She gazed at me, wide-eyed. “How did you know?”
My brows flew up. “Don’t tell me I’ve guessed—” Pointing at the ciphered pages. “Truly?”
“No.” Her too-round eyes relaxed into mockery at me. “They’re just recipes, you dolt.”
“Ah.” I doffed my cap. “Well played, signorina. Pity, I liked that witchcraft theory. Fear not, I have plenty of others. Might you possibly be a Jew, fleeing Spain to escape the Inquisition?”
I chattered on, watching her her fingers drum along her thigh as she pretended to ignore me. We were passing a roadside tavern now; drinkers scrambled up hastily from their trestle tables at the sight of the glittering Sforza banners. One or two fell to their knees; the rest blinked drunkenly. I saw two tavern maids dipping curtsy after curtsy like a pair of apples bobbing in a tub, drinking in every detail of Lucrezia’s dress, Giulia’s hair, the ornate carriage with its matched Sicilian horses and its coat of arms. Not terribly pretty girls, those tavern maids, but all girls looked prettier after enough cups of wine. Like Anna, whose dimple only seemed to get deeper and sweeter the more one drank. Strange how I could barely remember Anna’s face, and yet she burned in my thoughts so constantly . . .
I caught a drift ahead from Giulia and Lucrezia, who had turned their mounts into the grass alongside the road to avoid the dust kicked up by the cart horses. Still going on about the Count of Pesaro’s wretched sonnet. “Hail to thee, O springtime goddess fair—”
You’re going mad, dwarf, I sometimes told myself. Because I had no reason, none at all, to think my masked man was the Pope’s eldest son. Staking a woman to a table had to be the hot-blooded act of a madman—it hardly suited the cool deliberation with which Cesare Borgia moved through life. And surely any murder he committed would be murder with a purpose; the murder of someone who threatened either him or his family or his ambitions. He was so far above Anna and her ilk, they might as well have been beetles under his feet.
But wasn’t it the arrogant of the world who crushed the beetles—simply because they could? “Killing is a skill like any other,” Cesare had told me over the chessboard, speaking of his first murder. “It should be practiced until it comes easily.” Could Anna and her successors have merely been practice? Cesare would have been very young at the time of her death, but he claimed he had killed his first foot-pad at sixteen—and been dissatisfied at how clumsily he had done it. And each kill after Anna had been progressively cleaner.
Maybe they weren’t such hot-blooded kills after all. There was a certain lust about them, a dark deliberation in making each kill exactly the same—but Cesare Borgia had dark lusts, that I knew. I had seen for myself the black flames in his eyes when he bid our party farewell, and spoke to me of leading the papal armies. Since he hadn’t been allowed to lead the papal armies, perhaps that black lust had found a different outlet . . .
“Roses springing in your lissome wake—”
But if Anna and the others had merely been a cold slaking of frustrated ambition, a cool self-education in the niceties of murder—if the victims had been chosen precisely because they would never be missed—then why leave the dagger with the last body to stir up so much speculation? I did not for one moment believe Cesare would have done such a thing out of mere carelessness.
Maybe he got bored, I thought. Hadn’t he said it himself, baiting me?
“Perhaps I was arrogant rather than stupid . . . Perhaps I wished to see how far I could go, and still get away with it.”
I suppose I should have wondered why he would ever say such a thing to me, but that was the one thing in all this murky mess that didn’t puzzle me in the slightest. Cesare Borgia liked games, games of every kind. Games played with chess pieces, games played with live pieces. Baiting me, whether with truth or with lies, was just one more game to amuse him. Perhaps the final game to finish off the string of murders, because it seemed possible to me that there would be no more murders. I had kept my ears open all this winter, dropping questions among the cards when I played primiera with Borgia guards, papal guards, municipal guards—I even tried prying my way into granite-eyed Michelotto’s confidence, though he just stared at me like a blind statue. And no more women had been found throat-slit and table-staked. Not since late last summer, when I had played chess with Cesare Borgia among the vaults of Viterbo and asked him if he was a murderer of women, watched by his discarded mask on the floor.
A question he had very carefully not answered.
