They took him to the fortress of the Castel Sant’Angelo, to be washed and dressed in his military finery. “We should wait,” Cesare said, stone-faced as ever. “We should wait until he is tended, Your Holiness.” But my Pope just gave one great cry, a cry that split me like a sword, and rushed from his private apartments.
“Sweet Christ,” Cesare said viciously. “I didn’t want him to see Juan this way—stabbed nine times—”
“Nine?” I whispered, but my feet were moving, everyone’s feet moved, and papal guards closed about the whole party of us as we followed the Holy Father to the Castel Sant’Angelo. I had been inside that gloomy papal fortress before, looking down from its great crenellated walls over the lake of surcoats and pike points and lily-strewn flags that had been the French army—but my Pope had been laughing then, making nothing of the trials ahead of him and scheming with great good cheer how he would make this army melt away, bend to his bidding, wish they had never crossed him. Now there was no laughter—only the Holy Father’s piercing cry again, followed by hoarse, wailing sobs as I crossed into the chapel where the servants had laid out the corpse of the Duke of Gandia. I could not see Juan’s face, or his terrible mutilated body—only one limp white arm, trailing loose from its bier as my weeping Pope gathered his son up into his arms and rocked him like a child.
“Rodrigo—” I did not try to touch him, but he still struck at me as I approached, burying his head in Juan’s torn and waterlogged chest. Juan’s limp hand brushed my skirt, and I stepped back with a cry of my own. The palm had been torn open, pierced through by a dagger, leaving a great jagged wound. The river had washed it clean and bloodless, or else it could have been the hand of Christ upon His cross.
I became dimly aware that Cesare was ordering everyone out in a voice like ice. I cast a look at Rodrigo, but he was still weeping, still cradling his dead son tenderly to his chest, and I felt my eyes sting. I turned to go, but Cesare stopped me on the threshold of the chapel, waving the others on. “Giulia,” he said, “I have a task for you.”
I nodded dumbly, still deaf to anything but those terrible sobs in the chapel.
“I ask you to tend my sister,” Cesare said, and I saw the softening in his face that I always saw when he mentioned Lucrezia. No wonder the nasty-minded gossips of Rome thought the love he bore her was some perverse thing—he had no love for anyone but Lucrezia, and love in a man as cold as Cesare was such a miracle that surely people would think it a profaned miracle. “I won’t have her hearing of our brother’s death from strangers,” Cesare continued. “Will you travel to the Convent of San Sisto, to give her the news?”
“But His Holiness . . .”
“His Holiness will not want you for now,” said Cesare. “He will not want anyone.”
“I can’t leave him in this grief!” The howls from the chapel tore at me like claws. “I’ll wait here outside the doors all night if I must, but surely I should be here when he needs me—”
“I’ll tell him you’ve gone to Lucrezia; he’ll understand that. And besides, better to leave him for a time than to let him realize you are not particularly sorry Juan is gone.”
“I don’t—”
“Speak truth. It’s my father you grieve for, not my brother.”
I looked at Cesare, holding himself as calmly as ever. “I don’t think you’re terribly sorry about Juan either,” I heard myself remarking with a ludicrous numb candor. I felt as though I were floating above the ground, wrapped in wool away from anything that was real. “How long will it be before you start angling to put away your cardinal’s hat and help yourself to all Juan’s military posts?”
“A month or two,” Cesare returned, unruffled, and I shivered at his calm. “But until then, I can pretend sadness for my father. You aren’t very good at pretending, Giulia, and I don’t want him to remember your lack of any real grief later, and resent you. Better you come rushing back in a few days to console him, once he realizes he needs consolation, and he will welcome you as a balm and not a reminder. I will be counting on you, then, to help put him back together.”
“How clever,” I said. I didn’t like Cesare, but I could see the sense of what he said. Besides, I had no energy to refuse him. “I’ll go to Lucrezia at once.”
“Set off tomorrow at dawn,” Cesare said. “The streets will be too wild to travel tonight. Now, she’ll want to come back with you, but see she stays where she is. If murderers struck down Juan, I want Lucrezia kept safe behind convent walls.”
I turned to take myself home, wincing again as I heard the weeping from behind the chapel door.
