Or perhaps he’d just laugh derisively. Either way, I didn’t really want to find out. I had no affection for Orsino, but I didn’t want to see him hurt, either.
“Hello, mi perla.”
I smiled, hearing the deep voice behind me. I had plenty of nicknames in Rome by now—“La Bella,” which was really quite flattering, and “the Venus of the Vatican,” which was somewhat flattering, and “the Bride of Christ,” which I didn’t find flattering at all, though Leonello found it so sidesplittingly funny that I had a dark suspicion he might have been the one to come up with it in the first place. Only Rodrigo, however, called me his pearl. “Your Holiness,” I said softly, and blew out all the tapers but one. Padding across the woven carpet in my bare feet, I brought his hand up to my lips and kissed his ring. He nodded gravely, as he always did, then scooped me up in his burly arms and carried me to bed. He always did that too. There’s something about being small—men always seemed to want to pick you up and carry you somewhere, didn’t they? I was forever being toted about like a doll. “Oddly,” Leonello had told me once when I said as much to him, “I find my experience of being small somewhat different.”
Tonight, however, my Pope did not seem inclined for love. He put his head against my breast instead, absently kissing the base of my throat, and I leaned my cheek against his head and curled the locks of his black hair around my fingers. “You’re thinking of Juan,” I said at last.
“Juan.” Rodrigo was just a somber profile in the flickering half-dark of the single candle: an eagle nose, a bulky chest, a sad voice. “Gone, like Pedro Luis. Pedro, he was so young when . . .” Rodrigo’s voice trailed off, as it always did when he spoke of the firstborn son in Spain who had died after his first military command. “They said he was brave, very brave. I’ve told you that?”
“Many times.”
“Juan, he’s brave. Like Pedro Luis. He’ll be a great condottiere.”
I had my own doubts that a boy of seventeen who could hardly tear himself away from his hobbies of harassing the kitchen maids and killing cats in alleys was really poised to be the next Achilles, but I certainly wasn’t fool enough to say so. “Juan is gone, but he’s not dead, you know,” I said instead, smoothing Rodrigo’s hair. “He’ll be back.”
“I don’t like him going at all! Any of them. I like my family here, with me.”
“Says the man who wore my ear to a nub one night, telling me how his children were going to found a great web of interconnected dynasties throughout the world!” I bit Rodrigo’s earlobe, playful. “How are they supposed to make a great web of anything if they all stay here?”
“I’m still working on that,” he admitted.
I laughed. “So until you have the perfect solution, Your Holiness, leave Juan to Spain and Spain to Juan. Cesare—”
“The next Borgia Pope.” Rodrigo nodded. “The only problem is, I won’t be there to see him do it.”
“‘We have for Pope Cesare Borgia, Pope Alexander VII.’” I sounded out the words. “Doesn’t sound like him at all. He’d rather be the kind of Alexander who conquers the world.”
“Juan can conquer the world. He’s hot-blooded; made for the battlefield. Cesare, he’s got a cooler head, and one needs that in the Church.”
“I don’t think he wants the Church.”
“Someone in the Church doesn’t want him, that’s certain.” Rodrigo gave a derisive chuckle. “Someone’s made a nasty attempt to keep Cesare out of the College of Cardinals. That murdered girl in the Borgo, the one with her throat cut—I’ll eat my throne if it was the Jews. Judging from what turned up on the girl’s body, it was someone doing their best to smear Cesare’s reputation. Cardinal della Rovere, perhaps? He’s appalled enough at the idea of one Borgia Pope, let alone two . . .”
Rodrigo went on, half amused and half angry, and it was something faintly sinister about a dagger that had possibly belonged to Cesare, but I didn’t want to hear the details. I had no desire think about women murdered in the night, not when I lay so cozy and safe in my Pope’s arms. “So, if Cesare is to be the next Borgia Pope,” I said instead, changing the subject, “and Juan is bound to lead the papal armies, what does that leave for Joffre?”
“Naples.” Rodrigo frowned, fingers drumming against my arm as he looked up at the ceiling. He’d had it painted with a fresco of a golden-haired Europa being borne off by Jupiter in his form as a bull. Europa looked quite a lot like me, and the bull had a cloth of the Borgia mulberry and yellow across its broad back. “I shall have to do something about Naples.”
