Or the way Juan teased Lucrezia for the spot on her chin she had tried to cover up with powder, or jeered at Joffre for padding the shoulders of his doublet in an effort to look more the man for Sancha. Or aimed a kick at my little pet goat who trailed me on a gilt leather leash. I loved that goat, had loved him since I’d rescued him from ending up in a tourte when he was just a floppy-eared baby kid, and Juan had put him bleating into the wall with one boot!
“Juan’s just a boy,” my Pope was saying with all his usual tolerance, unknotting a tangled ribbon at my back. “Perhaps he ogles you, but he ogles every beautiful woman he sees! He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
He’d cuckold you in a heartbeat, I thought, but didn’t say it. To some things Rodrigo was entirely blind, and when it came to his favorite son . . . he hadn’t even noticed this evening after cena when Juan flung an arm about my waist, looking at my likeness in Pinturicchio’s fresco. “Our family harlot as the Madonna,” he breathed hotly into my ear, and his fingers stole down to cup my hip. “How’s that for irony, eh?”
I’d just smiled, giving his hand a good covert smack. “And this harlot will knock your ears around the back of your head if you touch her again, Juan Borgia.”
I’d been able to intimidate him when he was sixteen, but not now. He’d just given me another lingering up-and-down look, and swaggered ahead to join Lucrezia and Sancha as they studied the Annunciation fresco with its angels and arabesques.
“Did you see Juan slavering over Sancha?” I said over my shoulder to Rodrigo, feeling the last of my tight laces come loose. “I thought poor Joffre was going to pop with outrage.”
“She’s a flirt, that one.” Rodrigo chuckled, sliding the gown off my shoulders.
“And now all three of your sons are competing for her!” I stepped out of the circle of my gown on the floor. “If that’s not a recipe for disaster—”
“Bah,” Rodrigo dismissed, and pressed his lips to my shoulder above the edge of my filmy shift. “Take your hair down, mi perla. It’s a sight I never tire of seeing—one of the great wonders of the world, your hair.”
I attacked my pins, and he fell back on his elbows again, happily watching the first of my coiled plaits slither loose over my shoulder. My Pope clearly had no interest in hearing any more about the shortcomings of his sons. He had lost his eldest son Pedro Luis many years ago in Spain; a memory that still veiled his eyes in grief whenever he spoke of it, and after that old loss I suppose his indulgence to his surviving children was understandable. “A pity Lord Sforza couldn’t join us,” I said by way of changing the subject. “I know he misses Lucrezia in Pesaro.”
“Let him miss her. He’s a waffling fool, and more than that, he’s turned out to be a mediocre condottiere who does nothing but ask me for money. I wish I’d known that when I was considering his offer for her hand!” My Pope reached out to catch a lock of my loosened hair and bring it to his nose, inhaling deeply. I had expensive perfumes by the dozen in glass vials, but part of me was still a country girl, the girl who grew up in a tiny town beside Lake Bolsena and boiled flowers to make perfume, and I still preferred my old homemade scents of honeysuckle and gillyflower to all those expensive mixtures of frankincense and bergamot. “I heard from another mediocre condottiere today, you know,” my Pope went on, inhaling my hair again.
“Who?”
“Monoculus.”
“That’s a cruel nickname, Rodrigo. He is not one-eyed; it’s just a tiny squint.” But I couldn’t help a faint smile as I unraveled the last of my plaits. At least my Pope could joke now about my husband. Rodrigo was not jealous when other men looked at me—he just chuckled when envious archbishops ogled my bosom, or florid young lords paid me honeyed compliments. He liked being envied. But Orsino still worried my Pope sometimes. Orsino was my wedded husband; a man with the legal right to demand I return to his side, if he ever grew a spine and chose to exercise that right. Even the Holy Father could not really excommunicate a man for demanding that his wife cease committing adultery.
