Yes, on the whole I liked Carbognano very much.
Fra Teseo bowed as he approached, puffing a little from the climb he’d made from the church to the castello. “Madonna Giulia,” he greeted me. “You wished to be consulted about a new window for the church altar; I have the estimates from the glaziers. And there is that dispute between Messer Bernardo and Messer Guglielmo, the property line dividing their orchard; both have submitted a petition for your judgment. And the harvest festival to be arranged in October . . .”
The day-to-day business of governing a small town. “These figures from the glazier are very dubious,” I said, scanning the first set of papers. “He’s padding his estimate. Drop a hint, Fra Teseo, and see if his numbers come down. Messers Bernardo and Guglielmo, bring them to me next week and I’ll see if I can talk some sense into them . . .”
“Will Signore Orsini wish to hear them?” Fra Teseo hedged.
“My lord husband is involved in greater matters and will leave such small things to me.”
In truth, my lord husband did not like to arbitrate any kind of decision. Whether it was a boundary dispute, a charge of theft, or the choice of an Annunciation or a Resurrection in stained glass for the church’s new window, Orsino would just blink a few times and say, “I will think on it.” Which meant putting the decision off until hopefully it solved itself. I hadn’t resided in Carbognano a month before people started bringing such matters direct to me. I did not put myself forward—that wouldn’t have been proper, or wifely—but the villagers murmured their concerns to Fra Teseo, he brought them to me in the garden where I sat with my sewing, and Orsino beamed contentment without seeming to wonder why he had so many fewer petitions.
“Mamma?” Laura skipped across the grass with her book. “What’s this word, Mamma?”
“You should curtsy to your mother, child,” Fra Teseo reproved. “And address her always as ‘Madam, my mother.’” But neither my daughter or I paid any attention to him.
“That word is a name,” I said, reading the word my daughter’s plump finger pointed out. “Aeneas. Remember, Laura, he founded Rome.”
“Founded? Was it losted?”
Ask Leonello, I almost said. Because Leonello had been my shadow so long, and I still wasn’t used to his absence. He was here, surely—I would only have to turn around to see him, boots propped up on the stone bench under the hazel tree as he put down his own book and explained to Laura who Aeneas was. He’d be declaiming the Aeneid any instant.
But he didn’t, because he wasn’t here. And I felt the usual keen ache in my chest as I realized it all over again.
“The festival after the hazelnut harvest,” I said to Fra Teseo, giving Laura a gentle push back to her book. “I’ve already made preparations about the wine, and I believe we should give an outdoor pranzo if the weather permits.” What I would have given for Carmelina to cook for me, but I’d not heard news of her in months. I’d written to Lucrezia, asking if Carmelina could come to serve me, but had no reply. Well, there had been a reply, but it had been page after page about the new gowns Lucrezia was planning to order from the robe makers, and what suitors were already pressing for her hand even though her marriage vows to the Count of Pesaro had yet to be annulled, and how dull the convent was. Not a word about Carmelina. “Now, I know you’ve said a bull-baiting is traditional,” I continued to Fra Teseo, “but my lord Orsino doesn’t like to risk good hunting dogs in a pointless show, and nor do I.” Orsino had said nothing of the kind, but I did try to present my decisions as our decisions. A lord should be respected by his villagers as decisive in his rulings, even if perhaps he wasn’t. “Let us hold a pallone match among the village boys instead. I’ll present prizes for the winning team . . .”
It wasn’t until the last bit of business had been dealt with and the last bit of news discussed (the innkeeper’s daughter was with child; perhaps I could do something for her) that Fra Teseo hesitated and turned pink.
“If you will pardon me,” he murmured almost inaudibly. “It arrived this morning . . .”
Reaching into his sleeve, he passed me a stamped and sealed packet of creamy paper with a very familiar seal.
“Thank you,” I said calmly, and laid the letter unopened on the stone bench beneath the hazelnut tree. “Shall we read the story of Hades and Persephone together, Laura?” I asked, dismissing Fra Teseo, and did not look at the letter again until my husband came striding into the garden a little while later, his eyes lighting at the sight of me as they always did. I allowed mine to light up too, as I saw my lean and handsome Orsino in his riding boots and his fair wind-mussed hair.
