“Maestra?” Bartolomeo blinked. “There’s no such thing.”
“As of today there is.”
The apprentices goggled. Bartolomeo looked as if he were trying to decide whether to keep arguing with me or congratulate me, but I wasn’t having either. He shouldn’t be arguing with me or congratulating me; he shouldn’t dare say anything to me at all except “Yes, signorina” or “No, signorina.” After our frightening time with the French army when he’d seen me with all my defenses down, he’d forgotten that. So I shredded him and his pretensions and his recipes up and down with my tongue until he was sputtering and all the other apprentices were hooting, and then he shouted back at me, or tried to because I just shouted right over him, and in the end I’m sorry to say we ended up slinging ladles at each other. It was not dignified to fight with one’s own apprentices, especially before the others, and I probably should have demonstrated my new authority by sacking Bartolomeo altogether. But he really was quite a gifted young cook, or he would be as soon as his head deflated. So in the end I put him on pot duty, docked his free afternoons for the next two months, and stripped his wine ration for three, adding a new punishment every time he tried to argue. He should count himself lucky. My father would have taken him into the courtyard and beaten him bloody.
Bartolomeo was scarlet with humiliation by the time I was done, and part of me disliked doing it. Because it had been good, that touch of saffron in the frittelle. But public mutiny in any kitchens must be nipped just as publicly. And that goes double in any kitchens run by a woman.
“Well?” I glowered, hands on hips.
“Yes, signorina,” Bartolomeo mumbled, and whirling about, he plunged his hands with a tremendous splash into the nearest sink full of pots. “I mean, maestra.”
Maestra. I liked the sound of that!
CHAPTER TWO
People tend to believe the bad rather than the good.
—BOCCACCIO
Leonello
Do try not to fall on me,” I told her without lifting my eyes from my book.
“Oh!” Sancha of Aragon brought herself up short in a billow of blue Spanish brocade as she rounded the pew, looking down at me with black brows drawn. “You’re the dwarf, aren’t you?”
“Your perspicacity is as astounding as your beauty, madonna.”
“Are you insulting me?”
“Well, you are beautiful.” She had startling blue eyes, olive-skinned breasts on generous display, and a supple little mouth that, according to rumor, had sucked half the papal guards.
She tapped her foot at me, but I kept reading. I sat in the chapel’s rearmost pew, boots propped impiously on the pew ahead, reading Suetonius’s De Vita Caesarum through the colored reflections of the stained-glass window overhead. The Palazzo Santa Maria had its own tiny chapel complete with marble-carved altar and rosewood crucifix and an Annunciation all in panes of blue and crimson glass in the window—but no one ever prayed here, considering that the palazzo stood adjacent to the Basilica San Pietro itself. I sometimes came here to read, if the palazzo rang a little too noisily with female voices to find quiet elsewhere.
“You’re La Bella’s dwarf,” the lovely brunette above me persisted. “That stunted little shadow who follows her about everywhere. Don’t you juggle or tumble or tell jokes?”
“No. And what is the Princess of Squillace doing here without so much as a maid in attendance?”
“I left them outside at the door.” Sancha of Aragon lifted her little Neapolitan nose. “I am here to pray. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, surprising myself. My eyes had not really taken in my book for the past hour. For once, the chapel’s hush had made me think of more somber things than my latest reading, and I had been seeing a face superimposed over my book. A woman’s face, plain and tired and not so very pretty. Made less pretty by the slash in her throat below. A woman now four years dead, and I had not remembered what she looked like in a long time, but I was remembering now.
Mourning? Not really. She hadn’t been a great love of mine; just someone I could call a friend. Not even a close friend. Just a garrulous tavern girl with a sweet voice, who had been kind to me. But I had few enough friends of any variety, and when this one died I’d thought to avenge her. Dwarves have foolish notions.
Anna. That was her name. Worth remembering, even if I couldn’t avenge it.
