“‘In San Saba,’” she read, “‘lie Titus and Vespasian and Volusian.’ This is San Saba?”
“Santa Sabina,” her cardinal replied. “San Saba is across the field. You see the sheep under the pine? That one, that looks like a broken gallows.”
“‘In Santa Prisca is her body, and also the bodies of Aquila and Priscilla, of whom the apostle wrote.’ Which apostle? And isn’t Prisca the same as Priscilla, or are those really two different bodies?”
“Prisca was an early martyr, the one who was set on fire. Or no, they had to wait to execute her until she’d given birth because they couldn’t kill the child too—wasn’t that it?”
“Oh! There’s a sandal, or a piece of a sandal, from St. Peter in Santa Balbina. That’s close?”
“You’ll have me tramping all over this hill. Santa Prisca’s near.”
They left Bernardetto enjoying the chestnuts a pretty girl had sold him for a penny and bypassed Santa Sabina because it wasn’t in Giulia’s guide; no shards of the cross or mummified tongues there.
Up the road, the church of Prisca and Priscilla—or neither or both—looked unkempt. Though the Dominicans in their brown and white seemed well fed, part of the nave was still black from a century-old fire, and the one parishioner in her front pew had fallen asleep. Her snores did not have the soft tones of a sober woman. Only the cloisters retained their charm; some industrious monk had revitalized the garden, and within a boxwood hedge mingled roses and pole beans.
Her cardinal whispered something to the abbot, or was it the friar, and soon a monk came out to the garden carrying a thimble-sized glass of wine. They ought to have more visitors.
“My lady, would you care to see the crypt?” The monk who reached a hand out seemed too young to have settled on this path in life. He had a dusting of fine hairs on his chin and the scent of castor oil about him. He probably rubbed it on his jaw each night.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t the stomach for it.” She put a hand on the sheath of her seed. She could almost smell the sweetness of old decay rising up from the fresh tombs; everything these days smelled stronger—fish had become revolting—but human scents most of all. She’d never noticed how packed bodies were with odor. Sweat, but also the must of scalp and funk of toes and prick of stained urine.
“Oh, the bodies are all safely put away these days,” he said. He cast a look at the abbot, or the friar, who was frowning. “Or the lovely chapels? No? If your ladyship would permit us to offer you a gift worthy of your devotion?”
The whole thing was too silly. “Bless you, Brother. May I just take a rose?”
His cheeks reminded her of Leonor, those porcelain tones. He leaned over the hedge and wrenched a white rose free. “In honor of the Virgin,” he said.
Passing back through the dark nave she caught a chill, a quick centipede of cold up her spine. She was glad she hadn’t agreed to any subterranean tour.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked the young monk as he held open the door of the church for her. The rose was placed in her bosom so its whiteness seemed to bloom from her heart.
After confirming the absence of the cardinal and his master, who were debating the pope’s health by the front gate, the boy leaned into her and whispered, “Bodies are just the buckets. The water’s everywhere.”
Two nights later, the cardinal arrived just as supper was being served—intentionally, she thought—but he declined to come into the dining room.
“I received a parcel from the brotherhood at Santa Prisca,” he said, holding out a small package wrapped in cloth. “They were touched by your visit.”
She shook out the item inside and held it up to the sconce in the front hall. “They encourage me to go fishing?”
“They’ve written an accompanying note. It’s a relic from their collection, belonged to one of the apostles. They’ve offered it to the household of the pope, but that’s custom. They asked for it to be put in your hands.”
She looked at him skeptically.
“You know,” he said. “There’s something about a woman.”
“I’d feel very odd accepting this.”
“Then pretend it’s not from the time of our Lord. It could just be an old fishhook used by a hungry Benedictine back when the Arabs were rampaging through Rome. It hasn’t performed any miracles, if that’s what you’re shy of.”
“Well.” She tried to rub some of the rust off on her shawl. “And you truly won’t eat with us?”
