The Lion and the Rose (37 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

He has the Pope in his fist.

—ENVOY, WRITING OF CESARE BORGIA

Leonello

C
horus
,” I said, laying four cards down across the wine-sticky table. “All spades. The pot is mine.”

“Wait,” the Genoese sailor across from me protested. “You haven’t seen my cards yet!”

“Doesn’t matter. You have nothing to beat a
chorus
hand.” I leaned forward and began to scoop coins from the center of the table.

The sailor stared at me, suspicious. “How do you know what cards I’ve got?”

Dio.
The same conversations, the same suspicions, the same insults; every time I won. How had I stood it in the old days, years on end of rickety trestle tables and half-drunken gamblers and cards sticky with sour ale? “Mathematical certainty,” I said, bored, and then followed the usual argument about what that was, and the Genoese sailor ended up storming off and taking his two friends with him. I was left with the cards and a few
scudi
.

“More wine,” I told the sour-faced crone who served the drinks here. She never failed to twitch the sign of the evil eye at me when she thumped down my cup. I missed the days when Anna had worked here and never had to be reminded to cut my wine with water.

I’d come here first upon leaving the Palazzo Santa Maria. “I know you,” the tavernkeeper squinted at me. “The dwarf, you used to come here years back. Leonato?”

“Close enough,” I’d returned. “I helped you bury a girl named Anna.”

“Don’t remember.”

I sighed. “The one who got staked and killed in your kitchens?”

“Oh, her.” Crossing himself. “I remember
that
.”

Anna had long been gone from here, but I’d had some thought of talking to someone who remembered her. Anyone—customers who had bedded her, the other maids who had worked by her side. But they either were gone on themselves to other things or had memories as vague as the tavernkeeper’s. There was no one at all to care if I had said,
I avenged her death
. More of a dwarf’s foolish, oversized dreams.

“A drink?” the tavernkeeper had asked me instead.

“Why not?” And I had stayed, plying my old trade at his wine-sticky tables day after day, too bored to move on.

I lost three hands to a groom with manure on his boots, and recouped it an hour later against a fishmonger too busy reminiscing about the hanging he’d seen to pay attention to his cards. “Horrible, it was,” he confided, slapping down a card without looking at it. “The fellow goes black in the face, see, and his tongue comes out all purple. I made a wager he’d keep kicking as long as it took to say a rosary.”

“Leave us,” a peremptory voice addressed the fishmonger, who gaped briefly at the forbidding figure that had appeared like a black bat at his side.

“See here,” the fishmonger began. But a gloved finger pointed at him in emphasis, and my fishy-smelling partner swept up his cards and stole away without another word.

“You could not have waited?” I asked as the man in the mask slid into the vacated seat across from me. “I was about to win my evening meal from that fool.”

“Then I shall buy you your evening meal.” A few coins landed on the table.

“Very well. Would you care for a game?” I flicked my wrist, snapping the cards together. “We cannot play
primiera
with only two—perhaps Michelotto will join us? No? I must say, Michelotto, I have not missed that blank stare of yours. Perhaps a bout of one-and-thirty then, Your Eminence? A Spanish game, so surely it will be known to a Borgia.”

“Of course,” said Cesare.

He took one look at my battered and sticky cards and produced his own gilt-edged deck, dealing calmly as the other drinkers in the tavern eyed him from the corner of their eyes. Rich boys sometimes came here, stealing away from their tutors for a whore and a few drinks, but silent velvet-clad figures in masks, not so often. “A drink,
gentilhuomo
?” the tavernkeeper ventured, sidling around Michelotto’s statuelike gaze, but Cesare Borgia said, “Keep your swill,” without looking up from his cards, and after that no one approached our little table.

“I had not heard Your Eminence had returned from Naples yet,” I said, picking up my own cards. “Did King Federigo’s coronation proceed in style?”

“Tolerably. A bitch of a Neapolitan girl gave me the French pox, but one hears the pustules go away in time.” Cesare tapped the mask covering his face as he discarded a card. “You were hard to find, little lion man. I sent inquiries to Carbognano and Capodimonte first, thinking you had followed my father’s little giggler when she departed.”

“I am sorry to have misled you, Eminence.” I took another card myself.

“La Bella had no notion where you had gone. That surprised me.”

“Did it?”

“She seemed very anxious to discover your whereabouts.”

I knocked twice on the table: the sign to reveal cards. Cesare Borgia had a hand of seventeen; I had twenty-eight and scooped the coins.

The young Cardinal dealt again. “It was Michelotto who finally caught a glimpse of you, here in this tavern.”

I eyed the young Cardinal’s favorite murderer, who leaned against the wall cleaning his nails with his knife and ignoring us utterly. “What were you doing in the slums, Michelotto?”

“Michelotto likes the slums,” Cesare replied as though the man were mute. “On this occasion, he was having a drink after doing a little work for me.”

“Work?” I discarded a card.

“I’ve orders from the Holy Father to get Cardinal Piccolomini thoroughly unsettled before the next consistory. I’m having his guardsmen picked off at a rate of exactly one a week. It’s working nicely.”

I paused, looking at him. Cesare smiled, lounging across the rickety wooden chair in his velvet doublet with all the grace of a leopard. “Why admit such things to me, Your Eminence?”

“One man a week—it’s a heavy load, even for one like Michelotto who likes his work.” A smile for his guard, who looked faintly indignant from his post against the wall. “And I have similar tasks, from time to time, requiring a man of nerve and sharp blades.”

I laughed, swinging my feet above the floor, and the tavernkeeper looked up nervously. “You think that describes me? Nerve and sharp blades?”

“I’ve long had the intention of poaching both for my own service.” Cesare Borgia knocked twice, calling for cards. “Your work has been admirable.”

