She left her hands upon the lady’s shoulders for a moment longer, needing to feel that they were united. Everything would change when they returned to Rome, she knew it with a bone-deep certainty.
“I’m to return to Rome,” Bernaldino said. He was not dressed as was his custom, in simple leather doublet and hose. He wore traveling garb and fur-lined cloak, and the dark skin of his face made his eyes shine with golden lights.
“To fight?” As the French neared the city, men had poured from Pesaro, joining the condottiere.
His shoulders lifted. “The other men. The count,” he sneered at the word, “is equipped to see his wife home, if nothing else. This fight is not for me. Word’s come that my father has died, my brother with him.”
“I am sorry.”
He laughed, low in his throat. “I’m not. Whoresons, the lot of them. But there’s land, a house in Jativa.” He looked at her from under his heavy brows. Beneath the golden skin, his jaw clenched. “You could come with me.”
The shock of it made her wish to draw away, but she stopped herself. Bernaldino had taught her to face her fears. “As your wife?” she teased, keeping her tone light. She had grown fond of him during the past year, the kindness he kept carefully concealed.
“Have one of those. And sons besides. But you could be my woman.”
The refusal was already on her lips when he crossed the space between them in the way that only he could move, fast and silent, and her back was pressed against the wall near the window. Betta looked up, seeing his throat, the frayed edge of his shirt and the curls of hair at his chest. His mouth was at her temple. She curled her hands around his arms, meaning to push him away, but they remained there, testing the muscles.
“You’ve thought of it.” His lips painted the words on her skin.
She had. Imagined it, taking a man without pain. At times, she had danced around the edges of another feeling, the longing for Bernaldino’s company, his approval, the need to make him laugh. Those times when she had awoken, trembling in the night, longing for it, for him, even as the idea filled her with fear.
“I have.” Their mouths were close enough to kiss, sharing the same air. His hands found her shoulders, sliding between the cloth to touch the skin beneath. Bernaldino’s hands were rough, as if they had been coated in sand, causing a thousand bumps to appear on her skin.
“I want you. If children come…”
His words were an icy bath to her senses, freeing her from the spell that the words and the touch of his hands had wrought on her mind. The dream which had been forming, a dusty, rocky land with craggy mountains and a rough man with a gentle touch, blew apart. Gently, she freed herself and took a step back.
“There can be no children for me,” she said, reaching up to touch where the lines of his face met his eyes. “Good journey, Bernaldino.”
“Fuck it,” he snapped. He moved, and her back met the wall again, and Bernaldino was surrounding her, thighs pressing her legs open and hands grasping her backside. Lips and whiskers abraded her skin, his tongue spearing between her lips. Heat and summer lightning set fire to her body, softening her muscles until she was content to follow him into the places he lead. The square bodice of her gown was pulled down, and his fingers found her nipple. The growl that escaped him caused echoing heat to wind through her legs, which she tightened around him.
Only… She stiffened, remembering another set of hands, a promise she had made to herself.
“I cannot,” she whispered, lips a whisper apart.
He stopped, every muscle tensed. With a muttered oath, he withdrew, and Betta collapsed back against the wall.
“I’ve half a mind to…” he snarled, scrubbing at his lips with the back of a hand. “You listen to me, girl. When you find the man that made you afraid, you stick him as I showed you, and don’t stop until you can’t move your arm any longer. You kill him, girl, and then you come and find me if ever you change your mind.”
Chapter 40
They huddled together in kitchens near the hearth- Donna Maria, the cellerar, the pot boys and chef shoulder to shoulder, hands clasped beneath wool shirts. Every clash of steel on steel that echoed across the piazza drew them closer together.
Donna Maria felt her lips trembling. With a conscious effort, she pressed them together until her remaining teeth cut into her gums, stopping the quiver. It didn’t matter. The pain was better than weakness. One of her teeth bent as she ground them together; she relaxed her jaw, but her tongue found the spot and began moving it back and forth, testing the strength. Another one that she would lose soon.