But I had no desire to voice any such thoughts to hard-eyed Sancha of Aragon, who would not care anyway, so I just made an airy gesture. “I may be here to pray, Madonna Sancha, but you’re not. What man are you meeting?”
“Get out,” she snapped.
“No,” I said. “If I leave here I’ll have to go back to La Bella, and she’s having her hair dressed, which not only takes an eon, but she’s reading those wretched Avernus sonnets aloud to the maids and everybody’s sighing. All in all, I’d rather be dead.”
“Avernus?” Sancha wrinkled her nose. “What’s that?”
“The latest poetical sensation.” Ten sonnets had been published lately under the pen name of Avernus (the entrance to the underworld! How very mysterious!), written to the glory of some anonymous beloved named Aurora (the goddess of dawn, bringing light to Avernus’s darkness! How very romantic!). Whoever he was under his pen name, he had not overlooked a single cliché in the entire classical repertory of gods and myth as far as I could tell. And now of course, every woman in Rome fancied she was the inspiration for Aurora.
Except Giulia Farnese—she just shrugged and said quite without jealousy, “I know they weren’t written for me. You have to be chaste to be a poetical inspiration. Well, either chaste or dead, and thankfully I’m neither. No one dedicates poetry to live harlots!” Unfortunately, this conclusion did not stop my mistress from reading the wretched book cover to cover.
I dismissed bad love poetry from my mind and tilted my head back at the Princess of Squillace. “So, madonna, whom might you be meeting? Cesare Borgia?” Everyone in Rome whispered that Sancha was bedding her brother-in-law. Among many others.
Sancha tossed her head. “I could have you flogged, you know.”
“No, you couldn’t. I belong to La Bella, and while her taste in poetry is appalling, she’s very protective when it comes to her servants. Even ones as rude as I.” I flicked a page of my book over. “If it’s Cardinal Borgia you’re waiting for, then you will have a long wait. He was here, visiting Madonna Lucrezia, but he set off an hour ago.”
“What?” Sancha’s blue gauze veil drifted as she turned her head.
“The Holy Father, I understand, required his services. Some disturbance among the papal guard. The Duke of Gandia is their new Gonfalonier, but the Duke is out whoring and not to be found.”
“And Cesare just galloped off with never a thought?”
“Not of you, certainly.” The fire in his eye had all been for the troops His Holiness had conferred to the Duke of Gandia’s command. Cesare Borgia would certainly not pass up a chance at Juan’s post just for an afternoon tumble with his little brother’s wife.
“If he thinks I’ll be waiting here for him like a tame dog once he’s done, he can think twice,” Sancha sniffed. “Arrogant bastard.”
“He is at that.”
“He’s talked of you, you know.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “Leonello, isn’t it? He says you’re clever.”
“We play the odd game of chess now and then. Sometimes I even beat him.”
“Does he ever mention me?”
“No.”
“You’re a rude little beast, you know that?”
“Yes.”
She flung herself down beside me with a great lack of grace, sighing. I would have wondered why a princess would talk to a dwarf, but bastard-born Sancha of Aragon was not much of a princess. I’d never spoken a word to her before, but I’d observed her the past few months after she and her sulky little husband Joffre had come from Naples. It wasn’t for nothing that my mistress referred to her as the Tart of Aragon. “S
pread her knees for the nearest page boy, she will,” I’d heard one of her maids whispering to another. “Then tease her little husband about it, just to see his chin quiver!”
“An afternoon wasted,” Sancha complained, jamming a pearl pin further into her piled hair. “Cesare said we’d have the whole day after he was done visiting with Lucrezia!”
“How efficient of him,” I said. “Visit his sister, then pick up his sister-in-law on the way home for a good romp.”
Sancha cast her blue eyes at me. “Does that shock you?”
“Nothing shocks me,” I said, but thought of my friend Anna again. Her death had shocked me profoundly—staked out on a tavern table by a knife through each palm, and her throat cut afterward. She had a dimple in her cheek, her one claim to prettiness, and it had had a drop of dried blood in it by the time I found her dead on the table.
