She sank to her knees beside the pile of my discarded livery. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, waiting for her to intone some platitude about Juan’s soul being at rest, but she was silent as she folded my black doublet.
“You know, I’m disappointed you figured it out,” I said, stuffing the last rolled-up shirt into my old pack. “I covered my tracks so carefully.” Even at the end, when I’d had Bartolomeo put on his mask and hire a few street drunks to help us load Juan’s swaddled corpse onto the horse and then into the river, I’d kept myself anonymous. The men had been drunk, and to disguise my height I’d swung myself into the horse’s saddle in front of Juan’s corpse, and wrapped myself well in a cloak to hide my short legs. Neither the men we’d paid nor the wood seller who saw us toss the body into the river could have recognized the man on the horse for a dwarf. “How did you know it was me, Madonna Giulia? The note I had you write?”
“Of course.” There was anger in her voice, muted but powerful like a deep-flowing stream. “You involved me in the murder of my lover’s son, Leonello.”
“No one will ever know.” I strode across the chamber to my bed and began stripping the linens. I would at least leave my room tidied when the servants came to clean it out. “I burned the note once it served its purpose. I gave you my word on that.”
“That isn’t what worries me! You always keep your word—you think I don’t know that?” She stared at me a moment longer, but I refused to look at her, just kept stripping the bed. “Why? Why would you risk yourself, risk me, to kill him?”
I shrugged. “It isn’t important. Suffice to say the bastard deserved it, a thousand times over.”
I watched her sidelong as she lowered her eyes to the floor, crossing herself. “I believe you,” she whispered, and pressed at her temples with her fingertips as though her head hurt. “And I give you my word, too,” she said even more guietly. “No one will ever know who truly killed Juan. Not from me.”
“I’m touched. I didn’t think you kept anything from His Holiness. Not when he’s grunting inside you, anyway.”
That brutal tone usually worked well for me, when it came to keeping Giulia Farnese at bay. Say something cutting and she retreated with quiet hurt like a swan folding her wings. This time she merely smoothed my discarded sleeves and added them to the neat pile of black clothing. “Do you really feel you must go?”
“Oh, I think it’s time.” I finished stripping the bed, heaping the linens together. “Better if I’m out of the Borgia orbit, or I might be tempted to kill off a few more of them.” I’d nearly planted a blade in Lucrezia Borgia’s long white throat today for her careless offhand spite.
But it wasn’t really the little Countess’s fault. If I’d just kept better control over my face, shrugged, laughed it off . . .
My mistress’s voice again. “Why are you really leaving?”
Don’t, I begged La Bella silently. Oh, don’t! “Perhaps I’m bored with bodyguarding,” I said lightly. “It’s a dull business, after all, sitting about while you go to confession or get measured for dresses. Besides, I must have read every book in the Borgia collection by now. Time for new pastures.”
“Leonello—what Lucrezia said—”
“Leave it, Madonna Giulia.” I strode to my small shelf of books, the last things to be packed. The old books I had brought with me: the tattered Cicero, the well-thumbed Ovid and Boccaccio, the ill-printed copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. And the new books: the Chanson de Roland I had bought from the printer with my first payment as bodyguard, the marvelously translated and illustrated Iliad my mistress had given me at Christmastide last year . . . I left the Iliad and began sweeping the rest into my pack atop the clothes.
“But Leonello—”
“I said leave it!” I roared, and whirled to face her for the first time. Giulia Farnese had dutifully put on black in mourning for Juan, and her skirts pooled around her like the petals of a black rose as she knelt on the floor gathering and folding my dark livery. She always had a way of finding some tactful excuse to kneel or sit when we spoke together; any way she could fit herself to my height so I would not have to crane my neck at her. Her flesh glowed white against the black velvet; her hair gleamed gold in its netted mass, and her eyes were full of tears as she looked at me. Because she was the greatest whore in Rome (hadn’t I said that myself once, when I was being cruel?), and the best whores know men to the tips of their fingers. Even better than that, Giulia knew me. My face could hide to all the world that I had murdered a pope’s son, but it could no longer hide to Giulia Farnese how much I loved her.