My poor Pope
, I thought, and Cesare was right. Juan’s death grieved me only for the sorrow it gave Rodrigo. And I thought there would be a good many in Rome to echo that sentiment, no matter what pious platitudes were uttered in the days to come.
Though I did almost come to tears that evening when I saw the torchlit procession that took Juan from the Castel Sant’Angelo to the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, where (Joffre had told me, through tears that made him look ten years old again) their weeping mother Vannozza had already made arrangements for Juan’s burial. Juan in his gaudy Gonfalonier’s finery, borne along on a bier surrounded by two hundred torchbearers, his household guards and his military officers, and his crowd of swaggering young Spanish bravos who trailed along now with their fine tail feathers draggled in the dust. I saw one of Juan’s little Spanish dwarves trotting along in the jam of the household that followed the bier. Juan had brought a great many dwarf jesters with him from Spain, liking to dress them in motley and set them beating each other with blunted clubs for the amusement of his soldiers after dinner. But this dwarf was toddling after the bier now, scrubbing at his eyes, and I wondered if he was crying for his master or for the position he’d lost. Somehow I doubted it was Juan. . . . The whole procession was ringed by Spanish guards, staring out murderously into the Roman crowd with their blades drawn, but there was no violence—only wailing, and a great unease.
I could see Juan’s profile, wax-pale in the light of the torches held over his bier, and his still face had a beauty that stabbed me. A beauty it had never had in life, when any good looks he possessed were gilded by arrogance and vanity and fatuous pride. I could not help but wonder if he could ever have looked as pure and peaceful in life as he did on his bier.
Maybe if he had not been born a Borgia
, I thought, and shivered.
Nine knife wounds, to the limbs and body and throat. Nine, and the money not even taken from his pouch. A purse full of gold ducats, far more than a laboring man could earn in a year. Whoever had killed him . . .
“My carriage is arranged for dawn?” I checked with the stewards when I arrived back at the Palazzo Santa Maria. “Good. Can you send Leonello to me, please?” He hadn’t accompanied me to the Vatican to wait with Rodrigo; he often didn’t, as there were papal guards there to see to my protection. But he always came bounding up as soon as I returned to the
palazzo
, tapping his latest book against the outside of his leg, one finger marking the page where he’d left off—and tonight, I didn’t see him. “I want to speak with him at once,” I said, and suppressed a shudder. If I could speak the terrible suspicions that lurked somewhere in the base of my throat.
“There’ll be no speaking to Messer Leonello tonight, Madonna Giulia.” The steward lowered his voice. “Dead drunk, he is. Staggered in an hour ago, and he’s still sleeping it off. Not like him, is it?”
“No,” I said, and went to my chamber where I lay down fully clothed and spent another sleepless night contemplating unspeakable things.
Carmelina
I
n a cook’s world, and indeed with much of the world, the day divides itself sensibly: that is to say, around meals. The morning, for market and preparation and planning the day’s menus. When the noon sun climbs, it’s the bustle of
pranzo
that marks the change. Then
cena
, marking the sun’s descent, then the scouring and cleaning of the kitchen, at which point the day is at an end.
For a nun, life is governed by bells. Bells at midnight, then at dawn, then regularly through the day, interrupting you the moment you get into a decent rhythm of work, all the way to Vespers and Compline after sunset when all you can do is look at the broken intervals of the day and the utter lack of any properly completed tasks, and stagger off to bed to do it all again in the morning. And the next morning, and the next and the next and the next, because a nun has nothing to look forward to for the rest of her life but bells.
At least I could ignore the bells now. I was no lay sister anymore who had to lay down my ladle and go hastening off to prayers. I had been brought to serve the Countess of Pesaro, who had a suite of rooms in the gatehouse and certainly required to be served. She did not have to attend prayers and neither did I; I could just keep chopping away in the kitchens as the lay sisters straightened veils and wimples and fluttered away like magpies. But the bells got into my head anyway, the placid silvery rhythm reverberating about the inside of my skull, and I don’t know how many times I bent over the chopping block once I was blessedly alone and clapped my hands over my ears, trying to persuade myself that the walls were
not
moving in on me, they were
not
. “I’m going mad,” I told Santa Marta, whose hand I once more carried about in a pouch beneath my skirt, because in a convent there was no bloody privacy. “Only ten days here, and I’m already going mad.”
