The Lion and the Rose (42 page)

“They sent me,” I found myself saying.

She looked at me. “You?”

“And Michelotto. This is his sort of work, usually.” My first real errand, since donning Cesare Borgia’s livery. “Cardinal Borgia sent us to Pesaro, five nights ago. Very quietly. We had a letter in his hand for Lord Sforza, urging that the documents be signed, but the letter wasn’t the point.”

“What was?” Carmelina asked.

“We were to persuade him what would happen if he did not yield.”

“And?”

“And we did.”

It had been very quick work, really. All that riding, all the aches in my legs from the saddle, and the whole business itself done in a matter of heartbeats. We were on the way back to Rome almost before the sweat had time to cool on our horses.

“How did you persuade him?” Carmelina’s voice was quiet.

“Lord Sforza was in his
sala
—none of his captains there for once, just a page-boy with his wine and his letters. The page . . .” I shrugged. “It isn’t important.”

“It isn’t?”

Michelotto eviscerated him
, I almost said.
Dropped the boy’s guts onto his shoes in one stroke of the knife. Then broke his neck and slammed the letter on the table in one motion, all before either the page or Lord Sforza could scream.
And then Michelotto had looked at me with his empty stone-colored eyes, and I’d known what he wanted. Known it the way a snake knows the moment to strike its prey; the moment when the eyes go wide and white the way Lord Sforza’s eyes looked. And I’d taken the dagger out of my belt and slammed it through Sforza’s hand, through the letter and into the table.

Dio.
I hadn’t even meant to do it.

I—

I suppose Juan Borgia thought that too, when he shoved a knife through Anna’s palm.

Carmelina pushed a stray curl back behind her ear with one hand. The scarred hand, which looked like it had healed, but had left a mark the color of a man’s liver. I’d seen the page’s liver, Lord Sforza’s page, when his guts spread themselves on the floor.

Michelotto had given me a nod as I yanked my knife back up. Approval, almost, though it was hard to tell from a man so blank and colorless.

I’d looked over my shoulder at Giovanni Sforza as we left the study. A man of thirty or so, handsome enough with his fashionable beard and less-fashionable doublet, wax-pale and staring at the letter under his spread hand, spotted with his own blood. I looked at him, and he met my eyes. “You don’t want her,” I said. “You don’t want any part of that family.”

He’d still been staring as we shut the door. I don’t know how he covered the scene, after. Perhaps he claimed he caught the page thieving; no one would bat an eye if a lord killed a servant caught dipping in the gold. It was the sort of decisive gesture men-at-arms appreciated. Everyone liked a ferocious lord.

But Lord Sforza was not ferocious at all. Just a man from the country, a man who liked soldiers and horses and simple things, a man who must have had some sincere affection for his little Borgia wife if he had fought so stubbornly to keep her. Not a ferocious man, not like Michelotto, not like Cesare Borgia. Not like me.

“Good,” Michelotto said to me on the way back to Rome. He had a voice with no rise and fall whatsoever, a voice like a sheet of metal. “You did well, little man.”

“Will he sign?”

Michelotto did not dignify that with a response. But we heard the next day that witnesses were gathered in Pesaro to watch as Giovanni Sforza, Count of Pesaro, signed the documents stating that he had never laid a finger on Lucrezia Borgia due to his own overpowering impotence.

“Good,” Cesare said, brisk as Michelotto, and asked no more.

“Don’t you wish to know how we did it?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“Why?” The young Cardinal looked surprised. “If one leaves a task to subordinates, one trusts they are capable of handling it. I don’t employ anyone unless they are capable. You did your task, the documents were signed, and there’s an end to it.” He tossed a purse each to Michelotto and me. “Good work.”

It
was
good work. He had been right about me. This was the work I was made for.

If only my head didn’t ache.

I wished Carmelina would not
look
at me like that, with her suspicious black eyes and the accusing red eye of the scar on the back of her hand staring at me, too. I might have been tempted to put my head on her shoulder and ask her to rub my throbbing temples. But she looked at me that way because she knew what kind of work I could do, the things I was so good at. Unlike Giulia, who had looked so happy to see me when we saw each other in the Sala del Pappagallo. I lied when I said I’d retreated too quickly to read her face. I could read her face in a glance. She’d been glad to see me, lips trembling to speak, and I had no desire to hear anything she had to say.

Oh, but my head ached.