“Edicts to be sealed, shoes to be shined.”
“Jews to be marked, books to be burned.”
The cardinal seemed to bite his own cheeks. “You might let this remind you of your own soul sometimes. As the Lord said to Job, Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?”
“I take it his hook was too small.”
“He is a king over all the children of pride,” Father Lorenzo said, his finger pointed impertinently. “All the children of pride.”
When Allori came back for Maria’s second sitting, to color her in with vermilion and lapis, Giulia hovered outside the door, listening for some evidence of lively conversation. But of course Maria wasn’t clever; their flirtation wouldn’t take the form of talk. She took her book out to the gardens, where the paths led through careful boxed beds and erupting fountains and wound back under a pergola of roses to the west side of the villa and the windows of the sunroom. She examined a page, looked idly at the sky, returned to the book, slid her gaze across the bank of windows as if she were following the uncertain path of a butterfly. But the sun was slicing across the glass, and she couldn’t see in. He might already have her cousin in his arms, his nose fuzzling at her ear, the paints scattered in an arc around them.
She’d only made it through four pages of the Purgatorio before Paola found her: the seamstress was here to finish measuring her for the trousseau, and no, she couldn’t be put off. Giulia didn’t like the way the woman preened over the impending wedding, holding orange silks and rich brown velvets up to Giulia’s gold skin, murmuring, “Won’t the husband like this.”
“You’ll want children,” Leonor had said, attempting to comfort her when the death of Giulia’s senile first husband was immediately followed by the announcement of her second. “If you’re not in love—and you may come to that faster than you think—it’s a small sacrifice for a great boon.”
“The sacrifice being—”
“You can teach them what to do,” the duchess said. “It needn’t always be unpleasant.”
“Or I can adopt a gaggle of abandoned street children, and the work of taming them will consume my hours and entertain Bernardetto.”
Leonor had paused, her hand on her ward’s knee.
Now, as the seamstress pinned the hem up around her ankles and pulled in pleats along the back of her bodice, Giulia intentionally didn’t think of the makeshift studio in the sunroom, or what Allori might say to cajole the rosy-cheeked teenager, or whether he would smudge blue paint across the bridge of her nose to mark her as his own, to which she would respond by holding up her fingers to be pressed to his mouth and—
“A bride in love is a rare thing,” the woman said through the pins in her teeth.
Giulia flinched, and the seamstress smacked her hip as a reminder to stay still.
“It’s a lucky lady. I was widowed too, but couldn’t find no one else to have me. Some men, they like a fresh girl.”
“Some men,” Giulia said, pulling the skirt free from the woman’s grasp, “ought to consider where their own instruments have been.”
The nervous cardinal with his almost-mustache had avoided the past few church tours, but as Giulia strolled down the aisle of Santa Maria del Popolo with her hand trapped in Bernardetto’s elbow, she spotted his twitchy form consulting with a priest by the entrance to the crypt. She jerked her hand free, and though her husband tried to grab for her wrist, she managed to hop past his reach. The cardinal’s eyebrows lifted when he saw her; still pale, he put a foot toward G
iulia before pausing, uncertain of the protocol. She hastened toward him, alternating each of her steps with a skip, scuffling over the sunken tombs of pointy-toed knights, her own sharp heels tapping their soft stone cheeks. The rich are allowed to be childlike.
“Padre Lorenzo!”
He stepped back, as though she might barrel over him, and the other priest scuttled off. “My lady. What do you think of this house?”
Hands on her hips, she looked up and around. “You could never hope to reach the ceiling, which makes you wonder what the point is. What’s the teeny one, the Tempietto? I adore it, it’s like being caught in a cloud.”
“You have a feminine take on the divine, I believe.”
“I think you mean the divine had a feminine take on me,” she said. “Have you spoken to the abbot at Pianoro?”
“He came to the city yesterday, my lady, and I had the fortune to dine with him.”