“That chinless little snip can’t even scrape up the courage to ask me himself when he wants money,” Rodrigo continued with a snort. “Instead he applies to his mother and gets her to ask me. This time, it’s to pay his soldiers. They don’t listen to him unless their pay is current. Or even when it is current. There’s one son who should not have been slated for the battlefield!” My husband’s family the Orsini had been among those to side with the French upon their march south—at least, the more illustrious and prosperous branches of the Orsini. Not Orsino, however, whose mother was cousin and firm friend to Rodrigo. Where his mother led, Orsino followed.
“We don’t need to discuss Orsino, do we?” I shook my hair down, rippling clear to the floor, and Rodrigo clapped a hand to his chest as though pierced through the heart by the sight. I climbed onto the vast bed, sitting cross-legged like a tailor, and pulled his feet into my lap. People think it’s all jewels and gowns and keeping yourself pretty, being a mistress, but I’ve found it’s a good deal more about peace. Powerful men, whether kings of vast nations or lords of uncounted wealth or fathers of the world’s souls, are tired men. A thousand voices clamor every moment for their attention, their time, their favors; everyone wants something and they all want it now. When my Pope came to me at the end of the day, he could at least relax with the knowledge that I wanted nothing but him. “Your feet are hurting you again, aren’t they?” I scolded softly, rubbing his toes. “Why can’t you sit still when you’re dictating letters to your secretaries, instead of pacing like a madman . . .”
He gave a groan of pleasure, but his eyes were serious as they looked at me. “Does Orsino still write to you, Giulia?”
“He does,” I said.
“What does he write?”
Still a note of anxiety in my Pope’s deep voice. “Nothing very much,” I said, kneading my thumbs into the arch of his right foot. “Read the letters anytime you wish.”
“Oh, I trust you. It’s Monoculus I don’t trust. He wants you back.”
“Always,” I admitted. It had been a bargain my husband had made, or his mother Adriana da Mila had advised him to make: take little Giulia Farnese for a wife, let Rodrigo Borgia have her for a concubine, and he will advance your career, my dear boy! Orsino had regretted that bargain since the day he saw me at our wedding, but he still took the rewards, didn’t he? A condotta to hire soldiers, a hefty annuity, a castello in Carbognano and governorship over the town to go with it . . .
My husband had been everything a girl could dream of: handsome, young, and he even said he loved me. I didn’t know if I believed that, really—he didn’t even know me. But he said he’d loved me since the moment he’d laid eyes on me, and he certainly had his heart in his eyes whenever he looked at me, and that would be enough for most girls. But it wasn’t enough. What no one bothers to tell dreaming girls is that a handsome and adoring young husband isn’t any use if he’s gutless.
Still, a gutless husband is better than a brutal one. I’d have to go back to him someday, when either my Pope died or his passion for me did, and I gave a little sigh at the thought. Hopefully the first of those fates wouldn’t happen for many, many years—and maybe the second wouldn’t happen at all. Rodrigo had no cause to be anxious about Orsino—my husband would never muster up the courage to demand me back, no matter how many laws he had on his side.
“That’s enough about Monoculus, eh?” Rodrigo ran a hand over my shoulder, the edge of my shift sliding down my arm. “My children too. It’s making you morose.”
“That batch of quarreling pups you fathered would make anybody morose!” I said lightly, and Rodrigo brightened just as I’d intended.
“I’ll have you know my children are perfect.” He pulled me up into his arms. “Shall we make another? A Borgia prince this time, a brother for Laura . . .”
“Juan won’t be very happy about that,” I murmured between kisses. “He went into such a sulk when I was carrying Laura . . .” Worried
any child of mine would supplant him as the Pope’s favorite. In truth Rodrigo had always been just a trifle veiled in his affection for Laura. She was his daughter, of that I was perfectly certain—you had only to look at the nose (though I did hope she wouldn’t grow up with his bull shoulders). But she’d been christened under my husband’s name, and in truth when I counted backward from nine months there had been a time when I was trying to persuade Orsino to show just a little courage, enough to fight for his wife if he truly wanted to keep her . . .
