by Kate Quinn
I could see Juan’s profile, wax-pale in the light of the torches held over his bier, and his still face had a beauty that stabbed me. A beauty it had never had in life, when any good looks he possessed were gilded by arrogance and vanity and fatuous pride. I could not help but wonder if he could ever have looked as pure and peaceful in life as he did on his bier.
Maybe if he had not been born a Borgia, I thought, and shivered.
Nine knife wounds, to the limbs and body and throat. Nine, and the money not even taken from his pouch. A purse full of gold ducats, far more than a laboring man could earn in a year. Whoever had killed him . . .
“My carriage is arranged for dawn?” I checked with the stewards when I arrived back at the Palazzo Santa Maria. “Good. Can you send Leonello to me, please?” He hadn’t accompanied me to the Vatican to wait with Rodrigo; he often didn’t, as there were papal guards there to see to my protection. But he always came bounding up as soon as I returned to the palazzo, tapping his latest book against the outside of his leg, one finger marking the page where he’d left off—and tonight, I didn’t see him. “I want to speak with him at once,” I said, and suppressed a shudder. If I could speak the terrible suspicions that lurked somewhere in the base of my throat.
“There’ll be no speaking to Messer Leonello tonight, Madonna Giulia.” The steward lowered his voice. “Dead drunk, he is. Staggered in an hour ago, and he’s still sleeping it off. Not like him, is it?”
“No,” I said, and went to my chamber where I lay down fully clothed and spent another sleepless night contemplating unspeakable things.
Carmelina
In a cook’s world, and indeed with much of the world, the day divides itself sensibly: that is to say, around meals. The morning, for market and preparation and planning the day’s menus. When the noon sun climbs, it’s the bustle of pranzo that marks the change. Then cena, marking the sun’s descent, then the scouring and cleaning of the kitchen, at which point the day is at an end.
For a nun, life is governed by bells. Bells at midnight, then at dawn, then regularly through the day, interrupting you the moment you get into a decent rhythm of work, all the way to Vespers and Compline after sunset when all you can do is look at the broken intervals of the day and the utter lack of any properly completed tasks, and stagger off to bed to do it all again in the morning. And the next morning, and the next and the next and the next, because a nun has nothing to look forward to for the rest of her life but bells.
At least I could ignore the bells now. I was no lay sister anymore who had to lay down my ladle and go hastening off to prayers. I had been brought to serve the Countess of Pesaro, who had a suite of rooms in the gatehouse and certainly required to be served. She did not have to attend prayers and neither did I; I could just keep chopping away in the kitchens as the lay sisters straightened veils and wimples and fluttered away like magpies. But the bells got into my head anyway, the placid silvery rhythm reverberating about the inside of my skull, and I don’t know how many times I bent over the chopping block once I was blessedly alone and clapped my hands over my ears, trying to persuade myself that the walls were not moving in on me, they were not. “I’m going mad,” I told Santa Marta, whose hand I once more carried about in a pouch beneath my skirt, because in a convent there was no bloody privacy. “Only ten days here, and I’m already going mad.”
Her gold ring seemed to gleam at me in sympathy.
At least you’re safe here, I told myself firmly—and that at least was true. No matter how many times I woke with a shudder as I imagined Juan Borgia’s hands flinging me down on my own trestle table, I knew he would not find me here. The Convent of San Sisto was a worldly place—half the young choir nuns who giggled with Lucrezia and tried on her lip rouge were no more devoted to serving God than any bored girl who spends Mass making eyes at all the men. But even at a convent like this where the rules were lax and the prioress inclined to be indulgent when her richer-dowered novices wore silk petticoats and lilac scent, men were not allowed to stay. The Pope himself had sent a few guards to hammer on the convent gates a few days after Lucrezia arrived, being a trifle irate that his daughter had flounced off to a convent without asking his august permission first, and they had been firmly turned away like any unwanted suitor. So I had no fear that Juan would appear in these kitchens with his leer and his breath that smelled like wine and blood. Even if he came to see his sister, he would be allowed only a brief visit with her in her borrowed sala. He would certainly not be allowed to roam about the convent looking for a conquest—should it even occur to him to come looking for me at all. I was safe.
