First, however, she padded to a wall bench where a bundle sat wrapped in the immaculate linen that usually shrouded her new gowns when they came from the robe makers. “I’d meant to have this for you sooner,” she said, putting the bundle into my arms. “But the boots took longer than expected.”
“Boots?” I said, startled.
“Your new livery.” She gave me a little push toward a dressing screen at the other end of the sala, lushly painted with scenes from the Rape of the Sabines. The most beautiful of the Sabine women, as was common in this room which had been so lavishly painted and decorated specially for the Pope’s mistress, looked like Giulia. “Try it all on, I can’t wait to see how it came out.”
Self-consciously I retreated behind the screen, untying the linen wrappings. If she put me in some motley suit or belled cap . . . On the other side of the screen I could hear her chattering to the maids, asking one how her lamed mother was faring, listening to the second confess her hopes of marriage to one of the Borgia guards. “I’ll speak to Madonna Adriana about him; I’m sure we can manage something. Is he handsome?”
I swallowed as I edged around the screen again. My mouth had gone dry, and I couldn’t stop looking down at myself. Madonna Giulia turned midchatter to look at me, the maids following her eyes, and I suddenly found my stomach fluttering. Don’t laugh, I thought wretchedly. Please don’t laugh. I had not been laughed at in so very long—I might still be a dwarf but I was respected in this household, my skills feared and whispered of, and if any guardsman or rude maidservant japed at me, I had the right to cut them down with my viper tongue with no fear of punishment because I was more valued here than they. No one had japed at me in so long. If La Bella looked down at me from the height of her beauty and gave one of her merry laughs—
She did laugh—she laughed and clapped her hands. “Dio,” she said softly, the sheer honest delight in her eyes stopping the sick swoop in my stomach, “Messer Leonello, I knew you were a handsome man!”
“Hardly.” I found my tongue again somehow as I looked down at myself. “Velvet feathers do not turn a lame bird into a peacock.”
“Hush.” She prowled around me consideringly. “Let me adjust those ties for you at the shoulder—girls, hold up my glass!”
The two maids brought the mirror over, tilting it down at an angle so I could see, and I swallowed at the sight of my own reflection. The livery Madonna Giulia Farnese had chosen for me was stark unadorned black velvet, a severely plain doublet tailored like a glove to the contours of my odd torso. The tabs at the armholes were cunningly tailored, extending my silhouette to make my shoulders look broader, my head less oversized. The shirt was crisp snowy white, just a thread of blackwork embroidery at the wrists—“No lace,” Giulia said behind me. “I did promise. And see, there are two sheaths sewn inside each cuff for those little wrist knives of yours.” I had warm black hose that fit my stunted legs without bunching, black boots to the knee, a belt of supple black leather with several more stitched sheaths for my Toledo blades. The household emblem of the Borgia bull and the papal keys was confined to a discreet badge on one sleeve.
“The boots were the hardest,” Madonna Giulia said, retying the laces of my sleeves so that just a touch of the shirt’s blinding white showed at my shoulder. “I had the boot maker copy them from your old pair, with a few improvements. The soles are reinforced with extra support under the arches, and there are struts to stiffen the inner seam up to your knee.”
My feet, I could already feel, would have to walk a good many hours before they began to hurt in these supple boots.
“There, test the arm—too binding? I know you’ll want full range of motion through the shoulder if you’re to throw your knives.” Madonna Giulia stepped back, nodding as I swung my arm. “I’ve had four doublets made for you. This black velvet for lavish occasions, a good stout black linen for everyday summer wear, black wool for everyday winter—and a black leather for travel, or times you want more protection. I remember you saying sturdy leather is a good ward against a blade.”
My eyes stung, blurring the image in the mirror. That image showed a cool shadow of a man, stark and unsmiling, somber and dangerous, eyes shifting from their undistinguished hazel to a startling green when contrasted against so much black. I looked—I looked— Dio. “‘Handsome’ seems a stretch of the truth,” I managed to say.
“I don’t think so.” Giulia tilted her head in the mirror. “Your father must have been a good-looking fellow, I think.”
