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

asked the tavernkeeper around lips gone numb.
    “Early this morning,” the man complained. “One of the maids, she comes to light the fires and set the pots boiling at dawn, and what do I hear upstairs? A great wail, and by the time I’m down to take a look, the stupid girl’s gone and emptied her stomach all over the floor!”
    Enough to make anyone lose her stomach
, I thought. Anna lay on the long trestle table of the kitchens, head tipped back, skirts mussed about her bare legs. Her hands had been spread wide like the figure of Christ on a crucifix, spread wide and staked down to the table with kitchen knives through the palms. She’d still managed to tear one hand free, making a desperate lunging attack. I picked up her free-dangling hand, stiff and cold, and saw blood congealed in dark crescents under her nails. She’d raked her attacker hard.
    Good girl.
    “This’ll put business off for weeks,” the tavernkeeper grumbled. “Who wants to drink their wine and throw their dice at a tavern where a dead girl’s been staked, answer me that?”
    Though maybe if she hadn’t scratched her attacker, he might not have cut her throat.
It wasn’t the knives through her hands that had killed my friend—it was the messy slash across her neck, amid half a dozen shallow panicked ones as if the murderer had never cut a throat in his life.
    I could have taught you better
, I thought. One hand to grasp the forehead, pull the head straight back, and drag the knife across the throat in one straight deep stroke. Dragging it
across
the throat, that was key—drag it around, and the cut wouldn’t score deep enough.
You found that out, didn’t you, whoever you were? Took you four tries before she died.
    “Who did this?” I asked quietly.
    “What’s it to you? It don’t matter, no one’ll catch him.”
    No, probably not. A common girl found in a tavern with her throat slashed—the Tiber filled up nightly with bodies like that. Mostly they were raked up, carted off, and dumped unclaimed into anonymous graves. Who cared? Not the priests, who wouldn’t say a Mass for the dead unless they were paid by some member of the living first. Not the constables, those corrupt swaggerers more interested in loot and bribes than in finding murderers. No one would bother calling a priest or a constable in, not for someone like Anna.
    I reached out and closed her eyes, half-open and staring at the knotted rafters. “Who did this?” I asked again.
    “How should I know?” The tavernkeeper shrugged heavy shoulders, eyeing the blood that had run from the table to pool and dry on the floor. Behind the kitchen door at his back, I could hear the other maidservants twittering and wailing. “One of the other girls said there were three men in for a bit of fun late last night—throwing dice, spreading money around, eyeing the girls. Maybe Anna stayed to wait on them.”
    “You were here?”
    “I went to midnight Mass,” the tavernkeeper said virtuously.
    “You went to fuck that carter’s wife you like to visit when her husband leaves Rome with his mules, but no matter. These three boys—did your girls say anything else about them?”
    “Well dressed. Anna could have turned a pretty profit, pulling up her skirts for something better than dwarves and fishmongers. Things got out of hand, I imagine.”
    “No, she wasn’t raped.” I tugged her rumpled skirts down to cover her ankles. She had no blood under her skirts or bruises on her thighs. Bruises on her knees, as though someone had tried to force them apart, but Anna must have fought too hard. The knives through her hands, I guessed, had been to hold her still . . .
    “Who’s going to take care of this mess, I’d like to know?” The tavernkeeper went back to his complaining. “I’ll have to pay double to those maids, just to get them in here to clean that floor! And they won’t go touching that body, not a whore who’s died unshriven.”
    “I’ll tend the body.” I