“Soft your voice, as feathers from a dove—”
Carmelina looked up from her ciphered pages of recipes, hearing the drift of verse from the little Countess of Pesaro. “What’s that poetry Madonna Lucrezia keeps going on about?”
“Don’t ask, or she’ll recite the whole sonnet,” I said absently. “Love has turned Lord Sforza into a poet to rival Dante, to hear his little wife tell it. I could write better verse hung up by my thumbs.”
“Poetry.” Carmelina snorted, turning another page in her packet of recipes. “Thanks be to Santa Marta that nobody writes verses to common girls.”
“Poetry doesn’t move your heart?” I made big eyes at her, distracted for a moment.
“I’d be more moved if a man made me cena,” she said. “No one ever cooks for the cook.”
I looked at her thoughtfully as the wagon jolted beneath us. I could hear the clatter of pots in the boxes and sacks in the wagon—the kitchen equipment needed for any journey—and Carmelina turned to secure a knot on a box piled inside the wagon that had not been tightened to her standards. She was frowning, the familiar line showing between her straight black brows, but I judged she was as pleased as I to be out under the sky on a journey to places unknown. “May I ask you a question?” I asked.
“I came to Rome for the work, Leonello. Not because I’m a witch or a Jew or an exiled courtesan!”
“No, not that.” I tried a smile on her, but our spiky-natured cook just got suspicious whenever I started being charming. Caught on to that, had she? “The maids in the Palazzo Santa Maria—I know they’ve had their, ah, difficulties with the Duke of Gandia—”
“Not now that he’s in Spain,” Carmelina snorted. “Every maid in the palazzo went about singing for a week.”
“I can imagine.” Juan Borgia regarded the papal seraglio as very much his own personal harem when it came to the maids. I wondered from time to time if he might be my masked man; he certainly had a taste for both low women and unwilling women, and he was certainly hot-blooded. But he didn’t have the patience to hunt, kill, and butcher a deer properly, much less a woman. Idly putting his sword through stray dogs in alleys; that was about as much effort as he was willing to expend on violence. And though he might rape a girl, I didn’t see him cutting her throat afterward. He’d toss her a coin and think himself magnanimous for honoring her with his attentions. “Have the maids had difficulties with Cesare Borgia?” I asked instead.
If anything, Carmelina looked even more suspicious. “Why do you want to know?”
“No reason.” If Cesare Borgia truly felt that dark unspeakable lust that had led to Anna’s death and all the others, perhaps there were warning signs among the maids in the Borgia household. “Do they flee Cesare’s attentions as they do Juan’s?”
“No.” Carmelina hesitated. “Yes.”
“Which is it?”
“The Duke of Gandia, he’s a lout, but he might give you a coin afterward if you pleased him.” As I’d thought, yes. “And he’s quick,” Carmelina added with a snort. “Beatrice the laundry maid said it took longer to wring out a wet shirt.”
I couldn’t help a laugh. Definitely not the style of my painstaking, pain-taking murderer. “And Cesare?”
“He doesn’t pay, not ever. And he’s not quick.”
“Is he rough?” A man who liked blood might also like bruised flesh, in his milder moments.
Carmelina’s hand circled her own wrist unconsciously, rubbing it. “How would I know?”
I studied
her. “Are you blushing?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She had the recipes up to her nose again, hiding her face. I nudged them down.
“You are blushing. Don’t tell me you’ve had a roll in the hay with Cardinal Borgia, Signorina Cuoca.”
“Why would he look at the palazzo cook when he has the most expensive courtesans in Rome?”
“Why are you dodging the question?” I grinned at her glower. “Besides, all highborn lordlings like a low woman now and then, young Cardinal Borgia included. A deliberate roll in the mud, such filthy pleasure to be found . . .”
I said it crudely, with a certain obscene gesture, and Carmelina’s eyes flared again. “Is that what you’re keen on, Messer Leonello? Hearing all the details?” A disgusted shake of her head. “Don’t bother me with your perversions.”
“I have a reason for asking,” I said, and felt a pang of alarm that surprised me. No smiles now. “Did he hurt you?”
