“Signorina?”
A spoon of filling, just a spoon into a shell of very thin pastry . . . I rubbed my hands briskly up and down my apron. Pastry required steady hands, and I’d need very tiny strips like shutters to seal the tourte up. Then glaze the top with sugar and rosewater . . .
“Signorina!” An insistent finger poked my arm just as I was arranging the last little louvered flap of pastry. The little tourte fell apart in my hand, and I seized a wooden ladle from the nearest bowl and swung it in a short arc as I whirled.
“Santa Marta!” I yelled. “Sneak up on me again, and I’ll braise your liver in white wine and serve that to the Pope and his guests!”
The steward ducked my ladle, surprisingly agile for such a bulky little man. The red-haired pot-boy squeezing past us with a load of pans wasn’t so wasn’t so lucky; the ladle fetched him a good whack across the ear, and he yelped.
“What?” I snarled, scraping my ruined tourte into the waste. It had been a long series of days, and the horrid news I’d just heard from the market about that poor fruit seller who got herself so gruesomely murdered had hardly helped my peace of mind—and now I was so close to getting the recipe right!
“It’s Maestro Santini again.” The steward sounded ominous. “And he’s in a bad way.”
I muttered a prayer and sent it skyward as I dropped my ladle and flew into the courtyard. But my prayer died in vain: Marco was in no condition to cook. He leaned against the wall that shielded the carcasses and barrels of the kitchens from the street outside, and he stank of wine. A very bad Lagrima vintage, from the smell.
“Little cousin,” he wheedled, one eye peering at me through a fall of black hair. “My sweet Carmelina—”
“Never mind your fancy words.” I flew under one of his arms, hoisting him up before his knees could buckle. “How much did you lose?”
He squinted at me. “Who says I lost anything?”
“Because you only drink when you lose. And you only drink this much when you lose badly.” I grabbed a handful of his hair, hauling his head up before it could loll against my neck. “How much?”
“Hardly anything.” He swayed again, and the wine fumes could have suffocated an ox. “Just ten ducats . . .”
“Marco!” Near half a year’s salary.
“It was just one time, one little game . . .” He looked around at the ring of apprentices and stewards and manservants, noting the significant glances and rolled eyes for the first time. They all knew Marco’s tricks as well as I did, but somehow he seemed to think they all believed him when he said it was just one time. “What?”
“The sweetmeats,” I shouted. “The three hundred pounds of sweets we’re to deliver for Madonna Lucrezia’s wedding!”
He shuffled his boots, abashed. “Oh . . .” I wondered what it was about my cousin and weddings. One hint of nuptials in the air, and his sense of responsibility went straight to the Devil. On the other hand, maybe all men were like that. Marco looked shamefaced, swaying against me.
“Never mind.” I knew well enough how to carry on without my cousin. “Just sleep it off, and then— Oh, sweet Santa Marta, catch him!” Marco’s hard-muscled arm began to slide heavily off my shoulder.
The apprentices just gaped. Useless, the lot of them. Piero and a few other bad apples from my first days in Marco’s kitchens had long since been weeded out, but I wasn’t impressed with the new batch: brains no bigger than capers, one and all. Madonna Adriana was cousin to the Pope, and now installed in an even more luxurious palazzo with the Pope’s daughter and mistress—but she still liked to hire on the cheap. Why pay for experienced servants when raw green apprentices and untrained youngsters could be had for half the price? She didn’t have to train all those young lummoxes, after all. I did. And they all just stood there slack-jawed as Marco nearly slithered to the ground and took me with him.
The only one to move was the red-haired pot-boy, the one I’d accidentally whacked with a ladle. He made a lunge and caught my cousin under the arm before he hit the floor like six and a half feet of drunken ox. “What’s your name again, boy?” I barked. One of the new boys; scullions came and went like stray cats.
“Bartolomeo, signorina.” He looked about fourteen, thin as a spit but tall for his age, with wide bony shoulders. A wooden crucifix showed through the lacing of his flour-sprinkled shirt.
“What are you doing up in the kitchens anyway?” I demanded. “I set all pot-boys to work in the scullery; there are more pots to scrub than fleas on a dog.”
