The Serpent and the Pearl Read online

  “Not before I put one in his.” Card play wasn’t the only skill I’d picked up over a dubious life of scraping by. Knife play was handy for a little fellow like me who didn’t have a prayer in heaven of using a sword or flattening his enemies with a punch. I always kept a knife at my belt, sharpened to a whisper, and two or three more tucked away in places that didn’t show.

  “There’s easier ways to make money than playing drunks for it,” Anna argued. She slowed her steps to match mine, something for which I was always grateful. I tried not to scuttle when I walked, striding firmly and keeping my toes straight even though it made my misshapen joints ache, but forever running after longer-legged people made it near impossible not to scuttle like a crab. “The tavernkeeper yesterday,” Anna went on, “he was going on how he wants some entertainment in the common room in the evenings. You could juggle walnuts, tell jokes, make people laugh. Maybe even get yourself a suit of motley, be a proper jester. Coins would come rolling in, you’ll see. You’re funny when you want to be, Leonello.”

  “Anna,” I sighed. “Anna of the amber-bright gaze and kind heart, I esteem you greatly, but I fear you mistake me. I do not juggle. I do not tumble. I do not jest, joke, or jig, and for no price in all God’s created world do I wear motley.”

  “You’re a touchy little man, you know that?”

  “Just as every rose has its thorns, every dwarf must have some claim to distinction besides his height.” I kissed her hand formally as though I were one of the swaggering bravos in slashed doublets and curled hair roistering and laughing in the crowd ahead. Tall swaggering bravos. “Perhaps you would care to share my meal tonight? The pleasure of your company would be most welcome, at table and bed.”

  “A fishmonger already asked me,” she said, regretful. “I’d rather it was you—you don’t smell like fish and sweat between the sheets.”

  “Another time, perhaps.” Anna made a pleasant bedmate every now and then, when I was in the mood for company more lively than my books. She was affable rather than passionate, but a dwarf learned not to expect passion in the women he bought. Affable was good enough, and she would even take a half hour afterward to massage my stunted legs until the crooked muscles loosened. “I can’t go giving it to you for free,” she’d said the first time I took her to my bed. “I may not be pretty, but even a plain girl like me can’t go giving it away, not if she wants to get by in this world.”

  “Give it away?” I’d snorted. “You’re the first woman in years who hasn’t wanted double payment to make up for my deformities.”

  “You’re a little man, true enough,” she’d said, taking my chin and turning it toward the light. “But deformed don’t say it right. You’d be handsome, Leonello, if you didn’t scowl so much.”

  And she’d be pretty if she had the coin for a silk dress and a pair of velvet slippers, but she didn’t. I didn’t say it, though. I had a viper tongue that enjoyed spitting cruel words, but not to the one friend I had in all Rome.

  Anna was craning her neck at the crowd lining the street. “I hear music—do you think it’s a wedding procession?”

  “You’re the tall one, sweet lady. You tell me.”

  She pressed her way into the crowd, me sliding after her among all the legs like a fish negotiating the currents of the Tiber. “The bride, the bride,” someone whispered over my head. “I can see her horse!”

  “It is a wedding procession,” Anna said down to me, delighted.

  “Pity. I was hoping for a dancing cardinal.”

  “I don’t understand half the things you say.” Anna tucked a limp strand of hair back behind one ear. “You think she’ll be pretty? The bride, I mean.”

  “It’s some rich boy’s new wife,” the man behind me disagreed before I could reply. “Five scudi says she’ll be pockmarked and plain.”

  I wriggled my way past Anna to the front, with half an eye to following the bride and her retinue from her father’s house to her new husband’s. Wealthy brides toss coins into the crowds along the way, if they aren’t too shy, and I wasn’t too proud to pick a coin off the ground. Close to the ground as I was, I could get the lion’s share—a lion’s share for Leonello the little lion.

  Liveried servants were trotting along in columns now, forcing back the crowds on either side of the street as the procession began in earnest. A troop of pages with chests of the bride’s belongings—a critical buzz went up at the sight of the elaborately painted wedding chest, wide as a coffin, elaborately gilded and painted with saints. Yes, this was a wealthy bride. Grinning boys tossed flowers into the streets, musicians thrummed lutes not quite in tune with each other . . .

