“No.” I took a step back, still holding the knife at my side. “Come any closer and I’ll scream.”
“Scream, then. And I’ll tell this good household they’re sheltering a runaway whore still wanted in Venice for the robbing of the church of the blessed Santa Marta.” He took another step toward me, voice rising. “You’re a sorry excuse for a daughter, but you’re still mine. And if I say you’re coming with me, then you’ll obey. I’m your father—”
“And I’m cook to Madonna Giulia Farnese,” I found myself shooting back. “The Holy Father’s concubine herself. I have powerful friends—”
“The Pope’s cunt?” For someone who could talk so smooth and pretty for the clients, he had a mouth like a gutter in the kitchen. His voice rose steadily toward the bellow I remembered so well. “I should have known you’d end up cooking for another whore. If you think she’ll protect you, well, she’ll be too busy flopping on her back for the French, once they finally arrive and turn this town into a sewer. We’ll be well gone, and you’ll be headed back to—”
“I’m not going back there!” I shouted back. “Not that place. Not ever!” The corner of the trestle table pressed into my hip, and I dodged around it.
“Oh, yes, you are.” My father’s voice dropped from a bellow to a silky whisper. One of his most effective tricks to terrify his apprentices, that sudden modulation from roar to murmur; I often used the same technique myself. “But I want my recipes back first, girl. Hand them over.”
“I don’t have them.” My hand felt sweaty on the knife hilt.
“Lying bitch,” he said almost fondly. “Hand them over and maybe I’ll just turn turn a blind eye rather than report you to the Archbishop as a desecrator and a runaway—”
“I don’t have your precious recipes!” I yelled. “I left them behind when Madonna Giulia took herself to the country, and you know why? Because I don’t need them anymore, Father, because I make up my own recipes now and they’re better than yours. Because I’m a better cook than you are now, and the Pope himself eats my food and—”
My father lunged at me across the trestle table then, giving a swipe of his massive cook’s hand, and I dodged back. He missed the whipping end of my braid, but I stumbled on my own hem, and in a heartbeat he was on me, reeling me in by the knot of my apron. I hadn’t known when I picked up the knife whether I could bear to threaten my own father with it—I’d never challenged him before when he gave me a beating, after all. Fathers hit their children, and cooks hit their scullions; it was the way of the world, and I’d never thought of fighting back, just taken my punishment like any other member of his kitchens and vowed to do it better next time, whatever it was: a curdled sauce or an overdone rack of lamb. But now I made a wild slash of the blade, scoring his arm deep, and felt a strange exhilaration as blood droplets sprayed in an arc across the floor. “Does it hurt?” I yelled, swinging the knife again and missing. “Or does it hurt worse that you’re stuck cooking for an archbishop while your daughter serves the Pope!”
My father gave a roar and batted me across the side of my head with his hard open palm. A hot explosion of sparks filled the inside of my skull.
“Turning a blade on the man who sired you?” He flung me back against the wall, and I felt the drying racks press painfully into my shoulders. The knife flew out of my hand, skittering across the flagstones. “Whatever happened to ‘Honor thy father,’ Carmelina Mangano?”
“When you’ve robbed a church,” I managed to say around the buzzing in my head, “a broken commandment or two doesn’t seem like much, Father.”
He swung a hand at me again, doubling up his fist this time, the kind of blow he dealt out to thieving fishmongers who tried to cheat him on a load of tench and lake carp; and I knew I’d have more than a buzz in my head to show for it. No, no, he’ll knock me unconscious and then cart me upstairs and lock me up. The thoughts flitted by in utter panic, chasing each other through my head like frightened squirrels. I’ll wake up in chains, headed back to Venice—
But the second blow never landed. My father gave another yell, this one of surprise, and batted at the back of his neck instead. A certain small linen bag had fallen from the drying rack overhead, jostled loose by all the struggling, and landed square between his shoulders—to be followed by a cascade of little earthenware spice jars as a whole shelf gave way. My father yelled again, swiping at a crock of dried rosemary as it came down on his head, and I twisted out of his grip, making a desperate lunge across the floor for my knife. I found the hilt, clutching with sweaty fingers and scrabbling backward as my father came toward me again, blotting out the light. I had enough time to think that I’d rather die here than be hauled back to Venice to face the fate that awaited me there. I’d rather take Leonello’s option of being raped a few times by the French army.