“Good hunting today, my little rose,” he said, as he said every day, whether he had bagged a stag or a squirrel or nothing at all. And then his face fell as I placed the letter in his hand.
“For you,” I said, as was proper because a married woman got no letters that her husband did not read, and so I went back to Laura and looked over her shoulder as her lips moved along the lines of Leonello’s clear writing. “Pomegranate, Laura, sound it out. That’s the present Hades gives Persephone . . . ”
My husband had no glances for Laura—he rarely did. He could never help searching her face as though looking for signs of his rival, so mostly he avoided looking at her at all. He stood in the garden staring at the letter in his hand as though it were a snake. “I thought the last one was—well, the last one.”
“So did I,” I said, and ran my finger over Laura’s page for her. “Yes, Lauretta mia, you may have a pomegranate with your cena this evening, and you may eat all the seeds you want. No one will keep you in the underworld.”
Laura looked disappointed. “I want to see the underworld.”
“Oh, no you don’t!”
“Here—” Orsino pushed the letter back at me. “You read it.” He always did that, but I still left the letters unopened until he gave me leave to read them. I would give him no cause to think I was writing to Rodrigo behind his back.
“Well?” His hands clasped and unclasped at his sides, crumpling his fine hunting gloves as I broke the seal and read the familiar bold sloping scrawl. “Is it the usual sort of thing? He wishes you to return to Rome?”
“No,” I said slowly. “No, he seems to have given up. At least on that matter.”
“Good.” Orsino looked at me, gnawing his lip. “That is good, isn’t it? You wrote to him a fortnight ago, you were very firm . . .”
I’d let him read my letter before I dispatched it to the Holy Father. Rodrigo’s missives had begun coming for me not six weeks after I left Rome for Carbognano—just as Cesare had predicted. We would have you back at Our side, that letter came first, and when that went unanswered, You pain Us greatly by your absence, and when that went unanswered too there were a few furious rounds of Ungrateful, unfaithful Giulia! The usual sort of thing, in other words, and I won’t say I wasn’t tempted for a moment to return—return to Rodrigo, to the Palazzo Santa Maria, to the life I’d enjoyed in the Holy City.
But it wouldn’t be that same life, would it? Not the life I’d had with Leonello at my side, with Adriana and Carmelina and Pantisilea, with Lucrezia still innocent and chattering and young. My friends were gone. And here in Carbognano I had a castello filled with a growing band of new friends, and a lake where my Laura was free to run and play as a child should rather than sit still like a doll on display . . . and just like that, the flash of temptation when I opened Rodrigo’s letters was gone. I’d sat down a fortnight ago and written him a brief note avowing my future fidelity to my lord husband Orsino Orsini, whose child (I lied smoothly to the Holy Father) I was now carrying. And my prayers went always with His Holiness and the great reforms he had planned after the death of the Duke of Gandia, may God rest his soul.
I knew Rodrigo. That should have been the end of it.
“What is it?” Orsino peered at the lines in Rodrigo’s hand. “You said he’s not recalling you to Rome.”
“No.” I passed him the letter, nud
ging the goat away before it could eat the tassels off Orsino’s boots. My husband avoided my pet goat just as he avoided my daughter—yet another thing I’d brought from my former life in Rome. “The Pope is recalling Laura,” I said, and my mouth was dry.
Orsino read, and Laura looked up at the sound of her name. My beautiful fair-haired girl, looking the part of a country child now in a linen dress fit for grubbing in the garden and pebble-gathering by the lake. My Laura, who had learned to ride a pony this summer by scrambling on and off its broad back rather than being led formally about by grooms; who had a scattering of freckles across her little nose and no one to admonish her that freckles weren’t proper; who ran races and played hoodman-blind with the other children in the castello rather than being passed about at parties by giggling ladies who urged her to perform for their amusement. “The Holy Father wishes to arrange a betrothal for Laura,” I said through a throat suddenly turned sticky with fear.
“But she’s only seven.” Orsino was still reading.