“Wouldn’t he like to see me?”
“He expressed interest in your proposal; indeed, he thanked God for providing a possible road out of their recent difficulties.”
“Well, it’s not a road so much as—”
“I believe I can convey with confidence that he’d be willing to continue negotiations with your husband, or perhaps the duke.”
The door to the crypt was still ajar, and she had a brief vision of the cardinal’s body tumbling down the stairs, his red cap bouncing off his head as it knocked on each stone step. She perched herself on the end of the pew and fanned her face with the handkerchief she kept in her belt.
“Pardon,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just too much to stand upright.”
He sat beside her, reached out to touch her arm assiduously, pulled back just in time.
She made her eyes extra wide as she turned to face him, those white cheeks of his shaking like a quickset jam. “If you ask my husband or guardian for money for your rural monastery and its barren fields and its debauched monks and its shit-producing coffers, they’ll laugh you out of the pope’s court. There’s not a man alive who sees your province as a bargain. I’m the one with the funds, and I’m the one whose brain is broad enough to come up with a plan to turn your silly abbey into an asset. If you and your brethren aren’t interested, I wish your parishioners luck.”
She was halfway to her husband—undoubtedly trading hunting stories with the older cardinals, who themselves ought to have more important duties than serving as tour guides to idle nobles—when Father Lorenzo came skittering up behind her. His anxiety showed itself in a thin flush along his jaw, below his cheekbones, if he’d been born with any.
“I’ll consult again,” he said. “I’ll take your message. If you’ll forgive me.”
In moments like these, when the backdrop was grand and her muscles were moving and her wit was riding its conquering horse, she felt like the most magnetic woman in the Papal States. And wasn’t she? [You’re swaying me. I find myself at your feet. Child, listen: you won’t find a man worthy of you in heaven—I’ve been there. Let me pave the road of romantic regret with coins. Hold out your hand.]
She held out her hand and he seized it like a glass of wine. The slap of skin on skin echoed, because, as she’d suspected, this cathedral was entirely too large.
Someone had nailed horns over the palace entrance.
Bernardetto sent the valets out with a ladder after dark to pull them down, and when they reappeared in the morning, freshly polished, he called Giulia’s maid into his study and asked what slander she’d been spreading.
“I’ve said nothing,” she blubbered to Giulia as she dressed her for the day.
“You didn’t tell that silver-maned valet of your suspicions—the one you keep winking at?”
“I have no suspicions!”
“Did Bernardetto believe you?”
“I can’t spill a secret you haven’t shared.”
Giulia reached for the bowl Paola now kept on the vanity. She held it in her lap until the wave calmed. “I hadn’t heard of the horns. It’s rather clever, as long as he’s the one shamed.”
Paola rolled a stocking up her lady’s leg, her eyes still wet with fear. “You’re half of a sort of daughter to me, you know that, and I don’t fight only for my own position when I tell you to go kindly with him. You Medici think it’s a farce, but I know of men, and not a hundred thousand ducats can declaw them. If you want to call it a lie and make me leave, I will, and it’ll go easier for you.”
Giulia pulled her feet back and leaned toward the kneeling nursemaid. “If Christ himself swanned down for the second coming, I’d still choose you. That’s my opinion of men.”
Her husband had hired a troupe of performers for the party, and when from her window she saw them processing white-cloaked into the servants’ entrance, she was transfixed by the shortest one’s long brown hair. She couldn’t see their faces beneath their caps, but those waves bobbed and bounced like loose ferrets, brushing across the visitor’s hips, before the palace swallowed them all.