“If you don’t let me go, I’ll spit you through the gut like a roast pig,” I snarled, scrabbling to my feet, but I never had the chance. A great dull clang sounded like the echo of a church bell, and my father dropped at my feet like a hundredweight sack of flour. Standing behind him, cast-iron skillet still raised, was Bartolomeo.
We stared at each other, my apprentice and I, both of us panting hard.
“Signorina,” he gulped, and dropped the skillet with a crash. “I heard the shouting—was he trying to force you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” My apprentice blinked confusion, and I realized I was still speaking in the thick Venetian dialect of my childhood. Good; he wouldn’t have understood much of what my father and I had been shouting at each other. I shook off my Venetian patois like an unwanted cloak, scrambling a story together. “He came down to make hot sops for the Archbishop, and then . . .” Dear God, how to explain it? I crossed myself shakily. “Never mind. None of it matters.”
My head was still buzzing from the blow and the shock; I was trembling head to foot and my ears roared, but I forced my thoughts into some kind of working order as I threw a panicked look back at the half-open doors behind Bartolomeo. If he’d come running at the sound of all the crashing and shouting my father and I had done, others wouldn’t be far behind. Sweet Santa Marta, don’t abandon me now, I prayed, and reached down to seize one of my father’s limp arms. “Bartolomeo, get his other side, quickly—help me get him out of the way!”
Bartolomeo never blinked, just reached down and hauled my father’s massive arm over his shoulders. Between the two of us we dragged him on his knees to the farthest of the storerooms, where the Farnese steward stored the spare jars of olive oil and various other odds and ends. “What if he wakes up?” Bartolomeo ventured. “If he starts to shout—”
“Gag him.” I twisted my apron into a rope, knotting it between my father’s teeth. Was it more of a sin to gag your father than knock him unconscious? It felt sacrilegious, somehow, but that didn’t stop me from tying up his hands and ankles too, with loops of the sturdy twine I used for tying up game birds. If you’ve trussed a chicken, you can truss your father.
“Leave him,” I panted, and we left the greatest cook in Venice in an ignominious heap on the cold floor. A lump the size of a melon was already rising on the back of his head where Bartolomeo had whacked him, but his breathing was steady. It would take more than a skillet to kill my father.
“Shouldn’t we report him to—” my apprentice began as we retreated from the storeroom.
“No time.” I shot the bolt, dragged a barrel of salted herring in front of the door for good measure, and whirled back to the kitchen. “Help me clear up, quick!”
“But his archbishop will be expecting those hot sops from his own cook’s hands—”
“I can make them. He’ll never know the difference. Hurry!”
The steward arrived an instant later, followed by a trail of curious manservants and maids, but Bartolomeo was mopping up the very last of the blood drips from my father’s arm, and I’d retrieved the fallen pouch with the hand of Santa Marta and begun sweeping up the spilled spice crocks. “Noth
ing, nothing,” I said airily to the steward’s suspicious look. “Just giving this disobedient apprentice of mine a good clout for knocking over the spices. We’ll have everything ready in time. And,” I added in a whisper to Bartolomeo as soon as the steward waddled away and the maids flitted into the kitchen to help, “I’m doubling your pay.”
“I don’t get any pay,” he pointed out.
“That’s about to change.”
“No need, signorina.” Bartolomeo grinned, stuffing the bloody cloth he’d used to wipe the floor into his sleeve before anyone could ask questions about it. “Anytime you need someone hit on the head with a skillet, I’m your man.”
“Good boy.” The hot shivers of fear and excitement that had kept me moving so fast were draining away now, replaced by a cold sickness. For the first time I felt pain in the side of my face, and winced as I touched my cheek where my father had backhanded me. It was swelling already—within a few hours I’d have a black bruise. I’d better have an explanation to go with it.
I’d have to explain more than a bruise if anyone found out I had my father locked up with the spare olive oil.
