The Serpent and the Pearl

by Kate Quinn

  “The other two?”

  “Just men,” the older woman said, impatient. “What’s it to you?”

  “Better if we know what they look like. What if they come back?” I gave a dark look at Anna’s corpse, so still on the table between us. “What if it’s one of you lovely girls next time they feel like a bit of fun?”

  “Not likely.” The first girl made a face, dingy light from the windows cutting sharp shadows over her nose, which had been broken at least once by some drunken sailor or laborer. “One was right ugly—in livery, you know. Some lug of a guardsman. I wouldn’t service a man like that for a bag of ducats.”

  “You’d service the Devil himself for a single ducat,” her friend told her. “Much less a bag of them!”

  “What kind of livery did this guardsman wear?” I cut in before the first girl could bristle.

  “I don’t know, he had a cloak on. Had a horse embroidered on his chest, though.”

  “It wasn’t a horse,” the other girl contradicted. “It was a bull. All embroidered in red.”

  “No, it was a horse . . .”

  “The third man?” I said, crossing Anna’s hands over her flat breast. “What did he look like?”

  Blank looks and shrugs among them. “Just a man,” the older woman said finally. “Sounded like a Spaniard. Or maybe he was Venetian.” A sniff. “Who can tell with these foreigners?”

  Dio. “What about him, this Spaniard or Venetian?”

  “He came later, after the other two. Pinched my bottom, and didn’t even offer a coin. Said they should all go back to the Inn of the Fig, because there were prettier girls there.”

  I felt a sudden savage wish that they had gone back to the Inn of the Fig, and killed some prettier girl than Anna. A pretty girl with a black heart and a greedy hand; someone who had abandoned a baby on a hillside or given customers over to be robbed and killed by bravos—some girl with sins on her head that merited such a death.

  Such a death. Staked to a table, and for what? Had Anna fought too hard, and they’d panicked and cut her throat to silence her? Even in a tavern as seedy as this one, shrieks of murder and blood coming from the night might have roused a response from one of the cramped little wine shops or rented rooms across the narrow street.

  I wondered how many noble families in Rome liveried their guards in a red bull or horse.

  I wondered if it was the guard who wore the marks of Anna’s nails on his face—or the Spaniard-Venetian, or the boy in the mask.

  I wondered if any of them went to Inn of the Fig regularly.

  The two maidservants wandered away, unnerved by my sudden lapse into silence, and I was just as glad they were gone. I lit the tapers around Anna’s body and settled back onto my stool for her death vigil. I felt the volume of the Iliad in the inside of my doublet and pulled it out.

  “‘The Greeks all night with tears and groans bewailed Patroclus,’” I read. “‘On his comrade’s breast, Achilles laid his murder-dealing hands, and led with bitter groans the loud lament.’”

  No loud lament here. No one to care Anna was dead but me. Not like Patroclus, who at least had all the heroes of Greece to mourn him.“‘They washed the corpse, with lissome oils anointing, and the wounds with fragrant ointments filled . . .’ No oils and ointments for you, my good lady,” I broke away from Homer to tell my friend. “I’ll be lucky if I can buy a Mass for your soul.”

  The coins on her eyes gleamed at me.“‘All night around Achilles swift of foot, the Myrmidons with tears Patroclus mourned.’”

  I broke off, closing the little book. “At least Achilles knew who killed his friend.”

  Anna was silent. I looked at her.

  “Who killed you, my girl?” I asked her. “Answer me that, eh?”

  No reply.

  Giulia

  S o you are confessing to the sin of fornication outside the vows of your marriage? A grave offense, madonna.”

  “No,” I said, exasperated. “That’s not what I said at all. I said he’s trying to tempt me to the sin of fornication outside my marriage vows. He started trying the day after my wedding, two weeks ago. I ask you!”

  “So you desire a man besides your husband, and that man a most holy cardinal?”

  I glowered in the direction of the confessional grille. The dark little space was stuffy and smelled of stale incense, the wooden shelf was hard under my knees, and through the ornately carved wood of the grille I could see only flashes of the priest’s vestments. His disembodied voice was pinched and disapproving. I hadn’t really expected a priest to take my side on this, especially not over that of a cardinal, but—well, I’d been raised to take my troubles to the confessional, and habit died hard.

