I burst out laughing.
“—olive oil and French wine and some good cheese and so forth. Corinthian raisins, very tasty, you’ll like them. But I need at least a few extra ingredients to work with, and this kitchen doesn’t even have basil. Whoever heard of a kitchen that doesn’t have basil?” His voice rose. “I can’t cook you tortellini. I can’t cook you anything!”
I put my finger across his lips, stilling the flow of words. “Bartolomeo Scappi,” I said firmly, trotting out his rarely used second name for this most sacred of occasions. “You are no longer in any way my apprentice.”
“I wanted to prove it,” he grumbled.
“You proved it in my bed, didn’t you?” I said just a bit saucily. “After the fried tubers . . .”
That made him grin. “But you really would have liked my tortellini.”
“Stop talking about food,” I said for the first time in my life, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him again, and he bent and picked me up so my legs circled his waist. The vial of olive oil went smash all over the floor, and so did the little dish of raisins. So much for his hamper.
“Do you have a chamber somewhere?” he murmured. “A cell? Something with a bed?”
“Here, the storeroom—”
He backed into it, kicking the door shut without lifting his mouth off mine. “Does that have a bed?”
“Better. It has a lock.” I dragged the shirt over his head as he pulled me down to the floor between the flour barrels. “Mouth shut, Bartolomeo. Hands moving!”
His lips against my ear made my skin prickle all the way down to my toes. His hands were already following the prickles, down my back, down my hip, tugging my thigh up around him. “Yes, signorina.”
Giulia
Considering that I never wanted anything to do with la famiglia Borgia ever again, I really do think my final performance as the Borgia mistress was remarkable. I quite enjoyed myself. Perhaps I missed my true vocation in life: I was never a very good wife, or a very good whore either, and I was certainly never going to be a nun—but Carmelina had always said there were shadowy spaces between that stark trinity of futures, and she was right. Perhaps I should have been an actress of pantomimes and miracle plays!
“There’s no need to involve you, Giulia,” Leonello pointed out the previous night when he was brushing my hair for me, as had become his nightly habit. Even after so short a time, we had our traditions! All the hovering maids and nuns had finally been dismissed, but I’d complained of a headache and demanded that my dwarf stay behind to read to me. If he’d been a tall handsome man there would have been talk, but when was there ever talk when a lady was alone with a dwarf? I thought we could manage our lives very handily around that blithe assumption.
“Truly.” My lion frowned at me in the glass, stroking a comb through my hair with those clever hands of his. “You think I cannot intimidate a prioress all on my own? I have Bartolomeo to lurk and loom for me, after all. There’s no need to drag you into it as well.”
“It will all look more convincing if you have me pouting in attendance,” I promised, putting down the glass. “Don’t you want to see me pout?”
“You do have an enchanting pout,” he admitted with that grin that looked far better without its usual cynical tilt. He pressed a wave of my hair back behind my ear, adding, “You also have enchanting earlobes.”
“That’s absurd. How can anybody have enchanting earlobes?”
“I’ve no idea, but you manage it. When we get to Carbognano, I shall write a sonnet about them.” His thumb traced the outer edge of my ear in the way that gave me such happy shivers. “You’re wasted on me, you know.”
“What do you mean?” I turned away from my glass, taking the comb from him.
“The most beautiful woman in Rome, bestowed first on a coward, then on a corrupt old man, and finally on a dwarf?” Leonello’s eyes crinkled. “Hardly fair.”
“Tell me something, Leonello.” I put chin in hand, looking up at him from my stool. “Did you love me from first sight, the way Orsino and Rodrigo told me they did?”
“No.” He was very certain. “At first sight, I thought you a giddy girl who was very pleasant to look at, and probably even more pleasant to look at unclothed.”
“So it wasn’t all this”—I made a gesture at the hair, the breasts, all the things men usually stared at—“that made you love me.”
“I didn’t notice any of it”—making the same gesture—“after the first few months. A pretty face is like a fresco on a wall: you admire it for a time, and then you don’t even see it anymore because it’s always there.”
