Read Online The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) by Kate Quinn - Free Book Online Page A

after you ran out on that sneezing priest. I was the only one bold enough to try.”
    “Oh?” I gave him my sister Gerolama’s superb sneer. “And how did you do that?”
    “You have a mouth like a pearl, did you know that? Small, but perfect. I made inquiries with my good cousin, Adriana da Mila, and she found your brothers were searching about for a husband for you. One meeting was enough for Adriana to tell me you had a sweet nature to match that sweet face—”
    “You had her vet my
temperament
?” I couldn’t help exploding. “Like a
horse
? ‘She has pretty gaits but does she kick when she’s put to the saddle—’”
    “Of course I had your temperament vetted! You know how many beautiful faces hide foul tempers? But Adriana assured me it was quite the opposite with you, and accordingly, her son Orsino was supplied to your family as a prospective husband. And as for Orsino,” the Cardinal added, “if you’re wondering, he agreed to the proposition. He understood my patronage would bring him considerable compensation. Favors, posts, commissions, and so forth. Well worth the loan of a wife.”
    “He couldn’t have agreed to that.” I sat down very suddenly on a marble bench beside the fountain. The stone nymph gamboled in the water, laughing at me. “He wouldn’t have.”
    “It’s a common enough arrangement.” Amusement still laced the Cardinal’s deep voice, but he sounded gentler, as though no longer smiling. I didn’t know; I couldn’t bear to look at him. “My last mistress had three husbands in succession, each more compliant than the last. They profited from my patronage, she had respectability—and the children she bore me had protection.”
    “Children?” My voice was a stupid echo; I gazed at the arch where the rude boy Juan had disappeared. Of course. A cardinal who didn’t blink at propositioning a wife of one day certainly wouldn’t balk at producing bastards.
    “Five children living.” He sat down on the rim of the fountain opposite me, not too close. “Four here in Rome, three boys and a girl. A daughter in Spain whom I rarely see, now that she’s grown and married.”
    And older than me, no doubt. Not that there was anything so shocking about that; Isotta Colonna, who had cried all through her wedding, had been standing next to a human sphere of sixty-four. Three quarters of the girls I’d giggled with at Mass were wed to husbands twenty years at least their senior.
    Nineteen-year-old Orsino with his blushes and his blue eyes. I’d thought I was so lucky.
    I looked the Cardinal square in the eye. “If you wanted me so badly, why didn’t you take me last night?” I made myself ask. “It’s your
palazzo
—no one would have come to my aid. You could have done whatever you wanted with me.”
    “My dear girl.” The amusement was back, laced through his voice like a thread of honey through cake. “I’ve never in my life had a woman by force, and I don’t intend to begin now.”
    I jumped to my feet. “Then let me go home!”
    “Certainly,” he said. “Your new home is at the Palazzo Montegiordano, with your mother-in-law Adriana da Mila. She runs a comfortable household there—my daughter stays with her; I do hope you and Lucrezia will be friends. She’s a delight, and too often lacks the company of other young girls. Your husband will stay in the country at Bassanello, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes to bleat apologies at you for being the cowardly sprig that he is. I will come too, from time to time, to pay you court.”
    I lowered my lids in scorn. “And if I say no?”
Could
I say no? Or would I go to hell for defying a cardinal? Oh, Holy Virgin, who ever would have thought getting married would make everything so
complicated
?
    “Say no, and you will be none the worse off.” The Cardinal rose in a rustle of scarlet silks, his majestic height dwarfing me again. “In fact, you will be considerably the richer. You’ll have a pliant young