“Have you seen Bartolomeo lately?” Carmelina yanked a bulb of garlic out of the half-frozen ground. Her voice was light, conversational, and I remembered speaking to her in just as soothing a tone when she had been clutching her bleeding hand in the wine cellar and trembling like a horse about to bolt. Did I look like a horse about to bolt? “Bartolomeo writes to me. Mostly just recipes, of course. Perfectly ordinary letters—”

“Of course,” I said. “Because you’re blushing, and recipes make you blush like poetry.”

More light words, coming out in white puffs on the cold air. Any words I could find to replace the images in my head—until Pantisilea came out into the gardens in a flat run, skirts flying about her knees and her face pale as bone.

“Carmelina,” she gasped. “Carmelina, he’s calling for us, he’s calling for us both, he’s gone mad—”

“Who’s gone mad?” Carmelina rose, basket of herbs over one arm.

“Cardinal
Borgia
!” Pantisilea wailed, just like the little countess. “He found out, Madonna Lucrezia tried so hard, but she felt sick again and had to run to the basin. He saw how she looks under all those blankets and cushions, he
saw
—”

“Saw what?” I began to say, but Carmelina dropped her basket on the ground and sprinted after Pantisilea to the gatehouse where the Pope’s daughter was ensconced.

Perhaps Cesare Borgia had been shouting before, but he was deadly hushed now as he summoned the two maidservants inside the chamber. I crept on the outsides of my boot soles along the stairs, barely breathing, because when he spoke in just that hue of quiet I did not want to be caught eavesdropping.

“Who was it?” he said in his near whisper. “Who was it, sister? If that swaggering bravo Perotto dared seduce you—”

“Of course not!” The little Countess of Pesaro was hiccuping and gasping and sobbing all at once; I could hear that very clearly down the stairwell. “I’m not a
whore
, Cesare, I didn’t have a lover, it was my
husband
!”

“We warned you,” he snapped. “Father warned you to keep out of Sforza’s bed, and so did I. Warned. You.”

“And I
did
! I
did
, but he came to see me and I—”

“Here? He was allowed in
here
, after all my instructions to the prioress?”

“No, no, it was just before I came here to the convent. He came alone from Pesaro in the night, very privately. He was on horseback and he brought me a poem like he did in the old days. He wanted one last chance to talk. Sancha has a pavilion on the Tiber she uses for meeting—well, you, for one. She lent it to me so I could meet Giovanni in secret. It was
romantic
!” Lucrezia wailed. “There was a
moon
! I felt
sorry
for him!”

“You should have given him your pity with your knees shut. You think his testimony of impotence will carry any weight when you’re six months gone with his brat?”

That just fetched a fresh storm of weeping, which neatly covered my startled huff of breath on the stairs. Lucrezia Borgia, heavy with her husband’s child when they were trying to prove nonconsummation of the marriage? Oh,
Dio
.

Cesare’s deadly quiet voice continued. “Who else knows?”

More tears from Lucrezia, and I thought I heard Pantisilea begin to blubber as well, but Carmelina spoke steadily enough. “Three, Eminence. Pantisilea and I have tended all Madonna Lucrezia’s needs—she has stayed in bed, none of the sisters here know—”

“Three. You two, and who else? Perotto?”

“I had to tell
someone
!” Lucrezia hiccuped. “I was in
agony
, and he was so kind—”

“Three,” Cesare cut her off. “Good. Perhaps it may be handled yet. You, Pantisilea or whatever your name is, cease your whimpering and fetch wine. You, cook; I remember you. Food, whatever will keep my sister strong, but not much of it. Keep her slim. She is not to leave these chambers, and no one is to see her but you two and Perotto. He will handle her errands outside these walls as they need doing, and you will serve her within. And if any of you breathe one word of the Countess’s condition, to the nuns or to any other, I will have your throats slit. Now, get out.” Carmelina and Pantisilea flew from the room as though flung from a cannon, faces white as they hurtled down the stairs without even seeing me.

Careful
, I wanted to say to Carmelina.
Oh, be careful, Signorina Cuoca, this is not a secret you want.
But from the flash of her set, terrified face as she passed me, I did not think she needed the warning.

Inside the chamber, Cesare Borgia had lapsed back into Catalan. “’Crezia,” he said. “’Crezia
mia
, stop weeping. Your speech for the hearing; we will practice it again. Dry your eyes
.
”

“I can’t appear before the cardinals like this!” Lucrezia shrieked.

“Of course you can.” I heard a yelp and a rustle of bedclothes—it sounded like the Cardinal was dragging the little Countess out of bed. “Look at yourself in the glass—it will all be concealed easily enough. A dress with a high waist and a heavy skirt, a furred cloak. It’s deep winter; no one will question it.”