“How very ungallant!” But I beamed. “What changed? When did you start to love me?”
He put a hand on the crown of my head and smoothed it slowly down the fall of my hair. “When I saw you were kind. When I saw you were brave. When you had special reinforced boots made for me because you understood how my legs ached, even though I’d never told you . . .” He pulled one lock of hair gently through his fingers, all the way to the very end. “Who knows?”
I took his hand and put it to my own cheek. “I have been a prize all my life, Leonello. Prizes exist to be paraded; to inspire envy. Maybe lust.” I turned my lips against his palm. “Not love.”
“You are still wasted on an ugly thing like me.”
And I had not seen his looks in a very long time, either. If he was small, well, I was not tall either, and I was tired anyway of being carried about by the whims of large, peremptory men. But I rather thought Leonello would need time before he truly believed that I didn’t find him ugly.
Time we had. “To bed?” I suggested.
He gave that smile of his that made him so handsome. “To bed.” Only a few days and I was already used to his quiet warmth beside me, the way his hand held mine through the night as we slept. I was not used to having a man beside me as I slept. Rodrigo had always been too busy to stay the night; he had to rush back to the papal apartments to resume his work, and Orsino didn’t think it seemly for husband and wife to share a chamber. Perhaps it wasn’t, but I’d long since given up on being seemly, and I didn’t intend to go any longer without a shoulder to sleep on. It would be more difficult to manage in Carbognano than it was here in the solitary splendor of the convent’s gatehouse quarters, but I already had plans. If I was bringing a certain devoted former bodyguard of mine back to Carbognano, a man who would now take up official position as tutor to my daughter, then wouldn’t he need a chamber of his own to teach her in? Wouldn’t I need to hire a woodworker, someone skilled enough to make bookshelves and writing tables all fitted to a small man’s height, and after that a stonemason to carve scenes on the walls from Leonello’s beloved Homer? Behind that frieze of Trojan ships and Greek warriors, I was already planning the construction of a discreet passage leading to my chamber. If the Pope used to visit me unseen through a private passage, why couldn’t Leonello?
And if I married again, well, my next husband wouldn’t expect to sleep by my side either. Because Sandro had been right; I would need a second husband someday if I meant to protect Laura’s inheritance. And I already had my eye on a proper candidate: Vittorio Capece of Bozzuto, who would not want sons from me, or my presence in his bed, or anything at all except my occasional promenade on his arm to keep the gossip away. An ideal second husband, and Leonello agreed with me when I shared the name. Vittorio could live in Rome or in Naples with his handsome young pages, and I could reside in Carbognano with my lion. I had it all perfectly planned.
“And what happens if I put a child in you?” Leonello had asked me that the very first night, grim-faced, holding himself back so fiercely. “That would break your plans into pieces, wouldn’t it? You could never pass a dwarf child off as Vittorio Capece’s.”
“I’m not very fertile,” I’d pointed out. “One daughter in all the years with Rodrigo, and he tried to get me with child—he always hoped I’d give him a son. And Orsino tried too, tried every night for months and month
s, and nothing happened then either. I think it might have been Laura’s birth. She came so hard, and the midwives say it can damage the womb.” That should have marked me a great failure, my inadequacy as a breeder of sons, but not for the life I had chosen now. “Besides, there are ways to be careful, if you’re worried. Let me tell you just what can be done with a lime . . .”
It was already part of my evening disrobing: a night shift, a little rosewater for the face, and a halved lime. Of course it was a sin, but I was racking up such a number of sins these days, a lime didn’t add much to the tally. Fornication; lust; the taking of a lover outside the laws of marriage. Not to mention the fact that this lover and I had cooked up a plan between us to steal a nun out of her convent. No, a lime wasn’t much compared to all that.
And I must say, the plan we had cooked up for Carmelina worked beautifully. My little lion and I really did make the most marvelous team. That poor prioress never stood a chance against us!
