The Serpent and the Pearl (A Novel of the Borgias) by Kate Quinn

they look like. What if they come back?” I gave a dark look at Anna’s corpse, so still on the table between us. “What if it’s one of you lovely girls next time they feel like a bit of fun?”
    “Not likely.” The first girl made a face, dingy light from the windows cutting sharp shadows over her nose, which had been broken at least once by some drunken sailor or laborer. “One was right ugly—in livery, you know. Some lug of a guardsman. I wouldn’t service a man like that for a bag of ducats.”
    “You’d service the Devil himself for a single ducat,” her friend told her. “Much less a bag of them!”
    “What kind of livery did this guardsman wear?” I cut in before the first girl could bristle.
    “I don’t know, he had a cloak on. Had a horse embroidered on his chest, though.”
    “It wasn’t a horse,” the other girl contradicted. “It was a bull. All embroidered in red.”
    “No, it was a horse . . .”
    “The third man?” I said, crossing Anna’s hands over her flat breast. “What did he look like?”
    Blank looks and shrugs among them. “Just a man,” the older woman said finally. “Sounded like a Spaniard. Or maybe he was Venetian.” A sniff. “Who can tell with these foreigners?”
    Dio.
“What about him, this Spaniard or Venetian?”
    “He came later, after the other two. Pinched my bottom, and didn’t even offer a coin. Said they should all go back to the Inn of the Fig, because there were prettier girls there.”
    I felt a sudden savage wish that they
had
gone back to the Inn of the Fig, and killed some prettier girl than Anna. A pretty girl with a black heart and a greedy hand; someone who had abandoned a baby on a hillside or given customers over to be robbed and killed by bravos—some girl with sins on her head that merited such a death.
    Such a death. Staked to a table, and for what? Had Anna fought too hard, and they’d panicked and cut her throat to silence her? Even in a tavern as seedy as this one, shrieks of murder and blood coming from the night might have roused a response from one of the cramped little wine shops or rented rooms across the narrow street.
    I wondered how many noble families in Rome liveried their guards in a red bull or horse.
    I wondered if it was the guard who wore the marks of Anna’s nails on his face—or the Spaniard-Venetian, or the boy in the mask.
    I wondered if any of them went to Inn of the Fig regularly.
    The two maidservants wandered away, unnerved by my sudden lapse into silence, and I was just as glad they were gone. I lit the tapers around Anna’s body and settled back onto my stool for her death vigil. I felt the volume of the
Iliad
in the inside of my doublet and pulled it out.
    “‘
The Greeks all night with tears and groans bewailed Patroclus
,’” I read.
“‘On his comrade’s breast, Achilles laid his murder-dealing hands, and led with bitter groans the loud lament.’”
    No loud lament here. No one to care Anna was dead but me. Not like Patroclus, who at least had all the heroes of Greece to mourn him.“‘
They washed the corpse, with lissome oils anointing, and the wounds with fragrant ointments filled . . .
’ No oils and ointments for you, my good lady,” I broke away from Homer to tell my friend. “I’ll be lucky if I can buy a Mass for your soul.”
    The coins on her eyes gleamed at me.
“‘All night around Achilles swift of foot, the Myrmidons with tears Patroclus mourned.’”
    I broke off, closing the little book. “At least Achilles knew who killed his friend.”
    Anna was silent. I looked at her.
    “Who killed you, my girl?” I asked her. “Answer me that, eh?”
    No reply.
    Giulia
    S o you are confessing to the sin of fornication outside the vows of your marriage? A grave offense,
madonna
.”
    “No,” I said, exasperated. “That’s not what I said at all. I said
he’s
trying to tempt
me
to the sin of fornication outside my marriage vows. He started trying the day after my