Giulia
If there’s anything you must never say to a Florentine, it’s that Florence is the little sister of Rome. Any Florentine citizen will puff up like a toad and then proceed to list all the glories of their fair city, from the enormous dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore (“Far finer than the Basilica San Pietro!”) to the bridges over the Arno (“Far fewer dead cats in our river than in your Tiber!”). So unless you have a great deal of time to spend listening to a huffy lecture on all of Florence’s admitted glories, it’s better just to keep from making any comparisons at all. But Florence is a little sister to Rome, and in more than just her size. Rome is a courtesan in her prime, ripe and perhaps decaying a little under the façade of her cosmetics, but flaunting herself in spite of it: luscious and foul-mouthed and funny, praying and swearing and laughing all at once, speaking a dozen languages and spreading her skirts and her arms wide for all the pilgrims and travelers of the world. Florence is a girl just come from a convent: beautiful but self-contained, a little wary, a little prim. Rome is the hub of all Christendom; you can see a thousand new faces a day and never repeat a one, and Romans react a thousand different ways to any dilemma. In Florence everyone seems to know each other, and whether for good or ill, they all react as one.
And in January when I went to visit my sister, Florence was not only an insular city but a frightened one. Frightened, but strangely exalted, and what a mix it was to see on people’s faces.
“It’s all the fault of that wretched Savonarola,” my skinny and acerbic older sister fretted. But even in the safety of her own cozy sala, she gave a quick glance to make sure the maids were busy clearing the credenza at the other end of the room, and the servers occupied decanting the wine rather than eavesdropping on our conversation. I hadn’t been in Florence a day before I knew about Savonarola’s Angels: the young men and boys of Florence who had answered all that Dominican thundering from the pulpit to join God’s militia. That nice young page with the chestnut curls—who knew if after cena he might slip out of the house, don a white robe, and join bands of fellow Angels in singing hymns and roaming the streets looking for sinners to reprimand? Best to be careful; Savonarola had a great many Angels. Much like God Himself, I suppose, though I doubted God’s angels were quite so obnoxious and pimply.
“So it’s not enough now that we’ve been instructed to forswear sloth and luxury and idle pastimes,” Gerolama complained as she passed me a cup of warmed wine. “We’re now to be inspected, to make sure our houses contain nothing ungodly! It’s all for that wretched bonfire Fra Savonarola’s determined to build—you can already see the pyre being built in the Piazza della Signoria. We’re to toss everything vain onto it—jewels, lip rouge, perfumes, cards—”
“Then Madonna Giulia will return to Rome with no baggage at all,” remarked Leonello from his corner. It did not matter whether the room my bodyguard entered was my private chamber, the great Sala dei Santi in the Vatican, or my sister’s overdecorated little chamber with its too-ornate credenza and garishly embroidered wall hangings—Leonello’s hazel eyes always flicked briefly in each direction, measuring angles of attack in the event of any assassins lurking about, and then he took the corner with the best view of the room regardless of who might already be seated there, propped up his black boots, and took out a book. Currently the book was some salaciously illustrated volume of tales from the Orient that he had borrowed from Cesare Borgia’s collection, and Leonello flicked the pages with great interest. “Such utter rubbish,” he remarked. “I must be sure to finish it quickly, as I’m sure this city’s dirty literature will all be required as fuel for Fra Savonarola’s bonfire.”
I made a private note to keep my jewels in their boxes during this visit. I didn’t really see any reason why God would want me to burn up my teardrop pearl necklace or my diamond hair roses. Besides, according to Fra Savonarola and his ilk, a woman of my stature was thoroughly damned anyway, so why not at least go down to hell in all my finery? And how can you burn diamonds, anyway?
“I’m already storing away a few things,” my sister confided. “My better gowns, of course, and the good silver, and the pendant my husband gave me on our wedding. Though I may just let those hideous earrings from his mother get into the pile,” Gerolama added thoughtfully. “Not to mention that ghastly credenza from our great-aunt Lella . . .”