“No, not really.” My father had been far too worn and frayed about the edges, too battered by life for good looks.
“Your mother then—did she give you that dark hair?”
“I don’t know. I never met her.”
“I’m sorry.” Giulia’s voice was instantly contrite. “God rest her soul.”
“She didn’t die. She might live yet, for all I know.” There were gloves to go with the rest of my outfit; softest leather embroidered again with the bull and keys. “My mother was a whore, you see, and normally she wouldn’t know which of her clients put the baby in her belly. But by the time I was a few months old, she could see it must have been the dwarf, the one who juggled apples and walnuts in the mountebank show in the Borgo. He paid her double, see, to look past his deformities and give him the occasional tumble . . . She left the freakish baby with its freak father, and then she left altogether.”
There was a little silence. I didn’t meet my mistress’s eyes in the mirror, just pulled on my new gloves one by one. They fit perfectly, sewn to configure with the odd tridentlike setting of my stubby fingers.
“Your father must have been a kind man,” Giulia Farnese said at last, quietly.
“Why do you say that, madonna?”
“Because you have too much kindness to have been raised entirely without it, Leonello.”
I gave a bark of laughter, flexing my fingers in the new gloves. Such soft leather; it wouldn’t stiffen my fingers when I needed them nimble on a knife hilt. “No one has ever called me kind before, Madonna Giulia, but thank you. And yes, my father was a kind man.”
Too kind for this world, really. I remember his eyes, worn blue unlike mine, sad and anxious under the belled cap he wore for performing. He drank too much, I suppose, and it made him drop his walnuts and balls when he juggled, but people laughed all the harder so it didn’t matter. And he never raised a hand to me, even when he drank. He’d been the one to insist on schooling for me, though he could hardly manage to pay for it and I was an ungrateful little bastard who didn’t want to go in the first place. “They’ll torment me,” I’d protested. “The other boys!”
“Boys will torment you anywhere you go,” my father said, dragging me along. “And that brain of yours is too clever to waste, Leonello. You could be a tutor someday, or a clerk!”
I wondered if he would be proud of me today. On the whole, I thought not.
Madonna Giulia had dismissed the two maids—“Go see to Madonna Adriana, will you? Tend her if her guts are still grumbling.” The door clicked behind them, and she knelt on the fine woven carpet, her furred gown pooling around her as she sorted through the discarded pile of my old clothes in search of my Toledo blades in their hidden sheaths. “Where is your father now?” she murmured, and began passing me the finger knives one by one.
“Dead.” I slipped the shortest blade into its new home at my wrist cuff. “Some fifteen years dead.”
“What happened?”
“What happens to many of us.” I pushed another knife into its place in my new boot top. “Three drunks at a wine shop. They thought it amusing to kick him about . . . one of them must have kicked too hard. He was spitting blood from inside by the time I returned from my lessons.”
“Did you ever find them? The men who . . .”
“I vowed to find them, certainly. Find them and wreak bloody vengeance, oh yes. But how could I find them when all I had for a clue was ‘three drunks’? Not that it stopped me from trying.” I
stretched my lips in a smile. “I was a stupid boy.” Silence stretched between us, then, and I did not want to look at Madonna Giulia. If you say you are sorry for me, I will choke you, I thought. Wrap these new-gloved hands around your pretty throat and squeeze every drop of pity out of you.
But La Bella didn’t say anything. She only looked at me, still on her knees beside my pile of clothing so she had to tilt her head back at me as though I were a man of normal height. Her big dark eyes brimmed silence, looking not only at but through me as she passed me the last of my blades, and I still wanted to choke her. I wanted to be cruel, call her a brainless whore and make her weep. How dare you understand me. How dare you wheedle my secrets out of me. But wasn’t that what the best whores did, the ones who understood men to the tips of their intuitive fingers? The best whores weren’t brainless at all, and neither was she.
I swallowed my cruelty, settling my last dagger into its tab on my new belt, and looked into the mirror the maids had left propped up before me. I saw a dark man, a dangerous man, even a handsome man. A man at whom larger men would laugh at their peril.
