by Kate Quinn
“Perhaps you can go to the Vatican in a few weeks and give her testimony for her, then. Swear before God, Pope, and all others assembled that the marriage between you and Lord Sforza was never consummated, not once, and that you are still virgo intacta.”
Carmelina snorted. “I haven’t been virgo intacta for a good many years.”
“Nor has Lucrezia Borgia, but who’s quibbling?”
“Apparently not Lord Sforza.” Carmelina shook her head, yanking out a few sorry-looking threads of chives. What a joke it all was. Consanguinity had not worked as a pretext to annul the marriage, and neither had the excuse of Lucrezia’s two previous betrothals. Cesare Borgia’s solution? Nonconsummation, due to the Count of Pesaro’s prevailing impotence. I’d laughed out loud when I first heard it, and so had most of Rome. The Count of Pesaro impotent, when his first wife had died in childbed?
“It will serve him right,” Cesare had said coolly. “If he wished for a less humiliating end to his marriage, he should have signed sooner under the betrothal excuse.”
But Lord Sforza had stuck his heels in, and for that he would not only lose his wife—he’d be mocked all about Rome as a eunuch. An exquisite revenge, and I was learning what a talent my new master had for that.
“Impotence.” Carmelina let out a short laugh. “I ask you, what kind of man would admit to that? Even if it were true, and we both know Madonna Lucrezia and that husband of hers consummated that marriage on every bed in the Palazzo Santa Maria!”
“But the Borgias say they didn’t. And they have the power to rewrite truth, didn’t you know?” My nails needed trimming, but I had no intention of getting my knife out. I wondered if it still had blood on it. I couldn’t remember cleaning the blade since that recent little task I had performed for my new master.
Carmelina pinched a few dead needles off a chilled-looking rosemary bush. “I wonder how they made him do it. Lord Sforza, I mean. How did they make him sign his own virility away?”
“They sent me,” I found myself saying.
She looked at me. “You?”
“And Michelotto. This is his sort of work, usually.” My first real errand, since donning Cesare Borgia’s livery. “Cardinal Borgia sent us to Pesaro, five nights ago. Very quietly. We had a letter in his hand for Lord Sforza, urging that the documents be signed, but the letter wasn’t the point.”
“What was?” Carmelina asked.
“We were to persuade him what would happen if he did not yield.”
“And?”
“And we did.”
It had been very quick work, really. All that riding, all the aches in my legs from the saddle, and the whole business itself done in a matter of heartbeats. We were on the way back to Rome almost before the sweat had time to cool on our horses.
“How did you persuade him?” Carmelina’s voice was quiet.
“Lord Sforza was in his sala—none of his captains there for once, just a page-boy with his wine and his letters. The page . . .” I shrugged. “It isn’t important.”
“It isn’t?”
Michelotto eviscerated him, I almost said. Dropped the boy’s guts onto his shoes in one stroke of the knife. Then broke his neck and slammed the letter on the table in one motion, all before either the page or Lord Sforza could scream. And then Michelotto had looked at me with his empty stone-colored eyes, and I’d known what he wanted. Known it the way a snake knows the moment to strike its prey; the moment when the eyes go wide and white the way Lord Sforza’s eyes looked. And I’d taken the dagger out of my belt and slammed it through Sforza’s hand, through the letter and into the table.
Dio. I hadn’t even meant to do it.
I—
I suppose Juan Borgia thought that too, when he shoved a knife through Anna’s palm.
Carmelina pushed a stray curl back behind her ear with one hand. The scarred hand, which looked like it had healed, but had left a mark the color of a man’s liver. I’d seen the page’s liver, Lord Sforza’s page, when his guts spread themselves on the floor.
Michelotto had given me a nod as I yanked my knife back up. Approval, almost, though it was hard to tell from a man so blank and colorless.
I’d looked over my shoulder at Giovanni Sforza as we left the study. A man of thirty or so, handsome enough with his fashionable beard and less-fashionable doublet, wax-pale and staring at the letter under his spread hand, spotted with his own blood. I looked at him, and he met my eyes. “You don’t want her,” I said. “You don’t want any part of that family.”
He’d still been staring as we shut the door. I don’t know how he covered the scene, after. Perhaps he claimed he caught the page thieving; no one would bat an eye if a lord killed a servant caught dipping in the gold. It was the sort of decisive gesture men-at-arms appreciated. Everyone liked a ferocious lord.
But Lord Sforza was not ferocious at all. Just a man from the country, a man who liked soldiers and horses and simple things, a man who must have had some sincere affection for his little Borgia wife if he had fought so stubbornly to keep her. Not a ferocious man, not like Michelotto, not like Cesare Borgia. Not like me.
“Good,” Michelotto said to me on the way back to Rome. He had a voice with no rise and fall whatsoever, a voice like a sheet of metal. “You did well, little man.”
“Will he sign?”
Michelotto did not dignify that with a response. But we heard the next day that witnesses were gathered in Pesaro to watch as Giovanni Sforza, Count of Pesaro, signed the documents stating that he had never laid a finger on Lucrezia Borgia due to his own overpowering impotence.
“Good,” Cesare said, brisk as Michelotto, and asked no more.
“Don’t you wish to know how we did it?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Why?” The young Cardinal looked surprised. “If one leaves a task to subordinates, one trusts they are capable of handling it. I don’t employ anyone unless they are capable. You did your task, the documents were signed, and there’s an end to it.” He tossed a purse each to Michelotto and me. “Good work.”
It was good work. He had been right about me. This was the work I was made for.
If only my head didn’t ache.
I wished Carmelina would not look at me like that, with her suspicious black eyes and the accusing red eye of the scar on the back of her hand staring at me, too. I might have been tempted to put my head on her shoulder and ask her to rub my throbbing temples. But she looked at me that way because she knew what kind of work I could do, the things I was so good at. Unlike Giulia, who had looked so happy to see me when we saw each other in the Sala del Pappagallo. I lied when I said I’d retreated too quickly to read her face. I could read her face in a glance. She’d been glad to see me, lips trembling to speak, and I had no desire to hear anything she had to say.
Oh, but my head ached.
“Have you seen Bartolomeo lately?” Carmelina yanked a bulb of garlic out of the half-frozen ground. Her voice was light, conversational, and I remembered speaking to her in just as soothing a tone when she had been clutching her bleeding hand in the wine cellar and trembling like a horse about to bolt. Did I look like a horse about to bolt? “Bartolomeo writes to me. Mostly just recipes, of course. Perfectly ordinary letters—”
“Of course,” I said. “Because you’re blushing, and recipes make you blush like poetry.”
More light words, coming out in white puffs on the cold air. Any words I could find to replace the images in my head—until Pantisilea came out into the gardens in a flat run, skirts flying about her knees and her face pale as bone.
“Carmelina,” she gasped. “Carmelina, he’s calling for us, he’s calling for us both, he’s gone mad—”
“Who’s gone mad?” Carmelina rose, basket of herbs over one arm.
“Cardinal Borgia!” Pantisilea wailed, just like the little countess. “He found out, Madonna Lucrezia tried so hard, but she felt sick again and had to run to the basin. He saw how she looks under all those blankets and cushions,
he saw—”
“Saw what?” I began to say, but Carmelina dropped her basket on the ground and sprinted after Pantisilea to the gatehouse where the Pope’s daughter was ensconced.
Perhaps Cesare Borgia had been shouting before, but he was deadly hushed now as he summoned the two maidservants inside the chamber. I crept on the outsides of my boot soles along the stairs, barely breathing, because when he spoke in just that hue of quiet I did not want to be caught eavesdropping.
“Who was it?” he said in his near whisper. “Who was it, sister? If that swaggering bravo Perotto dared seduce you—”
“Of course not!” The little Countess of Pesaro was hiccuping and gasping and sobbing all at once; I could hear that very clearly down the stairwell. “I’m not a whore, Cesare, I didn’t have a lover, it was my husband!”
“We warned you,” he snapped. “Father warned you to keep out of Sforza’s bed, and so did I. Warned. You.”
“And I did! I did, but he came to see me and I—”
“Here? He was allowed in here, after all my instructions to the prioress?”
“No, no, it was just before I came here to the convent. He came alone from Pesaro in the night, very privately. He was on horseback and he brought me a poem like he did in the old days. He wanted one last chance to talk. Sancha has a pavilion on the Tiber she uses for meeting—well, you, for one. She lent it to me so I could meet Giovanni in secret. It was romantic!” Lucrezia wailed. “There was a moon! I felt sorry for him!”
“You should have given him your pity with your knees shut. You think his testimony of impotence will carry any weight when you’re six months gone with his brat?”
That just fetched a fresh storm of weeping, which neatly covered my startled huff of breath on the stairs. Lucrezia Borgia, heavy with her husband’s child when they were trying to prove nonconsummation of the marriage? Oh, Dio.
Cesare’s deadly quiet voice continued. “Who else knows?”
More tears from Lucrezia, and I thought I heard Pantisilea begin to blubber as well, but Carmelina spoke steadily enough. “Three, Eminence. Pantisilea and I have tended all Madonna Lucrezia’s needs—she has stayed in bed, none of the sisters here know—”
“Three. You two, and who else? Perotto?”
“I had to tell someone!” Lucrezia hiccuped. “I was in agony, and he was so kind—”
“Three,” Cesare cut her off. “Good. Perhaps it may be handled yet. You, Pantisilea or whatever your name is, cease your whimpering and fetch wine. You, cook; I remember you. Food, whatever will keep my sister strong, but not much of it. Keep her slim. She is not to leave these chambers, and no one is to see her but you two and Perotto. He will handle her errands outside these walls as they need doing, and you will serve her within. And if any of you breathe one word of the Countess’s condition, to the nuns or to any other, I will have your throats slit. Now, get out.” Carmelina and Pantisilea flew from the room as though flung from a cannon, faces white as they hurtled down the stairs without even seeing me.
Careful, I wanted to say to Carmelina. Oh, be careful, Signorina Cuoca, this is not a secret you want. But from the flash of her set, terrified face as she passed me, I did not think she needed the warning.
Inside the chamber, Cesare Borgia had lapsed back into Catalan. “’Crezia,” he said. “’Crezia mia, stop weeping. Your speech for the hearing; we will practice it again. Dry your eyes.”
“I can’t appear before the cardinals like this!” Lucrezia shrieked.
“Of course you can.” I heard a yelp and a rustle of bedclothes—it sounded like the Cardinal was dragging the little Countess out of bed. “Look at yourself in the glass—it will all be concealed easily enough. A dress with a high waist and a heavy skirt, a furred cloak. It’s deep winter; no one will question it.”
“They’ll see—”
“They’ll see what they are told to see: my pretty sister swaddled against the cold. Now, your speech . . .”
Cesare Borgia came from the room an hour later with a brow blacker than midnight, slapping his embroidered riding gloves against his hand, and by that point I was installed well below, making the passing sisters in their black and white flow around me as I sat on my stool over a copy of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia. “Did you hear?” my new master said without preamble. “Did you hear, little lion man?”
“Hear what?” I asked, chin in hand over my book. “Pliny claims amber will take on a charge when it is rubbed, did you know that? I shall have to test it out.”
I do not know if Cesare Borgia believed me, any more than I knew if he suspected my stubby hands were covered in his brother’s blood. But he said nothing more of it, and a few weeks later I stood in the Vatican with his retinue, craning my neck to see in the crowd of curious ambassadors and prelates as Lucrezia Borgia was brought from the Convent of San Sisto by sealed coach to give her testimony before the canonical judges. It was just days before Christmas, the breath puffing white in the air even inside the sealed chamber, and Lucrezia stood well-wrapped in her heavy winter velvets and enveloping sable cloak. She flushed prettily as she was called to speak, her sweet grave face a little fuller than usual, giving her the look of an angelic child. She spoke in solemn, perfect Latin (like a Cicero, they gushed afterward), and she testified that her lord husband had not bedded her once in three years of marriage, and she was thus virgo intacta.
How Rome rocked with laughter.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lucrezia . . . daughter, wife, and daughter-in-law of Alexander VI.
