesh had been starved instead of the belly, and on the narrow straw-stuffed apprentice’s pallet on the floor we flung our bodies down like feasts and tore at each other, savored each other, ate and drank each other, until there was nothing left but crumbs.
And it’s only when the crumbs are left and you’re scraping the dish that you begin to feel the shame of having acted like such a glutton.
I lay gasping and covered with sweat on the lumpy pallet, the hard shoulder and hip of my apprentice—my apprentice!—still pressed against my side. I heard Bartolomeo’s breath slowing and I closed my eyes and prayed as I had never prayed in my life. Sweet Santa Marta, just let him fall asleep. Marco had always promptly fallen asleep when he rolled away from me. If Bartolomeo did too, surely I could creep off to my own chamber and pretend this had all been some fevered nightmare. Surely. Sweet Santa Marta, please let him sleep.
“More Parmesan,” Bartolomeo said up to the ceiling.
“What?” I replied before I could switch to my other plan, which was to pretend that I was asleep. Or perhaps dead.
“More Parmesan.” He turned his head, looking at me over the thin pillow. “On those fried tubers. And a dash of rosemary. You’re right about that.”
“Oh.” I felt my face flaming.
“I’m going to write that recipe up,” he said cheerfully. “I write up all my recipes. The ones that work, anyway. I had an idea for shaved ice and frozen fruits and cream that was a disaster. I wanted it all creamy and cold and smooth, and it just melted into a great sticky puddle. But the fried tubers, those were good. I’m going to make a book someday—all the best recipes, and the best advice for cooks.” He reached out, smoothing back a curl of hair that was sticking to my neck. “You could help me write that part.”
I moved away from his hand, sitting up.
“Where are you going?” He sat up too, sliding his arms around my waist from behind and kissing the back of my neck. “You think I’m letting you up yet, as long as I’ve wanted to get you here? Just give me, oh, the length of time it takes to say a rosary, and then . . .” He buried his nose in my loose hair. “Sweet Santa Marta, maybe I won’t even need that long. You smell like cinnamon.”
“It’s very late.” I pulled away from his arms, keeping my words stern. “I’ll need to be back to my chamber before anyone’s awake to see me come out of here.”
“Why shouldn’t they see?” He fell back on his elbows, admiring me as I rose. “They’ll know soon enough anyway.”
“Oh, will they?” I snarled, fumbling for my shift. Men, always boasting about the women they’d wheedled out of their skirts. What an achievement for a mere apprentice: getting his own maestra di cucina to flop on her back. What a joke for the scullery.
Bartolomeo shrugged, unfazed. “They’ll know when we make the announcement.”
“Announcement?” I found my shift, yanking it gratefully down over my head. My whole body felt flushed and awkward with embarrassment. “Announcement of what?”
He grinned. “Marry me.”
I stood there goggling like a goose about to get its neck wrung.
“You think I’d bed you and not marry you?” He raised his eyebrows at my aghast silence. “What sort of man do you think I am? I know we can’t wed before I’m done with my apprenticeship, but I’m near finished anyway. I’m already better than half the undercooks Madonna Adriana hired on the cheap—”
Sweet Santa Marta, I thought again in utter horror, but the prayer stopped short this time. My patron saint clearly wasn’t going to be any help in situations like this, good as she was for keeping a roast rare on the spit or a sauce from breaking. This was far out of her control.
Bartolomeo must have taken my frantic, silent hunt for words as some kind of permission, because he rose from his pallet and came to slip his arms about my waist. “Summertime, do you think? We could save a little, go to the priest then—”
My mouth was dry, and my heart hammered. In the light of the single taper I could see every detail of this tiny cubby of a chamber: barely big enough for a pallet and a stool and a bag of clothes but exquisitely neat for all that; a bowl of crushed mint leaves that he must have placed to keep the windowless air sweet; a packet of scribbled papers that might have been the start of his recipe collection. A tiny chamber not tall enough even at its highest point for my apprentice to stand up straight, but he was standing in the middle of it now, utterly naked and proposing marriage to me.
A tiny, astounded part of me thought back to the words that had drifted through my head when I first woke up, just an hour ago: This is the sort of dream a woman has when her life has no particular passion in it, and probably never will.
“These will be our kitchens, yours and mine, we’ll run everything between us!” His words poured fast and eager now, like warm olive oil out of a jar. “The two of us, we’ll be the greatest cooks in Rome. Sweet Christ, Carmelina, I’ve never known a woman who could cook like you! Even,” he conceded, “if you put too much orange juice in everything.”
“I do not,” I couldn’t help saying, even though it rocked me clear back onto my heels to hear him say my name instead of signorina.