She was old. So old, she thought, trying to remember her age. It had been years since she had thought of it. Had she passed her fortieth birthday? Yes, she thought, some years past. It was a goodly age to reach; she was ready to die if it came to that. She had few regrets. There were no children to mourn her passing, only the house that she cared for and the girls that she tried to shelter.
At her elbow, Anna, the youngest of the serving maids, began to cry. Though Maria felt her heart clench, her voice stayed hard. There was no place in a house for sniveling.
“Shut it,” she snapped. “Or I’ll set you out to meet the Swiss myself.”
One of the other girls placed her arm around Anna’s shoulders and hugged her close. Mella, that one’s name was. The serving maids ran together in her memory, countless young faces, fresh, eager, as Maria herself had once been. Mella was rutting with the cellerar, but he was a kind young man and might marry her, so Maria had pretended not to notice the time they spent together in the stables.
“Shhhh,” Mella whispered. “They will not come here.”
“Course they won’t,” Maria agreed, feeling a pounding in her chest as she struggled to her feet. Too fat, she thought to herself. She had allowed herself to get too heavy, where moving was a struggle, just as her mother had done. But her mother had the consolation of a husband and children in her old age, and all she had was a memory, the brief summer of passion. “His Holiness will see this house protected. Mother of his children lives here. He’d not see her blood on the streets.”
“But…” Anna lifted her face from her friend’s shoulder. There was the shattering of glass as something was flung against the windows in the second story of the villa, and Anna’s question grew into a scream as the shouts gained intensity.
It was time, the moment coming quicker than she had thought. “Up, up,” she snapped, shuffling to the door.
“What?” Mella asked, face white.
“Follow me, unless you’d see the child in your belly bleed out on a Swiss cock.”
Mella flinched back as all eyes moved from the shuttered windows of the kitchens to her waistline, which had only begun to round. Maria ignored her, making hurrying motions with her hands.
“Come, come!”
The girls followed her, Mella and Anna, and the two older ones, Tessa, quiet and plain, already planning to leave the household for marriage, and Joanna, who had a face as long as any horse’s but a ripe, full bosom and a voice that was pleasant to the ears. Good girls, hard workers, though she would never say as much to their faces. They trailed in her wake as Maria moved to the stairs.
She concentrated on the task at hand, the dozen stairs leading to the second floor, ignoring the tightness that was sitting like a stone in her chest. Her nails…she glanced at her hand, flat against the stuccoed wall. Blue, as though she had painted them the dark shade.
Her thoughts were becoming muddled. Music sounded in the back of her mind, the sound that Paulo Bracchis had hummed as he left her bed. So many years ago, oceans of time, when the pitfalls of service had been nothing but a warning delivered by an old woman, not the etched stone tablets of her life. She had ignored the dangers of life serving others, seizing instead a brief moment, and she had paid the price. Bracchis had not, but he was gone, as was their son.
Donna Maria stopped and bent double at the waist when she reached the top of the steps. The girls clu
stered around her, whispering like a flock of frightened chickens.
One foot, Maria thought. One foot, and then the other, her slippers taking her to the second door of the passage. She knocked. A minute passed; Clarita opened the door. Wine scent wafted from the room, which was brightly lit by a dozen candles.
Clarita brushed back a lock of hair as she looked at them crowded in the doorway, four girls with frightened faces, and her, struggling to catch her breath. From the chair by the hearth, Vannozza dei Cattanei spoke.
“Will they come?” She stood, form swathed in a gown of crimson and yellow, hair elaborately coiffured beneath the veil. Lately, she had ceased to color her hair, and the dark strands were shot through with grey. The change suited her; without the false golden hair, she seemed kinder, less brittle.
Maria swallowed, forcing herself to draw breath. “Yes,” she wheezed, hand braced on the door. “Soon.”
Signora Vannozza sprang to life. In three quick strides, she crossed the room, stopping in front of the curtained bed. Clarita moved to assist her. Together, they lifted back the coverlets and feather mattress, exposing a shallow area between the ropes that supported the mattress and the shallow floor.