Parties were her strong suit. It wasn’t a matter of enjoying them; she excelled at entertaining, and competence can be its own reward. The duchess had told her, after one vivacious evening, that she needn’t feel she was making up for some deficiency. “What deficiency?” she’d said. But of course the perfect pearls of her teeth distracted from their darker setting, and if she furrowed her brow and listened with unparalleled fascination to the droning guests, they left thinking not of how she looked but of how magnetic they must be, to have so captivated a princess. And laughter was like an egg wash over everything, polishing each ill-timed joke and forgiving every dropped custard and audible belch. Her laugh was loud but as well tuned as a major chord; her companions sometimes heard it like a welcome ghost when the cathedral bells rang for a wedding, or a blacksmith hammered out the trigger for a gun.
The duchess had loaned her a pair of earrings that Giulia had been waiting to wear until she needed to cement a wooing: large opals ringed in gold, with garnets dangling off the ends like cherries on the stem. Neither the Roman women nor the Florentines had fully caught on to the ear fashion that Leonor brought from the Spanish Muslims, and Giulia didn’t want to alarm a man of the cloth with the trappings of an infidel. But look at how they caught the light from the candle and tied it into knots. Jewels like these went on and on. She picked one earring up and shifted it between her fingers, put the cool stone to her cheek, put it in her mouth.
“My lady?” Paola’s head stuck through the open door.
“Mm,” she said, and spat the jewelry into her hand. “None of my skirts are with their bodices. The green one has walked off on its own power. What play are the actors doing?”
“Some comedy, La Mandragola.”
“And there’s a woman?”
“If it happened in July, my lady—”
Paola had apologized five times for the incident at the pharmacy, for the dust-up with Bernardetto, for both her willful ignorance and her sly hints; she was now convinced that proactive steps had become necessary. The time for coyness had passed. She needed to know what the date of misbehavior was.
“Then June wouldn’t’ve had a missing menses, now would it? Where’s the calendar where you keep your snooping? The daily record of my bowels?”
“I would never—”
“If you can’t find my gown, leave my bewitched womb in peace.” Giulia dried the earring off on her petticoat and put the jewels on, shaking her head quickly to make them dance. She would rather be an infidel than not be noticed. The fishhook from the cardinal glimmered among her loose rings. The priests had such a passion for the classical; they’d prefer the relic hail from Caesar than St. Cecilia. And what a plain thing to be considered holy at all. Like the beginnings of a child. Thirty days for a boy, or forty; forty-five days for a girl, or eighty. No doctor had decided when ensoulment struck, because men were moles, blindly digging at a woman’s body. She didn’t feel it as a human—when she covered her belly with her palm she felt no hand re
aching back. But she also knew it wasn’t dropsy, wasn’t a tumor, wasn’t from eating too much fish. So what was it she felt if not something ensouled? [You feel yourself. The thing in you that isn’t un-alive is a limb of yours, pulsing with your own humors, a you that’s ravenous for more of you. What man in robes can tell you when God drops a separate breath inside?]
She wanted a strega to brew her a cup of myrtle or rue. She wanted to be deflated. Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?
Father Lorenzo was a red minnow among the guests, several score of the finest gowns and waistcoats in the city. Necklaces strung across high white bosoms, sleeves brocaded with dancing deer, and the handful of priests with their eyes diplomatically downcast. The palace staff had found additional tables to push together, and a pristine cloth, longer than any single cloth she’d seen, collected them all around the illusion of a single piece of furniture.
“You look like a painted angel.”
She didn’t have to hunt him down after all. She felt like a master physician whose patient was beginning to show signs of the cure.
Giulia raised her hands slightly as she turned, to better expose her waist to admiration. “Aren’t you Christians always saying the body is the true temple?”
“My lady, we rarely say that.”
“Have you had any messages from your abbot?”
“We apologize for our assumptions.”
“I’m accustomed. Does the offer suit him?”
The cardinal smudged his finger around his chin, as if feeling for tiny beard hairs.
“There are legal questions,” he said.
“I can’t hear you over the music.” A quartet had set up in the corner of the foyer, and the violinist with the pocked face was fiddling away like there were ants on his strings. “Did you say you’d like to ask my husband if my Medici money is real?”
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