“Yes, you do, but that’s not important. We’ll learn, we’ll both of us learn, we’ll travel!” His arms had tightened around me now, and he was gabbling faster. “We don’t have to stay in Rome, we could go to Milan; Lodovico Il Moro keeps a court there to rival the Pope’s. Then to Lombardy where I was born; I can show you how the French influence comes over into the recipes, and I know you scoff about the French and their sour spices, but there’s something to be learned there—”
“You’ve gone mad!” I had a handsome young man before me proposing marriage in all seriousness—was the world just laughing at me? What woman has to dodge marriage proposals after becoming a nun? He doesn’t know that, I thought disjointedly, and you certainly can’t tell him, so find some other way to dodge it.
I made myself plant a stern hand on Bartolomeo’s hard chest, pushing him back, but that might have been a mistake because I could feel his heartbeat speed up under my touch. Maybe mine too, but that was just more panic. “Bartolomeo, this has all been a mistake.” I spoke calmly, reasonably. “A very great mistake, and I do apologize for that. I am maestra di cucina, and you are an apprentice. I am seven years older than you, and I should never have—”
“And I’ve wanted you since I was fourteen.” His eyes burned me, bright as cinnamon. “When you threw me my apprentice apron for the first time. When you let me make smelt in green sauce for Madonna Giulia. When you put your head on my shoulder after we were captured by the French, and let me put my arm around you—sweet Christ, I nearly kissed you right then.” His voice bubbled faster, a
torrent of words like wine out of a breached cask. “I get weak in the knees just watching you beat eggs—when you’re slinging spoons at me just because I’m the only one in these kitchens brave enough to tell you that your recipe’s wrong—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I wrenched away, feeling a film of his sweat on my fingertips from his broad freckled chest. Bad enough to handle an apprentice in lust; boys were always in lust. But an apprentice in love? How can he be in love with me? a small inner voice thought in wondering astonishment. I don’t do anything but shout at him!
Never mind how it started, I thought harshly. Squelch it. For his own good, just squelch it. “This is just silly moon-eyed calf love,” I told him. “All boys go a little soft for their first girl. It means nothing.”
“You didn’t think I was such a boy down there.” He jerked his chin at the rumpled pallet, grinning. “And as a matter of fact, you aren’t my first girl.”
I seized on that. “Then go marry her, if you’re not the kind of lad who’d bed a girl and then leave her!”
“I did offer to marry her. She laughed at me. Nicely, though, and then she kissed me and said I was a lovely boy but if she married all the boys she broke in, she’d have enough husbands for an army. I liked her, but not the way I love you, though, so all in all I was very relieved—”
Sounds like Pantisilea, I couldn’t help thinking, but shoved the thought away. This whole argument was slipping out of my hands. “Well, I can’t marry you. You work in my kitchens”—I groped—“and you are under me, and—”
“Not last time, I wasn’t.” He grabbed me around the waist again, pulling me back toward the pallet. “But this time I’ll be under you if you like, Carmelina—”
“You do not have leave to call me that!” I shoved away desperately, trying not to look at the hard freckled length of his body against me. “We rolled about in a bed, but that does not mean you have leave to call me by name. You are my apprentice. And even if you weren’t, I have no intention of marrying anybody, much less you. Rolling about in a bed doesn’t change that either!”
“Why not?” He folded his arms across his chest, looking down at me in challenge. “The two best cooks in Rome, married to each other. Why not?”
Because I’m a nun, I almost said. Because the vow didn’t disappear just because I ran from it. Because you’d face charges if we were caught. Charges of profanation, desecration, adultery—crimes meriting at the least exile, at the most death, for marrying a nun who already had her Lord for a husband.
Bad enough that we bedded once—but if that was found out, Bartolomeo could at least claim he didn’t know my secrets. Likely he’d be spared as the innocent dupe of a wicked seductress. But if I were ever mad enough to marry, then my so-called husband’s guilt would be assumed, and his whole future in ruins. Oh, maybe I’d shared Marco’s bed on occasion, but Marco knew my past, knew the risks and the sins attached, and he certainly knew he couldn’t marry me. Bartolomeo didn’t know anything of the kind. You want to lay that on his conscience? my own conscience snarled, raking guilt through me like a lion’s claws. A boy who can’t bed a girl without offering to marry her after, and you want to tell him he’s violated a nun?
All my life I’d been taught that girls grew up to be wives, or else they became nuns or whores. I’d said that once to Madonna Giulia, when we first met. But she occupied an odd limbo between wife and whore, and I occupied an even odder one myself between whore and nun. There were shadowy spaces between the stark trinity of futures I’d been offered as a girl—but however you defined me, there would be no marriage in my future. I felt a moment’s pang of regret go through me like a sword, but I hardened my heart. I’d made my choices: work, only work, and the occasional casual tumble with men like Marco who knew about my past. Or maybe lordlings who liked to bed servant girls and were too high and mighty to care about consequences.
Bartolomeo was neither.
“Is it Maestro Santini?” Bartolomeo said, as though reading my mind. “Don’t tell me you mooned after him too like all those silly maidservants, just because he’s handsome and has curls. He’ll waste every scudo he earns, and besides, he couldn’t cook his way out of a flour sack. He lost his place here, and he’ll lose his place with the Duke of Gandia too.”