“Here,” she said. “Quickly.”
Another noise came from downstairs, the shattering of wood as the gate that barred the courtyard was broken down. Mella, who had been balking at being confined beneath the bed, wriggled into place, squeezing herself flat between the ropes and making room for the other girls, who quickly followed suit.
“Quiet, now. Not a word or all is lost,” Donna Maria said, laying her finger against her lips before she pulled the mattresses back in place and smoothed out the covers. They should be safe there, she thought. Girls hid in the servant’s chambers or in the cellars when they were attacked, not in the mistress’s rooms, where other riches were closer at hand to tempt the invaders.
As the girls concealed themselves, Vannozza returned to the table by the window where her treasures waited, strings of pearls and gold chains. Clarita brought a box, and they began placing her jewels inside.
Frantic minutes passed as the noises from outside grew louder, shouts, and the breaking of pottery from the other houses around the piazza and louder, the brays of laughter as their gates were forced apart. Maria could hear the stomp of boots on the tiles of the courtyard and a shout cut off as it gained in volume, the voice familiar.
“Sto…”
More noises, covering over the faint cries from beneath the bed. Vannozza and Clarita frantically worked, stacking jewels into locked boxes. Maria hurried to the wall, taking down a painting that had recently been sent to the villa, a scene of the Virgin and Child; the Virgin’s curling blonde hair and wide eyes were a near match for the Lady Lucrezia.
Vannozza nodded as Maria wrapped the painting in cloth. She began speaking very fast, trying to fill the silence. “Cesare sent it to me last month. He had purchased it years before, but the sight of it has begun to make him sad. He and Lucrezia have quarreled, I think, and she...”
Glass shattered on the first floor of the villa; the women worked faster, tossing gowns and veils about into a dizzying pile of velvet and wool.
“It pleases me that she is safe…” Vannozza said, closing her eyes for a moment as her lips moved in silent prayer.
Maria nodded, thinking of Betta, who was more daughter than cousin, safe in Pesaro with the Lady Lucrezia. That she was far from danger was some consolation, enough to put her mind at ease; the girl had been through enough. Saints and angels forgive her, she should have done more to help her. Few regrets marred her memories, but that was one. What that bastard son of a whore had done to her cousin’s child had been plain to see, even without the words crossing the child’s lips. She had known it, all the neighborhood had known it, but Maria had told herself that it was none of her concern, and done nothing. Coward, she berated herself, remembering her cousin’s face. Once, Constanza had been like a sister to her, and she had failed her daughter.
The door flew open, and Maria could not restrain a scream. Three men crowded the passage, all enormous, the largest men that she had ever seen, tall, blond-haired giants clad in bright uniforms with shiny breastplates covering chests the size of barrels.
Two held back, allowing the third man to step into the room. Sweeping off the cap on his head, he bowed low and then smiled as he straightened, showing teeth that were uneven but startlingly white. He spoke, words in the French tongue that Maria could not understand. Vannozza could, it seemed, for she stepped forward, the jeweled ornaments falling from her hands as though they were copper, of no account.
“I am Vannozza dei Cattanei,” she said, voice unafraid. “Mother of His Holiness’s children. Leave this house at once.”
The other two men stepped into the room behind their leader. The stench of them was overwhelming in the enclosed space, blood and sweat and metal. Maria shrank back from the hardness in their eyes, the deep red stains on the long weapons at their sides. These men had killed and would not hesitate to do so again.
The leader bowed again and laughed, a mocking sound. When he spoke, his heavily accented voice chewed the words, turning the Roman into something crude, like their own tongue. “The pope’s whore.” His eyes ran down Vannozza’s form, the scarlet and gold gown, the jewels on her fingers and at her throat. “Not La Bella. The other. The old whore. I am the captain, we claim all that you have in the name of the king of France, to fund his crusade.”
Vannozza lifted her chin. “Whore to a pope, and mother of his children. Now leave here, I am under his protection.”