“No.” She looked me right in the eye. “He was gentle as a lamb.”
“You’re lying.” I felt the tautness in me again, the hunt. “What did he do? Hit you? Tie you?”
She smiled. “You know, I think I feel like walking for a while.” With an arrogant flip of that pointed chin, she left me in possession of the field, sliding down the side of the wagon and marching ahead to join her red-haired apprentice where he was kicking a stone through the dust.
Gentle as a lamb, I thought, and kicked one boot against the boards underfoot. Liar. That gesture, circling her own wrist unconsciously. Marking a bruise that had long healed? The kind of bruise that would come, say, from having the arms pinned down.
What does it matter? I told myself. Even if she told you Cesare Borgia likes to bruise his bedmates, it proves nothing. Even if he likes to wear a mask and take himself off alone on God knows what solitary adventures—even if his dagger was found slammed through the hand of the last girl, and he was the one to put it there—even if he confessed to you, what could you do? He is the Pope’s son; he will never be brought to justice.
But I wondered sometimes if I really gave a fig for justice either. It was knowledge I wanted: the answer to the puzzle that had filled my mind this winter. I wanted that masked man to take off his mask and show me his face, whatever face it might be, as he flicked his chessboard king on its side in defeat.
“Leonello!” Giulia had turned her little mare back to me again, trotting alongside the wagon. “Leonello, listen to this line the Count of Pesaro wrote. “‘O Primavera bright and fair—’”
“Please no more,” I begged, wrenching my mind away from its useless whirlpool of speculations. Dio, no wonder the matter of murder had been weighing so heavily on my mind this winter—otherwise, it had been nothing but bad poetry.
“Caterina Gonzaga wants to visit us in Pesaro,” Lucrezia was telling Giulia now, leaning over from her velvet saddle with a dark look. “We must be sure to have all new dresses; I will not be outshone in my own home—my new home, I mean—and you know she’s always putting herself forward as though she were a queen! I’ll bet her husband never wrote poetry to her—”
“Kill me,” I pleaded. “Please, kill me at once before you begin talking about clothes again.”
But no one ever listens to the dwarf.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Beside you, she is a lantern compared to the sun.
—RODRIGO BORGIA, COMPARING CATERINA GONZAGA TO GIULIA FARNESE
Carmelina
W here are we going, signorina?”
“The fish market. Hurry up, Bartolomeo!” I quickened my steps, tugging my cloak closer about me as my apprentice sped to a trot. All around us, Pesaro was just waking up to a pewter-colored dawn. Rome would have already been bustling: workers hurrying off to open their shops, drinkers staggering home from a night of revels, beggars staking out the likeliest corners to beg.
“Why are we going to the fish market, signorina?” Bartolomeo obediently toted the enormous basket I’d shoved at him as we left the palazzo kitchens. “The steward at the Palazzo Ducale said he’d order sturgeon for you, delivered fresh to the door—”
“That means the steward gets a bribe from the vendor who sells sturgeon. I’ll see for myself what’s on offer, thank you.” Madonna Lucrezia was used to eating the best, and I’d make sure she kept getting it now that she was settling into her new home. A young bride should at least have a well-filled stomach as she learned how to manage her husband’s household. Roast pigeon with blackberry sauce, perhaps, and flat crisp Roman pizze to remind her of home . . .
“It’s a fine day, signorina.” Bartolomeo ventured. He was fifteen now and had grown a good hand-span taller than he’d been when I first tossed him an apprentice’s apron. He was still so milky pale that his freckles stood out across his face and neck like a dark sprinkle of cinnamon, but his arms had a layer of wiry muscle from so many hours of whipping egg whites and hefting sides of beef ribs. Ever since poor Eleonora the fruit seller had died so gruesomely in her own market stall, I’d seen the wisdom of taking a strong young apprentice with me to market when I did my shopping. Far better tall, alert Bartolomeo than the useless Sforza cook with his potbelly and his stale wine breath. “Looks like we’ll have a sunny morning,” my apprentice went on.