“My work was bodyguarding. Trailing about after an empty-headed flirt while she read bad poetry and had her hair plaited.” My hand was a measly eleven; Cesare’s twenty-nine. He took his coins back and dealt again.

“I refer to your more . . . private work.”

My fingers stilled on the new cards.
What do you know?
I thought.
Do you know I killed your brother?

Three months had passed since the death of the Duke of Gandia, and no murderer had been found. The Pope had publicly exonerated a variety of candidates such as bitter Giovanni Sforza, who according to common rumor would soon be deprived of his little Borgia wife. Even young Joffre Borgia had been exonerated, since he was widely bandied through Rome as a possible fratricide thanks to Juan’s liaison with the Tart of Aragon. But no killer had been arrested, and three months later the scent would seem to be cold. The gossips of Rome had found other things to talk about.

But Cesare Borgia’s eyes glittered at me through the eye holes of the black mask, and I felt the old stirring of interest at a puzzle to solve. Did he know? Cesare had had no love for his brother—but for daring to lay a finger on any Borgia, I would find myself on the rack or the
strappado
.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps I would only be offered a job.

“You think I wish to make a career killing your enemies for you, Eminence?” I said at last. “I make a fair enough living here from cards.”

“A dull living.”

“A safer one. Drunks are not nearly so dangerous as the kind of men you play your games with.”

“And don’t you miss those games?” He stretched his arms out across the wooden back of his chair. “The hunt? The chase? The kill in the dark? The look in their eyes when they realize they cannot escape you?”

What do you know?
my thoughts whispered at him.

Maybe nothing
, his whispered back.
Maybe everything.

I could find out, if I worked for him. Perhaps. A new puzzle, and truth was I’d been bored these past months for lack of puzzles. Though playing that game with Cesare Borgia would be a great deal more dangerous than playing it with Juan.

“Besides,” my masked man added, smiling. “Apart from the taking of lives, what else are you good for?”

That hit me in the stomach like a cold fist. “Something, I hope,” I managed to say, and the cards felt clammy in my hands.

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows. “What? Besides shabby little card games, that is.”

The thought echoed.
What
are
you good for?
I asked myself.
Alienating friends? Stumbling through Latin books? Writing piss-poor sonnets?

What indeed.

“Shall we leave it to the next hand?” I said finally, and we turned our cards over in silence.

“Thirty.” Cesare Borgia smiled.

I tossed mine down. “Thirty-one.”

“So?” He collected all the cards. “What’s it to be, little lion man? Will you come and work for me?”

Giulia

I
t is every little girl’s wish to be a poetical inspiration, preferably one which will live through the ages and inspire love in the hearts of men for all time, and jealousy in the hearts of all women. Or at least it was
my
wish when I was a little girl. I had thought my daughter would be pleased to learn she was named for the greatest muse of all, but Laura was disgusted with her namesake.

“She should love Petrarch,” Laura said very firmly.

“She couldn’t,
Lauretta mia
. She was already married.” I retrieved my daughter’s straw hat from where she’d flung it over a rosebush.

“She was mean,” Laura decided.

“Well,
he
should have been more sensible. But try telling that to a poet.” I kissed the top of Laura’s head. “Poets can be quite foolish sometimes. Wait till I tell you about Beatrice and Dante. Beatrice was another great poetical inspiration, you know.”

“Was she nicer?” Laura wanted to know, leaning over to stroke my pet goat, who had gotten quite fat on a country diet and now lay snoring in the grass at our feet.

“Well, Beatrice died. But she was nice even after she died.” I saw the plump form of our household priest approaching, his tonsured head sunburned from the heat that continued to swelter in Carbognano even in September. “You can read all about Beatrice and Dante someday, but it’s got very difficult words for a little girl. Try Leonello’s book instead, and see if you can’t pronounce all the names this time.”

It had been my former bodyguard’s gift to Laura just a month or two before he stormed out: a little book he’d bound together out of good parchment and silk ribbon, copied out in his own hand with simple stories from Homer and Virgil and a variety of Greek myths. “She’ll hate it,” he said, tossing the book rather casually in Laura’s lap. “There are no illustrations, and that child of yours won’t look at anything unless it has pictures of ladies in fine gowns.” But she’d doted on it at once: all those gory old tales of battles and gods, written up in large clear print that she could sound out slowly. At four and a half my daughter was beginning to piece her words together very nicely, and Leonello’s book had sped her along far faster than the pious verses Fra Teseo advised.

Really, priests. Did they sincerely think stupid little platitudes made anyone thirsty to learn? I remembered the texts I’d been given as a child:
Put on the slippers of humility, the shift of decorum, the corset of chastity, the garters of steadfastness, and the pins of patience
. How many times had I dutifully copied out
that
little gem? Since I never did put on the corset of chastity or any of the rest of it, I saw no reason why my daughter shouldn’t practice her reading on Leonello’s less pious but far more interesting
Perseus slew the sea monster with one stroke of his sword, and then he unchained Andromeda from the rock and kissed her.

I ask you. Which would
you
rather read?

Laura hugged her little parchment book. “When is Leo coming back?”

“I don’t know,” I said lightly. “Now, if you read the story of Troy and the great big wooden horse all by yourself—”

“I
like
the big wooden horse!”

“Yes, so read about him while I talk with Fra Teseo, and I’ll let you take the pony out to the lake this afternoon.” I clapped the straw hat back over her little head. “And keep your sun hat on!”

My daughter bent her head over the book, feet swinging again from the stone bench under the shade of the hazel tree. A very old hazel tree, Orsino had told me proudly when he first showed me the
castello
garden. Grown from a nut off the very first hazel tree in Carbognano, if you believed the stories. Carbognano was famous for its hazelnuts; I could eat them by the basketful as I sat under that tree and looked out at the blue surface of Lago di Vico.