“An egg should be boiled for as long as it takes to say the Credo, and no more.” Straight from my father’s book: page 303, Chapter: Lenten Dishes. I tossed Bartolomeo another egg, and he scrambled to catch it against his flour-grimed shirt. “Try again.”
He blew out a breath and dropped the egg into the pot to boil. “Credo in unum Deum—” One of the other apprentices sniggered into a pan of bubbling orange sauce, and Bartolomeo faltered. He’d been bouncing and full of questions when he was just a pot-boy, but now that he was the lowest of all the apprentices, shyness had come with a rush. “Credo in unum Deum—”
“I can’t hear you!” I thundered.
“Patrem omnipoténtem, factorem cæli et terræ—”
“Passable,” I said as his next egg came off the fire soft and perfect. “Now do it again until you don’t have to disrupt my kitchen by shouting a lot of prayers, you pottage-brained, boil-beaked lout.”
“Why do you shout at me, signorina?” he burst out. “You don’t shout at any of the others!”
Because none of the others showed his promise, that was why. By the end of Bartolomeo’s first full day as kitchen apprentice, I went down on my knees before the severed hand of Santa Marta and thanked her for softening Marco’s heart enough to let me keep Bartolomeo on. Not only did my former pot-boy have a cook’s nose, he had a soft wrist that boded well for his future sauces and a natural eye for how long to sear a piece of meat. I would never, however, dream of telling him so.
“You question my methods?” I pointed at the door toward the kitchen yard. “If so, you are free to leave now, Bartolomeo. Back to your uncle’s tannery yard and the smell of piss. Is that what you want?”
He set his jaw at me in a resentful look. “No, signorina.”
A little defiance—good. Cooks with pepper in the soul fared better than those without. “Boil another egg,” I told him, “and kindly do not question my instructions again.”
“Yes, signorina.”
I gave his knuckles another whack and moved on, barely hiding my grin as I heard a steely, determined mutter of “Credo in unum Deum” start up again behind me. I do like breaking in a good apprentice! It cleanses the palate, like chewing mint leaves in between courses of a long banquet.
The kitchens hummed today at a lower key, half the volume of any normal afternoon. Madonna Adriana had announced last week that Rome was still far too sultry for October, and she intended to retire to take the waters in Viterbo for a few weeks until this unseasonable heat finally broke. Madonna Giulia had pouted her cherry mouth at the Pope until he agreed a week in the country at her side would be most agreeable, and the whole household had been thrown into a frenzy. Marco had already gone ahead to Viterbo with half the scullions, maidservants, and pastry cooks and the lightest of the essential cooking equipment: skillets and mortars and cauldrons loaded into wagons or lashed to mules as he called back at me to bring those copper oil bottles or the straining cloths. I was to follow with the rest when Madonna Giulia and her mother-in-law and young Lucrezia finally set out. I was already fantasizing about the cool green quietness of Viterbo: fresh breezes to wash away the city’s stinking-summer smell of dead cats and baking bricks and sweating bodies. Lighter summer menus would be called on, to cool the blood and tempt heat-dulled appetites: snow-chilled wine and fresh-pressed infusions of mulberry or tart peach; salads of endives and caper flowers; chicken served cold with limes and just a splash of rose vinegar; featherlight omelets with goat’s milk and chopped truffles . . .
“Signorina?” One of the stewards paused in the archway, not quite putting foot into my kitchens. I had them all well trained now, ever since an understeward had jostled me as I was shifting a kettle off the fire and spilled a very nice pottage all over the floor. I’d chased the man out, whacking him over the head with a salted tench at every step, and I hadn’t had any trouble with the lot of them ever since. “Signorina, Madonna Giulia has sent down for you—she needs a packet of saffron for her hair rinse.”
“Every time she washes her hair, there goes my saffron.” But I didn’t mind so much—I didn’t have to pay for the saffron, after all, and besides, I was fond of Madonna Giulia. The way she consumed entire basketfuls of my frittelle in one sitting would have melted the heart of any cook on earth. “I’ll take it to her myself,” I called, stripping off my dirty apron and seizing an unopened packet of saffron.