  “No,” I tried again. “Cardinal Borgia is the one doing the desiring, not me. He thinks by waving a pretty necklace or two under my nose—”

  “You are guilty, then, of tempting a man of the Church to break his vows of celibacy?”

  “Considering his five bastards, I think he’s broken them before,” I pointed out.

  “It is not your place to reprove a man of God.” The priest certainly had no trouble reproving me. The voice pinging at me through the grille was icy. “The Cardinal’s fleshly sins are a matter for his own conscience. You must not add to his burden.”

  “His burden?” I sputtered. “What about mine? A wife with no husband, abandoned in a—a den of sin!” Surely that would move him? Priests were always going on about dens of sin.

  “Even through this screen, I can see you have the curse of beauty,” the priest continued, clicking his tongue. “Beautiful women are traps laid by the devil to snare the vows of men. Sheathe yourself in modesty and self-effacement, madonna, and do not add to the burden of this man of God by tempting him with your body.”

  “I don’t want to tempt him with my body!”

  “All women are thirsty for admiration. Has this man of God laid a finger upon you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But he wants to.” He’d visited once more, just a week ago, and I’d refused to say a word to him—I told the priest as much. “I sat there with my hands folded in my lap. I didn’t give him any encouragement.”

  But it hadn’t really made the impression I’d hoped. “Ah,” Cardinal Borgia had said, amusement lacing his deep voice. “Disdainful silence. Well, if you’re content with wordlessness, I shall be as well. Who needs conversation, with something as lovely as you to gaze at?” And he’d put his chin into his hand and gazed at me with slow-burning appreciation for a solid hour.

  “I was twitching by the end,” I told the priest. “You know what it’s like to just sit in silence being stared at? You wouldn’t believe how my nose itched, and all he says through the whole hour is ‘Would you mind sulking with your head turned the other way? I would be grateful for the chance to admire that perfect profile.’ What do you do with a man like that? No matter what I say, he just doesn’t get offended.”

  “Then his will is stronger than your vanity. Three Acts of Contrition—”

  The priest rattled off a list of penitential prayers that would have me on my knees until Candlemas, but I closed my ears, mutinous. These priests, they always stuck to their own kind. Everybody was at fault but them. When I was twelve and just starting to strain the lacing of my bodices, my confessor was a friar who breathed communion wine on my neck and whispered that he’d absolve me of the sin if I would just let him get a look at my ripening apples. That was the word he used, “apples.” I told his superior everything, and somehow it had all ended up being my fault: the budding little temptress swishing about, unsettling the poor men of God. I’d never really trusted priests since. And I’m not very fond of apples, either.

  “Ego te absolvo,” the priest on the other side of the confessional grille finally said, and rattled off the rest of my absolution. I crossed myself resentfully and left the confessional box before I could choke on either the incense or the hypocrisy. Men, I thought as I made my way past the line of penitents
waiting for the priest, and looked about for an altar where I could light a candle. I missed the old cross-eyed Madonna at the church in Capodimonte where I’d said all my confessions growing up. Here at the Santa Maria Maggiore everything was far grander: the huge columns were all Athenian marble, the arch and the apse had been inlaid with splendid mosaics of the Virgin, and all the saints in their niches looked snobbish. I finally paused before the altar of Santa Anna—she had a kinder face in her elaborate fresco than the censorious Madonna, and she also had very fashionable slashed-velvet sleeves. “Men are all the same,” I told her, lighting my candle. “Doesn’t matter if they’re doubleted or cassocked, does it?”

  “Sorellina!”

  I turned to see my brother Sandro, waving his hat overhead in a flourish as he caught sight of me through the church’s throng.