  “There she is!” Anna breathed. “Blessed Virgin, will you look at that?”

  A white mare wreathed in lilies and roses clopped along impassively under the most glorious of Madonnas.

  “Holy Mother,” a voice behind me whistled to the man who had bet the bride would be plain. “You lost your five scudi!”

  A cat may look at a king, they say—and a dwarf may look at a beautiful woman. Most men will be reprimanded for staring at a beauty, warned off by menacing looks from her husband, or a brother’s hand clapped on a dagger, or a cold glance from the beauty herself. A man’s stare means desire, and the good women of Rome must be safeguarded from the desires of men. But dwarves have no desires, not when it comes to beautiful women, so no one minds if a dwarf gawps. Besides, a beautiful woman’s nose rides the air so high she is not likely to look down far enough to see me. Caps were doffed across the street, men bowed outlandishly in hopes of catching the bride’s eye, and I just crossed my short arms across my chest and stared coolly.

  Dio, but she was a beauty. Perhaps seventeen or eighteen years old, laced into a rosy silk gown draped over her mare’s white flanks in such abundant pleats that I could list at least three broken sumptuary laws. Breasts like white peaches, a pale column of a neck, a little face all rosy with happiness—and hair. Such hair, glinting gold in the sunlight, twined with pearls and tucked with cream-colored roses.

  Most brides look shy, flustered, bemused. Some cry, some titter nervously, some sit stiff as jeweled saints in a niche. This one laughed like a pealing church bell and kissed her hands to the crowds as she bounced in her velvet saddle with sheer pleasure. She was having far too much fun to cast her eyes down in a crowd like a girl of good birth should, too much fun drinking in everything the world had to offer. Perhaps that was why her dark eyes traveled far enough to see me, looking back at her instead of doffing my hat.

  She grinned at me—no other word for it. Grinned and blew me a kiss as if I’d been a tall and handsome man, and then the mare swept her past in a billow of silk and rosewater. I wondered what her new husband was paying for her. Likely he’d decide she was worth it.

  “I wouldn’t be stuck pouring drinks in a tavern if I looked like that,” Anna said wistfully. “I’d be dressed in silk and dining with cardinals, and they’d be pouring drinks for me.”

  “That’s Madonna Giulia Farnese, I heard.” The man who’d lost his bet whistled as the last of the liveried servants hurried past, and the crowd began to disperse back to its usual business of shopping, thieving, and gossiping. “She’s for one of the Orsini. A dowry of three thousand florins!”

  “I heard it was five thousand,” someone else disagreed. “And the Orsini are the ones who paid it—”

  “Cheap at the price,” the first man said lustfully, nodding after the white mare. I could still see a glint of gold where the bride’s head bobbed above the crowds.

  “Cheap at the price,” I agreed, and escorted Anna to market. She chattered on about the pearls in the bride’s hair, and the cost of the rose-colored gown, and wouldn’t she look pretty in rose-colored silk too if she could ever afford it.

  “Not as pretty as the bride did, though,” she conceded, and I couldn’t help but agree with her. Not many women could match Giulia Farnese, later known to all Rome as La Bella. They should have called her La Bellissima, be
cause from that day to this I’ve never seen a woman lovelier.

  Giulia

  I n all the world, there was surely no girl as happy as me: Giulia Farnese, eighteen years old and married at last!

  Mind you, weddings aren’t always such occasions for bliss. Isotta Colonna cried all the way through her wedding last year, and I’d have cried too if I’d been standing next to a man so fat he was practically a sphere. Lucia Piccolomini cried even harder; her husband was a pimply boy of twelve. And my sister, Gerolama, looked sour as a prune when she said her vows, but then Gerolama usually looked sour, and at least she was a good match for her wizened raisin of a husband. “She’s lucky to get him,” my brother Alessandro had told me privately at the wedding banquet. “A razor tongue and a nose like a blade—we haven’t got enough ducats to dower her past all that.” He’d pinched my chin judiciously. “You’ll do better, I think.”

