“That’s your own vanity staring back at you!” Don’t provoke him, some little warning voice in my head cried. Be careful, Giulia—but what choice did I have? He wanted to take my daughter away, my daughter, and if my pleading and my sweet reason hadn’t worked to dissuade him, maybe my lies would. I’d say anything, anything at all, if it would wrench Laura out of his clutches—and if I said it here, where just the two of us could hear the words, then at least my defiance and my lies would be a private matter and not a public slash against Rodrigo’s pride.
So I threw my head back and gave the Holy Father the most vicious smile I could muster. “You think I was ever faithful to you?” I spat. “From the beginning, it was Orsino. We were together every chance I could find. My true husband, my young husband, whom I love more than life. Far more than I ever loved you, you foolish old man.”
Something in Rodrigo’s eyes died at that, but now that I’d started this flood of words they wouldn’t stop coming. I hardened my heart.
“Laura. Is. Not. Yours.” I enunciated each word and aimed it at him like a stone. “She is an Orsini. There is nothing Borgia about her. She’s not a vicious brute like your precious Juan, or a coldhearted murderer like Cesare, or a vapid little twit like Joffre. And she’s nothing like your darling Lucrezia, who is shallow as a cup and filled with nothing but fashion and spite.”
I turned in a flare of skirts and stalked for the doors. The Holy Father did not stop me. “No French comte will want Laura for an alliance, Rodrigo Borgia,” I called over my shoulder. “Because she is not your daughter. And I am not your pearl.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There is no redemption from Hell.
—POPE PAUL III, FORMERLY ALESSANDRO FARNESE
Carmelina
I was very fortunate. Very fortunate indeed. Everyone told me so—Leonello, the prioress—and I had to agree they were correct. Cesare Borgia did not bother addressing one word to me, but he would have told me I was fortunate, too.
My hair had never been beautiful. Too thick and prone to tangle; too curly and always escaping its pins in frizzy tendrils. Not beautiful hair; not golden and silky and down to my feet. Madonna Giulia would have cried if she’d been the one kneeling on a stone floor as a sour-faced lay sister with a face like a withered plum sheared her bald. But I had been fortunate enough to have ugly hair, so I knelt dry-eyed as the shears went snip snip snip and all my unruly curls piled up on the flagstones.
“Please understand.” Leonello’s voice had sounded so deathly flat when we spoke in the frosty courtyard. “This is the best I could do for you.”
I hadn’t managed more than a dumb nod. He still had his knife in his hand, blade gleaming in the rising moon, and Michelotto waited with the reins of his horse and Pantisilea’s stiffening body slumped before him in the saddle. He was playing idly with her limp fingers, twining them with his own as though they were fond lovers cuddling in the saddle, and it was not a sight that encouraged me to speak.
Leonello saw my gaze and followed it. “Pantisilea will go in the river,” he said. “So will Perotto. For knowing that the Pope’s daughter gave birth when she is supposed to be a virgin.”
“Could we convince everyone it was a virgin birth?” My voice came out very high and thin.
Leonello had been far beyond jokes. I’d never thought I’d see that day, but it was here, and his face was so eerie-calm I just wanted him jesting and snapping again. I knew the old Leonello, even if he sometimes irked me to the point of madness. I didn’t know this one at all. The one who had looked at me as Pantisilea still jerked in her death throes and said flatly to Cesare Borgia, “No need to kill the cook as well, Eminence. She’s a renegade nun, run away from her convent in Venice. Lock her up here and leave her to God, and Madonna Lucrezia’s secrets will stay inside these walls with her.”
I suppose it was the only way Leonello could avoid putting a knife in me. “Hate me if you like,” he’d said as he turned to go, not sounding as though he cared much. “Just don’t think of stealing away from this convent as you did the last. Because you’ll be found—Cesare Borgia can find anyone—and he won’t send me after you, Signorina Cuoca. He’ll send Michelotto, and you know how that will end.”