Laura was not even five, but I didn’t press the point. “Lucrezia had a betrothal at seven,” I said instead. And Lucrezia was now sighing her days away in a convent, waiting for a divorce at the age of seventeen. Lucrezia, who had been almost as sweet-natured and pretty as my Laura when she was a child.
And my daughter was so pretty, so tall and quick and laughing with such dark mischievous eyes. She’d abandoned her book now, and plopped herself in the grass to weave a flower chain around my pet goat’s neck . . . A daughter for any man to be proud of, especially a man who adored his family. A man who had lost one child and might be feeling newly possessive of the rest.
I’d assumed that if I took myself away from the Borgia fold for good, my Orsini-christened daughter would come with me.
“Giulia?” Orsino looked at me, and I took the letter from his hand and crumpled it up in my own, feeling the sun beating down on my head. “Maybe a betrothal would be a good thing for Laura,” he said. “She could be a countess someday, even a duchess—”
My sister would have said that. I’d had a great many scolding letters from Gerolama, chiding me for giving up the Holy Father’s favor. This is no time for virtuous flutters! she wrote indignantly. Think of the family. Better yet, think of your daughter!
Well, I was. And if I knew anything at all after watching Lucrezia grow up, her head turned first by one grand match and then another, I knew that no illustrious marriage was worth seeing my daughter change from the happy, unspoiled girl she was into a vain, self-important little ninny.
“No betrothal,” I said. “Not for Laura. Not like it was done for Lucrezia. A Spanish count one day and then a French duke the next, or maybe a Sforza or an Este or a Colonna, and all of them tossed aside the moment they prove inconvenient. No.”
“How can we refuse? It says here”—Orsino snatched the crumpled letter back, smoothing it out—“if we do not present ourselves within the month, the Holy Father will send an escort! That means guards, Giulia. This castello can’t withstand papal guards!”
I pulled my words in sharply before they could escape me. I laid a hand along Orsino’s cheek instead and saw the blossoming in his blue eyes. Even after three months, he still did not seem to believe his good fortune that I had come back to him. I kissed him lightly, and his mouth claimed mine with all the eagerness of a bridegroom. “Orsino,” I said, still cupping his cheek, and his smile faded because I so rarely called him by name. I called him my lord husband, as was proper and expected. “Orsino, we must go to Rome.”
He looked as though I had stabbed him between the ribs. “To see him?”
“No.” Stroking his cheek. “To fight him.”
Carmelina
When the soon-to-be-former Countess of Pesaro took to her bed late in August and declared there was no point anymore in getting up to face the day inside these dreary walls, she was not jesting. “Just leave me here to molder,” Lucrezia Borgia said darkly to the giggly younger nuns with whom she’d happily shared perfumes and gossip a few weeks ago. “Let me rot. No one cares a jot, anyway. Carmelina, more wine and some of those little burnt-sugar stars—”
Even confined to her bed, the little Countess kept Pantisilea and me in a trot most of the day. Pantisilea had to massage her feet because they ached, and then her temples because they ached more, and then I would be sent for cold lavender-scented pads for her eyes and perhaps just something to nibble—“I don’t know what I want, Carmelina, surprise me. Quince and ricotta tourtes again? Well, I suppose.” And then she would usually weep for a while, while Pantisilea, who had a sweeter voice than my crow’s caw, would sing some soothing little song while I waved a fan until my arms ached, or Lucrezia dried her tears, or both.
And then were the days when the Pope sent his daughter a letter or perhaps a gift of wine or fruit or a length of cloth. Lucrezia did not rise from bed to receive the papal envoy, but she always made sure to bathe first, sending everyone out so she could pat herself all over with rosewater, and then arrange herself back in bed in her best lace shift, and pearls in her ears, and just a bit of red ochre to bring some color to her cheeks. Because the papal envoy, well—
He swept in to make his bow before the day bed: Pedro Calderon, known as Perotto: slender, swarthy, dashing, and handsome. “Madonna,” he said, with a flashing smile and a sweep of his feathered cap. “Your radiance dims the room.”
