The Lion and the Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing?” I asked, and he stalked off with contempt across my kitchen.
My
kitchen, and I felt a great thrum of peace just looking around me. Most looked for that thrum in the recitations of Mass or the velvet enclosed spaces of the confessional, but a kitchen was my church. I was probably hell-bound for thinking anything so blasphemous, but I had greater sins than blasphemy on my conscience, sins like theft and fornication and altar desecration, so I was undoubtedly hell-bound anyway. Easy, quiet faith like Bartolomeo’s wasn’t for me.
    “Home indeed,” I said, and took a certain small pouch from under my overskirt. “Aren’t you glad?”
    She looked happy, if a shriveled and mummified hand enclosed in a bag could be said to have any expression. A rather dried-up and wrinkled thing, the fingers ancient and curled in on themselves, a single filigreed gold ring gleaming from one finger, the shrunken flesh over the ancient knuckles bearing the marks of old knife nicks and burn scars. The same kind of marks I had all over my hands, the same kind any cook had—and the severed hand I carried about with me for good luck was supposedly the hand of Santa Marta herself, patron saint of cooks everywhere. A most holy relic, and really she should not have been in the possession of someone as sinful as me, but there was that little incident of altar desecration in my past, and, well, accidents happen. And I must say, she seemed to enjoy getting out of a reliquary and into a kitchen again, because I’d never gotten actually
caught
, had I? Surely that was a sign of my patron saint’s approval.
    Of course, someone finally had caught me now. That dwarf with his sharp knives and his even sharper eyes, threatening to ruin me. Unless—
    “He wants a posset?” I told Santa Marta grimly, hanging her little pouch up on the drying rack alongside some sprigs of rosemary. “I’ll give him a posset.”
    She didn’t approve, I could tell from the way her ring glinted at me in the banked glow of the fires, but I tied on an apron resolutely and began mulling some wine . . . and an hour or so later, long after Madonna Giulia would have settled her daughter and her bodyguard and gone rustling off through her private passage to the Vatican to see her Pope, I was tiptoeing up the stairs with a steaming cup in hand.
    Leonello’s chamber was a tiny high-ceilinged nook wedged in at the very top of the
palazzo
. Madonna Giulia had seen him well settled on his narrow bed, his wounds rebandaged, the covers drawn up, his collection of books in easy reach and a branch of fine wax tapers lit and glowing if he felt like reading. The shadows danced over his face—a rather handsome face, despite the deep-set eyes and prominent forehead. His lids were closed, his dark hair rumpled and one arm pressed close against his bandaged side. I thought of leaving the mulled wine and skulking away like a coward. But then his eyes opened soundlessly, hazel eyes full of their usual bitter amusement, and he did not look one whit surprised to see me.
    “Well, well,” he drawled, and managed to raise himself to one elbow even though a hiss of pain escaped through his teeth. “Come to ravish me,
Signorina Cuoca
? Pardon me, make that
Suora Carmelina
.”
    Hearing my proper title in that smug voice made my teeth hurt. I thumped the cup down beside his books, so hard it splashed. “Mulled wine. Madonna Giulia’s orders.”
    He reached for it. “Our lord Jesus Christ is the only man to be served by nuns. Maybe I’ve died and been resurrected, to earn such a privilege?”
    I glowered. “Drink.”
    “Something I’ve been wondering.” He swirled the wine, ruminating. “I know you cut your hair and traveled as a man, when you escaped your convent and made the journey to Rome. You’re tall enough, and flat as a marble slab in the bargain—you’d pass. But I’ve always wondered how you got over the convent wall in the first place. Bribery? Ladder? Grappling