Still, safety was starting to seem a high price to pay for such maddening tedium. I had managed the vast kitchens of an even more vast palazzo, with dozens of people under my direct command and dozens more hopping to the sound of my voice—and now I had a drafty gloomy kitchen with a cistern that leaked, a hearth that smoked, and no hands to help prepare cena but my own (one of those hands still throbbing too much to be useful). In the Palazzo Santa Maria I had enjoyed a chamber all to myself, even if a small one—and now I shared an even smaller cell in the gatehouse with Pantisilea, who didn’t have any men to sneak off and seduce so I could have the room to myself. Working for Madonna Giulia I had served banquets to hundreds, and the most illustrious guests in Rome, too—and now I had only a few dishes to prepare each day, whatever struck the young Countess of Pesaro’s fancy.
“You could always whip off a few tourtes if you’re feeling bored,” one of the other lay sisters said hopefully. “The choir nuns, they’re all mad for anything sweet. You should see the frenzy whenever anyone gets any good sugar for a crostata—”
“No,” I said, and they didn’t press me. The lay sisters stayed well out of my way; I had full run of the dank little kitchen and no one talked to me while I was in it, which suited me very well indeed. But after a week I could have used someone to talk to. Madonna Giulia swinging her little slippered feet at my table and giving her golden peal of a laugh, maybe. Or Bartolomeo. I could have asked him whether he had tried making those fried tubers again for that Neapolitan lord, Vittorio Capece. Or I could have asked him what he had thought when I told him I was a nun . . . if he thought anything at all. If he had any sense, he’d banish all thoughts of me from mind and move his affections to a girl he could actually marry.
Still, I was thankful he’d freed me from having to prepare cena that last night at the Palazzo Santa Maria. I’d slept so very long and well—nowadays all my nights were interrupted by bells.
I’d worked myself into such a fit of the sulks by the time Sunday approached, I paid no attention to the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels that sent all the nuns flocking to see who approached the gatehouse. Who cared if the nuns had travelers begging a night’s stay, or if the Countess of Pesaro had summoned some vivacious friend like the Tart of Aragon or that self-important Caterina Gonzaga to lighten her growing boredom? I wouldn’t be able to cook anything for them; nothing decent, anyway. “Call this olive oil?” I muttered, and dumped a vicious dram of it into the bowl.
“Is there balm in Gilead, Signorina Cuoca?” a familiar voice said from the door. “Or at least balm for a small man’s aching head?”
I dropped my ladle into the bowl in surprise. “Leonello?” Spinning about. “What are you doing here?”
“Madonna Giulia has come to call upon the Countess of Pesaro, with some rather somber news. Where my lady goeth—” He shrugged, leaning up against the door frame to the small courtyard.
A pimply young lay sister whom I’d set to whipping egg whites stared covertly at him over her bowl, and Leonello stared back at her until she looked away. “Shoo,” he said, and flapped a hand at her. “Or I’ll eat you.” She fled with a squeak, and so did the sturdy, boot-faced woman whom I’d never once seen parted from the ever-simmering community stew since I arrived.
“There,” said Leonello, swinging inside. “Alone at last.”
I laughed, surveyin
g him. He pulled a rickety chair over to the trestle table and hopped up, feet swinging as insouciantly as always, but his face looked sunken and grained, and his black cap was tilted well forward over his eyes. “Are you suffering from the effects of too much wine?”
“This morning I was vomiting from the effects of too much wine.” He removed his cap with care, stubby fingers gingerly massaging through his dark hair. “Mere suffering seems a great improvement.”
“Chilled lemon water,” I said briskly. “Nothing like it for a sore head. Not that they have lemons here, or even water that I’d care to serve my guests. So—” I uncorked a jar with a cross carved into it. “Communion wine.”
“Stealing from this convent too, now?” Leonello winced at the thump of the jar on the table as I put it before him.
