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

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