Tonight at least, I was surely safe. I could keep my own people out of that storeroom for an evening, and if my father woke up, the gag would keep him from shouting. The Archbishop wouldn’t miss his cook as long as the food still arrived on time, and I’d wager the Archbishop’s other servants wouldn’t miss my father’s presence either. They wouldn’t be coming down to the kitchens, after all—my father never associated with a household’s other servants; he held himself a cut above a mere manservant or guardsman, and thus strictly aloof from their company. No, no one would miss my father until tomorrow when the Venetian party prepared to leave.
Santa Marta, I prayed as I began numbly assembling the muscatel pears and red wine for that Venetian archbishop’s damned hot sops. He couldn’t have timed his return from Florence some other week? Santa Marta, just get me out of this. You’ve already helped me once tonight—really, I had to wonder just how the shelf of spice crocks had managed to tip over at such an opportune moment. Now if you can, please please get me out of here before my father wakes up and tells them all who I am.
Giulia
T ell me about it again,” I urged. “Carbognano.”
Orsino’s eyes crinkled at me in that nice way I liked. “I’ve told you half a dozen times.”
“Again, please!” I smiled a little as my husband described his castello with its painted sala and long gallery, the quiet little surrounding town with its fields and hazelnut trees. His shyness had fallen away these past few days, especially in the quiet evenings like this when he would knock hesitantly at my chamber door before cena, and I would wave him in to sit with my maids and me as we sewed. Pantisilea would pour wine for us, her ears standing out like jug handles in her eagerness to hear anything juicy, and I’d stitch crooked seams across the altar cloth I was mangling, and Orsino and I would talk. Not of anything very important, really. Just ordinary talk, like any ordinary husband and wife.
I liked that.
“And there’s a garden in the castello too, of course. Herbs for the kitchens, but I want to have it planted with flowers.” My husband’s blue eyes rested on me more easily now, and his voice was firmer than its previous nervous fits and starts. A young man now instead of a boy; handsome in his best doublet, which had just been brushed, and his boots, which had just been shined. A man come wooing, only Orsino was paying court to his own wife. That had touched me very much the past few days. “Do you like roses, Giulia?” he asked me, still enlarging on his plans for the castello garden.
“It is generally safe to assume that women like roses!” I teased him. I could see that little garden: just the kind of sunny place where the chatelaine of the castello might sit with her sun hat, reviewing the daily tasks with the steward and keeping watch over her children.
Orsino was talking about his horses now, and the good hunting to be had around the castello. Another night I would have been happy to listen as he rambled, but time was short this evening. Cena would be laid soon, and we would have an extra guest at table tonight: my mother-in-law had arrived by coach an hour ago. She’d been all correct courtesies in the hall, where I’d offered my greetings and escorted her to her own chamber to wash the travel dust away, but I didn’t in the least imagine that she’d wait until cena was done to come chide me, or her son, or both.
“—herons and ducks in the lake for hawking,” Orsino was saying. “I could get you a little merlin if you wanted to learn—”
“Husband,” I interrupted gently. “Perhaps you should just say it.”
He cleared his throat. “Say what?”
I set my own cup down, waving back Pantisilea and her pricked ears as she edged closer. “What you came to Capodimonte to ask me.”
He rotated his goblet between his hands. “You know what I want . . .”
“Yes, but I want you to say it.” Firmly. “Women are like that, I’m afraid.”
He gulped and took the plunge. “I want you to come back with me to Carbognano.” He even managed to look me in the eye. “It’s a good place to live, Giulia. I’d have to rejoin my men at Bassanello first, but I’d come back to you once the fighting was done.” A shy smile. “You know I want you there.”
And oh, part of me wanted it too. Bring up my Laura by the lake, away from the serpentine politics of the Vatican that had governed Lucrezia’s brief childhood. I could live quietly; not a harlot anymore, not spat on in the streets. In time my notoriety would fade, and I’d just be another young mother in the bosom of her family, taking her daughter to Mass and eating those little fried smelt that I liked so much. Eating as many of them as I wanted because I wouldn’t have to keep myself slim anymore just to keep a man’s passion stoked.
