by Kate Quinn
I could feel my cheeks heating. “He told you all that?”
“He was very drunk at that point, I admit. He came to me troubled in his soul, you see, because he did not regret our actions, and thus feared he could not repent as one is supposed to after the doing of evil. As I was the only murderer and evildoer he knew, he wanted to find out how one made the proper atonement. An odd mix of purity and practicality, that boy . . . he needed reassurance, and even more badly he needed wine, so I broached a cask and gave him a little practical advice about how exactly one confesses the more serious sins to one’s priest without giving away the details that get one caught. Sins like, say, accidentally killing a clumsy lout despite doing everything possible to save him.”
My heart squeezed. Oh, Bartolomeo—“How could you drag him into this? He’s just a boy—”
“He’s no boy.” Leonello’s tone brooked no argument. “He’s a man grown, Carmelina. And he’s done nothing he need feel remorse for.”
Easy for Leonello to say, with his conscience as flexible as a snake and as impervious as burnished steel. Bartolomeo and his finely tuned sense of wrongdoing were another matter entirely. “He’ll never forgive himself,” I said into my hands. “Sweet Santa Marta, I wish he’d never met me.”
“Do you?” Another arched eyebrow.
“I’m sure he does, too! What if he’s caught and hanged because of me?” Dread pooled sickly in my stomach, replacing all my stunned shock. I could not even imagine the vengeance the Pope would unleash on anyone with a hand in the death of his favorite son. “Bartolomeo should take himself away to Naples or Milan, and as soon as possible. He can just as easily build a career outside Rome.” Just as easily, and far more safely.
I looked up at Leonello and I couldn’t help a shiver, meeting his calm, unrepentant gaze. I didn’t see him fleeing to Naples or Milan—he’d see this terrible business out to the end, whatever the cost. “Thank you,” I said. “I am grateful, you know. Even if it had to come at such a price.”
“I hate gratitude,” Leonello said, and tilted his head upward as the bells began to ring overhead, calling the nuns to Terce. “Unless it’s the kind of gratitude that offers itself up naked across my bed, but you clearly like your bedmates quite a bit taller and younger than myself.”
I felt too worn even to muster a glare. Instead, I leaned across the trestle table, and I touched my lips to his broad forehead. Leonello grinned and rose, and I hoped he wouldn’t be damned to hellfire for this unholy business. He didn’t seem to care one way or another, but I found that I cared. I crossed myself, shivering again, and he made a dusting-off motion of his hands as if to push my prayers and my sympathies away.
“Now,” he said, clearly done discussing vengeance, guilt, and all the rest of it. “Shall we go to Madonna Giulia, then, and tell her you will be accompanying us back to the palazzo?”
Back to the Palazzo Santa Maria, back to my kitchens, back anywhere I wanted. Juan Borgia was no longer anywhere in this world to threaten me. “Home,” I said, and the first faint stirrings of hope rose in me. Home.
“Yes,” Leonello agreed. “I’m sure the Countess of Pesaro will be far too busy weeping for her brother to put up a fuss over your leaving.”
Madonna Lucrezia was not weeping, however. She was screaming.
* * *
The little suite of rooms in the gatehouse for illustrious travelers would have been luxurious enough sanctuary for the Countess of Pesaro all by themselves, but she had brought her own little comforts as well. Silver combs and basins for the washing of her hair, little ivory pots of rouge and hair potions, three elaborately carved and painted chests containing all the gowns and shoes and linens deemed necessary to her retreat, her own fragile Venetian goblets and majolica plates, a pearl-inlaid lute so she could practice her music . . . Just today when I brought the Countess of Pesaro her midday pranzo of pastry pasticcetti stuffed with milk-fed veal, her little sala had been a bower of silks and laughter and bunches of flowers as she read aloud from Ficino’s De Amore while Pantisilea dressed her hair. “Stupid Ficino, I’m tired of him,” Lucrezia had been complaining. “I hear there’s to be another book of sonnets from Avernus to his Aurora, but who knows when I shall get them . . .”
Now as I edged into the sala wishing I could hide behind Leonello, the bower’s peace had shattered right along with the bowl of fresh violets and lilies that now lay smashed on the floor. Cushions had been torn off the wall benches, books lay facedown on the floor, and Lucrezia Borgia’s hair stood out wildly in all directions as she sobbed in the middle of her bed.
“Lucrezia mia,” Madonna Giulia was saying vainly, trying to put her arms about the young Countess. “Don’t flail and gasp like that, you’ll make yourself ill—”
“What do you know?” Lucrezia struck her away, gasping. “Have you lost a brother you loved?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.” I thought I heard just a touch of asperity in La Bella’s normally sweet voice. “My brother Angelo, remember?”
“To a fever! You lost him to a fever, not to a murderer!” Lucrezia buried her face in a velvet cushion with another howl.
“Weeping will not bring him back. Juan is at rest now.” Giulia stroked her back, and I looked down at the bandage that still swathed my hand and made cooking so awkward and difficult. The wound beneath it was either itchy or painful in unbearable turns, and I hoped Juan Borgia was burning in the flames of hell. If I was bound for the inferno myself for all my sins, and I probably was, I hoped the Devil would let me give the Pope’s son a turn or two on his own personal spit above the infernal flames. I’d sauce him down with hot oil myself, just to hear him shriek.
“Who would dare lay a hand on him?” Lucrezia was shrieking now. “Who would dare? My father will find them, he’ll hunt them down and then Cesare will kill them all—”
I couldn’t help a glance at Leonello, who was looking nonchalantly at the ceiling.
“I’m sure the killers will be brought to justice,” Giulia soothed.
But Lucrezia Borgia would not be soothed.
“It’s my husband, I know it is! My lord Sforza, he’s furious with Father about our marriage being annulled; he wanted to hurt us any way he could. He had Juan killed, he murdered my brother—”
“Now really, Lucrezia—” Giulia gave Leonello a hopeless look as Lucrezia struck her away again.
“If my husband had a hand in it, he’ll be sorry,” the Countess of Pesaro was shrieking now. “Cesare won’t wait for any annulment, he’ll make me a widow, and for my next wedding—” She collapsed in a wail again, perhaps remembering that Juan had escorted her at her first wedding. Though a distinctly uncharitable part of me wondered if there wasn’t a sliver of Lucrezia Borgia that enjoyed the chance to lay aside the gracious dignity required of a pope’s daughter, and have herself a good wallow.
“Should we return later?” I whispered to Leonello, but he gave his cynical shrug.
“Why not enjoy the show? Dio, one wonders how she’d carry on if a brother she actually liked was killed. Did she forget how Juan used to tease her till she cried about the spots on her chin, and how her feet were growing faster than her breasts, and how her first betrothals ended because no true nobleman could bring himself to wed a churchman’s bastard?”
Leonello spoke softly, but perhaps Lucrezia Borgia heard him over her own weeping and Giulia’s soothing murmurs, because she lifted her head from its tangled thicket of hair and fixed her swollen, red-rimmed eyes on the dwarf.
“Where were you when my brother was killed?” she demanded. “You’re bodyguard to our household, why didn’t you ride at my brother’s back with your knives when he needed a squire?”
“I am bodyguard to Madonna Giulia,” Leonello corrected, imperturbable. “The Duke of Gandia may have needed a guard, but my services were already required elsewhere.”
“Don’t you smirk at me!” Lucrezia cried, even though his face was entirely bland. “You never liked Juan. That lit
tle joke once where he told you to join the other dwarves in the mummer’s show—”
“I merely informed the Duke of Gandia that I do not tumble.”
“—and even if you had been at his back, I don’t suppose you’d have bothered to save him! Anything for La Bella, you’d walk on fire for La Bella, but when it’s my brother—”
“Lucrezia,” Giulia said firmly. “That is enough. There is no reason—”
“Oh, but every man is in love with Giulia.” There was a passing flash of spite in Lucrezia’s reddened eyes. “Even the family dwarf. It’s as plain as the nose on his face; I saw it when he kissed her before he jumped down into the bullring—”
I felt Leonello go rigid at my side, and glanced at him.