“Oh, Leonello,” she said softly.
I had dropped my armload of books. I bent to retrieve them, turning away so she would not see the prickle of tears in my own eyes. My heart boiled.
Love. None of the philosophers had it right; what a vile and bitter brew it could be. The ache that had so often swamped me when I sat outside Giulia’s chamber after she’d retired with her papal lover, hearing her laughter through the door, and her muffled cries of passion. The jealous bile that filled me when I saw the casual kiss Rodrigo Borgia liked to drop on the nape of her neck in greeting, so I had to hold my hand back from stabbing the Holy Father through the heart out of sheer all-consuming envy. The fury that had swamped me when Juan Borgia and those French soldiers and that thug of an Angel dared lay their hands on her; the raw, clawing determination to sacrifice every last finger and limb I had to keep her from harm. The lust, oh God, when she dropped her gown and stood naked for Maestro Botticelli, and I knew myself no better than those cardinals who ogled her, even though I wanted to beat them all bloody for the humiliation I saw rising red in her cheeks.
Everything in me lifted upward when she laughed, when her voice rippled on in its cheerful breathless chatter, when she dug into a plate of biscotti with unabashed zeal, when she shot me one of her teasing complicitous glances as a dull guest droned on at cena—and then the shaft of pleasure was always followed by a tang of bitterness, because what in this world can be more trite, more humiliating, more utterly laughable, than the sight of a stunted little man like me pining for a glorious golden beauty like her?
You are a joke. Don’t think I didn’t know it; don’t think I hadn’t told myself many times to leave this household, take myself back to the Borgo and my card games. Don’t think I didn’t rake myself, long and savagely, when I held Giulia’s note that had trapped Juan Borgia over the candle flame and found myself unable to burn it. Unable, that is, until I closed my eyes and put my head down on the page that still wafted her scent, and allowed myself to pretend—for ten precisely measured heartbeats—that those words were written for me.
The words that began with My love, I cannot resist you any longer.
Laugh at me if you wish. I won’t grudge you. I have laughed often enough, long and bitterly, at myself.
My eyes burned as I gathered my books up and stuffed them into the pack, but no tears fell and for that at least I was grateful. Giulia was silent, and for that I was more than grateful; for that I could have kissed her. As if I had not been kissing her a hundred times a day for years, in my imagination. The one kiss I had ever dared plant on her had been a poor excuse of a thing; a comic smack of my lips at the barest corner of her mouth that hadn’t in the end been quite comical enough to escape Lucrezia Borgia’s sharp eyes, God rot her.
One of my books had fallen face down, the pages crumpled, and she picked it up wordlessly. Too late I saw which book it was. “Don’t—!” I lunged, but the collected sermons of the world’s dullest Dominican friar had already disgorged their secrets, scattering a handful of loose papers. Giulia looked down at the pages covered in my writing—normally she would not have been able to read my hasty scribble so quickly, but these pages had been bound for the printer and so I had taken great care to write a clear hand. The signature of Avernus at the bottom was large and distinct.
Poetry. The final refuge of lovelorn fools. I’d penned all those
sonnets in one savage fortnight, after we had been ransomed from the French and I had been recovering from my wounds. Every day Giulia had tended me, seen my bandages changed and scolded me into drinking foul medicines and read me books to pass the time. She’d been kneeling beside my bed one afternoon, deftly adjusting the pillows under my head, talking in her sweet way of anything that would distract me from my pain, and she’d been so close . . . I’d nearly reached out to tilt up her chin with one hand, nearly captured her eyes with my own and said—God knows what I would have said. Horror at that near miss had made me cruel to her instead, snarling at her till she withdrew in hurt bewilderment, and then afterward I wrote poetry for her. She’d once said ruefully that no one wrote poetry to harlots, but I did—a dwarf’s pathetic homage to his unchaste muse. Poetry in the name of Aurora; the dawn bringing light to my darkness, oh God, how unbearably trite. I’d mocked myself viciously with every line, but all the scorn I’d heaped on my own head hadn’t stopped the words coming.