But I couldn’t think of Orsino, not with Rodrigo bending his dark head to plant unhurried kisses across my naked shoulders. “Come to me,” he whispered in his Catalan Spanish, and I threaded my arms around his neck and slid myself over him, making my hair into a candlelit curtain shutting out the world.
When I was a foolish virgin girl, I’d prayed very earnestly not to be married off to an old man as so many of my friends were. I dreamed of lean cavaliers and dashing poets, and what girl doesn’t? But girls are fools. Poets aren’t much good when it comes to love play, when you really think about it—all Dante ever managed to do after years of mooning after Beatrice was fantasize that she might one day give him a guided tour of Paradise. And as for lean cavaliers, well, Orsino had been the picture of a dashing young suitor, and our coupling had been awkward, clumsy, embarrassing, and brief. And afterward, he had stood back and given me away.
My Pope savored me every time he took me in his arms, tasted my skin and inhaled my hair, kissed me and cradled me and found something new in me every time to caress. “The curve of your spine is like a string of pearls,” he would muse, and trace his lips over my back until I was vibrating down to my toes. Or he would drop slow tantalizing kisses over every part of my face from my ears to my chin, everywhere but my lips, until I dragged his mouth down against mine. He liked me bold and never accused me of being wanton; he tossed me and teased me, made me laugh and made me cry out—and my husband might have given me to Rodrigo, but Rodrigo had never forced me. “I’ve never had a woman by force, and I don’t intend to start now,” he’d told me on our first meeting, and then stood back in utter confidence to let me choose. It’s not often a woman has a chance to choose, let me tell you. And I’d considered my options: the handsome young husband with the clumsy hands, or the ecclesiastical lover of more than sixty years who could curl my whole body up in shudders of pleasure?
Well.
“My papal bull,” I whispered, and felt the rumble of laughter deep in his chest above me.
He slept afterward, his head heavy on my breast, my arms showing pale about his swarthy shoulders in the flickering candlelight, my hair coiling over us both. “Everything will be perfect now,” he murmured, half-asleep. “You at my side, Juan returned, la familia reunited . . . the French defeated . . .” A yawn. “God has been kind, mi perla.”
Unease twinged at me again, and I didn’t know why. Not until I rose and dressed and tiptoed out, back to the Palazzo Santa Maria so the Pope would be found alone in his bed in the morning by his entourage, as was proper (even if they all knew I’d been keeping him company there). I yawned as I trailed through the darkened papal apartments, and my feet slowed in the Sala dei Santi as I looked again at the finished frescoes all the Borgia family had admired last night at cena. I looked past the frescoes this time, Juan as proud Turk and Cesare as merciless emperor and Lucrezia as pleading saint, to the Borgia bull motif repeated over and over in the floors and the walls. Not the placid grazing ox that had been the family emblem when they were merely the lowly Borja of Spain, but a massive defiant beast gazing about with arrogant eyes. In public appearances Rodrigo displayed his papal emblem of the crossed keys, the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. But here there were no keys and no Heaven either. There were saints on every wall, but it was the Borgias who dominated—the Borgias and their pagan bull.
“God has been kind,” Rodrigo had said. La familia united again, as they had not been for years, and the French had been swindled and outplayed by my wily Pope who had played that spotty French King like a harp, vowing eternal friendship and whispering confidential promises, and all the while he had been piecing together a Holy League to oppose them. Rome, Spain, Milan, Venice, even the Holy Roman Emperor; all allied against the French who had found themselves outnumbered and surrounded in Naples. What a victory—and with the French fleeing their shattered campaign, what enemy was there to oppose my Pope and his family?
And last night they had celebrated in these rooms, which might have an Annunciation and a Nativity and a Resurrection painted on the walls . . . but which glorified not God, but Borgia.
Kate Quinn, The Serpent and the Pearl
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends