The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) Read Online Free PDF

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, because 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