“Giulia,” he said thickly, and swung her down before her feet could even touch the steps. His broad arms wrapped her tight, and I saw his lips move in what might be a genuine prayer of thanks, this most wordly of pontiffs. The French looked amused and the papal guards were grinning by the time the Pope finally set his mistress of the past two years on her feet. He was tall, swarthy, heavy-shouldered; still a bull of a man at sixty-three. A fitting match for his family emblem of the Borgia bull. “You’re unharmed?” he demanded, cupping her face in his big hands.
“Quite unharmed, Your Holiness.” La Bella’s tired face creased in a smile. “Overjoyed to see my Pope again.”
He lifted her up and kissed her, and the French captain covered his grin with his hand. I saw that the Holy Father had discarded his papal robes for a black velvet cloak trimmed with gold, grandly spurred Valencian boots, a sword and dagger at his belt, and a cap with a dashing feather. Trying to look the cavalier for a mistress who had spent the past two days being complimented by young French gallants? What fools men make of themselves for beautiful women. Even popes.
More courtesies between Cesare Borgia and the French captain, as the Pope ignored them all and continued kissing Giulia, and at last the thing was done and the French escort retreated. Cesare Borgia gave a faint shake of his head, sauntering past his father, and leaned his auburn head idly through the carriage window.
“Little lion man,” he greeted me, as he always did. His lean handsome face was cut sharply across by shadows. “The French didn’t kill you?”
I gestured at my bandages. “They tried, Your Eminence.”
“Never count on the French to do anything right.” Cesare Borgia was no bull like his father; he had all the languid grace of a serpent as he lounged against the carriage. “How many did you kill, during this adventure?”
“Three.”
“And wounded?”
“The wounded don’t count.” I studied him. “How many did
you
kill, during my adventure?”
“What, how many Frenchmen?”
“How many anything.”
“What a thing to be curious about.” He had dark eyes, quite without bottom, and they never held anything warmer than amusement. They were amused now, looking through the shadows at me. “My man Michelotto told me you were asking questions.”
“Did he, now.” I tilted my head at Michelotto, Cesare Borgia’s stone-faced shadow—a fellow with no expression whatsoever whose stare could make a saint twitch. “It’s no crime to ask questions, surely.”
“That depends who you ask the questions about.” The young Cardinal smiled. I smiled. We’d been playing this game a long time, Cesare and I. It involved a woman, and how I thought she might have died, but I was hurting too badly tonight to indulge in any more games of cat and mouse.
Cesare Borgia strolled away, raising a hand in reply to the French captain who had trotted off with a final languid wave. The Pope sent a baleful look after the French party, muttering, “I’ll see them all in graves!” But Giulia Farnese smiled and tugged the Holy Father up into the carriage, and with a lurch it swung into motion again and rolled through the gates of Rome. I gave His Holiness the best bow I could manage from my litter, but he was kissing Giulia again and I looked out the window. It was too dark to see more than the shadows of buildings and passersby, the occasional lantern or torch or spill of light from an open door, so I took in a deep lungful of night air instead, banishing both Cesare’s games and the twist of agony from my hand. I smelled night soil and mud and smoke; river rot and dead cats and blood. It smelled like home.
“You’ll stay with me at the papal apartments tonight,” the Pope decided, finally sparing a kiss for Laura’s sleeping head before wrapping Giulia more firmly within the circle of his arms and his black velvet cloak. “Damn the cardinals if they complain. You can see the progress Pinturicchio has made on the frescoes—”
“After I see all my people safely home and settled,” Giulia interrupted him. “I want to put Laura to bed, and I intend to see that Leonello is made comfortable. Then I’ll come along to the papal apartments.”
The Holy Father waved a dismissive hand. “Let the servants tend to them.”
“I will tend to them, Your Holiness. They are my responsibility.”
I saw the Pope’s startled glance as he looked at his mistress. She’d never contradicted him in anything before, at least in my hearing. I turned my face away to cover a smile as she gazed back at the Holy Father with calm assurance. This was the woman who had faced down French pike-men unflinching. Not the starry-eyed, easygoing little beauty he had plucked from her husband and taken for his own.
I wondered if His Holiness realized just what a change there had been.