The Pope’s concubine lounged comfortably on a pile of velvet cushions in the grass of the central garden, wrapped in a series of towels with her little white feet bared under the sun. The top of her head protruded from a crownless straw hat the size of a wheel, her wet hair draped out over the vast brim to dry under the noon heat. Her face had been frozen into complete immobility behind a stiff white mask of some mysterious claylike substance, and she was buffing her nails with a piece of soft leather, occasionally leaning over to blow kisses at the baby who gurgled at her side in a little basket rigged with its own sunshade. Maidservants bustled back and forth, bees around their queen: one maid working at the soles of her mistress’s little feet with a pumice stone, another maid plucking at her hairline with a pair of tweezers to heighten the smooth white forehead, a third maid hunching witchlike over a jar of bubbling hair potion and shooing away that wretched pet goat. What a lot of bother it is to be a beauty, I thought. Myself, I would rather devote the passing hours to a complex sauce than to my own hairline and cuticles.
“Carmelina!” Behind the stiff mask, Madonna Giulia’s lively dark eyes lit up as though she’d been yearning all day to see me and only now could her life be called complete. I’d seen other women with that trick of worshipful welcome—my sister used to practice it before a mirror—but Giulia Farnese’s was too spontaneous and all-encompassing to be anything but sincere. “Have you brought my saffron?” she asked. “You won’t believe what it does for my hair—I put together a rinse of saffron, cinnabar, and sulfur, or rather Pia here does, and it gives me handfuls of pale gold streaks. Little red-gold ones too, which looks very well.” She gave a little bounce of pleasure. “I’m sorry I keep using your supplies, though. It would be very sad if you had to stop making those little saffron biscotti. I adore those biscotti. Did you bring any?”
“I’m afraid not, Madonna Giulia.”
“Good. I’m getting plump again. Sit down, sit down!”
“I should return to my kitchens, Madonna Giulia—”
“Oh, nonsense, you can take an hour.” She passed the packet of saffron threads back to the maid with the pot of hair potion. “I always eat when I’m sunning my hair, after all, and since I can’t eat until I take a bit of weight off, you might as well keep me company.” She tilted her little head on one side, assessing me as I sat. “No sense putting saffron in beautiful dark hair like yours, though. What shall we try instead . . .”
“A tincture of quicklime and lead,” the maid named Pia contributed, giving the hair rinse another good stir. “Good for dark hair, madonna.”
“But I never like putting metal in my hair, do you? A rinse with rosemary and sage, that’s what we used in Capodimonte.” Madonna Giulia gestured at the maids, who bustled behind me with giggles and began unpinning my hair. “And you must have a mask—it feels very strange and stiff, but it whitens the skin no end.”
“I don’t need white skin,” I protested, trying to swat away the maids. I’d never had a maid to do my hair in my life; my sister had always been the one to yank a comb through my curls and complain about the tangles. “I’m no fine lady, Madonna Giulia, I don’t—”
“Here, hold still.” With her own hands, the Pope’s mistress began smoothing cream over my cheeks. “Don’t screw up your nose like that; I know it smells, but it’s just bean flour, egg white, goat’s milk, and one or two other things. Some people like to add a dove’s entrails to the mix, but I never like putting bird parts on my face, do you? Goodness, but beauty can be a disgusting business. Men think it’s all Venus-in-her-bower, dabbing lotions and sprinkling per
fumes, but they have no idea.”
“Better to keep the masks and the smelly bits out of their sight, I always say,” another of the maids agreed. Madonna Giulia sat back, tilting her head as a maid began combing the new saffron and cinnabar mix through her damp hair, and one of the other maids was working something herbal-smelling through mine. My wiry curls had grown out to my shoulders again, long enough to plait. Leonello still made a point of offering outlandish theories about it whenever he saw me. “Let me guess,” he said yesterday when we crossed paths in the courtyard. “You’re a runaway nun fleeing the cloister!” Two days before that his guess had been, “A singer of plainchant, passing herself off as a boy to continue singing in a boys’ choir! You’re certainly flat enough for it.” A week before that: “Ah, I have it! You’re a Venetian courtesan who titillates her clients by dressing up like a man! The things one hears about Venetians . . .”