  And I had! It had taken time, of course—I’d have been married at fifteen or sixteen like some of my friends, but my father’s death (God rest his soul) had put a halt to all the various negotiations, and then my brothers had spent another two years scraping together a better dowry for me. “And wasn’t it worth the wait?” Sandro asked, gleeful. “Not just another provincial merchant for my little sister, but one of the Orsini. We’re lucky for this match, sorellina—you’ll live in Rome now, and better than a duchess.”

  Orsino Orsini: my new husband. I had to wonder what his family had been thinking, naming him that, but he was young! Just a year older than me, and not a sphere either, thank you. My new husband was lean as a rapier, fair-haired, with eyes like . . . well, I hadn’t gotten close enough to see what color his eyes were, truth be told. We met at the exchange of rings, and his gaze had been downcast the whole time as he fumbled the ring onto my finger and murmured the vows. He took one shy glance at me as I recited the words that made me his wife, and he blushed pretty as a rose.

  He was blushing now, stealing shy glances at me from across the splendid sala. Oh, why couldn’t we sit together at our own wedding feast? We’d be sharing a bed in a few hours; why not a table now? But Orsino in his slashed blue doublet with green-embroidered sleeves sat at one long table with the rest of the men, swamped by a lot of cardinals like fat scarlet flowerpots, while I was immured across the room with the other women, wedged between my stout mother-in-law in her maroon silks and my sister, Gerolama, who sat finding fault with everything. “I’ve never seen such display. There must be ten different kinds of wine at least; I only had three at my wedding!” I ignored her, smiling across the room at my new husband and boldly raising my glass to him, but he just blinked nervously.

  “Did you notice the glass, Giulia?” Madonna Adriana whispered. “All the way from Murano, diamond-point engraving—from my cousin the Cardinal, as a wedding gift to you. You would not believe the expense!”

  Judging by the sala of his palazzo, he could well afford it. The ceiling was high-arched and gorgeously painted; my slippers rested on a wonderfully woven carpet instead of plain flagstones; the long tables were covered in blue velvet and set with gold and silver plate. I tried not to stare, tried to look as if I were used to such careless luxury—after all, the Farnese are a family of noble birth in Capodimonte; I’d been raised in a castello overlooking Lake Bolsena in surroundings of great comfort, if not precisely this level of pomp and glitter. But I lost all ability to look blasé when the stream of dishes began appearing, carried in by sumptuously liveried serving men and wafting such tantalizing smells that I had to stop myself from gobbling like a pig at a trough. Yes, my mother-in-law’s cardinal cousin was a man of God, but he certainly believed in his luxuries. He had bowed and kissed my hand when my procession arrived in his courtyard, but I couldn’t remember which one he was—all cardinals look the same in those red robes, don’t they? Fortunately you don’t really have to remember their names since they’re all “Your Eminence” this and “Your Eminence” that. I flashed my dimples across the room at the whole flock of them, a gesture of coquettish thanks I’d practiced before a mirror as a little girl. At least until my brother Sandro had told me to stop fluttering my lashes because I looked like a drunken hummingbird.

  “I didn’t get any Murano glass at my wedding,” Gerolama was grumbling.

  “So kind of His Eminence,” I whispered to Madonna Adriana. I was already determined to get on with her—Orsino and I would be sharing the spacious quarters in her family’s palazzo, at least to start, and I was going to have my widowed mother-in-law eating out of my hand if it killed me. Fortunately, she didn’t seem hard to please: just commiserate with her now and then about the rising cost of everything, and she purred like a cat in the cream. Later I supposed Orsino and I would have our own home, but I was in no hurry. Madonna Adriana could bustle with the keys and the account books all she liked; I had no interest at all in fighting her for control of the household. I was going to spend the rest of my days with my feet up in the loggia and my hair spread out in the sun, eating candied figs and playing with my beautiful fat babies. And the rest of my nights in bed with my handsome young husband, making more babies and committing plenty of carnal sins to tell the priest at confession.

  “The first of the sweets, sorellina.” Sandro crossed the room with a flourish of a bow, presenting a dish for me. “Peaches in grappa—your favorite.”

  “You’ll make me fat, brother,” I complained.

