by Kate Quinn
I strolled off, humming a jaunty tune through my mask, and lost myself speedily in the crowd. Only when I was sure I’d outstripped his drunken gaze did I double back through the loggia.
“He won’t forget that,” Carmelina whispered in the shadows.
“Nor will he forget those legs of yours.” I whistled at the endless dappled length of her. “Whatever prompted you into a nunnery, Suora Carmelina? You could wear silk hose every day and command any price you liked as a courtesan.”
“I think I’ll leave the courtesan’s life to Madonna Giulia.” The exotic long-legged giraffe snorted, stripping off her mask and turning into the sharp-edged Venetian cook again. “I’m going back to my kitchens, thank you. At least if Juan Borgia comes sniffing around me there, I’ve got plenty of knives to fend him off.”
“Wise decision.”
Carmelina hesitated, looking down at me in the shadows. “Why did you help me? With the Duke of Gandia, I mean. You don’t like me.”
“And you don’t like me,” I returned.
“You haven’t told my secret,” she said. “What I am.”
“Because secrets are power,” I said airily. “The more people know your secrets, the less power I have over you. And what if I decide I want something from you someday? After seeing you in that doublet, I admit I have a few ideas—”
The hesitant friendliness in her face disappeared. “Don’t be vile,” she snapped, and stamped off in the direction of the servants’ stairs.
I whistled soundlessly, watching those splendid legs all the way down the loggia. Carmelina Mangano really was wasted in skirts.
Carmelina
My father had been a proper bastard, God rest his soul, but he was right. Servants shouldn’t mix with their masters. I hadn’t even been at that wretched masquerade the length of a sermon! I wasn’t sure what was worse: that I’d had to fend off the Duke of Gandia, or that I’d needed that ghastly dwarf’s help to do so. Give me my kitchens any day, where I was mistress of all I surveyed with my very own patron saint and plenty of quaking underlings.
It was all Madonna Giulia’s fault. Why couldn’t she have dressed me as a blackbird or a cat? Why did I have to be the one in men’s hose? “You should never wear anything else!” she’d said admiringly, and somehow everything sounded like a good idea when it came out in that rich laughing voice of hers. I suppose it wasn’t really her fault—I didn’t have to listen, after all; I could have put my foot down and refused to put on the hose. Not to mention the absurdly high boots that boosted me near as tall as Bartolomeo. “No, Carmelina, you are not too tall,” Madonna Giulia had argued when I protested the boots. “The key to beauty is to turn what should be a fault into an asset. Don’t think of yourself as too tall—think of yourself as built like a goddess! Cultivate a good haughty stalk in those boots, and men will trip over themselves for the privilege of gazing up at you!”
I couldn’t do anything about the boots now; they were tight as a second skin and I imagined I’d have to do a good deal of hopping and cursing in the privacy of my chamber to peel them off, no doubt with the hand of Santa Marta snickering at me, if a severed hand could be said to snicker. But I paused in a crook of the stairs to the kitchens and shook my hair down from the high-piled arrangement of curls that Madonna Giulia had insisted made my neck look longer, and scrubbed at the smoky stuff she’d had me line about my eyes as well. The arrogant kitchen cat prowled past, and I swear the notch-eared bastard was laughing at me. Santa Marta save me if any of the scullions saw me in this ridiculous ensemble; I’d never hear the end of it! Fortunately the kitchens were at full boil, trotting out one tray of dainties after another, and everyone would be far too busy to notice if I slipped through the storerooms to my own chamber. I’d be back in my apron to supervise the spun-sugar bulls and unicorns in no time.
“Little cousin?”
I yelped and whirled. My cousin Marco stood half through the doors leading to the outside courtyard, staring at me. I hadn’t seen my cousin once since giving him Madonna Giulia’s money. He’d been far too busy to visit me once the Duke of Gandia returned to Rome, too busy feeding the endless stream of soldiers, toadies, and whores Juan Borgia brought to his palazzo on a nightly basis for debauches that went till dawn. But now here he was: Marco, standing here looking at me after months, and why in the name of all that was holy did he have to turn up tonight?