“I’ll leave you at the Palazzo Santa Maria, then,” the Pope finally conceded in his sonorous Spanish-accented bass. “As long as you come along to the papal apartments afterward! I want you with me tonight, minx—I’ve not seen you for six months, with all your journeying.” Before her capture by the French, my mistress had left her papal lover for a long jaunt to the countryside, first helping to settle his daughter Lucrezia in her new marital home in Pesaro, and then returning to the Farnese family seat in Capodimonte for another extended visit. “Six months,” the Holy Father grumbled, wrapping her tighter. “Six
weeks
is too long!”
“You wouldn’t have me back at all if not for Leonello.” Giulia turned her smile on me, still stretched out in my seat opposite. “You’ve heard how he defended me?”
The Pope’s fierce dark eyes found me through the carriage’s shadows. “You’ll be tended by Our own physician, little man—you’ll want for nothing. You’ll be well rewarded, We promise in the name of God.”
I gave the best half bow I could manage lying down. “Your Holiness.”
He had already forgotten me, looking back to Giulia. “Now that We have you back and safe, We deal with the French. If they so much as laid a finger on you—”
“They were all perfect gentlemen,” Giulia said smoothly. “Though I must admit I found those cannons of theirs rather fearsome.”
“They may have cannons, but their king is a fool.”
Perhaps, I thought, but a fool with a claim to the kingdom of Naples in the south. When old King Ferrente died, King Charles of France had declared he would press his claim, and he’d come to do so with an army of near twenty-five thousand. Twenty-five thousand French pike-men would be enough to make any man nervous if he faced them, but the Pope looked merely contemptuous. “Little Charles wants Naples?” he snorted. “Let him come through Rome first, and I’ll make him beg for it.”
“Will you?” Giulia laced her pale fingers with his swarthy ones. “That I would like to see.”
“Well, you won’t, because I’m sending you to safety first,
mi perla
. One stint of captivity is enough!” He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “I’ll let Charles think I mean to grant his claim of title to Naples—he’ll make his troops behave themselves, if he thinks he’ll get that out of me. I’ll promise him this and that, and when he marches on Naples I’ll let him strand himself there while his army gets sick and his supply lines fail.”
“Will they start failing?”
“Cesare will make sure of it. I’ll give him to the French for a good-faith hostage; he’ll plant a few seeds of discord, then he’ll escape. Meanwhile, I’ll hook us an ally or two against the French. Milan must be feeling rather nervous by this time. Perhaps Venice too.” The Pope did not give any more details of his plans before an audience, even an insignificant audience like me, but his chuckle was wicked as a stream of good sins as he wrapped Giulia more tightly in his arms. “Bah! Now I have you back,
mi perla
, I’m full of plans. And you”—giving her ear a fierce tweak—“had better be full of remorse for causing me all this worry! Next time I tell you to cut your visit to your family short and come home to me, maybe you’ll listen!”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” she said demurely.
The Pope cleared his throat, and I wondered if he had forgotten I was there. “It
was
only your family you went to visit, wasn’t it?”
“I saw my husband.” Giulia’s voice was direct. “If that is what you mean.”
Rodrigo Borgia’s heavy hand tensed on his knee, fingers drumming. “And?”
A graceful shrug. “And nothing.”
The Holy Father still looked anxious. The most powerful man in Christendom, a force of nature in ecclesiastical robes, and he still felt the prick of anxiety over Giulia’s young husband. The absurdly named Orsino Orsini, blue-eyed and handsome and straight as a lance—but I had seen more spine in an oyster. He’d known from the beginning that his marriage was merely a polite fiction, a legality pasted over the private trade of financial patronage for use of his wife—but he’d taken one look at his innocent and beautiful bride when they traded their wedding vows and regretted the bargain. He’d pouted in the country for the loss of his wife ever since, not that it stopped him from accepting Rodrigo Borgia’s patronage. The young Orsino had come to visit his wife in Capodimonte when she had come for a stay with her family; I’d wondered if he meant to woo her back from her papal lover, but he had lost his nerve. He’d barely mustered up enough courage to tell Giulia that he would be happy to take her back when the Pope was done with her, and that was not the kind of passionate declaration to light a fire in a woman’s heart.
“Your Holiness.” Giulia drew the Pope’s chin toward her with a fingertip. “Orsino did not rescue me from the French.
You
did.”