“I traveled to Rome alone,” I always replied coldly, “and to keep myself safe, I traveled in men’s disguise. As you already know, because I’ve told you Santa Marta knows how many times!” But little Messer Leonello always gave me a knowing grin. Ever since he’d sniffed out the fact that I’d fled Venice with my father’s recipes, he wanted the rest of my story. Santa Marta help me if he found out just what I was fleeing. He’d turn me in just for the pleasure of seeing if he was right, the horrid little man.
Well, serve me right for lowering my guard around him. Up in the loggia I’d been thinking he wasn’t so bad at all. Perhaps even likeable. And then he’d struck, biting me like a snake lying in wait.
I wouldn’t be so careless again. Madonna Giulia might like her bodyguard, but I’d keep my lips sealed in his presence from now on. He was far too clever for his own good, and I didn’t need his cleverness focused on me.
All the maids were settling down now, creamed and painted with pilfered cosmetics and looking ready for a good gossip. “Is this usual?” I whispered to scrawny Pantisilea as she plopped beside me, unashamedly scraping out the remains of her mistress’s face mask from its pot and patting it over her own cheeks. I didn’t know Madonna Giulia’s maids near as well as I knew my kitchen girls and maidservants—in the strict hierarchy of servants in the palazzo, we inhabited an entirely different world than this perfumed and feminine one. But I’d never seen a noble-born lady of any household sharing her beauty supplies and her gossip with the maids before.
“You would not believe how the College of Cardinals is fussing,” Giulia Farnese was chattering. “You’d think we were about to be invaded by devils . . .”
No, I decided as the whispers began to fly, this was not usual, at least outside this enclosed world Leonello called the papal seraglio. My father had served a great many highborn Venetian ladies, and some might be willing to confide in their maids on occasion, but they were far less willing to hear any confessions in return. That was only for equals.
Then again, perhaps the Pope’s mistress didn’t really have equals. Women of her own birth and station never came calling on her now that she was the most notorious woman in Rome—the only people who called on her were petty lords and suave churchmen and their various functionaries, people who wanted to wheedle favors from the Pope, and they certainly didn’t bring their wives and daughters along. If she had been a courtesan she might have had friends among the other women of easy virtue, but such women would never be allowed into this house where the Pope’s virgin daughter dwelled. Giulia Farnese occupied a gray territory, I realized: too sinful for ladies and too virtuous for whores. No wonder she befriended her maids and came tripping down into my kitchens for tourtes and cooking instruction. Were there any other women she could talk to?
“So poor Francesca’s pregnant?” she was saying. The conversation had apparently moved from world gossip to household gossip. “I told her that guardsman was no good. I don’t suppose he’ll marry her?”
“No, and Madonna Adriana’s turned her out,” Pantisilea contributed, unashamedly rummaging among her mistress’s perfume vials. “No one keeps a maid on when her belly’s under her chin, we all know that.”
“How you keep yours flat with all the rutting you do—!”
“I have my ways,” Pantisilea said smugly. “You have to, if you want a man under the sheets and your post to go with it!”
Nods among the maids. They were a young and silly lot, most of them—Santa Marta forbid Madonna Adriana hire trained maidservants when she could get raw country girls so much cheaper!—and this batch of gigglers might not know that maidservants weren’t really supposed to gossip with their mistress or help themselves to her perfumes . . . but even inexperienced girls like these knew that a maidservant kept her belly empty, or she lost her place.
“Francesca was taking a potion,” Pia whispered. “She got it from an old crone who swore if she drank it every Sunday and sang a little charm, it would keep her from conceiving—”
“None of those potions work, do they?”
