It hurt—sweet Santa Marta, but it hurt! Had Leonello hurt so badly when he lost his little finger to the French? If it had pained him half as much as this, he should have trumpeted my secrets all over Rome in revenge. My bloody lips parted, but I couldn’t make a sound. The quivering blade neatly bisected my palm, now slowly filling with blood.
“Good,” Juan panted. He cuffed blood off his cheek from where I’d scratched him, and I could see a bulge in his codpiece that wasn’t just fashionable padding. He was reeling drunk, but dear God, he was hard as a kitchen spit. God help me, I thought, God help me, God help me—but why would He bother? I’d been wedded to His Son, and I’d fled them both.
“Hold down her other hand,” Juan Borgia ordered. “Hold it down, and give me your knife.” The guard had no resistance from me this time as he spread my limp arm across the trestle table. But he hesitated as he took the knife from his belt and began to give it to his master, hesitated with a strange little grunt, and I opened my swimming eyes to see the puzzlement in his gaze as he looked down at the blade suddenly growing from his shoulder.
“Stop this at once,” said a cold voice from the cellar doors.
Bartolomeo, I thought idiotically. But the figure in the doorway was far smaller, a dwarf with a knife in each hand who fixed the Duke of Gandia and his guardsman with an implacable gaze and said, “Let her go.”
Leonello
A spill of yellow candlelight making jagged shadows over the stacks of wine casks. A girl’s long body arched and writhing across a table like an agonized female Christ. The knife through her hand, its hilt throwing a cruciform shadow in stark relief across the flagstones. The blood pooling in her palm, dripping slowly through her fingers to the floor as Juan Borgia bent over her other hand.
I saw it all in one horror-filled instant. What a thing to see, when all I wanted was a cup of wine and a little sleep.
I didn’t even know I’d thrown the knife until the guard staggered back, clapping a hand to the blade in his shoulder. Carmelina contracted into a trembling ball about her staked hand. And Juan Borgia just straightened in slow arrogance, darkness writhing in his eyes.
“Get out of here, dwarf,” the Pope’s son rasped.
The Pope’s son. So I’d been half right all along. I’d just had my eye on the wrong son. No wonder Cesare Borgia had seemed so entertained.
“You will take your thug, Gonfalonier,” I said. “And you will remove yourself at once.”
Juan’s voice scaled up. “How dare you!”
I felt the same floating emptiness I’d felt when I swept Giulia behind me and faced the French army with nothing but the blades in my hands. I had a blade in each hand now, though I couldn’t remember drawing either, and I pointed one straight at the Duke of Gandia.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Juan snarled, and started for me. I flicked my wrist, and Juan stopped as the blade winged through his hair, carving a thread-fine furrow along one temple. A hair’s width of blood welled up. He’ll see you dead for that, I thought, but I didn’t even remotely care. I whipped another knife out of my boot top and held it between two fingers.
“There are only two of you,” I said, quite conversationally. “And if you think I cannot kill you both with ease, you are sadly mistaken. I believe you have no weapon, Gonfalonier, since you were careless enough to leave it stabbed through that girl’s hand, and your guard is on the other side of that table. By the time he rounds it, you will be dead and I will have seven more blades to spare for him.”
I heard Carmelina’s soft gasping from the table, and I saw Anna’s murderer hesitate. I could see a flush creep up from his collar. A red wave of it, like all the blood he’d spilled over the years. “When the Holy Father hears—”
“The Holy Father will hear a great deal,” I said, wondering in some quarter of my brain how my voice was coming out so calm when my insides were such a vicious coil of tension and rage. “Carmelina Mangano might be only the cook, but Giulia Farnese counts her a friend. You wish to upset La Bella, Gonfalonier? She is the only person in this world whose side the Holy Father will choose over yours. Cause any further damage to her friend, and I assure you she will bring your father’s wrath down around your ears.”
Another pause, one I counted not in heartbeats but in the slow drops of blood from Carmelina’s staked palm.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“I won’t forget this,” Juan snarled.
“Ever original,” I murmured, but I felt a violent squeeze of relief in my chest. If he had rushed me—
He would never have rushed me. A man who had to nail a girl’s hands down before he killed her would never rush even a dwarf.