“Looks like fog to me.” We had just passed the town’s central piazza, where a few beggars and drunks huddled against buildings sleeping off a night’s despair or drink. Not even a third the size of the Piazza Navona in Rome, but everything in Pesaro was small to a Roman’s eyes. I’d seen Madonna Lucrezia’s face fall just a little when she first laid eyes on her new home. “Oh!” she’d exclaimed. “It’s very . . .” To a girl accustomed to all the glories of the Holy City, the clamor and the pomp and the spectacle, Pesaro might have seemed just a bit provincial. Nor did it help that we arrived in another storm of summer rain, winds buffeting flat both Madonna Lucrezia’s careful confection of curls and all the banners that had been brought out to welcome her. Still, the skies cleared as the days passed, and Madonna Giulia waxed staunch enthusiasm in favor of Pesaro’s beauties: the blue bay and winding river mouth, the heavy Romanesque cathedral with its altar dedicated to some gloomy and mustachioed saint, the Palazzo Ducale. We’ll see if their fish market measures up, I thought, and quickened my steps through the piazza.
“They say the French will be invading soon,” Bartolomeo volunteered, crossing himself. He had an easy, devout sort of soul; the kind of boy who makes cheerful confession to his priest every week and never has anything terribly sinful to confess, either; the kind who accepts the Borgia Pope and all his worldly sins as something far lofty and above him, and puts an easy faith in God the Father instead. The kind of untroubled, unstained conscience I'd long since left behind me. “That’s what I hear from Lord Sforza’s men, anyway, and they have all the news about the French, straight from Milan.”
“Hmph.” I was far less concerned about the French than my new kitchens. Lord Sforza’s Palazzo Ducale was grand enough on the outside with its fountains and arcades and festooning coats of arms, but the kitchens were unspeakable. The apprentices were still banging into the low beams trying to find space for all the cauldrons and spits and ladles we had brought from Rome, and I had no idea how I was going to make milk-snow without a proper cold room to keep the cream from curdling. Still, Madonna Giulia had insisted on bringing us along, so we would all make do until we could get out of this backwater and back to Rome where the morals were depraved but I at least had space for my spoons.
My very first time as maestra di cucina—somehow I’d thought it would feel more momentous than this. Perhaps it would have in a kitchen with proper drainage. Still, these kitchens were mine to command until we returned to Rome; Adriana da Mila had not deemed it necessary to take two cooks to Pesaro, and Madonna Giulia had insisted it be me, so Marco had been left in Rome to mind the Palazzo Santa Maria while I accompanied the ladies to Pesaro. “Don’t see why they passed me over,” my cousin had humphed when
he heard the news. “My tourtes are every bit as good as yours, little cousin!”
“You know I didn’t ask for it,” I pointed out. “Besides, now you’ll have a summer free to dice as much as you like, without my nagging.”
“There is that,” he admitted, and felt sufficiently mollified to come knocking at my chamber that night for a last romp before I departed. “I’ll miss you,” he murmured afterward as he rolled away from me, just before falling asleep.
“You’re just too lazy to find yourself another bedmate,” I said tartly. Not that he couldn’t find one, a man as handsome as Marco, but finding one who didn’t start angling for marriage was another matter. Marco couldn’t marry me, and we both knew that full well, so as a bedmate I was highly convenient.
“Do you think the French will invade, signorina?” Bartolomeo was saying. “They’re savage, the French—they spit babies on pikes and desecrate churches, and salt the fields—”
“Salt,” I mused as we wheeled the last turn around a gibbet where they’d hanged a local robber last week. His carcass still swayed from the noose, mostly picked clean by now, though a solitary crow still pecked at a thigh bone. I’d need to find a good salty cheese after visiting the fish market, and a wheel of Parmesan too. I could not live without Parmesan. My immortal soul, yes—that was probably lost to me, considering I desecrated churches just like the French. My morals, yes—those were certainly in tatters too after all the time Marco and I had spent under the blankets. Not to mention that dark and very strange hour I’d passed with Cesare Borgia . . . that had probably tacked a good century of hellfire onto my soul all by itself. But I’d far rather live without soul or morals than Parmesan.