“It’s not Maestro Santini,” I said at last. “It’s a vow I made—to myself.” I wished I had a shawl to cover my thin shift. His eyes were still devouring me, making my skin prickle, and I folded my arms across my breasts instead. “I don’t need any husband. I’ve a good trade and a good position in this palazzo—” I was talking too much, too fast. Does a cook bother to explain his decisions to his subordinates when explaining a menu? A proposal of marriage should be no different. “I do not wish to marry,” I concluded with as much finality as I could muster. “Not Maestro Santini, and certainly not you.”
“But you get lonely.” Bartolomeo reached out and touched a curl of my hair, winding it around his finger. “I can always tell. It shows in your tourtes first, those marzipan ones you make for Madonna Giulia. They get sweeter, and you add more ground almonds. And it takes you half the time to whip up egg whites, because you get vicious when you’re sad, and you take it out on the eggs—”
He bent his head to kiss me again, surely one of the few men in the palazzo tall enough to do it, not that he was really a man; he was a boy and he was seven years younger than I and sweet Santa Marta, how did I get into this mess and why was I kissing him again and why wouldn’t he just put some clothes on before I did something else stupid?
“Enough!” I pushed him away, sweeping back my hair where he’d twined it about his hand. “I will forget this, Bartolomeo,” I said sternly as he opened his mouth. “But not if I hear one more word about it, from you or anyone else, so don’t even think about boasting to the other apprentices.” Dear God, I knew how fast gossip could spread through a kitchen. A cocky boy who has just made a conquest always wants to boast to his friends, but a cocky boy I might have been able to silence. A lovelorn moon-calf of a boy who had just been rejected in his first heart-felt marriage proposal? Had I been too busy worrying about Bartolomeo’s future to worry about mine?
All he had to do was burst out bitterly to the first friend he saw in the scullery, or the first pretty serving maid who took him to bed and consoled him with what a coldhearted bitch I was. And after that, the whole household would know how a kitchen apprentice had seduced the maestra di cucina, and I’d have not a single crumb of authority left. The maids and the pot-boys would all be giggling behind my back, and once it got up to Madonna Adriana . . . maids in this household were dismissed if they gained reputations as whores. Pantisilea was our resident harlot, and as much as everyone liked her, she would have been packed out years ago if Madonna Giulia had not intervened. And a maestra di cucina would be held to an even higher standard—if she could not keep order among her underlings, she was worth nothing. How my underlings would love whispering about Carmelina, the inviolable Madonna of the kitchens, revealed as no better than Pantisilea.
Stupider than Pantisilea. She was at least clever enough to keep her belly flat using all those prudent tricks with halved limes or cups of pennyroyal extract. I knew those tricks too, but had that stopped me? Had I really been so foolish and lonely and lust-drunk that I hadn’t even thought of pushing a halved lime into myself before my apprentice pushed his way in after it? If my belly swelled, it wouldn’t even matter if Bartolomeo held his tongue. I’d be out on the streets the moment my apron showed a bulge, and even Madonna Giulia wouldn’t be able to save my position for me.
Dear God, I was going to lose everything. All because I couldn’t keep my legs closed. My father was right—I really was just a slattern.
“Not one word to anyone,” I said desperately, jabbing a finger into Bartolomeo’s chest. “You will take my orders, you will do as I tell you, and you will never presume to touch me again.”
“Carmelina—”
“Or call me anythi
ng but signorina,” I rode over him. “You are an apprentice, and you are a silly boy, and I should never have let you touch me. It was a mistake, you hear me? A mistake.”
He stood there with his hands hanging at his sides, still naked except for the cross about his neck, looking at me. He flushed slowly, so dark his freckles disappeared all the way down his chest. He turned away from me, fumbling for his breeches, and I felt a pang. But I kept my stony expression. I’d suffered calf love too when I was his age—painful though it was, it went away quickly. He’d forget about me with the next maidservant to bat her lashes at him. Far better for his future if he did.
If he would just not ruin my future by talking . . .
“Good night,” I added in the same severe tones, and turned for the door. My cold and empty bed now seemed very welcoming indeed. Though before I collapsed into it, I’d have to rush for a jar of the strongest vinegar we had, and rinse my body out with a prayer that it wasn’t too late to keep myself from quickening . . .
But even in all my confused fear, I couldn’t stop myself from hesitating as I opened the door and smelled the waft of olive oil and coarse salt from the plate of now-cold tubers in the kitchens. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that Bartolomeo had not moved, still standing beside the rumpled pallet with his arms folded across his chest and his bare feet looking rather pathetic below his flour-dusted breeches.
“Bartolomeo,” I said. “You were right about one thing. Those fried things you made, whatever that vegetable is—they’re delicious. I’ll have you cook them for Madonna Giulia as soon as she returns.”
“Go to hell,” said my apprentice, and slammed the door in my face.
CHAPTER FIVE
Evil is often spoken of me, but I let it pass.
—RODRIGO BORGIA, POPE ALEXANDER VI