“Cesare might be able to shock you.” Sancha laughed. “He’ll do anything, you know. I had him take me once on the altar over there, in his cardinal’s robes.”
Time was, I’d thought him capable of sins a good deal more sinister than fornicating in a church. Three men had killed Anna: a guardsman and a steward from the Borgia household escorting a young masked man hunting through the slums of Rome for a whore. The steward and the guardsman I’d hunted down myself, but I’d never found the man in the mask. Time was I thought it might be Cesare, or maybe his vicious brother, Juan. And there had been other girls after Anna, found table-staked and throat-slit and raped. Five in all . . .
But the last had been a year and a half ago, the night after La Bella and I had been captured by the French, according to the gossip I’d gleaned on my return. Juan Borgia had been off in Spain then, and Cesare Borgia had been pacing the floor in the Vatican, witnessed by a hundred eyes as he tried to reassure the frantic Pope that his mistress would not be murdered by the French King. La Bella and I had not died that night; another girl had—but since then? Nothing.
The masked man who had killed first my friend and then a string of others was either gone from Rome or dead. Or had perhaps never existed at all, except in a series of coincidences and a dwarf’s overheated imagination. It would not be the first time my flights of fancy had led me into trouble.
Sancha twisted her neck at my book. “Why would anyone bother teaching a dwarf to read? All you have to do in life is juggle.”
“Why would anyone ever bother teaching a princess to read?” I retorted. “All you have to do in life is flop on your back and produce babies.”
“I’ve got the first part all right.” She let out a giggle, buffing at her nails. They could have used a good scrubbing. “What’s that book there?”
“De Vita Caesarum.”
“It sounds dull.”
“It’s salacious imperial gossip about the old Roman emperors. I find Latin smut is much easier for a poor scholar like me to parse together than Latin prayers.”
Her lips curved. “Is there anything dirty?”
“Well, Emperor Domitian liked to depilate his concubines—pluck their hairs out one by one with tweezers.”
“Which hairs?”
“Which do you think?”
“Oooh.” Her eyes widened deliciously, and then she laughed. For a beautiful girl, Sancha of Aragon had a surprisingly nasty laugh. “Can you see the Holy Father doing that to Giulia Farnese?”
“Keep your tongue off my mistress, madonna.”
“Well, aren’t you the little champion?”
“I’m paid to be.” No use explaining friendship to a spiteful tart who didn’t believe dwarves had any more feeling in them than dogs. I turned a page.
“I don’t see why everyone thinks Giulia’s so special.” Sancha sounded resentful. She’d cut quite a dash at the Neapolitan court, and no doubt she’d intended to do the same here—but in Rome, it was Giulia Farnese who set the fashions. The virtuous women of the Holy City might shudder at the Bride of Christ’s reputation, but they devoured every detail of her appearance down to the last tassel and ribbon. Let Sancha of Aragon show herself at Mass in blue striped velvet, or Lucrezia Borgia in pink-and-silver checkered silk—if Giulia Farnese tripped out in pale green with a matching furred capelet, every woman in Rome was soon sporting the “Farnese green” and the “papal mozzetta.”
“Really, I don’t think she’s so beautiful at all,” Sancha continued peevishly, picking at her nails again. “I’ve got a far finer figure. Don’t you think, little man?”
I allowed my eyes to travel over her. “I’d have to make a comparison, Madonna Sancha.”
“You must have sneaked a look when La Bella was dressing.” Sancha tossed her head. “If you saw me without my shift, you’d give me the prize.”
I’d never seen Giulia naked, nor to my knowledge had any man who wasn’t the Holy Father, but I had no intention of saying so.
Joffre Borgia’s wife looked down at me through her long lashes, and I saw a spark of interest in her eyes—a spark I’d seen before in the eyes of other women. “Tell me, are you little and stunted everywhere?”
Ah, the eternal question. Female curiosity; it’s put more women in my arms than you might think. Though never a princess. “Am I stunted everywhere?” I repeated, giving Sancha a slow, cool smile. “Perhaps you’d like to find out for yourself, madonna.”