“They’ll see—”

“They’ll see what they are
told
to see: my pretty sister swaddled against the cold. Now, your speech . . .”

Cesare Borgia came from the room an hour later with a brow blacker than midnight, slapping his embroidered riding gloves against his hand, and by that point I was installed well below, making the passing sisters in their black and white flow around me as I sat on my stool over a copy of Pliny’s
Naturalis Historia
. “Did you hear?” my new master said without preamble. “Did you hear, little lion man?”

“Hear what?” I asked, chin in hand over my book. “Pliny claims amber will take on a charge when it is rubbed, did you know that? I shall have to test it out.”

I do not know if Cesare Borgia believed me, any more than I knew if he suspected my stubby hands were covered in his brother’s blood. But he said nothing more of it, and a few weeks later I stood in the Vatican with his retinue, craning my neck to see in the crowd of curious ambassadors and prelates as Lucrezia Borgia was brought from the Convent of San Sisto by sealed coach to give her testimony before the canonical judges. It was just days before Christmas, the breath puffing white in the air even inside the sealed chamber, and Lucrezia stood well-wrapped in her heavy winter velvets and enveloping sable cloak. She flushed prettily as she was called to speak, her sweet grave face a little fuller than usual, giving her the look of an angelic child. She spoke in solemn, perfect Latin (like a Cicero, they gushed afterward), and she testified that her lord husband had not bedded her once in three years of marriage, and she was thus
virgo intacta
.

How Rome rocked with laughter.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lucrezia . . . daughter, wife, and daughter-in-law of Alexander VI.

—SCURRILOUS ELEGY ABOUT LUCREZIA BORGIA

Carmelina

I
was used to blood. I could cut a pig’s throat in one double slice, and scrape the blood off my hands afterward without a thought. I’d killed woolly little lambs and big-eared baby goats for my table without a drop of sentimentality. Man’s work, and perhaps that was the trouble. A woman’s work of breeding babies and bearing them, well, that had passed me by.

Lucrezia Borgia was screaming, bleeding, writhing in her birthing bed, and she terrified me.

“Oh, Jesu, it hurts!” Her matted hair stuck to her sweating face, she clung to Pantisilea’s white-knuckled hand, and she was sobbing and praying around her gulps for breath. “Where is Cesare, he said he’d be with me—” She lapsed into Catalan for a few whimpering seconds, and then into Latin.
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum—”

“We should fetch the prioress,” Pantisilea said nervously.

“What do you think a nun would know about any of this?” I exploded. “We do what Cardinal Borgia said. We sent Perotto for the midwife; now we wait.” I had no idea what else to do. My own mother had borne only my sister and me; I’d not helped with the birth of a dozen more little brothers and sisters as so many daughters did. And when my mother went to assist at a friend or neighbor’s childbed, well, I’d been so unnerved at all the screaming that I’d always volunteered to heat water in the kitchens or run back and forth for cloths—anything that would keep me out of the way. Now I was beginning to wish I’d stayed and watched at a few more of those childbeds.

“It all began so fast—” Pantisilea bit her lip. One moment our mistress had been lying in bed as usual, eating a plate of my burnt-sugar stars and reading the Avernus sonnets again, though mostly she leafed through them while complaining that Perotto never looked at her now that she was fat and ugly. And Pantisilea had been reassuring her that of course she was not fat, which was even true because for such a slim little thing, Lucrezia Borgia didn’t show her pregnancy near as much as she might have. A stroke of luck for her Vatican appearance, that had been. Even now at nine months it was only her face that looked any fatter, and frankly that was from too many burnt-sugar stars. But Pantisilea and I still had to spend a great deal of time assuring her that she was not at all fat or ugly, of course she wasn’t—

But this afternoon she had interrupted our reassurances with a cry, and there had been a rush of water across the sheets, and now the whole bed was soaked through. Not just from water but from sweat, and from blood.

“Benedicta tu in mulieribus—”
She broke off in another cry, and I felt a stab of pity for my little mistress. I hadn’t much liked her, not since she had immured me up here just because she didn’t feel like eating convent food—I’d have given everything I had to turn my back on her and leave these walls forever. But seeing her writhing in that fouled bed, so swollen and young . . .

“Bite on the sheets,
madonna
,” I encouraged. “We must keep you quiet; remember what His Eminence said.” Though how Cesare Borgia thought we were going to keep the nuns from knowing their illustrious guest was giving birth in the gatehouse, sweet Santa Marta knew.