I stood well back from the cellar doors, not lowering my eyes or my knives until the Duke of Gandia snarled something at his guardsman, and the two of them stalked out of the wine cellar.
I heard one great gasp from the trestle table behind me as the footsteps receded. “Th-thank you,” Carmelina gasped. “Thank you—”
“You’re quite welcome.” I still stood in the doorway, watching the quivering shadow of my murderer disappear up the stairs. Once he turned to look back, and I saw a parallel rake of three lines across his cheek where Carmelina had scratched him. Blood on his face and murder in his gaze as he looked at me.
But not tonight. Tonight he would take his unspeakable urges to bed unslaked. My masked murderer.
Don’t be wrong, I thought coldly. Don’t be wrong this time, dwarf. After all, a girl had been killed while Juan Borgia was in Spain; that alone had made me scratch his name off my list when I was looking for my murderer.
But only one girl while he was gone in Spain, one girl in three years. Things had gotten so quiet during those three years, I’d convinced myself I must have constructed the whole thing from my imagination. But they hadn’t been so quiet after all. Juan Borgia had probably been killing girls in Spain instead, girls turning up staked to tables in Gandia and Barcelona instead of Rome.
He could not have killed the one girl in Rome during that time. I didn’t know who had killed her—but he had killed the others. He had killed Anna. I was sure of it.
Five years, Anna, I told my friend. It took me nearly five years, but I found him.
I heard Carmelina’s voice again behind me, a thin quiver. “Is—is he gone?”
“Quite gone.” I sheathed my Toledo blades, kicking the cellar doors shut.
“How did you—” I heard the rustle of her skirts, saw her try to sit up on the trestle table. “How did you come to be here?”
“Lie back down, dear lady, until I can get that knife out of your hand.” With some effort, I dropped the bar back across the cellar doors into its bracket first. I had no desire for Juan to sneak back and surprise me as soon as my back was turned and my knives sheathed. “As for my presence here, a night’s insomnia proved useful for once. I thought to fetch a little wine—a cup of Chiarello and Nestor’s speech in Book IX of the Iliad always puts me to sleep.” I spoke lightly, conversationally, giving her time to slow her gasping breath. “The door was barred, and I thought I heard struggling. Then it wasn’t barred, and in I came.”
“But they did bar the door.”
“Perhaps it gave way.” I bent down and picked up the thing on the floor that had almost tripped me as I entered. “And what is this disgusting thing?” A grisly souvenir from one of the Duke of Gandia’s prior victims?
“Santa Marta.” Carmelina gave a watery half laugh, half sob. “Did she unbolt the door for you, or did the bar just fall out of the bracket?”
“I said lie back.” I surveyed the knife through her palm, taking hold of the hilt. “Count to three.”
“One—”
I yanked it out. “Good,” I said as the cry choked off between her teeth. “Sit up, that’s it—clap your apron round it, while I find some bandaging.” I thought of trying to get her on her feet, get her out of the cellar and upstairs for some proper care, but she was still shaking, clinging to the edge of the ta
ble, and I doubted her feet would carry her up the cellar stairs yet. She looked sadly frail, this prickly self-assured girl I had sparred with for so long; frail as Murano glass and about as likely to shatter into pieces. I wanted to pull her head onto my shoulder and promise her all would be well, but Carmelina Mangano was no fool, and she was no child—she knew all was very far from well. So I turned my back and rummaged through the cellar, finding a wad of thin cloth some maidservant must have left behind after straining wine, not turning around until I heard her get her shaky gasps under control. Then I offered her the jug of wine that had been half emptied by Juan Borgia as he waited.
“Drink,” I advised, wrapping her uninjured fingers through the handle. “And keep drinking while I bandage that hand. Let’s have a look, now . . . it’s not so bad, really. The blade went straight through, between the bones. It should heal clean if you can keep it out of the food for a few weeks. You shouldn’t need a surgeon.” I was no expert, but it seemed the right thing to tell her. “If you ever decide to go back to your nunnery, you can pass the scar off as the stigmata, eh?”