I had a fleeting urge to clap my giraffe mask back on. If I’d been wearing the mask he might not have known me—in my outlandish male finery, in the dim light of the back passage, maybe he’d assume I was some noble guest who’d gotten lost. Perhaps one of Sancha of Aragon’s notorious Neapolitan ladies-in-waiting, sneaking off to some dark corner to meet a lover. But no, my mask dangled from my hand and Marco’s eyes had gone huge at the sight of me.
I attacked first. “What are you doing here? If you’ve come for more money, you might as well go home. I’m in the middle of a banquet, and I’ve no time for your wheedling. Or your threats.”
“I’ve a night to myself with the Duke of Gandia going out for once instead of entertaining,” he began automatically. “His guardsmen invited me along in the entourage; we all know each other now after all the zara games we’ve played. Thought I’d slip down, see everyone . . .” Cadge a few delicacies too, no doubt, and the odd coin anyone might feel like lending him. Marco trailed off, and his eyes flickered over me. “What are you wearing?”
I groaned. “Will you just get out of my way, Marco? So I can get to my chamber and take off what I’m wearing?”
The same frank admiration I’d seen in Leonello’s eyes now filled Marco’s. “I’ll help you take it off.”
“Oh, be serious.” I looked over my shoulder toward the hum of commotion from the kitchens. So far it seemed no one had missed me. I’d told everyone I felt ill, needed a breath of air. “Keep the mouths shut and the hands moving until I’m back!” I’d said in conclusion, or started to say, but in the end I slipped out without saying it. It was a phrase I’d stopped using since Bartolomeo had said those same words to me, but murmured against my lips.
“Who knew you’d look so well dressed as a man?” Marco caught me around the waist. “Not my usual tastes, but just this once—”
“Marco, let go of me. I’d rather sleep with a Tiber eel, don’t you dare—”
But his lips dove down on mine. “You’re beautiful,” he murmured. I tried to evade his kisses, and he pulled me against him with a heat he hadn’t shown for me in a long time. That heat had been pleasant enough, but when compared to the passion with which my apprentice had seized me . . . “Did I ever tell you you’re beautiful?” Marco said wetly into my neck.
“No, because I’m not.” I gave his hand a sharp smack as it tried to find its way inside my doublet. “Sweet Santa Marta, what is wrong with you men? I put a pair of hose on and you all go insane! Marco—”
“Signorina,” a distinctly cold voice called. “That idiot Ottaviano’s gone and broken the horn clean off the sugar unicorn. I’ll repair it with a little egg white.” A hesitation, and diffidence crept into the voice. “Are you still feeling ill, or—”
Then that voice broke off like it had been cut with a knife.
I groaned, feeling the urge to thump my head repeatedly against the wall. Preferably until I achieved unconsciousness. “Bartolomeo,” I said, closing my eyes. “Go. Away.”
“Egg white, yes.” Marco sounded offhand, breezy. “That should patch your sugar subtleties for you. I can lend a hand if you like; I’ve a night free from my own kitchens!”
Bartolomeo ignored him, frozen in the act of scrubbing his big hands on his apron as he stared at us, at Marco’s arm still slung around my hip. It was the first time he’d looked me in the eye since the night we—well, that night. I saw the same dark flush spread slowly up from the collar of his shirt until his freckles disappeared. “So,” he said in a strange flat voice. “You don’t care after all if a man can cook or not, do you? Or if he’s a fo
ol. As long as he’s got curls and a smile. As long as he’s not a boy.”
I could feel myself blushing. “Bartolomeo—”
He took off his apron, balled it up, and flung it at my feet. “I quit.”
“You can’t!” I wrenched away from Marco’s arm at my waist. “Bartolomeo, we’re in the middle of a feast—”
“Bugger that. Someone else can fix the damned unicorn’s horn.” Bartolomeo looked at Marco contemptuously. “Hire him back, if you want another apprentice. Egg white and a small brush should do it, Marco. If you even remember how to cook, after all the wine and the cards.”
“See here, boy,” Marco began, glaring, and Bartolomeo hit him so fast I almost didn’t see it. He was as tall as Marco now, and even stronger with all the hauling of barrels and carcasses that was an apprentice’s lot. The muscles bunched under the freckled skin of his arm as his fist exploded into Marco’s jaw. Then my cousin was flat on his back on the flagstones, blood dripping from his lip, and I heard screaming and wondered if it was me. But it wasn’t me, it came from upstairs. Even Bartolomeo, hauling Marco up by the collar and preparing to wallop him again, paused to jerk his eyes upward in puzzlement at the shouting now drifting down from the gardens.