I’d had one copy printed under the name of Avernus—the entrance to the underworld! How very dark and mysterious!—and I’d hoped I could inveigle her into reading it. Cheap thin verse on cheap thin paper, hardly readable considering I’d had it done up by the half-drunk printer in the Borgo who made most of his living printing scurrilous pamphlets, the printer whose spare room I used to rent before I came the Borgia household. She’ll laugh at it, I’d thought when I looked at my poor offering. Good. Hearing her laugh at it would surely cure me.
But she hadn’t laughed. She had loved it, my pathetic little collection of sonnets, loved it more than Petrarch’s sonnets to his Laura, she said. She’d loved them and sighed over them and read them aloud to anyone who would listen, and soon everyone in Rome was quoting my stunted private passions back and forth to each other.
Even that bitter shame had not stopped me from writing a second batch.
I scrabbled the pages of new sonnets away in frantic haste, but Giulia’s eyes had already widened. “Leonello, don’t go. Please don’t go, I—”
“I wouldn’t stay if you spread your legs for me right now,” I grated, and slung my pack over my shoulder. Maybe it would look suspicious to some, my flight so soon after Juan’s death, but so be it. I wouldn’t stay here to see Giulia’s pity—I would rather die on the rack than bear that. So I took a jagged breath, and turned my back on her.
She rose to follow me, but she had heavy velvet skirts to weigh her down, and I’d dropped into that speedy undignified scuttle that I never used in her sight because I had to be tall for her, as tall as I could manage. I scuttled out of my chamber and slammed the door, and drawing the dagger at my belt, I wedged it fast between the door and the jamb. A few jolts would dislodge it, but that was all the time I needed to disappear from this palazzo.
“Leonello!” my mistress cried through the door, hammering on it, and I strode away without a second glance.
Giulia
For the very first time in my life I wanted to drink myself insensible. I wanted to sink my wretched body into a warm scented bath, I wanted to cuddle Laura tight and feel her arms about my neck, I wanted to curl up in my bed and weep for a very long time. What I did not want, at the very end of this agony-filled day, was Cesare Borgia striding into my sala with a curt “Come to my father at once.”
“No,” I said into my hands. I’d been sitting curled on my day bed with my head in my arms ever since my bodyguard vanished from the palazzo like a devil disappearing into a puff of smoke, and I saw no reason to change my plans just because my lover’s eldest son was being peremptory. “No, I am not going anywhere. I am not at your beck and call, Cesare, and all I want to do for the rest of this evening is curl up in a chair and weep.”
But Cesare was not inclined to take a woman’s tears seriously, or her wishes either for that matter, and striding across the sala, he took me by the arm and levered me up. “You will talk to my father, and you’ll do it now. He’s gone mad. Sweet Christ,” Cesare swore. “Three days and nights he refuses to eat or speak, and now he’s speaking again but he won’t speak sense!”
“What’s wrong?” Another terrible fear struck me. “Has he—harmed himself?”
“Worse.” Cesare sounded grim. “He wants to reform himself.”
I refused to believe him as he towed me out of the Palazzo Santa Maria, over the marble steps at the threshold where I’d stood for an hour waiting as one by one my guardsmen came back saying none of them had found or even glimpsed Leonello after he’d gone striding off into the teeming streets of Rome. I went on not believing what Cesare had told me, until he ushered me with great speed and none of his customary grace through the passages of the Vatican to the private papal apartments—and then I saw my Pope.
I did not even recognize the bent figure in humble homespun robes, kneeling in prayer not at the elaborately carved and gilded prie-dieu, but on the hard floor itself. Then he turned his head and I saw the hooked nose and gray grief-stricken face of Rodrigo Borgia. All at a stroke, in the days since Juan’s death, he had grown old.
I could not resist flying to him, putting my hands to his face. “Oh, Rodrigo,” I whispered, and he allowed me to embrace him, fold his head against my bosom. I felt tears drop from my eyes to his tonsured head, but I didn’t know if the tears were all for him or for—
“Giulia,” the Pope said, pulling away from me and rising. “You should not have come.”