But—
“When the Pope orders you to send me back to Rome,” I said, “what will you do?”
His eyes flickered. “Maybe the Pope won’t order you back. You said his letters were angry—”
“But he still wants me.” My long absence really had made his heart grow fonder—which had been my aim, when I first departed Rome this summer. Now it looked like I’d succeeded a little too well. “What will you do if he comes for me himself, Orsino, instead of just sending your mother?”
A long silence as my young husband bit his lip. And then a knock sounded at the door, and before I could send Pantisilea to answer it, a figure swept in: square-faced, sharp-eyed, powdered, and curled.
“Madonna Adriana da Mila,” Leonello announced unnecessarily.
“Good evening, children,” my mother-in-law beamed, and her eyes did a fast relieved flick to see that we were well attended by maidservants. Holy Virgin forbid I ever be alone with my own husband! “So lovely to see you again, Orsino. Giulia, my dear, you’ve been too long gone from Rome! I’ve missed you terribly, and I’m not the only one.”
I didn’t offer her either wine or a seat. She helped herself to both.
“Goodness, but I’m tired,” she said, giving a wave of her hand to dismiss my maids. I nodded Leonello out too, and he shut the door on our little trio without comment. Normally, I’d have welcomed his presence here as a caustic-tongued shield against my mother-in-law, but I’d hardly spoken to my little bodyguard since the day I’d slapped him beside the shore. And I didn’t really want his sharp eyes on the quarrel I could already feel building in this room like storm clouds gathering over the lake, hunching Orsino’s shoulders and bringing my chin up at a defiant angle, as Adriana settled herself like a cozy velvet-clad cat.
“His Holiness ordered the pace himself when I started out from Rome,” she went on in her creamy voice, “and I must say it was a killing pace! Warm this wine for me over the brazier, won’t you, Orsino? That’s a dear boy. And then perhaps you’ll run along and allow me a word with Giulia. I’ve one or two things to discuss with her in private.”
“I think—” Orsino blushed as he took his mother’s cup, but he look
ed at her squarely. “I think I should stay.”
“Really, dear boy—”
“There is nothing you can say to me that you cannot say in front of my husband,” I interrupted, and gave Orsino a quick smile.
Adriana looked at the pair of us and gave a shrug. “As you please. I’ve a letter for you, Giulia, from His Holiness. You really have made him very irate, you know.”
“Yes. I know.”
“You don’t sound very bothered by that, my dear.”
“I’m not.” Giulia la Coraggiosa, I remembered Carmelina saying. “He doesn’t own me, after all,” I said, and gave another glance at Orsino where he stood warming his mother’s wine over the brazier.
“Maybe not, but His Holiness is still frantic to have you back.” Madonna Adriana gave a little smile. “Cardinals and ambassadors pressing him day and night about the French, and all he cares for is getting you safely back to Rome.”
“Hmm.” I picked up my mangled altar cloth again and began unpicking a crooked stitch. Orsino drew a deep breath. Shout at her! I winged the thought toward him, arrow-like. Put her in her place! But he crossed the room silently and gave his mother back her goblet.
“Thank you, dear.” Adriana blew on the surface of the warmed wine. “Now, Giulia. Your return to Rome isn’t just a matter of what the Holy Father wants anymore. It’s a matter of safety. You really must not be here when the French army comes—have you heard what happened to the other towns they’ve passed through? Men murdered, women having their fingers sawed off for their rings, altar boys raped—you know the French. Babies no older than Laura having their heads dashed against the stones—”
I jabbed the needle into the ball of my thumb, and winced. I’d managed to put the French rather successfully out of my mind lately, what with everything else I had to worry about. “Is the army really so close?”
“No more than a few days north, my dear. The advance parties may be even closer.”
“Then I’ll prepare to leave tomorrow,” I decided. Arranging my life to please myself instead of others was one thing, but there was no point in being foolhardy. One of my shutters had come loose in the night’s breeze; I rose from the cushioned wall bench and crossed the room to close it. Capodimonte was unseasonably warm considering it was November, but the nights were winter cold again. I hoped the French froze in their camp.