“Better take the mirror away,” I said. “I’m in danger of growing as vain as you, Madonna Giulia.”
“I pray I have not offended you, Messer Leonello,” she said quietly.
“On the contrary, my dear lady.” I turned and gave a faultless, empty bow over her hand. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Thankless and perfidious Giulia!
—EXCERPT OF A LETTER FROM RODRIGO BORGIA TO GIULIA FARNESE
Giulia
It was always a bad sign when Rodrigo lost his temper without dropping the papal We.
“All Christendom bows before Us, and We can’t command obedience from one witless harlot?” he roared. “As if the French aren’t enough trouble!”
“I am sorry as always if I have offended Your Holiness,” I murmured, looking down at my folded hands.
“Offended Us?” he shouted, storming up and down as though the rage were too great to be contained by stillness. “You foolish, feckless, half-witted girl, you’ve destroyed everything!”
I hadn’t waited this time for Madonna Adriana or some other helpful informant to tell my Pope that his daughter and her husband had consummated their marriage. I had gone direct from bidding Lord Sforza good-bye, watching him give Lucrezia’s hand a squeeze from the height of his horse as she unashamedly held her face up in the courtyard for a farewell kiss, and sat down to write Rodrigo myself. And when I had the news he had returned to Rome a week later, I oiled and scented every inch of my skin, looped my throat with the huge teardrop pearl that had been his first gift, laced myself into my new lavender silk with the silver brocade insets, left my hair loose and rolling to my feet the way he liked it, and waited. By the time His Holiness Pope Alexander VI came storming into my sala at the Palazzo Santa Maria, his face was so dark with fury against his white robes that he could have been a Moor. My maids were fleeing for the door before the first furious Spanish roars erupted all over me like a fountain of scalding hot water.
“Lucrezia is a woman grown,” I said when my Pope paused for breath. “Old enough to take up her duties as a wife. As you yourself wrote, signed, and had witnessed in her marriage contract.”
“Don’t play notary, Giulia Farnese,” he snapped, still pacing the length of my sala. One of the maids had dropped the shift she was mending as she fled the room; he kicked it furiously out of the way. “You knew Our wishes in the matter. She was to remain virgin, and that Sforza lout was to keep his hands off!”
“I thought of Your Holiness’s alliance with the Sforza and Milan.” I kept my tone to a submissive murmur; soothing, caressing. “Lord Sforza had begun to believe you meant to cast him off—”
“We were damned well considering it! Count of Pesaro, hah. He’s a failed condottiere and a provincial puppet, and he thinks he’s worthy of a pope’s daughter?” Rodrigo’s papal ring flashed as he drove one fist against his other palm. “I bought a royal match each for Juan and Joffre; Lucrezia deserves no less!”
“. . . So Your Holiness does mean to annul the marriage?”
“We can hardly do so now,” he snarled at me. “Not with the marriage consummated! You air-brained fool, meddling in Our politics—”
“Cesare was there as well,” I couldn’t help pointing out, trying not to sound exasperated. “He knew your wishes when it came to Lucrezia’s marriage. Why aren’t you shouting at him for not stopping Lord Sforza?” Really, men. Lucrezia’s duenna and her big brother at hand to watch over her, and her misbehavior was still all my fault? I ask you.
“Cesare will always take Lucrezia’s side over Ours,” Rodrigo snapped. “We thought We could at least count on you to follow Our wishes!”
He went ranting at me again, and I cast my lashes down. A touch of the penitent wouldn’t hurt: a repentant Magdalene ready to kneel at his feet and press her lips to the papal shoes.
“Lucrezia is happy, Your Holiness,” I ventured as soon as he stopped for a wrathful breath. “So happy. Lord Sforza pleases her, and she pleases him.”
“It is not her business to be happy! She is Our daughter; she will do as she is told!”
“Always.” I cast a glance up through my lashes. “But surely His Holiness is pleased to see her so content in the marriage you made for her?”
