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

the incense or the hypocrisy.
Men
, I thought as I made my way past the line of penitents waiting for the priest, and looked about for an altar where I could light a candle. I missed the old cross-eyed Madonna at the church in Capodimonte where I’d said all my confessions growing up. Here at the Santa Maria Maggiore everything was far grander: the huge columns were all Athenian marble, the arch and the apse had been inlaid with splendid mosaics of the Virgin, and all the saints in their niches looked snobbish. I finally paused before the altar of Santa Anna—she had a kinder face in her elaborate fresco than the censorious Madonna, and she also had very fashionable slashed-velvet sleeves. “Men are all the same,” I told her, lighting my candle. “Doesn’t matter if they’re doubleted or cassocked, does it?”
    “Sorellina!”
    I turned to see my brother Sandro, waving his hat overhead in a flourish as he caught sight of me through the church’s throng.
    “A far cry from Capodimonte, isn’t it?” he continued as he made his way to my side before Santa Anna’s candles. He looked out over the high-vaulted transept, the richly gilded saints, the inlaid floors of the basilica. “But you’re moving in grand circles these days.” Sandro’s dark eyes crinkled approvingly at my green velvet gown, my billowing embroidered sleeves, the silvery net into which I’d packed my hair. Finer than he was used to seeing me dressed—the way we’d been raised, silks and velvets had been saved strictly for holy days and celebrations, but for the Borgia and the Orsini, brocade and pearls were for every day. “I imagine the priest clucked at you for vanity,” Sandro continued, “but how many other sins can you have committed in just a fortnight or two of marriage? For myself, I’ve got the usual batch of carnal offenses to work off. It does seem unfair that a little flutter with a pretty girl gets me twice the penance a student or a soldier would get. There are distinct disadvantages to the clerical life, at least on the lower rungs. One isn’t really able to get away with serious sinning until one is at least a cardinal. I suppose that should motivate me to climb the ladder; how do you fancy me as ‘Cardinal Farnese’—”
    I hadn’t seen my favorite brother since the wedding. He said some business had taken him from the city for a few weeks—“One does have to put in the occasional hour or two of work as a notary, unfortunately.” I suspected it was a girl who had taken him away from the city, not notary business, and I scowled at him because it had been a pair of weeks when I really could have used some brotherly assistance.
    “What, no fond greeting?” He mimicked my glare. “Marriage isn’t sweetening you as much as I’d thought it would,
sorellina
.”
    “Not much of a marriage thus far,” I said, still glowering. “Orsino has gone to the country, and Cardinal Borgia is trying to seduce me.”
    Sandro hooted. “Oh yes! The aging Cardinal, a squid in red robes, winds his caressing tentacles about the trembling figure of the maiden fair—”
    “Sandro, be serious!”
    “—she twists, she turns, where shall she go? Andromeda chained upon the rock for Neptune’s monster of the deep, a melting beauty shrinking in terror as powerful arms pull her toward her doom—”
    “Shouldn’t the future Cardinal Farnese be reading Scripture rather than Greek myths?”
    “—with all her strength she fights her fate, this virgin sacrifice to the lusts of a primal god—”
    I stood there simmering while my brother doubled over with laughter. People were starting to stare, but that never bothered Sandro. I took him by the sleeve and pulled him away from Santa Anna, between a marble column and the line of penitents filing one by one into the confessional. “Sandro, stop chortling! It’s not funny.”
    “Of course it’s funny.” Sandro swallowed his last chuckles, dark eyes dancing. “Borgia’s a mitered old