I groaned, stealing Bartolomeo’s favorite expression. “Santa Marta bung me with a spoon!”
He turned away from Marco, who was muttering and gingerly feeling at his lip, and toward me. “Carmelina—”
“None of that!” I jabbed a finger into Bartolomeo’s chest. “Help my cousin up and for God’s sake stop hitting him. We will discuss your position here later!”
His voice was low and steely. “If you think I’m going to watch you drape yourself all over that bungling ham-handed ass after you kicked me out of my own bed like a stray dog—”
“Later, Bartolomeo!” I left Marco groaning against the wall and my apprentice eyeing him with balled fists. The shouts coming from the garden had redoubled, if anything—could something have caught fire? Those torches dotted all about the garden . . . I ran back toward the stairs for a quick look, slipping the giraffe mask over my face again. My hose and boots were indecent, but I had to admit they were far easier to run in than skirts and clogs.
There was already a clot of servants clustered at the narrow servants’ entrance, where the servers had been whisking the platters in and out of the garden all night. “What happened?” I heard someone say, shouting to be heard over the commotion in the garden, and someone else yelled, “It’s the Duke of Gandia!”
I should have gone back to my kitchens to sort out the mess that had erupted, but I could see over everyone’s heads in my tall boots, and the sight of a tiger and a bear rolling on the grass made me hesitate. Bestial grunts came from beneath their masks as they swung and clawed at each other, and for a moment I wondered if I was imagining things. Had I come outside at all? Surely it was Bartolomeo holding down the bear and administering great hammer blows back and forth with his fist; surely it was Marco leaking blood through the mouth of his mask. But then I recognized the tiger—the tight striped doublet, the mask flying off to land in the crushed grass—and I heard Juan Borgia’s drunken howl as he shouted something foul in Catalan. The watching crowd howled back, half of them cheering, half of them swearing, and with the strange effect of the mask’s limiting eye holes, I thought for a moment that all those beast masks had become beast heads in truth, beast heads resting on sumptuous brocade doublets and velvet bodices. They froze me to the spot in horror.
Sancha of Aragon was watching with lips parted below her fox muzzle, dress dragged off her shoulder and one nipple showing darkly above the fox-fur trim of her bodice as she shouted for Juan to finish him off, finish him off! A cardinal in a horse’s long-nosed mask was whinnying drunkenly, laughing and calling for more wine. I saw Madonna Giulia on the very fringe, trying to call for order, but Leonello dropped his lion mask into her hands and swept her behind him, lion’s eyes flickering in all directions.
“Enough!” someone roared in a bull’s bellow. The strange bestial roaring died away, not slowly, as heads turned toward the masked bull with the curved horns. The Duke of Gandia and his opponent were the last to pull apart, rising with a final mutual snarl, panting and heaving. “Brawling before our guests!” the Pope shouted at his son, and descended to a rattle of furious Spanish.
“Your Holiness!” Juan cut him off, swaying in the grass. Glassy-eyed drunk; I could see it—drunker than when he had fumbled at my hip. “Do you know what he called me? The offense could not be borne!”
His opponent snarled, clawing off his bear mask. I recognized him—one of Ascanio Sforza’s party and a friend of Lucrezia’s husband; a young lordling who had once sent down a compliment for my salted ox tongue. “You said a pig’s mask would suit me better than a bear,” he spat at Juan. “Called me a lounging glutton!”
“And he insulted my birth!” Juan roared to his father. “Insulted my lady mother, called me a bastard!”
“We are,” Cesare Borgia noted dryly from one side. Juan Borgia’s elaborate tiger doublet was torn and dirty now, his face smeared with blood, but his brother in the glittering serpent mask was chill and immaculate as new ice.
“I will not hear my name insulted,” Juan howled, and I half-expected him to fling himself on the ground like a screaming child. “Your Holiness, I demand justice!”
The figure in the bull mask stood still, arms crossed over a burly chest. I wished I could see his face, but the bull’s muzzle gave nothing away.