“The Pope.” A scar ran the length of the man’s cheeks, Maria saw. The light threw strange shadows on it as he turned his head, taking in the rich hangings, the gold and jewels still littering the table. “The pope is in the Castel San’Angelo like the sniveling dog that he is. My king rules from Palazzo San Marco. He has said the city is ours.”
“For now.” There was no fear in Vannozza’s voice. “Take what you will. I can hear your men below. But know this; all that you steal will be repaid in blood.”
“Blood?” At the word, the captain smiled. “I like blood.” He stepped forward. The top of her head reached only to the center of her chest. He looked at her up and down, lingering on the swell of her breasts. “I’d another before, or I’d show you blood.” Still smiling, he lashed out with the back of his hand, catching Vannozza across the face with a crack that sent her stumbling back across the bed. Clarita rushed to her mistress, shielding her from attack with her body while pulling down skirts and linen, trying to preserve her modesty.
The Swiss captain looked to the other men. He nodded at the table and the boxes of jewels and ornaments. The men immediately began gathering them up. Turning, the captain found Donna Maria, his eyes sweeping her up and down.
He spoke another word in his strange language, only to repeat it in Roman. “House woman. Show me the coins, and the girls for my men.”
Maria made sure to keep her eyes from straying to the bed. “All the gold was sent to the banks weeks ago,” she lied. “And there are no girls here! They fled hours before!”
Her expression must have revealed falsehood; with a sneer, the blond giant whipped out a mailed fist, catching Maria in the eye. There was no pain, Maria thought, falling to the floor and feeling the crack as her head hit the tiles. Only a pressure, and something wet on her cheeks. Blinking, she tried to clear the fluid, but was only able to open one eye a slit. Her fingers left the floor which had rushed up to greet her and found the place where a gaping hole had been left in her face. An eye. The plate on the captain’s glove had taken her eye.
There was a dull ache, a sense of loss. The things her eye had seen, they were vanishing from her mind: the games she had played, when she had been the loveliest girl in the neighborhood, the way that Paulo Bracchis had looked at her, thirteen though she looked older, sent to keep house under another mistress; the light in her son’s eyes, light that had only last
ed a few months, and then to see it gone when she had found him in his cradle one morning, as cold and blue as one of the ornaments on Signora Vannozza’s gowns. Lights, so many lights, they crowded around her, welcoming. Sinking into that light…she wanted it, to find her sweet angel son again, but there was work to be done. Maria took a breath and fought against the descending warmth.
Other men had entered the room, half a dozen, and they were pawing through the treasures that Vannozza dei Cattani had collected during her lifetime- the gold brooches, the pearls, even the painting with the likeness of her daughter watched them as they were hauled away. Her mistress was screaming at them, hair coming down from the veil, but Maria could not hear. There was a buzzing in her ears, like bees.
Finally, only the Captain was left. He looked from her, still a pile on the floor, to Vannozza and Clarita, standing next to the bed, arms around one another. He walked closer, hands outstretched, and Clarita’s mouth opened wide in a scream. Another punch sent her back on the bed in a tumble of wool and linen underskirts until Vannozza stood alone, lifting her chin.
A knife appeared in the man’s hand. Vannozza nodded, shoulders slumping, and reached into her bodice. From the tight band of cut velvet encircling her breasts, she withdrew something the size of her palm. The light caught it. A silver-bound book.
It was at that moment that the fog which had enclosed Maria’s ears passed. As though from very far away, there was an annoyed grunt.
“A psalter?” With a sniff, he tossed it into the brazier and stalked from the room. The door was left open, allowing them to hear the noise which continued unabated from the villa, the shouts and mutterings, the breaking of glass and the tossing of chairs and credenzas as the remaining rooms were searched for valuables. When the last man disappeared from view, Clarita rushed forward, seizing a poker and flinging the smoking book from the coals. Though it had only been exposed to the flames for a minute, the damage was severe. The once bright illuminations were charred and ruined.
Servant to the Borgia Page 24