“Because they are true,” I said.
Giulia looked up at me from her bench. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, not all of it,” I shrugged, hanging up her damp cloak. Servants were approaching with trays and cups of warmed wine, but I waved them back for the moment. “Your Pope is no marrano, and we both know Lucrezia does not pleasure her brothers or her father, and I doubt our good Cardinal Cesare practices dark magic. But for the rest of it, well, Juan Borgia has raped more than one virgin who had to be packed off to a convent, and Cesare is certainly capable of murder, and since our departed Pope Innocent VIII left us with empty coffers, his successor has filled them by means of selling benefices. And I believe a rather hefty sum changed hands when King Louis XII wished to divorce his queen and indicated he was willing to pay for the required dispensation.”
“How do you know these things?” my mistress whispered.
“It’s common knowledge, Madonna Giulia.”
“But the rest of it.” She shook her head a little. “What that stalk-necked boy said about drunken orgies and incest—”
“Half-truths.” I spread my hands. “Cesare Borgia sleeps with his sister-in-law, after all—why not his sister too? The Pope dotes so much upon his daughter that he called her away from her husband to visit him—so surely she shares his bed as well as his table. As for naked women in the Vatican, stripped for the Pope’s pleasure while he watches with his friends—well, it might not have been an orgy, but I think you can recall a recent event along those lines.”
Giulia stared at me as though I had horns. “This is how people see him? All of them?”
I thought of Cesare, who knew where to find a murderer of innocent women and didn’t care a fig about it except to find my silent burning frustration amusing. I thought of the Pope, who in the early days would not ever have exposed his pearl to the world’s greedy eyes. I thought of Lucrezia with her rouged cheeks, and Sancha arching greedily against me. I shrugged again.
“But it’s not fair!” Giulia burst out. “There have been other popes with bastard children—Pope Innocent had sixteen! And Rodrigo is hardly the first to sell a benefice or two, or hand out red hats and bishoprics among his family. So why does he incite them to all this hatred”—waving the pamphlet—“and not the others?”
I paused, leaning against the doorjamb and reflecting. A good question, that. “Perhaps because unlike the others, this pope hides nothing,” I offered. “In the past, a pope passed his bastard daughters off as nieces rather than marrying them off openly in the Vatican in huge weddings. Popes promoted a few family members—not all of them. Popes at least pretended virtue—smuggled their mistresses in through discreet passageways, rather than installing them openly in luxurious seraglios.”
This pope pretended nothing, hid nothing, was ashamed of nothing. I supposed that was the most unforgivable sin of all.
The chill February wind gave a moaning gust outside the door, and I saw Giulia shiver. “What will they say of Laura?” she said in a low voice. “Just because she is a Borgia and can be painted with the same brush?”
“She was christened an Orsini.”
“She’s a Borgia. Rodrigo might doubt it, but no one else in Rome does, and isn’t that what matters? What people want to believe?” Giulia sounded bitter. “Will they say she’s the bastard get of a fallen woman, a little harlot in the cradle?”
“Probably,” I said.
Giulia shook her head and rose, the pamphlet still crumpled in her fist.
“Let’s get upstairs to the sala,” I said, and touched her arm. “You look cold.”
“I am cold,” she sighed. “Cold to the bone.”
A whole entourage of papal guards in the Borgia colors awaited us in sour Gerolama’s overheated little sala. A stolid captain stepped forward, offering Giulia a sealed missive stamped with the Pope’s own seal. “We are to escort you back to Rome at once, Madonna Giulia,” the captain intoned. “His Holiness will not have you caught in Fra Savonarola’s unrest. News of this coming bonfire disturbs him.”
Frankly, it disturbed me. I looked at my mistress, wondering if she would disobey him in her anger over being stripped before half the College of Cardinals. But she looked down at the Pope’s seal, and her free hand drifted up to touch her head, which must have been aching after all the yanking the Angels had done on her hair. “I will pack,” she said, and I let out a silent breath of relief. This was no city for the Bride of Christ, nor for anything beautiful. Fra Savonarola was a man of dust and pain; he wanted everything beautiful rendered to ash. The Borgias might have their sins, but I could not count their love of beauty as one of them.