The Count of Pesaro shouldered forward, square-faced and earnest beside his exquisite peacock of a wife, giving his friend in the bear mask a reassuring clap on the arm. “Your Holiness, surely we can blame this quarrel on the wine. My friend will be more than happy to apologize for any offense—”
“Of course, Your Holiness,” the young lordling said, starting to look nervous, but the Pope ignored them both utterly and gave one careless gesture to the guards.
“Hang him.”
No bestial howl this time; only silence. The young lord with his silly bear mask stood frozen. He only began to struggle when the guards seized hold of him. “Your Holiness! I never—I didn’t—”
“Your Holiness,” Lord Sforza began.
“I will not hear my children insulted,” said the bull, and then the shouting broke out again. Some pushing to see, some pushing to move away, Juan standing with his head thrown back and triumph in his eyes. I saw Madonna Giulia threading swiftly to the bull’s side, speaking in tones too soft to hear, but he only swatted her away. The young lord was screaming as they called for rope, a length of rope, and for a moment of sickened hope I prayed there was no rope. But someone found rope, of course they did, and the guards looped it about the young man’s throat.
“You’re mad!” the Count of Pesaro wailed. “You’re all mad, you bloody Borgias—”
“Then leave us,” Cesare Borgia said carelessly. “We have no need of you, Sforza. Not now.” And putting his serpent’s arm about Lucrezia’s shoulders, he walked her away as guardsmen tossed the free end of the rope up to the high rail of the loggia overhead, and the bear-headed lordling just shrieked.
I did not watch him hang. I turned away, half blind in my mask, and pushed through the crowd back to the servants’ door. I tore off my giraffe’s face, feeling the gorge rise in my throat. “What’s happened?” Marco greeted me, holding a wad of cloth to his bleeding lip, but I shoved past him and fled to my tiny chamber, ripping the dappled hose and doublet away with shaking fingers. The next day it was whispered everywhere in Rome that the masquerade had continued its merriment after the man hanged—that the Pope and his concubine trod a happy basse-danse under the jerking boots. Lies, all lies. The guests trailed out uncertainly, hiding their masks under their cloaks like shameful things. Giulia turned away from her bull before he could approach her, fleeing upstairs, and her brother Cardinal Farnese barred the Pope from following. I saw her later at the window of her chamber, still clutching Leo
nello’s lion mask, looking ghastly sick as she stared out over the city.
No one ate my sugar subtleties. The spun-sugar unicorn, the swan and the peacock, the bull with its molded horns I had painstakingly applied with gold leaf; none of them were even carried up to the garden. I stood down in the kitchens long after the stewards and undercooks and the rest of my uneasy scullions had gone to bed, staring at the sugar unicorn. Its horn still lay broken off beside its prancing gilded hooves; no one had mended it with egg white and a brush, and that was when I realized Bartolomeo was gone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A greedy youth, self-important, proud, vicious, and irrational.
—A CONTEMPORARY’S DESCRIPTION OF JUAN BORGIA
Giulia
Everyone dislikes their mother-in-law, and at the beginning of my marriage, I was no exception.
Adriana da Mila had brokered the arrangement between Orsino and the Pope—the arrangement that had turned her son’s wife into the Borgia concubine—and as a bewildered new bride I had found that very hard indeed to swallow. Complain all you like about your mother-in-law; mine was a procuress.
But that old bitterness had softened since our mutual stint of captivity with the French. There’s nothing like shared terror to bring about camaraderie. Adriana had been most courageous in the way she’d helped me calm the maids and tend Leonello’s wounds. And she did absolutely adore my daughter, even if Laura wasn’t really (except in name) her granddaughter. A mother can forgive a great deal of someone who loves her child, after all, and I was no exception. So I wasn’t pleased at all when I came upon my mother-in-law, sitting with her face crumpled in deep lines of bewildered hurt.
“Adriana?” I had just returned from confession when I saw a stream of maids passing in and out of her private chambers with armloads of gowns and shoes and linens. “Adriana, are you leaving for a journey?” Properly speaking, I should have addressed her formally as was customary for a dutiful daughter-in-law, but we had been through too much to be anything but equals.