“I robbed a reliquary from my last convent,” I said after making absolutely certain the two lay sisters weren’t eavesdropping outside in the courtyard. “You think I would balk at communion wine?”
Leonello managed a grin. “Can you possibly be bantering with me, Suora Carmelina? You haven’t spoken a word to me in years except to scratch and spit.”
“Any man who comes to my rescue with knives drawn must be viewed in a better light,” I informed him. “Even if he does know every secret I have.”
He studied me. “I would not have told, you know. I did like to torture you with it now and then, but as for truly giving you away?” A shrug. “Even I am not so cruel as that.”
I looked at him, my little adversary sitting with elbows propped on the trestle table and his chair tilted back on two legs, hazel eyes serious under cocked black brows. He looked small and wry and unexpectedly kind, not at all as sinister as I’d first found him. And though he was far beneath my eye level as usual, his broad-chested, big-headed little figure in its plain black had more quiet authority than Juan Borgia ever had in his most swaggering finery.
“I am sorry, you know,” I told him, and didn’t mind the apology. “That I was so prickly with you, and for so long. I misjudged you.”
“Most people do. You at least did not misjudge me as a drooling idiot or some fool in motley. For that”—raising his cup—“I thank you.”
I gave him an answering grin, wondering if we might have cleared the distrust away for good, and retrieved my ladle and bowl. “So?” I asked as he drank an abstemious mouthful from his jug. “What brings Madonna Giulia here? And why aren’t you with her instead of putting your feet up in my kitchen?”
“She has gone to see the Countess of Pesaro in private.” Leonello tilted the jug, looking down into it. “To tell her, in fact, that her brother is dead.”
I stopped stirring, feeling my mouth grow dry all at once. “Which brother?”
Leonello looked at me straight. “Juan.”
I dropped my ladle for the second time as I made a grab for the edge of the table to steady myself.
“Sit down, dear lady.” Leonello pushed a stool out for me with one booted foot, and by the time I was seated with a cup of that thin communion wine in my own hands, he’d outlined the bare and brutal details of the Duke of Gandia’s death.
“Stabbed nine times?” I shivered. “Someone wanted him very dead.”
“They did,” Leonello said.
I eyed him. “Any ideas who . . .”
“Take your pick of enemies. Rome is swarming with rumors.” Leonello waved a hand. “The Orsini, for his attacks on their lands? The Sforza, for the slight done to the soon-to-be-annulled Count of Pesaro? The Count of Pesaro himself, to punish His Holiness for this attempted annulment?”
“Leonello—”
“Or perhaps we must look closer inside the family. There was no love lost between Juan and Cesare, as all Rome knows. Or Juan and Joffre, who could perhaps have been more angry than we all thought about Juan bedding his wife.” Leonello looked thoughtful. “Though if Joffre is that angry to be cuckolded, he’ll have to wipe out Cesare next, which would be considerably more difficult. And after Cesare, the whole papal guard, most of the palace pages, and everyone else to whom Sancha of Aragon has given her kisses and her greedy little hands. Even myself.”
“You? And the Tart of Aragon?” Even with my head still reeling from the news, I couldn’t help but make a face. “I thought you had better taste.”
“Fortunately for me, her taste runs to the exotic. Even as far as the deformed and short-statured.” Leonello waved the Tart of Aragon away with one hand. “Back to Juan. There are, of course, all those outraged husbands and fathers out for his blood, the ones who had to console weeping wives and despoiled daughters. Count Antonio Maria della Mirandola, most recently, whose daughter surrendered her virginity most unwillingly. Who knows how many more like her have vengeful relatives?” Leonello gave a long innocent blink. “So, how are we ever to know who killed our good Duke of Gandia?”
I eyed him back in silence. Maybe he was as sinister as I’d first thought, at that. “How indeed.”
We looked at each other.