She leaned down, smelling of overripe flowers. Her breath was hot and spiced on my face. “All those dirty things in that book, little man. Is that what dwarves like? Do you like to pluck out hair too?”
Dio. I linked my fingers around the back of her neck and yanked her mouth against mine, just to shut her up. She gave a gasp of surprise, but then her tongue darted into my mouth, and her teeth scored my lip.
I drew back, touching my lip where she’d drawn a bead of blood. Private rumor among the guardsmen had it that Sancha of Aragon liked rough handling, both giving it and receiving it, and for once rumor appeared to be correct. “I don’t need books for inspiration,” I said finally, and flipped De Vita Caesarum closed before she could ask any more sordid questions about the plucking out of hair.
She looked pleased at my daring, and her hand strayed to toy with the lacing at my shirt. “Cesare has some books that would make a churchman go blind. Any churchman but him, that is.” Her fingers petted my chest as though she were caressing a lapdog. “Cesare likes to tie me down, you know. Like a crucifix, with my arms out, and then he does whatever he likes to me.” She lowered her voice. “And what he likes is to hurt me.”
My fingers froze, moving through her hair. “Does he, now?”
She arched a little, giving a shiver and a purr at once. “Sometimes I think he won’t stop. Not till I’m dead.” She didn’t appear too disturbed by the thought. To girls like Sancha of Aragon, rough play is all a game, just another way to lead a man about by the balls. She’d shriek bloody murder if the rough play ever got dangerous. But it never would, because who dares seriously hurt a king’s daughter? No, she’d play her little games around the fringes of the dark things, fancying herself so daring, and the girls like Anna were the ones who died when they did the same.
“You should be careful, Madonna Sancha,” I said finally. “I’ve known five girls in this city who died bound down. Their arms wide, their legs spread, and their throats cut.”
“Just whores,” Sancha shrugged. “Nothing to do with me. Another died like that two nights ago.”
My voice came out too sharp. “You’re sure?”
“Staked to a table with knives. Juan told me. He heard it from a guard. What does it matter?” Sancha hesitated a moment, and I wondered if she’d made the same connection I had, but she just looked impatient that we weren’t talking about her any longer. You may be a king’s daughter, lovely lady, I thought, but you really aren’t very bright, are you?
“You know, Juan’s been very attentive to me,” she went prattling blithely on. “If Cesare thinks he can keep me waiting, well, he’ll find I can have as many Borgias as I like without pining after
him—”
I twined my hand through her hair again, and she broke off her complaining to dandle her hand down toward my breeches. She had a gleam of spite in her half-closed eyes that I’d seen before too, on girls who thought it great fun to wait till a man was half clothed and then snap their legs closed with a stream of spiteful laughter. A dangerous trick to pull on a full-sized man who might use his fists, but what can a dwarf do except slink away in shame?
“Why don’t you tell me more,” I murmured, dropping a string of unhurried kisses down her slender neck as she stroked me. I like being teased no more than any man, but I’d let her do it if it kept her talking. “Tell me everything you know about this woman who died two nights ago. And after that, tell me all about Cardinal Borgia and his . . . tastes.”
“Is that the kind of thing you like to hear?” She laughed. “You’re a twisted little man, aren’t you?”
“Oh, you have no idea.” I was smiling as her mouth closed on mine, but not because I had a princess in my arms. Another girl was dead, and that was nothing to smile about . . . but perhaps I’d been right after all. Perhaps the man in the mask wasn’t a product of my imagination.
And perhaps I had not been so wrong to suspect Cesare Borgia.
Giulia
There’s no sight like a girl being alluring with all her heart. The flutter of the lashes, the delicate blush of the cheeks, the rapid rise and fall of the bosom—it’s a performance in its own right, just as much an art as the singing of a motet or the execution of a complicated basse-danse. Having made quite a study of allurement myself, I enjoyed watching another woman do it well.