“And would have if they’d carried you to the ninth ring of hell.” His hand stole under her furred cloak to her breast. “Come here,
mi perla
. . .” His private name for her. She nestled closer, lifting her face, and I looked out the carriage window and counted the rotations of the wheels. I’d never been more relieved when the horses finally halted at the Palazzo Santa Maria. I was surprised the passion igniting in the seat opposite me wasn’t streaming out through the shutters like the pale plume of smoke that had announced Rodrigo Borgia’s election as Pope.
“Leonello, let me fetch the guards to carry you down—” My mistress disentangled herself from the Holy Father, her mouth swollen from kissing, and began to fuss over me. I was tempted to bite her head off again, but there was no stopping her when she began to fuss, and anyway I was still too weak to walk under my own power. The wound at my shoulder had broken open, as I could feel even through the bandages, and my hand was throbbing as though some patient sharp-toothed beast were chewing it off. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the blackness behind my eyelids, blackness thick enough to swallow pain. Any pain, even the pain when my litter was awkwardly trundled out of the carriage and carried into the pretty little
palazzo
beside the Vatican where the Holy Father had installed his mistress in her papal seraglio.
“Madonna Giulia—” Another woman’s voice sounded in my ears, brusque, accented with the crisp tang that belonged to Venice. Though it had been a long time since Carmelina Mangano had seen Venice, and I knew all the reasons why. No wonder she sounded hopeful as she asked, “Messer Leonello—is he dead?”
“No,” I answered in place of my mistress, and opened my eyes. The girl with the Venetian voice hovered beside my litter as it was carried through the
palazzo
toward my little chamber. A girl of perhaps twenty-two in a plain wool gown with the sleeves rolled up, tall as many men and thin as a kitchen ladle, with a cloud of wiry black curls bundled at the base of a long neck. Tired-looking, because she too had been part of our captured party, and she must have made a dash from the wagon bearing the other servants to catch up with my litter. She was no beauty like Madonna Giulia, but she had a pair of eyes like black fire and she smelled like cloves and cinnamon, and she carried herself tall and proud as a queen. Maybe I stood only a hand-span over four feet, but I had a liking for tall women.
Not this one, though.
“I’m not dying,” I said from my litter, and gave our household cook a grin because I knew it would frighten her. Good. It was her fault I was in this litter to begin with, and I had no mind to be forgiving. “In fact, I’m determined to make a full recovery. I know how that must disappoint you.”
Her face darkened and she stamped off in the other direction. “Bring him a hot posset, Carmelina,” Madonna Giulia called after her, and I closed my eyes again as the guardsmen brought my litter into my chamber and laid it down on my narrow bed. The pain in my hand no longer seemed quite so acute. Perhaps it had been no lie, what I told Carmelina. Perhaps I
would
make a full recovery.
Pray I don’t
, I thought at her.
Or I’ll ruin your life.
Carmelina
W
hen I first came to Rome, I’d had nothing to my name but a tattered bundle of recipes and a mummified hand in a bag—and on that shaky foundation, I’d built myself a future. Cook to Madonna Giulia Farnese, feeding an entire
palazzo
that housed not just the Pope’s mistress but the Pope himself when he came for intimate little suppers at La Bella’s table. Well, to be fair it was my cousin Marco Santini who held the title of
maestro di cucina
, but Marco was a card-playing fool who would rather sweat over a
zara
board than an oven, and everyone in the household knew who really ran the kitchens. Me, Carmelina Mangano, the best cook in Rome even if I was a woman, and I’d
earned
that. I’d earned all of it, with nothing more than a little luck and the skill in my hands—and now here I was returning to Rome once again, and everything I’d built was about to crash on my head.
All because of one horrid, overobservant dwarf.
I had to stop twice and press myself against walls as the other servants in Madonna Giulia’s traveling party streamed back to their old quarters in chattering packs. Some were laughing, some bragging of the dangers they’d seen; some were still white-faced and worn from those dangers, and others declared they meant to get drunk at once. I felt numb and cold all over. All I wanted was to crawl off to the tiny chamber that used to hold spare jars of olive oil and now held my pallet and little chest of clothes. But I wouldn’t sleep, not yet. “Make him a posset,” Madonna Giulia had told me, settling her odious little bodyguard in his own chamber. And whatever happened to me tomorrow, tonight I was still the cook, and the cook stayed awake until everyone in the household was fed.