He looked shame-faced, hitching a skinny shoulder under Marco’s limp arm. “I followed the smells.” A long rapturous sniff. “What is that, signorina?”
“That’s a decent start on three hundred pounds of wedding sweetmeats, that’s what that is.” Madonna Lucrezia Borgia would become the Countess of Pesaro and wife to Lord Sforza in just two days’ time, and the wedding celebrations at the Vatican would be like nothing Rome had ever seen. The papal kitchens would of course feed the vast crowd of wedding guests following the ceremony, and provide the private evening cena the Pope intended to give for his daughter and her new husband . . . but Giulia Farnese, may God bless her generous flighty heart, had batted her great dark eyes at the Pope and begged my services and mine alone to provide the sweets that would circulate among the guests after the ceremony. And since, after a year of passion, the Pope was still purring and arching for his mistress like a boy of sixteen, he’d granted her wish in a heartbeat.
If it had been Marco in charge, he would have just flipped to the back of my father’s recipe collection (page 428, Chapter: Dolci) and churned off a list of the usual favorites at such banquets: sugared pears, candied cherries, sweet biscotti. Easy enough . . . but I didn’t want to settle for easy. I stayed up late in the kitchens, sprinkled with sugar and sticky-fingered with honey, experimenting with one idea after another in a fever of excitement. Miniature tourtes of caravella pears and sweet summer strawberries sliced thin as a holy wafer; blood orange segments layered and honeyed in pastry stars; violets and apple blossoms encased in shells of crystallized sugar; pale candied almonds feathered and slivered and layered together into little pastry swans; insubstantial crisps of burnt sugar that melted on the tongue; and Giulia Farnese’s favorite marzipan rolled out into fanciful shapes and dyed in the Borgia colors of mulberry and yellow. Tiny, beautiful, delicate, mouthwatering; everything a bride in the full bloom of youth was supposed to be. My wedding gift to the young Lucrezia Borgia, even if she never knew it.
Three hundred pounds of refreshments called for a great deal of sugar; the kitchens were now a rolling boil of luscious smells. After so many hours of nighttime experimentation I hardly smelled it anymore, but young Bartolomeo looked as if he were about to faint on the wave of sweetness. “What is that?” he breathed again.
“Sugar, cinnamon, candied pine nuts, rosewater, saffron, cloves, almond paste, and pepper,” I said briskly. “Among many other things.”
“You can’t put pepper on sweet things,” he objected.
“You most certainly can,” I sniffed. “Ground fresh over seared baby peaches with a dollop of rosewater-whipped cream—” Another of my late-night inventions.
He looked interested. “Can I try one, signorina?”
“Certainly not. See Maestro Santini safe to his bed, and then get back to your pots.” I turned back to the chattering scullions and undercooks with a clap of my hands. “I want to see mouths shut and hands moving! We’re running behind, you clods, and it’s not just Madonna Lucrezia who will be eating these sweets, it’s ambassadors from Milan and Mantua and Ferrara and who knows where else. Back to work!”
They all scattered, used to obeying me by now. The red-haired pot-boy was already shouldering Marco past the wine cellars, and I couldn’t help shaking my head in grudging affection as my cousin was hauled off with his curly head lolling. Normally it did no good for a kitchen’s state of mind, seeing their leader drunk and incapable. But there was something so endea
ring about Marco’s little-boy guilt when he lost his money, and his naked joy when he won it—there wasn’t a maid in my kitchens who could hold his lapses against him, or resist covering for his absences.
Well, I wouldn’t need to do much covering today. As long as I delivered Madonna Lucrezia’s sweetmeats for her wedding guests, after all, no one inside this insulated billow of kitchen steam would get in any trouble on account of Marco’s lapse. And if the maids and pot-boys no longer grumbled at my orders, well, they knew after a year of working side by side that if there was anyone who could roll out that endless line of wedding sweets in time, it was me. I smiled, giving an automatic pat to the little bundle of Santa Marta’s hand under my skirt, and reached for the bowl of caravella pears to try my miniature tourte again. Marco had objected, saying you could never make a tourte so small it could be eaten in one bite; the crust would surely blacken in the oven before the filling cooked.
My nose and I, we knew better.
Leonello
W ell?” my mistress said anxiously. “What do you think?”