Not just content, but glowing. Lucrezia had flung ecstatic arms about me the moment the Sforza entourage left the courtyard in its important clatter of hooves. “Thank you,” she had whispered. “I can bear it now, if he has to be gone for a time. I’m not useless anymore!” She had spent the past weeks humming all over the palazzo, stitching with great wifely industry on an embroidered shirt that she meant to give her husband on his next visit. “Husbands like presents from their wife’s own hands,” she told me with a sage nod, and I’d been careful not to smile.
Lucrezia’s father was not smiling either. His dusky face darkened even further, and his eyes narrowed to folds at the corners in a way that prickled me.
“You are Our concubine, Giulia Farnese.” His voice dropped from its bull roar to a cold levy of sentence. “Not Our councilor, not Our ambassador, not Our adviser. And certainly not the mother of Our daughter Lucrezia. Or of any other child of Ours.”
That stabbed me. Tears pricked my eyes, but I bit fiercely on the inside of my cheek. I would not cry before him; I would not.
“I am none of those things, Your Holiness,” I managed to say, looking up at him with a steady gaze. “Unlike your ambassadors and your councilors and your advisers, I care only for your happiness. Your happiness, and that of your family.”
“That is precious little consolation.” He clipped off the words. “You disappoint me, Giulia.”
At least I disappointed him, not Us. “It pains me to think so.” I stretched out a hand, touching the back of his knuckles, but he brushed me aside.
“I have a great deal of business to attend to.” Turning away. “Do not look for me tonight.”
I was not going to stand by for a fortnight this time, waiting and hoping for him to get over his temper as I had when we quarreled over Laura and Orsino. I caught hold of his embroidered sleeve, halting him. “Surely it is part of the Holy Father’s duties to punish transgressors?”
“Yes.” Impatiently, he shook at my grip.
“Then punish me.” I sank to my knees before him, allowing my skirts to pool around me. “I am in error, Your Holiness, and I require penance. Punish me for my wrongdoing.”
He stopped, looking down at me. I released his sleeve and bowed my head until my hair flooded forward over his feet: a penitent Magdalene in truth, kneeling at the feet of Christ. All the Magdalenes ever depicted in paint have wonderful hair, don’t they? Penitence just doesn’t look as picturesque without a good flood of hair. “Forgive me, Father,” I whispered. “For I have sinned.”
He was silent. But he did not move either, and I reached slowly, oh so slowly, for his hand. I brought
it to my lips, allowing my breath to whisper across his fingertips, and kissed his ring. “Punish me,” I whispered, and through my veil of hair I cast him a slow, burning glance.
His hand descended on my head, the papal benediction I had seen him bestow hundreds of times. But his hand wound through my hair, jerking me to my feet with a painful yank. “You deserve it,” he whispered.
“I do,” I whispered back, and kissed him with my teeth. He caught me up in an embrace so hard it hurt, tossing me down on the satin-covered daybed, and so much for my new lavender gown with the silver brocade insets because it came off me with a great rip of expensive silk. I wrapped my arms around him, my knees, and I gasped quietly as his mouth left rough marks on my shoulders.
“Minx,” he muttered with an angry, unwilling chuff of laughter against my breast. “Meddling minx—”
“Then punish me for my meddling,” I whispered, setting my teeth into the lobe of his ear, raking his back with my nails, and he filled me with a groan that was half need and half fury.
“Goodness,” I said afterward, curling against him. “I should anger you more often, Your Holiness.” He had bent his head to my breasts and used his teeth until I cried out, not precisely from pain. My skin still tingled. “I do believe I like your kind of punishment.”
He gave a hmph at that, a glint still showing dangerous in his eye, but he pulled my head down against his shoulder. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Giulia Farnese.”
“Then I shall endeavor to give you more for your trouble.”
“More?” He cocked a heavy dark brow. “More what?”
“I don’t know,” I said demurely. “I shall have to put my mind to it.”
He laughed again, his old laugh with its thread of amusement at the world’s follies. “My Lucrezia,” he asked, “is she truly so happy?”