Signorina Cuoca no longer, I could have reminded him. I was Suora Serafina again. But being Suora Serafina was infinitely better than being at the bottom of the Tiber with Pantisilea. More good fortune. I told myself that, as my chopped hair piled up around my knees on the floor. I was alive, and for that I could feel a dim, horror-stained gratitude toward the little dwarf who had done me one last favor as a friend. Or perhaps, a former friend. Men like Michelotto didn’t have friends—and soon, Leonello wouldn’t either.
Never mind Michelotto; I was too frightened of Leonello’s death-haunted eyes to even think about running away again.
“Our newest sister,” the prioress had greeted me brightly when I was ushered in to see her that evening, new-clothed and anonymous in my habit and veil. “His Eminence Cardinal Borgia has authorized that you are to resume your vows within our walls.” A delicate pause. “He did not mention which order in Venice previously housed you.”
I doubted Cesare Borgia knew or cared. Leonello had revealed I was a runaway nun, but he hadn’t revealed anything else.
“The Cardinal’s guardsman,” the prioress went on. “The, ah, small one. He mentioned your name in religion was Suora Serafina, but he was very unforthcoming with further details . . .”
She looked at me hopefully, waiting for a morsel of gossip, but I wasn’t about to bring altar desecration into this hellish mess if I didn’t have to. Staying behind these walls was better than being shipped back to Venice to have my hands and nose chopped off. And if this sharp-eyed prioress learned I had my patron saint’s hand in the pouch beneath my skirt, she’d take it away from me; put Santa Marta back in a reliquary to draw pilgrims and donations to her convent doors.
Maybe I should have given Santa Marta back—it was where she belonged, after all; in the bosom of the Church. Maybe undoing that old act of desecration would have . . . I don’t know. Redeemed me? But I thought I felt the hand twitch in her pouch, and I didn’t want to give her up.
I remained silent, and the prioress looked disappointed. “In any case,” she went on, “you will resume your name of Suora Serafina, but without reference to your, ah, prior service in Venice. None of the other sisters within these walls will know that you are not simply a new lay sister who was moved to take vows after spending these months with us. No scandal at all, you see?”
“Very fortunate,” I echoed.
“Yes, if I do say so. And we are delighted to have you. I understand you were once a cook for His Holiness’s cousin?” My new prioress’s face was alight. “Do you have any skill with marzipan?”
See, I could even go on being a cook. How lucky.
“Your new cell.” The lay sister who escorted me and my small bundle of possessions from the guest quarters in the gatehouse to the quarters of the sisters themselves was entirely cheerful. “It’s a good one, right on the east wall so you’ll get a little dawn light through the window slit. Of course the choir nuns get real windows.” She lowered her voice. “It doesn’t do to annoy the choir nuns. They can make life miserable for us, so if I were you I’d squirrel away whatever coin you’ve got and save it for when you need a favor.”
“Yes.”
“Or since you’ve a skill you can trade, that works just as well. I’ve got clever fingers for braiding hair”—wriggling her plump hands—“and I trade that for a bite or two of meat during Lent. They do like their plaited hair, the choir nuns! They grow it out under their veils, you see. Us lay sisters, we’d be skinned if we tried that. But it’s the way of things, so I don’t see any use complaining.”
“No.”
“Now, you’ll soon get used to the prayers, but for this first week you’re to be allowed to sleep through Matins!” She beamed. “Isn’t that fortunate?”
?
??Very,” I agreed.
A week. And then another week, my body used to rising and falling with the bells as though I had never left them behind at all. And another week, my hands chapped from the cold that the sullen kitchen fires couldn’t quite banish, the even more bitter cold in my cell. Four stone walls, a pallet and a prie-dieu of my own, a peg for my cloak and habit. I’d gotten used to the habit again too. Strange how much my hands remembered; how to adjust the veil and wimple over my poor cropped head. I didn’t struggle with it, not the way novices were supposed to, and I suppose that drew comments, but the nuns were far more interested in the new gossip about the Pope’s daughter.
“She’s to marry Alfonso of Aragon, they say! A handsome prince from Naples—”
“Do you really suppose she broke her arm and that was all the screaming we heard on her last day? I saw that Perotto going in and out for months, he was so handsome. Do you suppose they . . .”