“Mamma, Mamma!” My Laura dashed into the sala in a whirl of bouncing blond curls. “Giuseppe the cook gave me a sugar lump! And he says there are angels in Florence, angels on every street corner—”
“Not the kind of angels you want to meet, Lauretta mia.” I lifted my daughter up into my lap, dabbing at the sugar on her cheeks. Nearly four years old now, plump and golden and giggling, and every time I looked at her my heart squeezed utter happiness. Even with the rest of me so unsettled.
“You’d better put her in a wool dress when you take her out.” Gerolama sniffed at Laura’s apricot velvet gown with the sleeves trimmed in fox fur, a miniature copy of mine. Laura had at last outgrown the stage of wanting to run about naked; these days she took a very keen interest indeed in her dresses. “Swirly skirts!” she always demanded of my robe makers. “With sparkles.” Sparkles were all she thought about now—Laura had wanted earrings for her last birthday, and so I relented and let Leonello pierce her little ears with a heated needle. She’d been so determined to have pearl eardrops of her very own, she hadn’t made a peep at the pain. “You spoil that child, Giulia,” my sister scolded as I kissed the top of Laura’s blond head.
“Of course I do,” I said without shame, and tickled my girl until she shrieked laughter. She had exactly the same ticklish spot at her waist as my Pope.
Gerolama eyed her: a shrewd farmer’s wife pricing a lamb to see how much it will fetch at market. “Still an Orsini, is she?”
“In name at least.” But in blood—well, blood was beginning to tell. Laura’s face was emerging from its infant roundness into a character and shape of its own, and from certain angles I thought I could see a chin that might turn out like Lucrezia’s, or an arch of eyebrow exactly like Cesare’s. And she definitely had Rodrigo’s nose. Laura Borgia? I wondered, and thought I could see my Pope wondering too lately as he looked at my daughter.
“Has His Holiness spoken of a marriage for her?” Gerolama pressed. “That would seal the connection for our family, you know.”
“She’s not four years old,” I protested.
“And you told me yourself Lucrezia had a betrothal at seven. It’s never too early to start planning a daughter’s future, Giulia.”
Says the mother of none, I thought unkindly.
“Besides, you’ll lose your looks someday, and the Pope’s favor with them, and then where will we all be? But if you’ve managed to betroth Laura to an Este or a Gonzaga, well, that’s something we can all fall back on.”
“I am touched by your concern for your niece,” I said tartly.
“I only want her properly married,” Gerolama retorted. “A countess or a duchess, think of it! Or are you going to groom her to take your path instead?”
My voice slid from tart to freezing. “My daughter will never be an old man’s plaything.”
The words startled me, coming out so fast and unthinking. Perhaps because it wasn’t quite the fate I had pictured for myself, when I was a little girl who also loved sparkles and swirling skirts.
Laura soon slid off my lap and bounced away to go play with the new litter of kittens in the kitchens—“Can I have one, Mamma? Can I, can I?”—and Gerolama was soon complaining of the insolence of her maidservants and the difficulties of keeping dust off her carpets. Eternal topics among respectable women, and perhaps there were more benefits to being a harlot than I’d previously thought, like the fact that most respectable women refused to talk to me. They rushed to copy any item of clothing I wore on my sinful body, but my sinful conversation was entirely shunned.
Still, I was glad I’d come to Florence, even if my sister did grate a
gainst me. I could play with Laura all day long now, brush her curls and tell her stories and applaud her as she took up her miniature lute with great seriousness and fumbled through her first simple song with every bit as little musical talent as her mother. All the time with my daughter that I wanted, without being interrupted by some obsequious archbishop murmuring about how much he would appreciate a new benefice from the Pope. In Florence I could relax my morning routine, leave off dressing my hair in those elaborate plaits and curls that took hours and left my neck rigid, without having the Tart of Aragon make some pointed comment about how sad it was when a woman stopped taking trouble with her looks. I could rise early to watch the dawn if I liked without being exhausted from some endless banquet the evening before; I could throw on any gown I liked for Mass because nobody cared if I had worn the same thing to Mass two weeks ago; I could go riding without Lucrezia always trying to make sure her riding dress was just a little finer than mine. I could spend an entire morning in my shift if I wanted, savoring my way through Avernus’s sonnets and reading bits out loud just to annoy Leonello. “Listen to Sonnet VIII; surely even you have to admit it’s marvelous. He compares his Aurora to Helen of Troy—”
“No more, I beg you.” Fingers in ears.