“Now?” I poked his ribs until he squirmed. He was quite endearingly ticklish, my Pope. I aimed ruthlessly for the sensitive spot at his waist, and he caught my wrists together in one strong hand. He pinioned me against his broad chest, speaking in his most thunderous papal whisper.
“I shall excommunicate you, minx, if you make me squeal.”
“And I shall beg my Holy Father for forgiveness. On my knees, of course.”
“Then I may excommunicate you just for the pleasure of the sight.” He kissed the tip of my nose, finally smiling, but his mind was still on Naples. At least it was no longer gloomily fixed on Juan and poor dead Pedro Luis. “I think Joffre will rope Naples in for me. King Ferrente has a few spare princesses lying about—he’ll give one to Joffre, if I support him against France and Spain too . . .”
“Don’t tell me Spain wants Naples now.” I made a face. “You just gave them a continent!” It had been all the talk that spring: the new Eden discovered by that Genoese sailor whose name I could never remember, an Eden Rodrigo had ceded mostly to Spain. I’d been less interested in the maps and treaties of it all than the strange things brought back from this new world: odd plants and dusky-skinned slaves in manacles, and strange bright-colored birds that were supposed to talk. Rodrigo had obtained one of the birds as a present for Lucrezia, but so far it refused to say anything, just sat sullenly on its perch and tried to take the fingers off anyone who fed it. Privately I’d named it Vannozza.
I dandled my fingers along Rodrigo’s chest. “So, Joffre ropes in Naples, through a Neapolitan princess. Lucrezia ropes in Milan, through a Sforza husband. What fish are you going to catch with Laura?”
“I don’t know. France, perhaps? They’re starting to make trouble.”
I smiled. Vannozza had been entirely wrong—Rodrigo was already making plans for Laura, plans every bit as grand as for any of her children. “A French duke,” I began, envisioning my daughter’s rosy future, but Rodrigo had already moved on.
“France will have to wait for the moment. Naples comes first.” His fingers drummed mine decisively, all his pensive silence gone in the fire of decision making. I’d never yet seen my Pope tired. “And the College of Cardinals—it needs a batch of young blood to shake up those old ganders in their red hats. It’s time Cesare was a cardinal, anyway. And what about your brother—does he fancy a red hat?”
I picked my head up off the papal shoulder. “Sandro?”
“Yes, why not? He’s a jokester and he’ll never amount to much, but he’s amusing. Besides, I like offering him favors.” Rodrigo grinned. “He rather likes me, you see, or he would if I weren’t bedding his sister”—leaning down to lay kisses along the line of my shoulder—“so I get to watch him wishing he could hit me, and wishing he could accept whatever I’m offering, all as he’s saying no with exquisite coldness. Refreshing, after all the slithering sycophants I usually deal with.”
“If you really do want to offer him a red hat, I’ll make him say yes.” My brother had turned down several lucrative favors offered by my Pope, despite all my pleading and persuading. To be made cardinal, though . . . it would be the making of my big brother. He’d be secure for life, a great man, and I wanted that for him: success, happiness, everything in the world. Maybe because he was the only one of my family who didn’t hold out a greedy hand to me now that I was in a position to grant favors.
I didn’t like asking for favors, really. Rodr
igo might shower me with gifts in his easy, open-handed way, and my family too, but I never requested any of it. I wasn’t a whore, no matter what the people of Rome called me—and they did call me that, alongside the prettier names like the Venus of the Vatican. It still distressed me sometimes. I was a girl of noble birth and good rearing, raised to adorn a man’s household and bear his children, and sometimes I had to wonder just how I’d come so far from that.
And sometimes I wondered if I’d really come very far from it at all. I did adorn a man’s household, after all, and I had borne his child, and all in all the days I spent tending my baby and getting fitted for dresses and going to Mass and presiding over the family cena in the evenings weren’t so very different from the life I’d expected to have after marriage.
It had all gotten very muddled.
I sighed, and Rodrigo lifted my chin on the point of one finger. “Come to me,” he whispered.
“Yes, Your Holiness,” I whispered back, and he pulled me against him.