The Duke of Gandia is dead, I thought, and felt a bubble of violent relief swelling in my chest. Probably a sinful bubble, but there was no stopping its rise. I felt like laughing, or weeping, or maybe both. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Another death will sober you rather more, I think.” Leonello nursed another small sip of communion wine. “Your cousin, Marco Santini. He was serving as Juan’s squire that night. He was not killed in the initial attack, but he was wounded and knocked unconscious. It seems he was dragged to a nearby house and tended there, but he died without waking.”
Sweet Santa Marta. Marco too? My eyes flew open; I gaped a moment, and Leonello looked at me inscrutably. I put the heels of my hands to my face to hide from his gaze. Marco.
Marco dead.
Ever since the attack in the wine cellar, rage had festered in my belly toward my cousin—a flinty, straightforward fury; almost comforting. But now I felt rage muddling together with shock, with disjointed memories of the boy who had first captured my heart when I was twelve with his easy smile and broad shoulders. I thought of the amiable gambler I’d tousled and chivvied out of wine shops and zara games, the shame-faced fool who thought nothing of leaving a wedding banquet in midpreparations just to put a bet on a bullfight, the man whose bed I’d sometimes shared when he felt like celebrating a win at the cards . . .
My cousin, who had given me to Juan Borgia because he owed money, or because I had taken his place in the kitchens, or both. Maybe Marco hadn’t really guessed what the Duke of Gandia would do to me, but I was sure he’d been careful not to think about that part. Marco didn’t like to think about ugly things. He’d just screwed his eyes firmly shut, lured me into the trap, and told himself nothing ugly would possibly happen.
I made myself take my hands down from my eyes, because unlike my cousin, I could look at things when they were ugly. “Marco and the Duke of Gandia, Leonello?”
Madonna Giulia’s bodyguard sipped calmly, not deigning to answer me. I didn’t know what to think, whether to rejoice at the end of Juan Borgia’s life or say a prayer for the end of Marco’s. Is this the price? some part of me wondered. Juan Borgia dies, but so does a foolish, laughing man who used to share my bed? I sat feeling very cold in the hot kitchen, breathing shallowly through my nose and trying to keep my head from flying into pieces, as the dwarf opposite me swirled his wine thoughtfully in its cup.
“You know, I’ve never seen you drink more than a cup of wine at a time, Leonello.” I managed to speak around the confused choke of emotions in my throat. “Much less get reeling drunk.”
“Sometimes even I feel the need for oblivion.” He tilted a shoulder. “It was a bad business, Carmelina.”
“The Duke of Gandia—did he—”
“When there is a viper loose,” Leonello said in a neutral voice, “you can run all you like evading the fangs. But sooner or later, someone will have to risk the fangs and kill the viper.”
“True,” I said faintly. “All the same—pl
ease don’t tell me any more.” If I heard any more, I was going to be sick.
“Ask Bartolomeo for details, then,” Leonello said. “When you are ready.”
“You involved Bartolomeo?” I shot to my feet.
“I thought you didn’t want details.” Leonello blinked innocently.
“You odious little man, I will hate you all over again if Bartolomeo came to any harm!” Sweet Santa Marta, if he was caught and executed for this, it would be all my fault. Was God so jealous of His brides that I was a curse to any man who laid hands on me? I’d bedded three men since taking my vows: Marco, who was dead; Cesare Borgia, who said he was the Devil and was surely damned to hellfire—and then, Bartolomeo. Who had become embroiled in God knew what dark business, and all because of me.
“Calm yourself,” said Leonello, seeing my face. “He’s unhurt. Though probably even more hungover than I am. He knew I was accompanying Madonna Giulia to the convent today and made me promise to seek you out. I was to tell you—let’s see—” Leonello cast his eyes up to the ceiling. I folded my arms, glowering, heart pounding. “Ah, yes. He’s taken a position as undercook in the household of Vittorio Capece of Bozzuto. That Neapolitan lordling who collects paintings and pretty page boys.”
“I knew that already. That’s all Bartolomeo said?”
“There was a great deal more in the way of flowery protestations,” Leonello said. “I shall not embarrass you by repeating it all verbatim. He adores you, he will write to you until you can leave here, he would wait for you forever—”