“I would speak to you, Mother Prioress,” I said in bored tones after deigning to take Mass the next morning with the sisters. I hadn’t seen Carmelina in the ranks of black and white, but finding her was Leonello’s task. I rustled off after the prioress, who showed me to her private sala with great alacrity—a sala any palazzo could have boasted, with its fine woven carpets and inlaid table and carved chairs. Mother Prioress offered a velvet cushion for my back and a very unmonastic wine to sip, and I rustled my skirts and flashed my pearls and made offhand mention of a donation I had been planning to make for the sisters of San Sisto. “Or shall I say, a donation the Holy Father urged me to make? After the great care you have taken of his daughter the Duchess of Bisceglie, he is most interested in furthering the prosperity of your establishment.”
“His Holiness is too kind,” the prioress purred in her carved chair, patting her own skirts with their rustle of silk beneath and no doubt seeing new stained-glass windows for the altar and even better wine for her private stores.
“There is just one small matter he has entrusted to me first . . .”
Leonello burst in on cue, and I felt like cheering. What a picture he made! Back in his black livery I had designed with its handsome touches of white, he strode like an only slightly small colossus toward the prioress, who recoiled visibly from his steely gaze. Cesare Borgia’s notorious demon dwarf, with whispers of blood and murder and poison whispering around his footsteps . . . and right behind him, a hulking red-haired guard in Borgia livery, dragging a tall and terrified young nun.
“That’s the one,” Leonello told me, hardly bothering to glance at the prioress. “Suora Serafina, she was calling herself.”
The red-haired guard jerked to a halt, pushing Carmelina before him. Her eyes bulged over the big freckled hand that covered her mouth, and her wimple and veil had been yanked away. Holy Virgin, what had they done to her hair?
“I don’t understand,” the prioress gasped. “This is Suora Serafina, yes—a holy sister, fled from her orders in Venice. His Eminence Cardinal Borgia ordered that she resume her vows here.”
“His Eminence no longer.” Leonello took up the narrative now, as I yawned down at my nails. “Did you not hear? Cardinal Borgia renounced his red hat two days ago. He is a prince of the world now, not a prince of the church. And now that he is no longer bound by the church’s laws, he has different plans for Suora Serafina. She is no longer to remain here as nun.”
“A nun cannot be released from her vows,” the prioress began.
“But she can be released from these walls,” Leonello cut in effortlessly. “Suora Serafina served the Pope’s daughter here, as you know. The Duke—you are aware Cardinal Borgia is now Duc de Valentinois, or Duke Valentino? He wishes his sister’s reputation, and those who might wish to damage it . . . more closely guarded. We are to take Suora Serafina with us.”
The prioress looked from Leonello to Carmelina and back with something like horror. “For what purpose?”
I flicked my eyes at Bartolomeo. He really was holding her entirely too gently to be credible here. I’d coached him last night in his role as brutal henchman—“More swagger, Bartolomeo, and do try to leer occasionally. Is a little brutality too much to ask?” But Carmelina’s former apprentice, I’m afraid, had no talent for mime. He stood there holding Carmelina between his hands like a bouquet of roses, and what we really needed here was a good snarl and a cruel yank on her arms. Fortunately, my clever cook produced a stifled little cry as though he had yanked cruelly on her arms.
“Where will you be taking her?” the prioress repeated, horrified.
My turn in the drama, and I leaned forward earnestly. “It’s been decided that I will find her suitable work in the countryside. She’ll come to no harm, I assure you.” At that, Leonello smirked behind me in amused contempt. Naïve females. “No harm at all!” I continued with a dim-witted little trill. “But it was thought better if she took up another name there, and Suora Serafina was pronounced dead and buried behind these walls.”
Leonello drew one of his little knives and began to clean under his nails with it, giving the prioress a silky smile. She’ll be dead and buried soon enough, that smile whispered, and the prioress stared mesmerized at the knife.
“And for your trouble, naturally you shall be compensated.” I produced a purse and dropped it to the table beside me with a negligent clink. I’d sold my diamond rose brooch for a purse that heavy. I liked the idea that Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, was so kindly funding a nun’s escape from her vows.