—SCURRILOUS ELEGY ABOUT LUCREZIA BORGIA
Carmelina
I was used to blood. I could cut a pig’s throat in one double slice, and scrape the blood off my hands afterward without a thought. I’d killed woolly little lambs and big-eared baby goats for my table without a drop of sentimentality. Man’s work, and perhaps that was the trouble. A woman’s work of breeding babies and bearing them, well, that had passed me by.
Lucrezia Borgia was screaming, bleeding, writhing in her birthing bed, and she terrified me.
“Oh, Jesu, it hurts!” Her matted hair stuck to her sweating face, she clung to Pantisilea’s white-knuckled hand, and she was sobbing and praying around her gulps for breath. “Where is Cesare, he said he’d be with me—” She lapsed into Catalan for a few whimpering seconds, and then into Latin. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum—”
“We should fetch the prioress,” Pantisilea said nervously.
“What do you think a nun would know about any of this?” I exploded. “We do what Cardinal Borgia said. We sent Perotto for the midwife; now we wait.” I had no idea what else to do. My own mother had borne only my sister and me; I’d not helped with the birth of a dozen more little brothers and sisters as so many daughters did. And when my mother went to assist at a friend or neighbor’s childbed, well, I’d been so unnerved at all the screaming that I’d always volunteered to heat water in the kitchens or run back and forth for cloths—anything that would keep me out of the way. Now I was beginning to wish I’d stayed and watched at a few more of those childbeds.
“It all began so fast—” Pantisilea bit her lip. One moment our mistress had been lying in bed as usual, eating a plate of my burnt-sugar stars and reading the Avernus sonnets again, though mostly she leafed through them while complaining that Perotto never looked at her now that she was fat and ugly. And Pantisilea had been reassuring her that of course she was not fat, which was even true because for such a slim little thing, Lucrezia Borgia didn’t show her pregnancy near as much as she might have. A stroke of luck for her Vatican appearance, that had been. Even now at nine months it was only her face that looked any fatter, and frankly that was from too many burnt-sugar stars. But Pantisilea and I still had to spend a great deal of time assuring her that she was not at all fat or ugly, of course she wasn’t—
But this afternoon she had interrupted our reassurances with a cry, and there had been a rush of water across the sheets, and now the whole bed was soake
d through. Not just from water but from sweat, and from blood.
“Benedicta tu in mulieribus—” She broke off in another cry, and I felt a stab of pity for my little mistress. I hadn’t much liked her, not since she had immured me up here just because she didn’t feel like eating convent food—I’d have given everything I had to turn my back on her and leave these walls forever. But seeing her writhing in that fouled bed, so swollen and young . . .
“Bite on the sheets, madonna,” I encouraged. “We must keep you quiet; remember what His Eminence said.” Though how Cesare Borgia thought we were going to keep the nuns from knowing their illustrious guest was giving birth in the gatehouse, sweet Santa Marta knew.
Another long and grueling hour passed before the midwife arrived. A plump little woman with a basket over her arm, hustled along by a white-faced Perotto. “No need to hurry me, young man,” she clucked. “First babies never come quickly, plenty of time yet, and you did say this was a first—ah, yes, we’re well in time.” A pat to Lucrezia’s sweating forehead. “Best get you up out of that bed, my dear, up and walking. Lean on the maid, that’s it—and if the other maid can fetch us hot water, and perhaps a store of cool wet cloths for her face—”
“I’ll go,” I said, abandoning Pantisilea, who gave me a dirty look as she helped the midwife haul Lucrezia Borgia gasping out of bed. Perotto had already fled the scene, lucky man.
Lucrezia’s voice trailed after me toward the stairs, half shriek and half whine: “I don’t want to get out of bed and walk! I don’t want to, I’m telling my brother—”
“Sweet Santa Marta,” I muttered. “Let me never have a child.” If I couldn’t have been born a man, at least make me barren. I flew down the steps, away from the sound of the midwife’s cajoling, and I nearly fell over the convent’s prioress.
“Pardon, Mother Prioress—” I curtsied hastily.
“There appeared to be some disturbance in the gatehouse,” she said in her smooth voice that whispered of being reared in a palazzo somewhere herself, just as her gliding steps whispered of silk shifts under her black convent skirts. “Is our honored guest quite well?”