Another long and grueling hour passed before the midwife arrived. A plump little woman with a basket over her arm, hustled along by a white-faced Perotto. “No need to hurry me, young man,” she clucked. “First babies never come quickly, plenty of time yet, and you did say this was a first—ah, yes, we’re well in time.” A pat to Lucrezia’s sweating forehead. “Best get you up out of that bed, my dear, up and walking. Lean on the maid, that’s it—and if the other maid can fetch us hot water, and perhaps a store of cool wet cloths for her face—”

“I’ll go,” I said, abandoning Pantisilea, who gave me a dirty look as she helped the midwife haul Lucrezia Borgia gasping out of bed. Perotto had already fled the scene, lucky man.

Lucrezia’s voice trailed after me toward the stairs, half shriek and half whine: “I don’t
want
to get out of bed and walk! I don’t
want
to, I’m telling my
brother
—”

“Sweet Santa Marta,” I muttered. “Let me never have a child.” If I couldn’t have been born a man, at least make me barren. I flew down the steps, away from the sound of the midwife’s cajoling, and I nearly fell over the convent’s prioress.

“Pardon, Mother Prioress—” I curtsied hastily.

“There appeared to be some disturbance in the gatehouse,” she said in her smooth voice that whispered of being reared in a
palazzo
somewhere herself, just as her gliding steps whispered of silk shifts under her black convent skirts. “Is our honored guest quite well?”

“She has fallen on the stairs.” I trotted out the lie Cesare Borgia had prepared for us all. “It seems her arm is broken. We sent Messer Perotto for a wise-woman to tend her.”

“Our infirmarian here could have seen to her—”

“Cardinal Borgia will have none but the best physicians tend his sister.” A little head bob of apology. “It seems this woman is versed in the setting of bones. I imagine it will be painful, however—please do not be disturbed if you should hear our mistress cry out.”

“Of course,” the prioress said smoothly, and I could see not a ripple on her face. Well, if she suspected anything, who was to say otherwise? And where would a nun even take her suspicions? Besides, I would have laid good odds that these walls had seen babies born before. Nuns break their vows too, after all, and erring wives retire behind convent walls in sudden fits of piety when they need to wait out inconveniently swollen bellies in private. I didn’t think this elegant prioress would blink at one single thing that was going on in Madonna Lucrezia’s chamber right now.

“If you will excuse me, I am to fetch cloths for my mistress—” I took myself down to the kitchens in my ugly black habit that was too short, and flew back up with the wetted cloths. I was back and forth for hours with possets, reels of thread, more cloths, until the sun began its fall and a cold blue twilight fell over the convent.

That was when the gatehouse heard the angry cry of a newborn child.

“Put the little mite to the breast quickly, if you wish to stop those wails.” The midwife was already packing the soiled linens, the vials of herbal potions, the tools she had brought with her in her capacious basket. “I’ve administered a sleeping draught,” she told me. “Your mistress will sleep for a time. It’s best if she feeds the child herself the first few days, but do try to arrange a wet nurse out in the country as soon as the babe can travel. City air isn’t good for infants.”

I realized that after all these long hours the midwife had not asked any of our names or volunteered her own. She did not seem curious about the exhausted Lucrezia lying half swooned in the bed, or the tiny collection of swaddled, reddened limbs in the basket of linens that had been padded and prepared as a makeshift cradle. The midwife merely bestowed a twinkling smile on us all, collected a purse from Perotto, and disappeared as swiftly as she had come. A midwife who can be discreet will make herself a good living. There are always women who find a child inconvenient, usually silly girls who have managed to lose their virtue to a poet when they were supposed to be saving it for a husband. A speedy birth in a convent and a quiet payment to a midwife who can keep her mouth shut, no names of course, and everything restored to normal afterward with no one’s reputation the worse—I should not have been surprised Cesare Borgia would know how to arrange such a thing.

“What was it?” I asked Pantisilea as we trailed exhaustedly down the steps toward the convent courtyard. Lucrezia was sleeping sound under the midwife’s draught, and the baby appeared to be sleeping too in her arm. At least for the moment, and both of us lunged to get out of the chamber’s stuffy confines.

“What was what?” Pantisilea yawned.

“The child. Boy or girl?”

“You know, I don’t know. I didn’t even look.”