“Ssshh! Mother Prioress will have your head for talk like that!”
They asked me what I knew of the Pope’s daughter and her secrets. “You served her, after all. She and that good-looking envoy, did they . . .” But I had nothing to say. Suora Serafina had no opinions. She faded into the crowd of black and white, just as anonymous as the others. Nothing to set her apart except maybe the small bulge in her sleeve.
And maybe on the nights Suora Serafina wasn’t feeling so very fortunate, she opened the pouch in her sleeve and shook something out onto her bed. Something a little withered, a little dark and dried, but still boasting a filigreed gold ring on one small curled-in finger.
“Move!” she’d cry out in the dark. “Give me a sign! Give me something!”
But the dried-up old relic had no magic in it, not away from a kitchen. A proper kitchen, that is, not a convent kitchen with no spices to speak of and an oven that barely spat out any heat. It was a kitchen to make Suora Serafina weep, and that was where she did most of her weeping: tears sliding silently down her cheeks to land in the watery stews along with the turnips past their prime and the stringy cuts of meat. She didn’t bother to wipe her face. Those stews couldn’t be spoiled by a little salt water.
Weeping was for the kitchen. Screaming was for the cell, hunched into a ball with a pillow crammed over the face, screaming into it over and over because the walls were not moving in around her, they were not. Suora Serafina was used to stone walls; she belonged inside them, after all, and once her throat was hoarse and burning she could usually remember that.
At least you are not at the bottom of the Tiber, I reminded myself grimly. There is no escaping the bottom of the Tiber.
And at that thought, Suora Serafina would remove her pillow from her face and put her head down on it instead. Postponing, for just one more day, the thought of taking her belt from around her waist and hanging herself from the kitchen rafters.
Leonello
I have never enjoyed watching executions. I have no particular objection to hanging murderers or the rapers of virgins, but I’ve escaped the scaffold too many times myself to enjoy watching a man dangle from a noose with piss running down his jerking legs. Most of Rome would disagree with me; there is always a lively turnout for a hanging or a drawing-and-quartering or even just a branding.
Best of all, though, is a burning. And when the excommunicated Dominican Fra Savonarola was arrested in Florence and brought to Rome to burn for his heresy in condemning Pope Alexander VI, I went with the rest of Rome to watch him sizzle on the pyre. Why not? I didn’t sleep very well these days anyway. Perhaps I’d see a mad monk stalking through my dreams tonight with his face burned off, and not Giovanni Sforza looking at me in such horror as I staked his hand. I didn’t mind that part of the dream so much, but then he always turned into Anna looking at me in horror as I staked her hand, and then Perotto, asking if I would please just stake him through the hand and not kill him.
They did not build the great pyre in the Piazza San Pietro. The smoke would billow up into the windows of the Vatican, and Lucrezia Borgia—recovered now from the fever or the broken arm or whatever it was that had officially kept her to her bed, and looking rather slimmer too—had complained prettily that she could not bear such a stink of smoke and burning flesh. Her lightest word was law to the Pope; he was already showering her in gifts now that her new betrothal to Alfonso of Aragon had been sealed, so what was a relocated execution? The bonfire was built near the Ponte Sant’Angelo instead, where the bodies of common criminals hung on display. As I joined the eager press of the crowd, I passed under the crow-picked feet of a thief hanged a fortnight ago. The lad was mostly bones by now, though his hands, which had been chopped off and hung about his neck, still fared surprisingly intact.
What is there to say about an execution? I found a wall on which to sit, boots dangling over the cheerful chatter of the crowd, who had brought mugs of beer to drink and apples to gnaw as they waited, and children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders. A great roar went up when Fra Savonarola himself appeared, flanked by two of his most fervent supporters who had also been sentenced to die, all of them shrinking inside in their vestments. I had seen the mad monk only once, from a distance, in Florence as he stood with arms spread over the roaring Bonfire of the Vanities, but I remembered him as taller. The great hooked nose seemed pathetic as a bird’s beak now, not a fierce beacon to sniff out sin, and the curved red lips looked dry and gray as ash.