There was a great deal of fluttering and complimenting, to which Pantisilea and I listened with interest as we hovered outside with trays of sweetmeats and cups for wine, and then finally Lucrezia’s silvery voice called for us. “But why won’t he sign?” my mistress was pouting as we entered with curtsies. She had a new embroidered shawl about her shoulders from His Holiness, and a new letter, too, though she’d tossed that to one side. “Cesare assured me he would sign it!”
“He would have done so.” Perotto had an assured courtier’s voice, soft and reassuring. “The Count of Pesaro would have signed last week, madonna, but the canon lawyers—”
“Oh, bother the canon lawyers. A batch of dried-up old spiders, what do they know? Ah,” Lucrezia greeted us, and gestured the wine toward Perotto with a gracious wave. “You may go, Pantisilea. Carmelina, you stay and comb out my hair; the pins are hurting my head and you’ve got a far lighter touch.”
I didn’t have a lighter touch, and the pins weren’t aching her head either. Madonna Lucrezia just wanted the papal envoy to admire her hair, and she knew I’d comb it out for her without making eyes at Perotto as Pantisilea always did. I began pulling pins and arranging the long blond locks, which had gotten darker since they no longer had their daily sunning, and Perotto paid a few graceful and unoriginal compliments about Venus in her bower. Lucrezia preened herself, but soon she was pouting again.
“Well, you might as well tell me. What did the canon lawyers say?”
“They could find nothing in your past betrothals, Madonna Lucrezia, that would invalidate your current marriage.” Perotto had the envoy’s gift of presenting bad news as though it were good, but even he sounded a little worn at all the back-and-forth legal wrangling that had been going on these past months. “Your past betrothals were formally concluded before your vows to Lord Sforza, so . . .”
“So the Holy Father will have to find some other excuse for annulment.” Madonna Lucrezia’s rosy little face had gone hard. She’d had a certain guilty sympathy for her husband at first—“Oh, my poor Giovanni, his pride must be hurting him to lose me like this. He does love me so!” But after the rumors he’d lately begun spreading, well . . .
Perotto, who had had to dry a good many of Lucrezia’s tears after she’d heard of those foul rumors, changed the subject with alacrity. “Perhaps you have heard, madonna? Your eminent brother has returned from Naples.”
“Oh, Cesare is back! You must tell him to visit me immediately.” She shook her loose hair forward over one shoulder in a gesture exactly copied from Giulia Farnese, and flicked a finger at me. “Carmelina,
go make some more of those little pastry things with the blood-orange slices in honey. Now, my dear Perotto . . .”
“Isn’t he beautiful?” Pantisilea sighed down in the convent kitchens when I entered with the empty plate. “He’s even prettier with his doublet off, let me tell you. I had him in Madonna Lucrezia’s sala last week, up against the wall with his hose around his feet. There’s nothing as funny-looking as a man with hose around his feet, is there? But he was very pretty, and lovely for kissing. I do like a man with no rotted teeth.”
“I wouldn’t go boasting about Perotto’s kisses if I were you,” I warned, arranging more of my little honeyed pastries on their majolica platter. My new mistress ate them by the basket; she was already starting to get fatter under the chin, and they weren’t doing her teeth any good either. “He’s Madonna Lucrezia’s to flirt with.”
“But girls like us don’t count as flirting! You could have him too if you wanted, Carmelina.” Pantisilea never minded sharing her lovers, I would say that for her.
“You’re welcome to him.” I shoved a curl back behind one ear, feeling the rustle of paper in Santa Marta’s pouch. She shared her living space with quite a thick packet of letters by now, all from a certain former apprentice of mine. Santa Marta didn’t seem to mind, but I think she approved of Bartolomeo. Her dried-up fingers had always seemed to rustle approval inside their pouch whenever I took a sniff of one of his sauces. “I don’t like dark-haired men.”
“Well, Madonna Lucrezia does.” Pantisilea winked. “Do you think she’ll take him for a lover? Perotto, I mean.”
“She might, but he won’t.” I reached for my apron. Perotto flirted with my new mistress, and paid her extravagant compliments, but no more. A very shrewd young man, and you had to be, to make a career under Pope Alexander VI. “Perotto wants to rise, and he won’t rise far if he sleeps with the Pope’s daughter.”