* * *
In the end, however, we did see the great burning that would be known as the Bonfire of the Vanities. The fires were lit at noon, accompanied by a citywide clamor of church bells, and smoke was roiling up toward the sky when Madonna Giulia’s carriage with its envelope of papal guards rolled out into the streets of Florence. Even emptier streets—everyone in this city, it seemed, had flocked to watch the burning. Or else they stayed home and prayed.
“Stop the carriage,” Madonna Giulia called to her captain as we approached the Piazza della Signoria.
“Madonna—”
“I said stop!”
The wheels creaked, and we gazed out. A throng of fervent figures choked the piazza; men cheering and roaring, women sobbing and casting their cosmetics pots or their mirrors into the blaze; children competing to see who could throw a toy farthest into the flames. A great eight-sided inferno, larger than a house, boiling black smoke in great billows that immediately made little Laura begin to cough. Giulia pulled her daughter away from the window, but I stayed, my stomach rolling sickly. I saw ranks of white-robed Angels singing hymns in their loud fervent voices; Dominicans weeping and lifting their hands up to the heavens as they railed at God. I saw a frail little nun assisting an Angel as he flung a painted panel of nude sea nymphs into the flames; I saw statues and mirrors, velvet hangings and illuminated books and playing cards waiting their turn to be burned. I saw a bent man in a patched robe with tears streaming down his face, praying as he flung armloads of drawings and canvases onto the pyre, and for a moment I thought it was Maestro Botticelli, but I blinked and he had disappeared.
The smoke billowed again, and I saw a black-robed friar with fleshy lips and a great hooked nose, elevated above the others. He flung his arms upward, outspread like a crucifix, howling at the heavens, and I was too far away to hear any of his words, but I heard the answering screams responding to the cries of the beast himself. Fra Savonarola flung one finger out toward his personal inferno, and I saw the figure that had been propped at the very top of Florence’s illicit luxuries. The bulky, straw-stuffed figure of a man in rich jeweled robes.
“Is it His Holiness?” Giulia said, low-voiced.
The smoke coiled down again like a tremendous serpent, hiding everything from my eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Do they really hate him so much?”
“Of course they do, madonna. They are sheep, and they believe whatever they are told. Everyone hates powerful men.”
“They wouldn’t if they knew him,” she said passionately. “If they saw how hard he works—how he denies himself sleep and wine and rich food—”
“Not much else,” I murmured.
“How he’ll receive any petitioner, no matter how low-born, because he says every man should have the right to address the Holy Father—how he wouldn’t even care that they say these things of him, because he says Rome is a free city and anyone can say or write what they please!” Giulia took the crumpled ball of the pamphlet and flung it out the window, clutching Laura even tighter. “Does that sound like an Antichrist to you?”
“We’re in Florence, not Rome,” I said, and waved out the window at Savonarola’s hell. “This is not a free city to be saying anything.”
“Drive on,” Giulia called to her captain, and the carriage jolted into motion again. Giulia
stared into her own thoughts, stroking Laura’s hair, and I watched the enormous cloud of smoke rising into the sky as we pulled away from it. The paintings that would be going up in the engulfing flames, the statues, the works of art, the books. Dio, the books.
Just as much trash as art, I told myself. Would the world really be so deprived, losing a few cosmetics pots and pairs of dice and bad paintings of naked goddesses?
But the books, I couldn’t help thinking, and a twist of helpless anger curdled my stomach.
“I thought for a moment that I saw Maestro Botticelli in that crowd,” Giulia said perhaps an hour outside Florence. “He was tossing his own paintings on the fire. I suppose one of them was the sketch of me.”
“I suppose so,” I answered.
“Good,” said Giulia Farnese.