Whichever it was, Lord Sforza had an heir. Not that he’d ever know it, drinking bitterly in Pesaro with his manhood publicly in shreds. I took a moment to wonder what would happen to the child, if it would be sent away soon into the countryside with a wet-nurse as the midwife had suggested, or perhaps passed off as some minor sprig on another branch of the voluminous Borgia tree. I knew better than to ask.

The moon was just starting to rise, white as frost against a twilight sky. We lingered in the emptying courtyard, watching the nuns in their black and white hurry inside at the sound of the Vespers bell. I took another gulp of the fresh air, savoring the cold after the stifling chamber with its smells of blood and birth. I had a new letter from Bartolomeo, and it had the usual news about how he had packed a hamper yesterday for Madonna Giulia when she took her daughter to see a snake charmer in the Piazza Navona, and how he had really begun work upon his recipe compendium now, beginning with a section on meatless dishes since it would be Lent soon. The same sort of letter he usually wrote, but he had begun it simply
Carmelina
and not the formal
Signorina
, and I wanted to think about that, think about it and study my name as it looked in his neat back-slanting hand—but the last of the nuns disappeared inside to their prayers and soon it would be dark, and Madonna Lucrezia would be needing us.

“We should go in,” I said to Pantisilea. “As soon as that child wakes crying she’ll wake too, and she’ll be wanting warm wine and cold compresses and Santa Marta knows what else.”

“My mother birthed six children, and she never howled as much as Madonna Lucrezia did squeezing out the one,” Pantisilea groaned, and we were both laughing when hoofbeats sounded.

“My sister,” Cesare Borgia rapped out from the back of his horse, almost before it had pulled up in a clatter of hooves. Pantisilea squeaked a little at the sight of the tall dark horse and its tall dark rider, but I stepped forward.

“She is well,” I said, and no more than that. He nodded approval; this was a public place after all, even if the nuns had all gone to Vespers.

“I will remove my sister at once. She will rest tonight at the Vatican, with all the comfort she needs.”

“She’s too weak to be moved,” I began, but the young Cardinal cut me off with a twitch of one black-gloved finger.

“I have a horse-drawn litter prepared for her.” I could see it trundling into the courtyard with the rest of his men, a great cushioned thing as wide and soft as a bed. “The distance is short, and the Holy Father is eager to see her.”

And perhaps his grandchild, I thought. Not to mention that once out of the convent, that grandchild could be hidden safely away. Anyone’s child at all, certainly not the child of the Pope’s daughter with her reborn virginity.

I nodded. “We will see her things packed.”

“We shall send for them later. I want my sister away tonight.” Cesare Borgia had brought a small entourage; just the horse-drawn litter and a few guardsmen behind on horseback. His most trusted men, no doubt. “You two prepare to leave as well,” he added. “You may ride with my men.”

I felt my heart leap at that. I had Santa Marta in her usual pouch at my waist, and Bartolomeo’s letters—anything else in the convent, I did not care if I ever saw again. A pair of dresses too worn for decency, a few shifts, and a kitchen whose inadequate ovens I would never need to curse again.

“Where is Perotto?” Cardinal Borgia asked, glancing about.

Pantisilea was already accepting a hand up onto the horse of one of the guardsmen. “Scampered as soon as the noise began. Men always do, at a birth.” She swung her leg over the saddle in front of the guard, looking over her shoulder to twinkle a smile at him. “Well now, how are
you
?”

“Pity about Perotto. Well, I shall catch him later.” Cesare made a gesture, and the guardsman sitting behind Pantisilea calmly drew a dagger and stabbed her. I saw the blade only as a needle-flash of weak moonlight, but it found its way between two of Pantisilea’s bony ribs and she gave a noiseless gasp. Her body jerked, but the guard had his arm hard about her waist and he stabbed her again. Once. Twice. Three times.

There was very little blood. Just the desperate stiffness of her body draining away. She slumped over the saddle, silly Pantisilea who had kept me up so many nights this past year with her prattle about all her lovers. Silly Pantisilea slumped dead over the pommel, and the guardsman pulled her back against him, methodically arranging her head until she looked like a woman who had fallen asleep in the saddle.

“Put her in the river, Michelotto,” Cesare Borgia said disinterestedly. “Find the midwife too, and arrange an accident. Something innocuous. That trick with the falling roof tiles, perhaps.”

He was swinging out of his saddle now, moving toward me. I backed away, feeling panic freeze in my throat—another Borgia coming toward me, this one much harder to kill than Juan, and Leonello wasn’t here this time to save me with his knives and his wit. Or even Bartolomeo with his skillet. Oh, Bartolomeo—