Her gold ring seemed to gleam at me in sympathy.
At least you’re safe here
, I told myself firmly—and that at least was true. No matter how many times I woke with a shudder as I imagined Juan Borgia’s hands flinging me down on my own trestle table, I knew he would not find me here. The Convent of San Sisto was a worldly place—half the young choir nuns who giggled with Lucrezia and tried on her lip rouge were no more devoted to serving God than any bored girl who spends Mass making eyes at all the men. But even at a convent like this where the rules were lax and the prioress inclined to be indulgent when her richer-dowered novices wore silk petticoats and lilac scent, men were not allowed to stay. The Pope himself had sent a few guards to hammer on the convent gates a few days after Lucrezia arrived, being a trifle irate that his daughter had flounced off to a convent without asking his august permission first, and they had been firmly turned away like any unwanted suitor. So I had no fear that Juan would appear in these kitchens with his leer and his breath that smelled like wine and blood. Even if he came to see his sister, he would be allowed only a brief visit with her in her borrowed
sala
. He would certainly not be allowed to roam about the convent looking for a conquest—should it even occur to him to come looking for me at all. I was safe.
Still, safety was starting to seem a high price to pay for such maddening tedium. I had managed the vast kitchens of an even more vast
palazzo
, with dozens of people under my direct command and dozens more hopping to the sound of my voice—and now I had a drafty gloomy kitchen with a cistern that leaked, a hearth that smoked, and no hands to help prepare
cena
but my own (one of those hands still throbbing too much to be useful). In the Palazzo Santa Maria I had enjoyed a chamber all to myself, even if a small one—and now I shared an even smaller cell in the gatehouse with Pantisilea, who didn’t have any men to sneak off and seduce so I could have the room to myself. Working for Madonna Giulia I had served banquets to hundreds, and the most illustrious guests in Rome, too—and now I had only a few dishes to prepare each day, whatever struck the young Countess of Pesaro’s fancy.
“You could always whip off a few
tourtes
if you’re feeling bored,” one of the other lay sisters said hopefully. “The choir nuns, they’re all mad for anything sweet. You should see the frenzy whenever anyone gets any good sugar for a
crostata
—”
“No,” I said, and they didn’t press me. The lay sisters stayed well out of my way; I had full run of the dank little kitchen and no one talked to me while I was in it, which suited me very well indeed. But after a week I could have used
someone
to talk to. Madonna Giulia swinging her little slippered feet at my table and giving her golden peal of a laugh, maybe. Or Bartolomeo. I could have asked him whether he had tried making those fried tubers again for that Neapolitan lord, Vittorio Capece. Or I could have asked him what he had thought when I told him I was a nun . . . if he thought anything at all. If he had any sense, he’d banish all thoughts of me from mind and move his affections to a girl he could actually marry.
Still, I was thankful he’d freed me from having to prepare
cena
that last night at the Palazzo Santa Maria. I’d slept so very long and well—nowadays all my nights were interrupted by
bells
.
I’d worked myself into such a fit of the sulks by the time Sunday approached, I paid no attention to the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels that sent all the nuns flocking to see who approached the gatehouse. Who cared if the nuns had travelers begging a night’s stay, or if the Countess of Pesaro had summoned some vivacious friend like the Tart of Aragon or that self-important Caterina Gonzaga to lighten her growing boredom? I wouldn’t be able to cook anything for them; nothing decent, anyway. “Call this olive oil?” I muttered, and dumped a vicious dram of it into the bowl.
“Is there balm in Gilead,
Signorina Cuoca
?” a familiar voice said from the door. “Or at least balm for a small man’s aching head?”
I dropped my ladle into the bowl in surprise. “Leonello?” Spinning about. “What are you doing here?”
“Madonna Giulia has come to call upon the Countess of Pesaro, with some rather somber news. Where my lady goeth—” He shrugged, leaning up against the door frame to the small courtyard.
A pimply young lay sister whom I’d set to whipping egg whites stared covertly at him over her bowl, and Leonello stared back at her until she looked away. “Shoo,” he said, and flapped a hand at her. “Or I’ll eat you.” She fled with a squeak, and so did the sturdy, boot-faced woman whom I’d never once seen parted from the ever-simmering community stew since I arrived.