I wasn’t stupid enough to say so, but I couldn’t agree with her there. Because I’d seen that sketch take shape under Botticelli’s hand, during that one awkward sitting in the papal apartments, and even half formed in chalk lines with the colors just hinted at, it had the look of something breathtaking. He’d caught her expression, a fearful wonder I’d seen as I described the things they said of her Pope, and her hair would have been a marvel of a thing on canvas, picked out in gold leaf and contrasting with the white of her body and the darkness he’d scribbled about her with the half-formed serpents and monsters of the underworld. A canvas that might have rivaled his Birth of Venus, and now the world would never see it.
Savonarola’s great bonfire was only a smudge on the horizon behind us now, but the wind had caught the whirling cloud of ash and brought it down on the road like a strangely warm storm. Flakes of ash powdered Giulia’s hair like deathly snow as we made our way back to Rome.
PART TWO
April 1497–June 1497
CHAPTER SIX
O bawdy Church . . .
You have become a wanton whore with your lust.
You are lower than the beasts, a monster of depravity.
—FRA SAVONAROLA
Carmelina
Carmelina.” Madonna Giulia greeted me distractedly. “What do unicorns eat?”
“Um.” I blinked. “Virgins?”
“That’s dragons. Isn’t it? I thought unicorns only got captured by virgins.” Giulia rummaged in a box before her mirror, back to me. “And then there’s the question of what lions eat, and serpents and peacocks and swans. Goodness,” she sighed. “It’s going to be a disaster.”
“What is, madonna?” I ventured into her chamber, drying my hands on the apron I hadn’t had an opportunity to take off before being whisked upstairs to see my mistress. For a panicked instant I thought I was going to be dismissed. A fortnight’s agony of waiting and praying and dousing myself with vinegar had given me the relief of knowing I wasn’t with child—but I could still lose my reputation and everything else with it. All Bartolomeo had to do was go beyond glaring at me stonily and let something slip, maybe show the marks my nails had left in his back and tell the scullions what a whore the maestra di cucina was . . .
But no: Madonna Giulia beckoned me in with her usual friendly wave, and her chamber bustled with a dozen robe makers throwing swatches of figured velvet and Spanish brocade over everything. Slippers and sleeves lay discarded on every surface, the goat gnawed on a curtain tassel, maids darted back and forth like schooling lake smelt—La Bella’s usual cheerful disorder, except for the masks. Dozens and dozens of masks, feathered and jeweled, beaded and eyeless, that lay about the room on every surface staring at me.
“Sweet Santa Marta,” I said as La Bella herself turned from her mirror to look at me. “What’s it supposed to be?”
“A unicorn.” Madonna Giulia doffed her white-and-gold beaded half mask with its tip-tilted eyes and spiraled gilt-and-ivory horn. “I’ve decided to be a unicorn for His Holiness’s masquerade in a fortnight. It’s a Menagerie Ball, so we’re all to come as animals. So, what does one serve a unicorn at a Menagerie Ball?”
I vacillated dubiously between holy water and oats. You couldn’t even get a decent frittella out of holy water and oats. Then I counted my days and blinked. “A fortnight? That’s Easter.”
“Just afterward.” Madonna Giulia’s voice was very dry. “The very instant Lent is done, in other words. The soonest His Holiness could host another celebration for the Duke of Gandia’s triumph at Ostia.”
I heard a few snorts about the room at that. Juan Borgia had come prancing back to Rome crowing of the victory he had won over the remainders of the French army, which had immured itself in Ostia, but the winds of gossip had it that his generals deserved the credit. Besides, what did a small victory count when all the ground gained over the rebellious branches of the Orsini family last fall had had to be given back already to keep the peace?
“In any case,” Madonna Giulia concluded, tossing the unicorn mask aside and picking up a silver-white swan mask with an ivory beak and a cockade of white feathers, “we’re to design a menu for the masquerade. I’m not sure what to serve a lot of wild beasts, or guests dressed as wild beasts. I suggest we don’t serve it in a trough. The last thing we need to do is give Juan ideas.” She wrinkled her nose. “I wonder if he’ll come dressed as a jackass.”