“Why are you being kind to me?” Carmelina took a deep drink of wine as I began blotting and wrapping, and I heard her teeth chatter against the rim of the jug. “You don’t like me. You lost a finger to the French because of me—”
“My dear lady,” I said quietly, “I believe we can overlook that at the moment.”
She swallowed more wine.
I tied off the ends of the bandage and tried, for the first time in all my conversations with this lanky girl, to be tactful. “Our good Gonfalonier, did he . . . take you?”
“N-no. That was—next.” She gave me a watery smile. “You were very timely. I don’t like to think what would have happened after he’d staked me down.”
“Something much worse than you imagine.” I’d seen for myself the feral glitter of his eyes, the tremble of anticipation in his moist lips. Perhaps he hadn’t come here with the intention of killing her—perhaps he only wanted to see those long legs again, and wrapped around him this time. An adventure, lying in wait for an unwilling girl. But somewhere, maybe when she’d scratched him, things had gone bad. As they had for Anna, who had probably been his first.
“What do you mean, worse than I imagine?” Carmelina’s voice still wobbled, but the shakes in her hands were subsiding. “What’s worse than this?”
“Never mind.” I took the wine jug from her hand, downing a healthy swallow myself. “You will have to leave here, you know.”
She curled her good hand about the bandaged one, looking away from me. The light from the remaining tapers sank into the black hair knotted at her neck, danced merrily over the bruises I could see rising dark and puffy on her cheeks and throat.
“Madonna Giulia would gladly make a fuss on your behalf, of course,” I continued. “But even for Giulia, the Pope will never punish his favorite son merely for assaulting a maidservant.”
Juan would suffer no justice for Anna’s death either, or the string of women who followed her. What were a few low women, against a pope’s son? He will never pay for killing them. What a waste, finding my long-sought murderer only to discover he couldn’t be punished. But I banished that thought for another day. Carmelina came first—surely the first of Juan’s victims to escape him alive. That at least was no waste.
“The Duke of Gandia, you may be assured, will not forget you.” I addressed the words to the cook’s lowered head, as she would not look at me. “He will not forget how well you looked in that giraffe costume, and he will certainly not forget how you marked his pretty face with your nails tonight.”
“He won’t forget you either,” she managed to say. “Running him off like that.”
“But I have the Pope’s other son as my protector, and Cesare would like nothing better than to irritate his brother with my presence.” I didn’t really know if I could rely on Cesare for protection, but Carmelina had her own future to agonize over. It seemed unfair to burden her with mine, too. “Unless you want to risk rape or worse, you will have to leave here. And very soon.”
“Leave?” She looked around the rows of wine casks, but I didn’t think she was seeing them. I saw the scrubbed cheer of the palazzo kitchens in Carmelina’s big tear-filled eyes, with her bustling scullions and obedient apprentices and Madonna Giulia tripping down the steps calling “Tourtes! Biscotti! I always eat when I’m happy!”
“Leave,” I repeated. “You must.”
Leave everything she’d built here, all because of a Pope’s lecherous, murderous son.
“I know,” she said, and began to cry.
I dared to hop up onto the trestle table beside her then, my boots swinging freely above the floor. I took the jug of wine from her hand and tugged her head down on my shoulder.
“I don’t have anywhere to go.” Her hand clutched my sleeve as she wept into the black wool of my doublet. “Not anywhere. Not in this wide world.”
I thought of Anna, of a fruit seller named Eleonora, of the other women whom I had not been able to save. The ones who had died in agony. But not this one—not this one.
My voice came out somber and measured, echoing off the cold stone of the cellar. “I swear I will see you safe.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the affairs of this world, misery alone is without envy.
—BOCCACCIO
Carmelina
Are you sure it’s enough?” Madonna Giulia looked anxious as I weighed the purse she’d given me.
“More than enough.” Close to a year’s wages, by the feel of it. “Thank you, Madonna Giulia.”
“I understand one can buy a few luxuries even in a convent.” She smiled. “And the Convent of San Sisto, Lucrezia tells me, can be rather worldly. Silk petticoats and strawberry crostate for all the nuns, from what I hear!”
My smile thinned. My convent in Venice had been worldly too, at least for the well-born Brides of Christ. Not so much for the lay sisters.