“I only saw him once,” I heard a woman’s voice say as the friar was led trembling toward his pyre. “But I remember him as taller.”
I shouldn’t have been able to pick her voice out in such a throng, but I could pick her voice out anywhere. Silently I slid down from my wall into the crowd, wending my way closer to the figure with the honey-gold cloak and honey-gold hair. I’d managed to avoid her for months in the festivals and ceremonies of the Vatican; just a glimpse of that gold hair and I disappeared into the nearest throng before she could lay eyes on me.
“It’s no wonder he looks smaller.” Giulia’s companion shaded his eyes with his hand as the friar was hoisted up onto the pyre. Not her pretty young husband, but an older man with a Neapolitan drawl. I remembered him; a minor lord from Bozzuto. “They racked our good friar for days, you know. He recanted his confession twice, but the strappado has a way of proving persuasive.”
“Would you confess, Signore Capece?”
“M’dear, they would not even have to hoist me up to the irons. One look at the rack, and I would thrust my hand out to sign whatever they wished.”
The crowd let out a howl when it was announced that Fra Savonarola was to be hanged before burning. The writhing and screaming as the flames began to lick at the feet; that was the part everyone wanted to see. But they quieted again as he was noosed with a length of chain. Such a thick, eager silence. I saw the man tremble, the man who had been mad enough to burn a stack of Botticelli paintings and challenge a Borgia pope.
Giulia’s voice was very quiet—she stood so close, I could have reached out and run a finger down the length of her sleeve. “I wonder if Fra Savonarola will speak.”
“Wouldn’t be allowed, m’dear. If I were His Holiness, I would have made a bargain with our good Dominican beforehand: he’ll be spared the flames, but only if he refrains from stirring up the crowd with a gallows sermon. Who wouldn’t prefer quick strangulation to slow roasting?”
For a hanging, it was a distinct anticlimax. The prayers, the condemnations read out in ringing voices. The ritual shaving of what remained of the victim’s hair, so the flames could consume his face unobscured. Then the length of chain snapped taut, and Fra Savonarola’s feet jerked once, and that was all.
Giulia had turned her face away. “I think I will go,” she said to her escort as the crowd gave a satisfied murmur and the executioners began heaping brushwood about the friar’s dangling feet for the fire. “I’ve no wish to smell burning flesh on such a beautiful day.”
She half-turned, gathering her skirts, and I didn’t slide awa
y swiftly enough. Fool to get so close, dwarf, I cursed myself. But Giulia showed no surprise at seeing me. “Leonello,” she said, as calmly as though we had planned to meet each other here. “What luck. Perhaps you will be good enough to escort me back to the palazzo of Vittorio Capece?” A light touch to her companion’s shoulder. “I believe my host wishes to stay a while longer, and I do not.”
Evasion was one thing, but not open flight. Not a second time. “Madonna,” I said, and bowed.
Vittorio Capece and I had played chess a few times, but he did not seem to notice my presence; merely sent a pair of his guards with Giulia in a distracted wave. The first flickers of flame were rising under Fra Savonarola’s limp feet, and the crowd was cheering and laying wagers on when his robes would catch. Giulia’s companion did not cheer or wager, only stood with folded arms and a hard face.
“Signore Capece is very grim,” I couldn’t help noting as the guards cleared a path for Giulia back through the crowd. “Why is he your escort to the most fashionable execution of the year, and not your pretty husband?”
“Orsino gets sick at the sight of blood.”
“‘My little rose,’” I mimicked. “What does he say when he pricks himself on your thorns?”
“He doesn’t know I have any thorns.”
But she couldn’t help a faint smile at my mockery. And I mocked myself, silently, for how her smile still made my heart stop. “Evidently your host doesn’t object to seeing a little blood,” I said instead, waving a hand back at Vittorio Capece.
“Men like Fra Savonarola make life very difficult for men like Vittorio.”
“You mean sodomites?”
“His Holiness doesn’t bother persecuting such men here in Rome. He told me once that if he did, the College of Cardinals would be half empty. In Florence, Fra Savonarola did his best to put every such man to the rack.”