  “Oh well, I’ll eat them then.” He popped a soft spiced peach into his mouth. “Delicious. Madonna Adriana, your cook has outdone himself.”

  “Give me those!” I snatched the plate, smiling at my elder brother. He was six years older than I, and we shared two other brothers as well as sour Gerolama, but Sandro and I had always been each other’s favorites. We had the same dark eyes that snapped laughter even when we were trying to be serious, and we’d grown up making faces at each other during Mass and getting smacked by our harried mother whenever we smuggled a grass snake into the priest’s shoe. It had been Sandro who held me when our mother died giving birth to a baby that didn’t live. Two years ago when my father joined her in heaven, my older brothers had been the ones to assume the mantle of family authority, but it had been Sandro who stroked my hair and vowed that he’d look after me now. I’d missed my brother terribly when he went to the university at Pisa to begin his career as a cleric, but now he had come back to Rome to start work on the lowest ecclesiastical rung as a notary. He wasn’t a very good notary, and I didn’t imagine he’d be a very good cleric either—Sandro adored chasing girls too much to ever abide by any vow of chastity, and he had a theatrical streak better suited to a jester. But even if he was the worst churchman on earth, there was no better company to be had at the evening cena table.

  “So tell me, Sandro—” I lowered my voice as Madonna Adriana began telling Gerolama how terribly expensive the roast peacock had been. “Why isn’t my husband getting up from his chair to give me peaches in grappa?”

  “Have some pity for the poor lad! Married at nineteen, and not to some cross-eyed convent girl he can intimidate, but to a nymph, a Helen, a Venus!” Sandro thumped a fist to his heart, a dagger from the heavens. “As Actaeon was struck down for daring to gaze upon Diana in her glory, so young Orsino fears to gaze upon his bride in all her glory—”

  “Shut up, Sandro. Everyone’s looking.”

  “You like everyone looking.” Sandro grinned, coming back down to earth. “My little sister is the vainest creature in all God’s creation.”

  “You sound like Mother.” God rest her soul, she had always been scolding me for vanity—“You think the Holy Virgin worries how she looks, Giulia mia?” But from what I could see, the Holy Virgin didn’t need to worry how she looked because she was always beautiful, in every painting I’d ever seen of her; beautiful and serene in some becoming blue gown-and-veil combination that had probably been sewn by angels. We earthly girls had to put a bit more thought into our appearance if we wanted to look half so fine, so I just sa
id an extra Paternoster every morning in repentance for the sin of vanity as I plucked my eyebrows.

  “Never mind,” Sandro was saying. “Young Orsino will get up his courage soon enough after another dance or two.”

  “So let’s encourage him.” I gave the dish of peaches a regretful look, sucking the sweet grappa off one fingertip, but really I’d already eaten heartily as a peasant tonight (oh, that roast peacock, and there was some kind of delicious pastry thing with sweet cheese and onions!). “Dance with me, Sandro.”

  “Does a priest dance?” Sandro rolled his eyes up to the heavens with great piety. “You offend my clerical dignity, not to mention my vows.”

  “Your vows weren’t too offended when you were flirting with Bianca Bonadeo earlier. During my vows, mind you.”

  “Then a basse-danse at once.”

  “The basse-danse is boring!” Orsino and I had already opened the floor with a basse-danse earlier in the evening. All that decorous gliding around palm to palm, and he hadn’t quite had the courage to look me in the eye. I preferred something livelier from the viols; a tune that got my blood running, and maybe gave me a chance to show a flash of ankle in the turns. “Let’s dance la volta.”

  “You’re the bride, sorellina.” A word to the musicians, and a smattering of applause rose as my brother led me out to the floor. I gave a graceful half spin, flaring my airy rose-colored skirts to acknowledge the applause before the lively beat of the viols began, and I seized Sandro’s hand. A beat or two as we pirouetted through the first steps, and then Sandro put his hands to my waist and tossed me into the air in the first lift. I knew how to land so my skirts belled, throwing my head back and laughing, and I dipped my bare shoulders into the candlelight in the direction of my new husband. Look at me, Orsino, I begged silently. Look at me, dance with me, love me!