  “A far cry from Capodimonte, isn’t it?” he continued as he made his way to my side before Santa Anna’s candles. He looked out over the high-vaulted transept, the richly gilded saints, the inlaid floors of the basilica. “But you’re moving in grand circles these days.” Sandro’s dark eyes crinkled approvingly at my green velvet gown, my billowing embroidered sleeves, the silvery net into which I’d packed my hair. Finer than he was used to seeing me dressed—the way we’d been raised, silks and velvets had been saved strictly for holy days and celebrations, but for the Borgia and the Orsini, brocade and pearls were for every day. “I imagine the priest clucked at you for vanity,” Sandro continued, “but how many other sins can you have committed in just a fortnight or two of marriage? For myself, I’ve got the usual batch of carnal offenses to work off. It does seem unfair that a little flutter with a pretty girl gets me twice the penance a student or a soldier would get. There are distinct disadvantages to the clerical life, at least on the lower rungs. One isn’t really able to get away with serious sinning until one is at least a cardinal. I suppose that should motivate me to climb the ladder; how do you fancy me as ‘Cardinal Farnese’—”

  I hadn’t seen my favorite brother since the wedding. He said some business had taken him from the city for a few weeks—“One does have to put in the occasional hour or two of work as a notary, unfortunately.” I suspected it was a girl who had taken him away from the city, not notary business, and I scowled at him because it had been a pair of weeks when I really could have used some brotherly assistance.

  “What, no fond greeting?” He mimicked my glare. “Marriage isn’t sweetening you as much as I’d thought it would, sorellina.”

  “Not much of a marriage thus far,” I said, still glowering. “Orsino has gone to the country, and Cardinal Borgia is trying to seduce me.”

  Sandro hooted. “Oh yes! The aging Cardinal, a squid in red robes, winds his caressing tentacles about the trembling figure of the maiden fair—”

  “Sandro, be serious!”

  “—she twists, she turns, where shall she go? Andromeda chained upon the rock for Neptune’s monster of the deep, a melting beauty shrinking in terror as powerful arms pull her toward her doom—”

  “Shouldn’t the future Cardinal Farnese be reading Scripture rather than Greek myths?”

  “—with all her strength she fights her fate, this virgin sacrifice to the lusts of a primal god—”

  I stood there simmering while my brother doubled over with laughter. People were starting to stare, but that never bothered Sandro. I took him by the sleeve and pulled him away from Santa Anna, between a marble column and the line of penitents filing one by one into the confessional. “Sandro, stop chortling! It’s not funny.”

  “Of course it’s funny.” Sandro swallowed his last chuckles, dark eyes dancing. “Borgia’s a mitered old goat, sorellina; all Rome knows that. Don’t tell me you don’t know how to handle a randy cleric! Just level him with that icy stare you’ve perfected, the one that turns men into worms. And if that fails, deal out one of your slaps that could drop an ox—”

  “I already did,” I confessed, and my sore heart eased a little as Sandro tweaked my cheek just the way he always had since we’d been children. Maybe his japes drove me to distraction sometimes, but he was still my big brother, and a girl with a proper big brother is never alone. Rodrigo Borgia would do well to remember that, and so would my husband.

  “Don’t get your feathers ruffled, Giulia; you’re a married woman now, not some Turkish concubine at a slave market. You think some swaggering priest can just sweep you off and put you in a gilded cage?” Sandro hooted laughter again at the thought.

  Actually, that’s exactly what he has in mind. But suddenly I hesitated to say it. I’d wanted nothing more than to spill my troubles to my brother as soon as he returned to Rome, but now I felt a pang of caution ripple through me. Maybe my husband didn’t care about defending my honor with a rapier, but Sandro certainly would. My brother generally favored the world’s sins with an amused and lenient eye, but his leniency would end when it came to the protection of his favorite little sister. I wanted his protection, of course—but not if I got my brother cut to ribbons. “What do you know about Cardinal Borgia, Sandro?” I asked instead.

  “Gossip, of course.” Sandro tucked my hand into his elbow, turning away from the confessional line. “And my venial sins can always wait their turn for a good gossip. Let me escort you home.”

  I put up my sunshade as we came out of the church into the piazza, and my guards straightened hastily from where they had been lounging on the sunny steps. When I was an unmarried girl I’d only ever been trailed by an eagle-eyed mother or maidservant when I went out, someone to make sure my eyes stayed on the ground and not on the men. (As if that ever stopped me from peeking.) These days I had a whole retinue: a quartet of armed guards in the yellow and mulberry Borgia livery with the bull embroidered on their chests; a page to carry my train; Pantisilea, my cheerful maid, to hold my sunshade and gloves; and every last one of them was paid to spy on me. Toadies.