I just read louder, giggling. “‘A golden Helen for a golden war—’”
“Kill me, please. Kill me at once.”
It was all just another of my forays into the ordinary world, I suppose. And even if Florence felt small and fearful under Savonarola’s rantings and his Angels, it was a foray I enjoyed.
A respite away from my Pope.
“I shall have to give His Holiness a good excuse if I wish to stay longer,” I told Leonello one morning as I was lacing Laura’s little dress up her back.
“No, you don’t. He doesn’t own you, after all, and I’ve heard you say so yourself.”
“True,” I agreed. “But the letters are getting irate. He started out apologetic, begging me to come back soon and saying he’d die a slow and horrible death if I was still angry at him. But now he’s getting angry that I haven’t answered any of those letters, so I’m getting missives about how I’m an unfeeling minx for leaving him so long.”
“Tell him Fra Savonarola refuses to let you leave until you have given all your jewels over to his bonfire.” Leonello distracted Laura from her wriggling by picking up one of Gerolama’s prized glass ornaments from Murano and balancing it on the very tip of one finger. “You’ll get another week in Florence, and the Holy Father will finally excommunicate our good fire-and-brimstone friar.”
Laura clapped her hands at Leonello, crying, “Make it dance, Leo, make it dance!” Leonello would juggle for no one but my daughter. He set three of Gerolama’s fragile vases to whirling above his stubby hands as I recaptured Laura’s little wrist and stuffed it into her sleeve. My daughter had nursemaids, of course, but I would far rather dress her myself. Left to her own devices, Laura would beg the maids to steal my rouge for her cheeks and my pulverized malachite to smear around her eyes. Just because I was a harlot did not mean I was going to let my daughter start painting herself like one at the age of not-quite-four.
Laura squealed delight as Leonello tossed one vase high and caught it with a hand behind his back, and I tilted my head at him. “You’re so good with children, Leonello. Why on earth don’t you marry and have a few of your own?”
“What woman would have me?” His eyes followed the dance of the vases in the air. “A stunted little fellow who only comes to her waist?”
“Nonsense, you’re not so small as that.” I’d seen many dwarves; jesters and tumblers in the Duke of Gandia’s household or the Tart of Aragon’s, and Leonello overtopped them all by at least a hand’s breadth. He really stood only half a head below me. “A great many women would consider you handsome,” I informed him. “If you’d only make yourself pleasant to them!”
He turned a circle, still juggling for Laura, and I saw that the back of his neck reddened as it always did when he was exasperated. I did adore exasperating him. “Women like to point at men like me, Madonna Giulia. That does not mean they find me handsome.”
“Why not choose a woman like you, then?”
Leonello gave a snort of derision. “Because one dwarf is an oddity, but two together are a freak show. No.”
“You aren’t very nice to your own kind, you know.” I’d seen him watching Juan’s Spanish dwarves when they bounded out to entertain after cena. They looked at him in curiosity and envy, my bodyguard in his rich blacks standing so proud with his dark head thrown back, and he gazed back at them with no expression at all. “You’ve found yourself a soft billet,” I’d once heard a wizened little woman in motley tell Leonello, eyeing his livery cynically, and he gave her a smile of slow scorn. “Why don’t you ever seek their company, Leonello?” I persisted. Surely there was companionship to be found among those like him, but I’d never once seen him look for it.
“They envy me,” he said briefly. “And I despise them.”
“Why?”
“They wish they had a place in the world. A place where they are not laughed at.” One by one, Leonello caught the fragile glass vases. “And I scorn them because they never taught themselves any skills, nothing that would raise them above laughter. Instead they took the easy path, and let the world mock them. Eventually it turns them sour, and then they turn to drink, and most of the time they die badly. And as far as I am concerned, it’s their own fault.”