When Rodrigo had first made love to me, I had not the faintest idea what he was doing. From everything I’d heard whispered by my mother and her various pious, bawdy, or downright ghoulish maidservants, I knew the whole process of lovemaking was at first painful, and after that it could be either pleasant or boring, but it would be brief. Men took their pleasure, and it was a straightforward business. Rodrigo was neither straightforward nor brief. “What are you doing?” I’d asked, flushing pink and crossing my arms over my breasts as he gazed at me that first time.
“Appreciating,” he said, taking my hands away. And not just appreciating the parts of me everyone seemed to notice—my hair and my breasts and the obvious bits. “The skin just inside your wrist is like satin,” he might announce one night, and slowly thumb the pulse there until it was beating like a fall of fast spring rain. “And do you know you have dimples in your knees?” Tracing them all around. “And in your elbows?” His touch sliding up the line of my ribs, around the point of one shoulder and down to my elbows. “And one more dimple at the very base of your spine . . .” I’d feel his mouth there, moving my hair aside unhurriedly as he appreciated his way up the whole length of my back, and my entire body would be thrumming, happy to be appreciated all night long.
I still didn’t know if Rodrigo was doing it all wrong, or everyone else was. But my swarthy, heavyset lover of sixty-two years could appreciate a patch of skin over my hip until it was leaping off my body in the effort to follow his hand, and in the end I decided I’d rather have that than a handsome profile or a youthful countenance. A great many young girls have to marry old men, after all—I was lucky enough to get one with power, presence, charm, and the most useful penchant for both gift giving and lovemaking; a man whose passion for me remained undimmed after a year.
Yes, I’d call that lucky indeed.
“My Papal Bull,” I teased, my lips brushing his, and his burly chest rumbled laughter against my breasts. A blasphemy and a double entendre all in one; the kind of joke that he liked, and I slid myself down over him in a long candlelit shimmer of hair and apricot-scented skin. His eyes glittered dark in the shadows, still devouring me, until passion shuttered them and he groaned. “Mi perla,” he whispered, one hand tracing the dimple at the base of my spine, the other cupping my neck and then roping my hair about his palm to pull me down against him. Our mouths clashed, drank, clashed again. On my painted ceiling, Europa rode her bull. Down below, I rode mine.
“Rodrigo?” I said softly afterward. “Can I ask something of you?”
“You women, always picking at a man when his defenses are low!” Rodrigo’s eyes were still closed, his voice drowsy now, though I could hear the smile in his words. “What is it you want, mi perla? Diamonds? You can have as many as you like.”
“No.” I rested the point of my chin on his shoulder. “I want our daughter to have the Borgia name instead of Orsini.”
He was silent for a moment. “It’s against all law, Giulia.”
“You could change the law.” I smiled, kissing the side of his throat. “You’re the Holy Father, after all!”
“And Laura Orsini is a perfectly good name.” His eyes opened in the dark. “So let us leave it there, Giulia.”
“But everyone knows she’s your daughter, not Orsino’s. Why not make it official?” I could charm Rodrigo into anything; surely I could have my way in this. “‘Laura Borgia,’ just imagine—”
“No!”
I stared at him through the dark. Our limbs were still entwined so companionably, my pale skin pressed against his swarthy flesh beneath the sheet, my hair coiling over us both—but his voice had snapped out with the force of a lash. “Rodrigo, surely you can’t doubt that Laura—”
“Why should I believe she’s mine, Giulia? You were bedding down at the same time with that squinting sapling of a boy!”
I felt a sick swoop in my stomach. “I wasn’t—”
His voice was curt. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying,” I said, bewildered. “I told you I bedded with my husband. I told you the day I came to you—I said I was no virgin anymore, and you said you didn’t care!”
Rodrigo sat up in bed, a bulky shape in the dark, and his voice was cold. “I’d have cared a great deal more if you’d bothered to mention you were bedding your husband and me the same damned week. I had to hear that from Adriana, once she got it out of that little coward she calls a son.”
Adriana. That rancid, tattling old trout. “I told you, it was only once with Orsino!” I said, and heard my voice scale up. How had this become a quarrel? My Pope and I had never fought before, not about anything. “Once!”
My Pope flung back the bedcovers in an angry motion and rose. “So you say.”