“I shall miss you, Carmelina,” my mistress told me, wistful. “I’ve been relying on you and your marzipan tourtes since my wedding day, you know. I shall never forgive that lout Juan for forcing you out.”
It had been Leonello’s idea to enlist our mistress in my retreat from the Palazzo Santa Maria. I’d protested. “Since when does the lady of the house involve herself in a cook’s doings?”
“La Bella does,” he’d retorted. “Don’t you know her at all by now?”
“Well, what do we tell her?”
“The truth. A portion of it, anyway.”
And Madonna Giulia’s warm sympathy had rushed out at once when Leonello dropped into her ear the news that Juan Borgia had been pressing me ever since seeing me in my costume at the masquerade. “It’s all my fault,” she’d fretted, summoning me at once. “I should never have dragged you along that night. If you wish to drop from sight for a while, I don’t blame you. Juan’s a brute; you aren’t the first maid I’ve had to—well, never mind. Where shall we send you?” The Duke of Gandia was immured in the Vatican today, dancing attendance upon his father for various formal audiences, but I had no illusions that he wouldn’t come back. “Let’s see,” Madonna Giulia mused, and in the end she hit on the perfect solution.
It wasn’t her fault that her solution made my skin crawl.
“The Convent of San Sisto,” La Bella said triumphantly. “It’s perfect. Lucrezia leaves tomorrow anyway, and she’s taking a retinue—her maids, her chests of clothes. She’s even stole my Pantisilea away from me, lured her away with promises of higher wages and handsome men at the papal court after she leaves the convent—well, why not let Lucrezia take you, too? You can keep Lucrezia fed during her convent rest, and you’ll be safe doing it. Even Juan can’t get past a nunnery’s walls!”
Back to a convent. Back to black-and-white habits and suspicious eyes under veils, prayers and Masses and stale convent bread that was half sawdust. Surely not, I told myself. No stale bread for the Countess of Pesaro, not if she was
taking me and not if I were to cook for her. I would still be Carmelina Mangano. Not Suora Serafina, as I’d been in my convent in Venice.
I hadn’t thought of my nun’s name in a long time. It whispered over my skin like a dead breeze.
But this time it won’t be forever. I repeated that like the beads of a rosary. This sojourn behind convent walls would be strictly temporary. Lucrezia Borgia wouldn’t stay in the convent more than a few weeks, a few months—when she left, I could leave too, and by then I’d have found something else. Something far away from Rome, where Juan would never think to look for me. But until then, at least the convent walls would be safe.
“Perhaps you can come back, after . . .” But even Madonna Giulia’s smile faded. After what? After Juan forgot me? The Duke of Gandia never forgot a slight. If he’d hanged a lordling at a party for daring to call him illegitimate, I didn’t want to think what he’d do to me for scratching him across the face, or watching him be so thoroughly humiliated by a dwarf.
Somehow I didn’t think a knife through the hand would be the end of it. Or even the beginning.
I shivered, touching the bandage on my hand, and of course Madonna Giulia saw. “I’m getting you a salve for that wound,” she said, and rummaged in her store of vials and potions. “Juan’s a ravening beast; I’d stick him with that dagger myself if I could see him now—”
My face flamed. As much as I needed her help, I hated seeing the sympathy in her big dark eyes as she looked at my bandaged hand. It was what everyone looked at—the only visible sign of what Juan had tried to do, and everyone stared at it when they thought I wasn’t looking. The only one who didn’t look on me pityingly was Leonello. His eyes had been somber when he saw me that night, but they lacked pity. Leonello might have seen me shaking, crying, and bloody, but he did not seem to find me pathetic, and for that I was grateful.
Madonna Giulia finally let me go—“I’m keeping you from your packing, I know you’ve got to be traveling by dawn”—and I left her chamber with a purse full of ducats and a vial of salve and another vial of that herbal rinse she concocted that miraculously took the frizziness out of my curly hair. “Just because you’re in hiding doesn’t mean you can’t keep tending your looks. Frizzy hair depresses me terribly even when there’s nobody but me to see it. And then I just end up eating more than I should and getting plump, because I always eat when I have frizzy hair.”