“I only wish to comfort you—”
“My son is dead,” Rodrigo said simply. “If I had seven papal thrones instead of one, I would give them all to have Juan alive again. No one can comfort me.”
I felt rather than saw the Pope’s living son fold himself against the tapestries, inscrutable and silent as ever. “God is looking over Juan now,” I said, and wondered how many lies, how much blood, had swirled around that name—that vicious, prancing boy surely damned to hell.
Rodrigo was looking at Juan’s magnificently turbaned figure in Pinturicchio’s fresco. “I will have all this removed,” he said, waving a ringed hand that suddenly seemed shrunken to my eyes. “The gilt, the paint, the marble. Simplicity will become me better in future.”
“Your Holiness?” I said, cautious.
“God has seen fit to punish Us for Our sins.” Rodrigo turned from me, folding his hands into his homespun sleeves. “It is the only explanation. Juan did not deserve such a death.”
I bit my tongue at that.
“My son’s killers will be found,” Rodrigo said in his sonorous Spanish bass as though addressing the whole College of Cardinals, and I bit my tongue even harder. “They will be found and tried, but there must be more. There must be change. There will be change. We have prayed upon it; God has spoken to Us. His Holy Church has become a sinkhole, and We have allowed her to be fouled. No more.”
I looked at him even more cautiously.
“We summon a consistory tomorrow.” Rodrigo turned to look at me again with his ghastly sunken eyes, and somehow the sweep of his plain robes was more regal than all his papal regalia. “There will be reforms made, and men of virtue rather than rank appointed to make them. The sacred offices will be carried out with rigor. Benefices will be conferred upon those who earn them, not those with coin. We shall renounce nepotism, simony.” His voice had its old energy now, the passion of planning, though I still heard the ocean of grief behind it. “And Our priests must change themselves as well, if they are to serve the Church as she deserves to be served. Cardinals must limit themselves in income, six thousand ducats—”
“They won’t like that,” Cesare spoke behind me. “Speaking as Cardinal Borgia, I do not like that.”
“Reforms will be made,” my Pope said, steely. “You will serve God in future, Cesare—not yourself. Give up your fine clothes and your bullfights and your concubines.”
Cesare’s gaze drifted to me.
“Or you will give up your red hat and give it to one more worthy.”
“As to that—” Cesare shr
ugged. “Throw the red hat in a bullring for all I care. What about the rest of our family? Or am I the only one to be reformed, Your Holiness?”
“Joffre and Sancha can return to Squillace.” My Pope’s tone was listless again; this man who adored his children above all else now sounded indifferent to them, his eyes dull again as he fingered the plain wooden rosary at his waist. “Lucrezia—she has already retreated to the Convent of San Sisto; perhaps she will be inspired to take the veil. A fitting calling.” He closed his eyes in a hard blink. “I must be father to my flock first, not to my bastards.”
Cesare turned to me. “Perhaps La Bella will talk some sense into you.”
The words came out of me before I was aware I was thinking them. “Perhaps I don’t wish to.”
“What?”
I studied my Pope, thinking of the vigorous black-haired suitor who had first ambushed me in a garden the day after my wedding. The lover who had claimed me in a half-empty palazzo, his dark eyes heavy with passion as he looked on me. The father of my daughter, who had come to my bedside after Laura’s birth with a beautifully painted birth tray piled high with candied cherries, and insisted on feeding me every one. The bull in his red horned mask, more cheerful pagan satyr than Holy Father.
This man looked nothing like any of his previous incarnations. This man was weary, heartsick, determined—and stainless. He could have been an exhausted Moses gathering himself to face the Red Sea, or a bowed John the Baptist turning away from the temptations of Salome. This man was not Rodrigo Borgia; he was Pope Alexander VI. A man about whom even Fra Savonarola would have nothing evil to say.
Juan’s death. A maelstrom of pain and fury whirling out from the ending of that worthless, wasted life. If something good could come of it—if Pope Alexander could come from it—then perhaps all my lover’s grief would not be wasted.
“Your Holiness,” I said slowly, and dropped to my knees. “May I have your blessing?”
His ringed hand touched my head, stroked just once over the smooth piles of my hair. “Bless you always, my child.”