  “So—” I gestured them all back a few steps as we set off across the piazza, lifting my velvet hem as I skirted a puddle. Pigeons flapped and squawked across the stones of the piazza; vendors hawked bits of wood or rag as fragments of the True Cross or the Shroud of Turin; beggars squatted with bowls outstretched toward the veiled women hurrying in and out of the church. “Tell me about Cardinal Borgia.”

  “Got under your skin, has he?”

  “I’m serious, Sandro!” What kind of man was my suitor? What could he do to my brother, if Sandro came to his door steaming with fury on my account? More importantly, what would he do? I didn’t know anything about Rodrigo Borgia, really. Madonna Adriana did nothing but sing his praises dawn to dusk: his learning, his wit, his taste in all things artistic, the influence he wielded in the College of Cardinals, but I didn’t know if I could believe any of it. May the Holy Virgin herself consign me straight to hell before I’d give the Cardinal himself the satisfaction of asking. I didn’t have anyone to consult but my brother, who might be only a notary but always knew all the gossip in Rome.

  “He’s Cardinal-Bishop of Porto e Santa Rufina,” Sandro began, ticking the titles off. “Administrator of Valencia, and spent some years there—he is a Spaniard, you know; Borgia used to be Borja. There’s some who said the Borja used to be Moors or Spanish Jews, but I wouldn’t put much stock in that. Dean of the College of Cardinals, which means he’ll summon the Conclave when it comes time to elect a new pope—”

  “All these titles and elections,” I said, impatient. “Tell me the interesting parts!”

  “Rich,” Sandro said. We had left the piazza now, plunging into the maze of narrow winding streets that coil and twist back on each other in such a vast citywide knot that any non-Roman is instantly lost. As none of them will hesitate to tell you, as soon as they sense you had the temerity not to be born in the Eternal City. “You saw his house—he’s one of the richest cardinals in Rome, I daresay.”

  I thought of the huge pearl, currently lying on my windowsill where the sun could strike velvet gleams out of it. I’d flung
it down there instead of locking it away in one of my chests, determined to let one of the servants steal it, and that would teach His Eminence a lesson when he learned I’d lost his precious present and didn’t even care . . . but none of the servants would touch it, too afraid of getting their hands chopped off as thieves, I suppose, and it really looked so pretty lying there in the sun gleaming and singing at me. I didn’t know what to do with it, only that I was not going to wear it.

  At least not where anyone could see me.

  “—bastards, of course,” my brother was continuing in his cheerful recitation of my suitor’s vices. “Seven or eight by various mothers, in Spain and Rome—”

  “Five living, he told me.” I made a face. “I’ve met one—Juan; he’s sixteen. He’s forever dropping in to smirk at me and make rude remarks. There’s another son, supposedly; he’s only just returned from the university in Pisa; and a younger boy and girl who still live with Madonna Adriana, but they’re all visiting their mother now and I’ve not met any of them. If they’re anything like Juan, they’ll be a sorry batch.”

  “All provided for, though,” Sandro allowed. “The daughter’s been dowered to the skies; Juan Borgia is Duke of Gandia in Spain—”

  “I know. He’s forever underfoot. Duke or not, he’s still a witless, lecherous idiot.”

  “—and the elder boy in Pisa was made Bishop of Pamplona by fifteen.” Sandro gave an envious shake of his head. “Oh, for a doting and all-powerful father. How am I ever supposed to be a bishop or a cardinal someday without one? I’m far too lazy to earn it.”

  All-powerful. I kicked at a stone, wobbling for a moment on the tall wooden stilt clogs I wore to elevate my slippers out of the mud. Comfortable tooled-leather slippers; an old pair. In my chamber I had a prettier set, gold-buckled and brand-new, made of supple diamond-patterned snakeskin. Yet another gift that had appeared anonymously at my bedside one afternoon, all tied up with a silk ribbon the color of a cardinal’s robes. Not just any cardinal, but one of the richest and most powerful of cardinals.