“—My brother died, all because Leonello couldn’t bear to leave his precious Giulia even for an hour, and—and—” The little Countess’s chin quivered. “Oh, Juan!” She went off into another gale of weeping.
“Lucrezia, don’t be absurd!” Giulia exclaimed with a little smile. “Leonello certainly doesn’t—”
My eyes flicked down to her little bodyguard. I had never seen his face anything but guarded, quizzical, sometimes amused—but for one horrified instant all his defenses were gone.
Giulia looked puzzled, gazing at him as Lucrezia bawled into a cushion. “Leonello?”
Leonello’s gaze touched her for just a split second, touched her and then leaped away again like a drop of water leaping off a hot stove. His usual cool mask blinked back into place half a heartbeat later, but the agony in that one split-second glance sent a ribbon of ice crawling down my spine. I felt a great swell of pity.
Perhaps there were worse things, when it came to matters of the heart, than falling into the arms of your seven-years-younger apprentice after eating too many fried tubers.
“Madonna Giulia,” I heard myself saying as Lucrezia continued her oblivious wailing and Leonello stood expressionless and blank-eyed as a statue. “Perhaps Messer Leonello and I may be excused? We don’t wish to intrude . . .”
Leonello was gone the moment Giulia nodded, giving a wooden bow and disappearing through the door. I heard his boots retreating down the stone steps, almost running, and Giulia looked after him as if she wanted to follow.
“Don’t,” I heard myself saying. “Madonna Giulia . . . I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
“Very well.” She sank back down onto the bed beside Lucrezia, who was now weeping more softly, and my mistress’s face was now stricken as well as puzzled as I bowed out. It took another hour to calm the Countess of Pesaro. I waited in the passage outside with a hovering Pantisilea, gnawing my thumbnail, Leonello nowhere in sight, until at last Madonna Lucrezia’s voice called for her maids again.
“You can’t stay, Giulia?” the little Countess was asking as we tiptoed back through the doors. Lucrezia sat up and wiped her face, limp and spent and more or less calm, her momentary flash of spite forgotten. “I’m going to weep all night if I don’t have someone to comfort me.”
“So will your father, if I’m not there.” Gently but firmly, Madonna Giulia disengaged her clinging hands. “I really must go back to the palazzo, Lucrezia—I shouldn’t have left them all, but I didn’t want you to hear the news from a stranger, and neither did Cesare.”
“Very well.” Lucrezia heaved a gusty sigh. “Pantisilea, fetch some rosewater compresses for my eyes. Carmelina, you go get me a plate of something—I don’t care what. Oranges, maybe. They were Juan’s favorite.” Her chin began to tremble again.
I opened my mouth, but Giulia was ahead of me without needing to be asked. “I’m going to take Carmelina back with me,” my mistress said. “She’ll be badly needed back at the palazzo in all the fuss that’s coming.”
“Oh, but I need her here.” Lucrezia mopped her eyes again. “I’m not going to eat that stale convent bread and gruel, am I? No, Carmelina stays here with me.”
“Lucrezia—”
“No.” The Pope’s daughter put her chin up. “You are not taking her too—I suppose you want Pantisilea back as well? You can’t be bothered to stay with me, so no one else is allowed to either?”
Giulia looked exasperated.
“Go running back to my father if you must.” Lucrezia flung herself back into the pillows, eyes oozing all over again. “Carmelina stays here.”
“I work for Madonna Giulia,” I dared to say. “If it please you—”
“It doesn’t please me.” Lucrezia Borgia looked genuinely surprised. “And it’s pleasing me that matters.”
“I am taking her with me,” Giulia began, looking irritated again, but Lucrezia cut her off.
“My father pays all the palazzo servants, Giulia. Not you. Not to mention the fact that he endows this convent. If I tell the prioress that Carmelina and Pantisilea must stay here, then they will not be allowed to leave!”
The Pope’s daughter would not be budged. She was crying again when Giulia finally cast her eyes up to the heavens and departed.
“Oh dear, I am sorry,” Giulia whispered to me just outside the door. “I’d take you with me now anyway, but if I upset her any further, Cesare will have my head. When she calms down, I’m sure she’ll change her mind—I’ll write her a letter about it in a few days, I promise.”