I studied him. “That seems very harsh.”
“The world is harsh, Madonna Giulia. I was born as I am, and I see no reason to whine about it. At least I can make certain that I never marry, never sire children, and never pass this deformity of mine to some unfortunate infant. Stop whimpering,” he said sharply to Laura as she clamored for more of his juggling, and I bit my lip. I did like to tease Leonello, but I would not hurt him for the world.
He turned to put Gerolama’s vases back in their niches, and when he turned back I saw his eyes were glass-cool and he was done with the subject. “Maestro Botticelli’s painting of you,” he said, all business. “You did promise him you would complete your sittings while you were here in Florence.”
I made a face, grateful for the change in conversation. “I suppose if I string the sittings out, I’ll earn another few weeks here. If I want them.”
Laura was still looking hurt, and Leonello tweaked her nose in apology for snapping at her. “You’ve been putting it off, Madonna Giulia. Sitting for your painting.”
“I don’t want to do it,” I said simply.
My bodyguard regarded me, head tilted. He hadn’t spoken of the day I’d posed naked and cold in the papal apartments surrounded by leering men, and I hadn’t either. I wondered if Leonello would say something cutting and careless about it—we called ourselves friends by now, but that had never stopped him in the past from carving me up with his viper’s tongue if he was in the mood, and he was certainly in the mood now after the way I’d probed him. But his voice wasn’t mocking at all when he spoke. “If it’s any consolation,” he said instead, “you carried it off rather splendidly.”
But oh, going to Mass that first Sunday after my portrait-sitting had been agony! I was used to being stared at as I took Communion at the Basilica San Pietro—mostly it was the women who stared, craning their necks to see if my sleeves were cut in the French fashion or the Neapolitan, or if my collar was lace or marten fur. That particular Sunday it had been the men staring, trading the latest rumors in a hot whisper about how I’d stripped naked before the entire College of Cardinals and posed on my hands and knees as the Mary Magdalene, or with my legs spread and an apple in my hand as Eve. What a great many whispers had flown through Rome in just a few short days. I’d closed my eyes, cheeks burning as I opened my mouth for the Holy Wafer, and I heard one of the altar boys whisper to the other, “Do you think she goes on her knees and opens her mouth like that for the Holy Father?”
How was I supposed to
carry that off splendidly?
Leonello was still looking at me, thoughtful. “Will you refuse to finish Maestro Botticelli’s portrait then, Madonna Giulia?”
“Maybe.” I turned Laura around, stroking a comb through her hair. She was already begging me for chamomile pastes to help it grow as long as mine. “Maybe not. Sitting for Maestro Botticelli, well, it won’t be so bad with just him in the room. I don’t mind that so much. But after the portrait’s done it will be displayed everywhere, and I don’t know if I want that.”
“Perhaps His Holiness will keep it for his private apartments.”
“He won’t.” Once, yes—Rodrigo would have been too possessive to let any other man see what I looked like under my gown, even if just in a painting. That Rodrigo would never have pressed me to strip naked before a roomful of cardinals either . . . I struggled to pinpoint the change, dividing Laura’s hair to plait. “He’ll enjoy watching them be envious. So he’ll show the painting to everyone, and all Rome is going to know exactly what my breasts look like, not just a handful of cardinals and papal functionaries.”
And then my brother Sandro really would put a fist into someone he shouldn’t, possibly my Pope. The only way I’d been able to calm him after all the rumors that had flown about . . . well, I’d lied completely and told him it was all just vicious gossip. How was I supposed to maintain that little fiction if there was a portrait of me in all my nakedness, and everyone in Rome had seen it?
“You may console yourself with one thing,” Leonello said at last.
“What?”
“All Rome has wondered for years what your breasts look like. If you have the painting done, the citywide suspense will at last be ended.”
I laughed, feeling lighter somehow. “Will you stay in the room with me, if I go to Maestro Botticelli for another sitting?”
“I thought you wanted fewer men gazing on the breasts in question, not more.”
I tied off Laura’s blond plait, and sent her skipping out of the sala with a kiss to the top of her head. “You don’t count.”