I glanced behind me involuntarily, and I wasn’t the only one. If there’s anything priests love to thunder about, it’s the things women do to keep their bellies flat.
“Well, don’t ask me how it’s done,” the Pope’s mistress said. “I may be a wicked woman, but I don’t know a thing about how to stop babies from coming, except to keep nursing the one you have as long as possible. That’s what my mother-in-law says, anyway.” Madonna Giulia lifted her baby out of the basket, settling little Laura’s plump limbs into her own lap. “Of course the old trout had to tell me that the very first time I was nursing Laura. ‘Nothing grinds away a woman’s youth like a series of births, my dear, so you’d best avoid more babies if you want to keep your figure and your place.’”
We couldn’t help laughing at her flawless mimicry, though there were more sidelong glances.
“It’s a sin,” one of the maids said firmly, crossing herself. “It’s a sin, trying to limit the children you bear. You have to take what God sends!” But the other girls were already whispering. Maybe it was something about that stiff white mask most of us were wearing by now—we could hide our eagerness, hide our faces from the things we were saying. The things priests told us women were never supposed to say.
“If you can get your man not to seed you,” one of the maids whispered, “when he finishes, that is—then you won’t conceive. If he finishes elsewhere—”
“Oh, when can you ever get a man to do that!”
More giggles. I wondered if they were all blushing as hard as I was under the mask.
“It’s all to do with the moon,” Pantisilea said with authority. She was our resident harlot, after all, though a nicer harlot had never been born. “When we’re ripe to breed, I mean. You watch the moon and you chart your courses with it—”
“There are more reliable ways than that,” I heard myself saying. All those white-masked faces turned toward me, and I rubbed self-consciously at my cheek, which was beginning to flake. “Well, there are.”
“How would you know?” Pantisilea asked, offended. She was the harlot, after all; she couldn’t have a kitchen grubber like me infringing on her field of expertise.
“Venice is the city of courtesans,” I said. “There was one called La Turca, she was shining black all over, the most expensive whore in La Serenissima—well, I knew one of the girls she hired as a maid. I learned a thing or two.”
“Let’s hear it, then!” Giulia bestowed a kiss on the dimpled fist Laura had wound around a lock of her mother’s hair. “I love my baby, but I don’t want eight more. Out with it!”
I hesitated, wondering just what kind of sin it was to be giving the most notorious woman in Rome advice about limiting the number of bastards she bore to a pope. “Take a lime and halve it,” I said at last. “Then . . .” I mimed silently.
Noses wrinkled around our little circle. “Sounds uncomfortable,” Pantisilea decreed.
“Neapolitan limes,” I advised. “They’re smaller. More expensive, of course, but you buy the good limes to s
tuff into a chicken’s cavity, after all. No reason not to stuff your own with quality ingredients.” I shrugged again. “It’s not foolproof, La Turca’s maid said, but I suppose nothing is.”
“Except staying a virgin.” My mistress smiled, cracking the mask still further about her eyes. Giulia Farnese could not go two sentences without smiling. “And who wants to do that?”
“Not me,” about four maids said in unison, and everyone went off into gales of giggles.
Not me either, I thought. I’d not been virgin since I was seventeen and a handsome apprentice of my father’s managed to addle my wits in a storeroom behind a stack of crated oranges. It had all been rather sweaty and rushed, but a few times later I was starting to see the point of it all. Unfortunately that was when the apprentice boasted to the wrong friend, who in turn let it slip to my father, and then there was a great deal of shouting, and benches were thrown, not to mention oranges. When all was settled and done, my foolish lover found himself dismissed and packed off home, and I got a sound lashing as my father roared on about how difficult it would be to find me a husband who would take a soiled bride. I’d castigated myself a good deal at the time for my shameful lusts, but now I just castigated myself for not choosing a more discreet lover. A busy kitchen was the worst place on earth to keep secrets, and a little pleasant rolling about behind a crate of oranges had been no trade for a lost reputation.