Carmelina managed another little cry. Leonello cleaned his nails some more, looking sinister. Bartolomeo lurked, looking not very sinister, but the prioress had no eyes for him as her gaze flicked from the knife to the purse.
“You know the reason Suora Serafina ran from her convent in Venice?” I added, careless. “It’s a shocking story.” Leonello had told me all about Carmelina’s grisly little piece of dead saint, and I’d had an idea how to use the information.
“Cardinal Borgia gave no details.” The prioress sounded cautiously interested. “I assumed Suora Serafina ran away to join a lover. It’s usually the reason, with these feckless young nuns.”
“No, it’s far worse than that!” I leaned close, lowering my voice to a horrified whisper. “A charge of altar desecration! She absconded with a most holy relic—”
“Surely not!” The prioress crossed herself.
“It’s a wicked world,” I sighed, and kept my eyes away from Leonello who was giving me a long stare. This line of conversation had not been part of our little playlet, but I’d thought all along that this avaricious smooth-faced prioress with her love of good wine and silk shifts might need more grease for her palm than mere gold.
And yes, she was looking very interested indeed. “This stolen relic . . .”
“As you can imagine, Suora Serafina could hardly sell it at the market!” I reached under my cloak. “My guard found it hidden in her cell.”
Everyone caught their breath as I tossed it to the table: a long braid of golden hair as thick as a man’s wrist, coiled like a lustrous blond snake.
“The hair of Mary Magdalene,” I said, crossing myself. “The hair that tumbled over the feet of Christ Himself. Can anyone doubt it? Look how it gleams after so many centuries!”
I heard a sudden explosion from Carmelina. Fortunately, with Bartolomeo’s hand clapped over her mouth, it sounded like a sob.
“A worthy relic indeed,” the prioress breathed. She took a glance at my own hair, but I’d picked a pearled velvet headdress this morning that covered my head completely.
“A worthy relic in need of a worthy resting place,” I agreed. “Caretakers more cautious than the sisters of Santa Marta in Venice. Even if they heard of it resurfacing in Rome, they could hardly look to reclaim it when they allowed it to be stolen in the first place.”
The prioress crossed herself. She was seeing lines of pilgrims, I thought: pilgrims dipping eagerly into their purses to see the braid of (my) hair all
locked away in a rock crystal reliquary, bringing fame and wealth to the Convent of San Sisto.
A far better bribe than a mere bag of coins. She already had no eyes at all for Carmelina, standing pinioned in the not-really-very-brutal grip of Leonello’s red-haired henchman.
“I am sure Cardinal Borgia—that is, Duke Valentino—has the wisest possible plans for Suora Serafina.” The prioress gave a glittering smile, and the golden braid of hair disappeared into her sleeve faster than I could blink. “I shall send him word myself that she has died of a fever and has been buried upon these resting grounds, God rest her soul.”
“God rest her soul,” I echoed piously, and it really was a miracle that we all got into the coach before exploding in laughter.
Carmelina
I brought a hamper,” Bartolomeo announced, and then my red-haired lover looked puzzled when everyone burst out laughing all over again. “What? I thought we might want a bit of a nibble on the road—”
“Of course you did,” I choked against his shoulder. The Convent of San Sisto was already behind us, and so was Rome. The coach was a hired vehicle, and it racketed along the dry summer road with none of the cushioned comfort of the conveyances La Bella had enjoyed as Pope’s mistress, but I had never been so happy in my life to be jolted about like an apple rattling around in an empty basket.
“What did you put in that hamper, Bartolomeo?” Leonello poked at the woven basket at our feet. “It’s moving.”
“I almost forgot.” Bartolomeo untied the lid. “That’s not for eating. Though Carmelina always threatened to put him in a crostata—”
My old notch-eared kitchen cat put his head over the basket with his rusty mrow.
“He should go into a crostata,” I said. “I’ve no use for cats who won’t catch mice!” But I lifted the cat up out of the basket and settled him on my lap.
“She wasn’t so happy to see me,” Bartolomeo complained.