“Thank you, madonna.” I bobbed a curtsy, and Giulia gave me her own warm glance in return. But her eyes flicked down the stairs where Leonello had fled. “You had best be on your way,” I managed to say. “Let me get you a few biscotti for the carriage ride.”
Her smile definitely looked a little wan. “Yes, I always eat when I’m traveling.”
I watched out the nearest window as my former mistress set out across the convent grass for her carriage. Maybe this was my punishment. The man who had hurt me was dead, but I was still locked inside these walls—and who knew how long it would be, before I paid my penance for it, and Fate or Lucrezia Borgia released me?
I heard my new mistress’s impatient voice floating from her chamber. “Carmelina, where are my oranges?”
“Coming, Madonna Lucrezia,” I called back leadenly, and as I trudged back to the dank and dismal kitchens that were my new domain, I heard the convent bells begin to toll again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Beauty awakens the soul to act.
—DANTE
Leonello
Even without turning, I knew the moment my mistress stepped into my chamber. The scent of honeysuckle and gillyflower filled my nose, and I took a deep breath of it and kept stuffing shirts into my pack.
Silence built, but I would not be the one to break it. I imagined a dozen things she might say, but her first words were, “You’ve changed your clothes.”
“I think these will suit me better in future.” I pushed the sleeves back on my patched linen shirt with the ill-fitting doublet above it. I wasn’t certain I’d kept my old clothes, the ones I’d worn when I was first hired to act as bodyguard to a cardinal’s concubine, but upon returning from the Convent of San Sisto, I found them stuffed at the bottom of my chest. I put them on in place of the crisp blacks that Giulia had designed for me as my own personal livery, even down to the boots she’d had specially fitted for my twisted legs. Dio, but my feet already missed those supple black boots with the reinforced soles and supportive seams, now lying in an abandoned heap with the black doublet and the black hose that actually fit my misshapen legs, and everything else I was leaving behind. On top of the pile was my deck of cards—the new deck, beautifully painted and gilt-edged, that Giulia had given me to replace the cards that Savonarola’s Angels had confiscated in Florence.
I wasn’t leaving this palazzo with one single solitary thing that had come from her. Not so much as a shirt-lace.
“I haven’t seen your chamber since you were recovering from your wounds after our French adventure.” Her skirts rustled behind me as she turned, examining the four walls I’d called home for the past few years. “I’d forgotten how small it is.”
“A dwarf
doesn’t need much in the way of space.” Except for the fact that it had a high-corniced ceiling and no rats, my chamber in the Palazzo Santa Maria was not so different from the bolt-hole I used to rent in the Borgo in my days as card player. A narrow bed, a chest of clothes, a small shelf of books, a candle to read them by. The difference was all in the details.
I’d retreated to my room the instant the carriage returned from the Convent of San Sisto. The carriage wheels had hardly stopped rolling before I was swinging down into the courtyard and making for the doors. I’d elected to ride on the jolting seat with the driver rather than inside with La Bella as I usually did; I’d been perched up high and staring ahead between the horses’ ears by the time she left Lucrezia Borgia in her chambers and come back to the carriage. “Leonello?” she’d said, looking up at me, but I stared straight ahead and she sighed and climbed in.
I’d known, however, that I would not be able to avoid my mistress entirely.
“You’re leaving us.” Her voice was quiet.
“Your powers of perception are absolutely breathtaking,” I said, and rolled up the last of my spare shirts.
“Why?” The rustle of her skirts again as she came closer. I still didn’t turn. “Because Lucrezia said—”
“That I allowed her brother to die?” I cut her off. My head was still throbbing, no longer just from the wine I’d drunk with Bartolomeo. “That it was all my fault, due to some astoundingly fuzzy logic? Well, logic is not our little Countess of Pesaro’s strongest suit, but she is correct in one particular. It is my fault her brother is dead.” I slammed the lid down on the now-empty chest. “Because I murdered him.”
I hoped for an outburst or a denial or a cry of horror—anything to make her recoil, rush away in tears, leave. But Giulia Farnese only said quietly, “I know.”