She turned a circle before me, skirts flaring, and I looked up from the finger knife I was sharpening and scrutinized her top to toe: Giulia Farnese, now known to all Rome as Giulia la Bella, the Venus of the Vatican, the Pope’s beloved. Her famous hair had been twined at the back of her head into a complicated mass of gold plaits; she wore green and gold Spanish brocade with full flounced sleeves; her gold-embroidered slippers peeped out of her fringed hem. “Beautiful, of course,” I shrugged. “No different than the previous six dresses.”
“Don’t I look sallow in green?” Giulia gave another turn before me. “Please tell me I look sallow.”
“Why on earth do you want to look sallow, Madonna Giulia?” I slipped the finger knife back into its hidden sheath at my wrist.
“This is Lucrezia’s wedding day! Everyone has to look at her, not me or that primping girl who’s to carry her train, or anyone else. I need to look plain by comparison.” Giulia flew back behind her dressing screen again. “Very plain,” her voice floated out.
“Then put a sack over your head and be done with it,” I said, returning to my book.
Maids descended on La Bella behind the screen with more armloads of brocade—“Madonna, have you considered the gray velvet with the gold embroidery?”—and I sat back more comfortably against the tapestried wall, feet dangling far above the floor, Giulia’s gold head bobbing above the edge of the screen in my peripheral vision. Her chamber looked as though a rainbow had exploded inside it: silk gowns and velvet gowns and brocade gowns lay strewn across the huge curtained bed; pairs of sleeves hung like dismembered arms over the cushioned footstools; the wall benches were six inches deep in tasseled gloves and embroidered caps and beaded veils. Madonna Giulia’s pet goat, now grown to full slothful maturity and forever paroled from the possibility of ending up in a crostata, lay curled in a corner placidly eating a velvet slipper. Maids bustled back and forth: linen maids, cosmetics maids, seamstresses, robe makers, the two maids assigned to keep La Bella’s skin white, the three maids whose sole job it was to tend her hair—all of them pink-faced with excitement. Lucrezia Borgia was to become the wife of Lord Giovanni Sforza, today, and none other than Giulia Farnese would lead her to the altar.
At which decision I had to wonder if the Pope had taken leave of his usually shrewd senses. Lucrezia at thirteen was a fetching little thing: blond, sweet-faced, tall enough to resemble a woman; conscious enough of her dignity to glide rather than bounce. But standing beside La Bella, she would be nothing but an afterthought.
“Not that one,” I heard my mistress say as the maids whisked her green and gold gown away and began holding up alternatives behind the dressing screen. Considering she was now the most notorious woman in Rome, Giulia Farnese was surprisingly modest—much to the great disappointment of all the male servants, there was no half-dressed parading about the palazzo for the Pope’s concubine. “No, not that dress either—or that—”
“The yellow-green dress,” I called out from behind my book. “It’s the color of cat vomit. You still won’t look ugly, but it’s a start.”
“Don’t see why we have to listen to him,” one of her maids said behind the screen—scrawny Pantisilea, who wasn’t so improbably named as I’d thought. Penthesilea the Amazon queen had dragged all the men she met off to captivity; Pantisilea the maid dragged all the men she met off to her bed. “I’ve never had a dwarf,” she’d told me cheerfully on first acquaintance. “Want to try me?” And we’d had a laugh or two between the sheets, but now she was looking at me over the screen with a dubious eye. “What does a bodyguard know about dresses?”
“We are in dire need of a man’s opinion,” Giulia informed her. “Oof, that’s tight, loosen those laces—”
“He’s not a man, madonna,” one of the other maids objected.
“But at least he’s impartial,” I said from my wall. “What you need is a pair of eyes that does not notice your beauty.”
“You don’t think I’m beautiful, Leonello?” Giulia peeked over the top of the screen, giving me the benefit of her big wounded eyes before being yanked down again by the maids.
“Certainly you are.” I turned a page absently. “But I have worked in your company near a year now, madonna, and no matter how beautiful the frescoes on one’s wall, eventually one ceases to notice them.”
“You’re horrid,” Giulia complained. “His Holiness says he’s as struck as he was when he first laid eyes on me.”
“Which is why you want my opinion instead of His Holiness the Pope’s.”