“He wouldn’t need a costume.” I moved a death’s-head mask from a stool to sit down. Unlike the little Countess of Pesaro, Madonna Giulia did not keep her servants standing during long interviews. “We’ll serve a collatione, lots of small dishes served on vine leaves, since beasts don’t eat off plates. And tiny one-bite sort of nibbles, since beasts don’t use spoons either.” A great many cold thin-shaved slivers of fine meats; salted nuts and candied curls of citron; endives stuffed with cheese and drizzled with oil; olives and Spanish mustard and a great blood-rare roast of ox shoulder for all the masked predators . . . “And sugar subtleties,” I decided. “Molded and dyed in the shape of beasts. I can make a spun-sugar unicorn with a gilded horn for you, Madonna Giulia.”
“And a red sugar bull for His Holiness.” La Bella’s dimple flashed. “He’s to come as the Borgia bull, of course.” The dimple disappeared. “Oh, dear.”
“Madonna?” I ventured.
She gestured at the roomful of masks. Three of her maids were giggling and trying on feathered harlequin half masks before her mirror, but their mistress looked somber. “It’s not really a good idea, is it? Everyone at each other’s throats as it is, and then put them all in masks and tell them to behave like beasts?”
I shrugged, uncomfortable. My mistress had been very sober-faced since her return from Florence, distracted and more inclined to curl up in her chamber playing with Laura rather than join the hilarious evenings of games and cards and song that Madonna Lucrezia and Sancha of Aragon planned every night. It was Lent, the time for somber reflection rather than raucous play, but that had certainly not slowed them down. Whenever Sancha of Aragon visited the Palazzo Santa Maria, she always had some whine for the steward about “Carp again?” If she even bothered to come to cena at all, with all her bed-hopping. It wasn’t long before all the maids had picked up Madonna Giulia’s name for her, and I had to remind them that they could not go about referring to the Princess of Squillace as “the Tart of Aragon,” at least not where anyone could hear them.
Madonna Giulia was still looking at the mask in her lap, and I tried to coax a smile from her. “It’s just a masquerade, Madonna Giulia. Harmless fun, you know—and I come from Venice; I know about masquerades.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Giulia smiled at me, and a thoughtful gleam lit her eye. Seizing my wrist, she pulled me up from the stool and looked me over. “Well, I may not particularly want to act the hostess in a horned mask for this affair, but if I’m to do it, I shall have some fun. What beast will we dress you up as, Carmelina?”
“Me?” I nearly blurted out that the last time I’d worn a mask, it had been fleeing a convent during Carnivale while dressed as a man in order to escape charges of altar desecration. “Madonna Giulia, I’m just the
one making sugar subtleties and preparing the banquet. Not a guest.”
“Nonsense. Every one of my maids is going; we’re sneaking you all in for a lark.” She gave her enchanting grin. “In a mask and a costume, who’s to know? There will be hundreds of guests; no one will ever find out.”
“You’d have a costume and a mask made for me, when I’d never wear it but once?” I cast an incredulous eye about the swatches of fine-woven cloth, the fragile costly masks. “The expense—”
“Bother the expense,” said my mistress blithely. Of course, she never had to think about the cost of anything. Ten extra costumes so all her maids could attend the masquerade? Why not!
Very few noble ladies like Giulia Farnese bothered befriending their maidservants as she did, but I’d long since gotten used to the informality in the Palazzo Santa Maria. The plain truth was that La Bella had no women to talk to but the maidservants. The other highborn wives of Rome were far too virtuous to come calling on the Pope’s whore. They envied her looks, they copied everything she wore, they fawned on her at public functions if their husbands needed some favor from the Holy Father—but they were certainly too good to befriend her. So she befriended the palazzo’s maids instead, gossiping and giggling with them, lending them her perfumes and hair potions, drying their tears over failed love affairs or helping arrange marriages for them. I couldn’t count the number of times Madonna Giulia had come tripping into my kitchens for a plate of biscotti or a little cooking instruction (at least until I banned her from cooking instruction, because the woman could set cold water on fire just by walking past the pot).