“It was.” I sat up, clutching the sheet to my breasts. “Adriana didn’t tell you that too, when she was busy telling tales?”
“Adriana always has my interests at heart.” Rodrigo reached for his robe in an angry swipe. “Clearly I can’t say the same for you.”
“You can’t possibly think— How dare you—” Angry words choked in my throat like hot sparks, but my Pope cut me off before I could string any of them together.
“Who put this foolish notion about Laura’s name into your head, anyway?”
“Vannozza,” I threw back. “She said you’d find a way around the law, if you really wanted to. And she’s right, you could!”
He let out a bark of laughter. “That wife of mine does like to meddle.”
I erupted out of bed, pulling my hair around me instead of a robe. “Wife?”
“She was at my side for more than ten years, Giulia. She was wife in everything but name.”
“And what does that make me?” I sputtered.
“Never mind.” Rodrigo raked a hand through his hair. “The law is the law, Giulia, and I will not go bending it just to put my name on the result of your foolishness.”
“She’s not a result!” I cried. “She’s a Borgia. One time with Orsino, just one time against all the times—”
“I don’t want to hear about him,” Rodrigo snarled, and I would have flinched at the rage in his voice except that suddenly I understood it.
“You think I would ever choose Orsino over you? Just because he’s young and—” I’d been about to say handsome, but that didn’t seem quite tactful. “Just because he’s young? Is that why you never said anything to me, when Adriana first told you?”
He made a furious little chuff of denial, but his eyes slid away from me.
“Rodrigo.” I took my Pope’s big hand in both of mine, my sore heart softening just a little, though my pulse still pounded outrage. “Rodrigo, you know you have nothing to fear on that score, I—”
“We are Pope, Giulia Farnese, and We fear nothing.” He jerked his hand from mine, turning in a quick whirl like a bull about to storm into the arena. And oh, Holy Virgin, but it was a bad sign when the papal We emerged. “It is late. There is work to be done. We shall bid you good
night.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and a tight misery clutched my chest, but I pushed it down. “And Laura?” I couldn’t help whispering.
“Will remain an Orsini.” Rodrigo looked at me over his shoulder, and I saw the glint of steel in his eyes. “Really, Giulia, you’re very lucky she was born a girl. If you’d borne a son, I’d be far more angry with you!”
“Your Holiness,” I managed to say, flat-voiced, trying to hide how very much that hurt me. He gave an angry jerk of his chin, not quite a farewell, certainly not the fond kiss with which he usually left me, and I stood clutching myself, cold and naked and miserable as the door banged behind him. I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling the tears burn my cheeks. My Pope gave me pearls and diamonds and velvet gowns; he gave me a silver teething ring for Laura and a cardinal’s red hat for my favorite brother—but he wouldn’t give a name to my daughter.
Not that.
Apparently even the Venus of the Vatican cannot have everything.
CHAPTER TEN
It is better to be feared than loved.
—MACHIAVELLI
Carmelina
You,” I told Bartolomeo, “are a disgrace. You are unfit to do so much as sweep a floor in my kitchen. You bring shame to the skill of good cooks everywhere, and you will die a miserable failure unable to even boil an egg.”
Needless to say, I was delighted with my new apprentice.
“What’s wrong with it?” Bartolomeo stared crestfallen at the toughened egg lying before him like a little stone. “I’ve seen my mother do this—”
“Seeing and doing are far different things.” Maybe little boys watched their mothers in the kitchen as they grew, but they didn’t pay attention, and why should they? Most boys did not grow up to be cooks. When they came to me as apprentices, they had no store of basic knowledge such as a girl would, since any girl knew from infancy that the management of her future husband’s kitchen would be her domain. I insisted all my apprentices start with the basics. Or rather, Marco’s apprentices, but since I was the one who taught them while he took care of the household’s menu planning, I could do it all my way. (Half the time I planned the menus too.) Young Bartolomeo looked mortified to be shown how to hold a knife or beat cream into peaks, especially with the other apprentices his age rolling out pastry dough and whipping up sauces and snickering at him, but a little mortification was good for the soul. I was sure Santa Marta would agree with me. She’d been reduced to a withered hand that lived in a spice box, and she didn’t seem to mind her demotion at all.