Giulia flew out behind the screen again, this time arrayed in embroidered yellow-green silk. “Well?”
“Better,” I said. Not really—even unjeweled and swathed in a dress the color of cat vomit, Giulia Farnese would still draw all eyes. The virtuous women of Rome could be divided fairly evenly into two camps: those who drew their skirts aside from the Bride of Christ and her scandalous reputation, and those who fawned on her because their husbands hoped for some favor from His Holiness. But every woman in Rome, whether scornful or sycophantic, craned their necks to see every detail of what Giulia Farnese wore. If she appeared at Mass in the Basilica San Pietro in a blue velvet gown, every cloth merchant in the city began hawking “papal blue.” If she wore a dashing little furred cap tilted over one eye when she went to confession, every woman in Rome with a claim to high fashion was sporting a “Farnese biretta” within a fortnight. Doubtless by tomorrow morning, there would be a storm of women racing off to their robe makers for dresses in cat-vomit silk.
“Better,” I said again as my mistress twirled. “You’ll be the least ostentatious woman at the Gilded Excrescence.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call Lucrezia’s wedding that.” Giulia made a face at me as her maids tied her sleeves. “It’s sure to be a beautiful occasion.”
“Certainly it will be a sumptuous one.” His Holiness the Pope was sparing no expense in the wedding of his bastard daughter. I looked down into the cradle beside my wall bench at the bride’s little sister. “Will you be having a wedding like this in thirteen years or so, little one?”
The baby gnawed on her own fist in her nest of crested linens: the latest addition to the papal seraglio, born almost nine months to the week that Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, and there wasn’t a soul in Rome who hadn’t done their sums on hearing that.
“Why shouldn’t Laura have a wedding like this someday?” Brushing the maids aside, Giulia came to lift her daughter out of the ornately carved cradle. The baby gurgled and spit up on her mother’s shoulder, but Giulia dabbed at the silk unconcernedly. “A count or a duke is none too good for a pope’s daughter.”
“And by the time she grows old enough to think of marrying, His Holiness will be bankrupt from all the other weddings.” Thirteen-year-old Lucrezia was the first of the Borgia bastards to marry (at least the first of the bastards he had here in Rome) but there was already talk of a Spanis
h bride for Juan and a Neapolitan princess for little Joffre. I wasn’t supposed to know His Holiness’s ruminations, but I still liked to keep my card-play sharp, and I often played primiera with the papal secretaries. They sometimes put papal secrets in the pot instead of coin. “His Holiness should just put her in a convent to save money,” I advised.
“Nonsense; if she’s anything like me or her father, she’d be a dreadful nun. Won’t you, Lauretta mia—look, doesn’t she have Rodrigo’s nose?”
“She has exactly the same nose as any other baby.”
Giulia ignored me, blowing loud kisses all over baby Laura and finally laying her back in the carved cradle. “Oh, dear, I’m late!”
“You’re always late, madonna,” one of the maids scolded, and La Bella flew like a yellow-green bird with her entourage behind her.
I slipped down from the wall bench, shooing the white goat as it moved on from a mostly consumed slipper to a pair of embroidered gloves, and I sauntered after my mistress. I paused a moment to lean over the cradle, partly to tickle little Laura until she giggled and partly to make the superstitious nursemaid fork the sign of the devil behind her back as she always did when the little fiend—that would be me—came too close to her charge.
The new Pope was not a man to waste time. Immediately after his ascension to the throne of San Pietro, he moved the papal seraglio containing Madonna Adriana and his daughter and his mistress to the exquisite Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico, a stone’s throw from the Vatican itself. All Rome was abuzz at the scandal, and even I had raised an eyebrow; popes had kept mistresses and bastards before, and most cardinals maintained at least one unofficial household, but there was always the necessary shell of respectability: concubines passed off as cousins, illegitimate sons as nephews. But Pope Alexander VI cared not a fig for gossip and made no such pretense, moving his mistress openly to her new home, and I had been moved right along with the rest of her servants and belongings. We had all let out gasps and whistles at the sight of the Palazzo Santa Maria: the high-arched loggias framing the jewel-like gardens, the marble terraces and splashing fountains, the long flights of shallow steps leading to breathtaking vistas over Rome. An Eden fit for Dante’s Paradiso . . .