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

crossed the kitchen, climbing up on a chair to reach the box where the tapers were kept. I took a handful and hopped down from the chair. “I’ll pay,” I said, forestalling the tavernkeeper’s sputtering, and began setting the tapers about Anna’s still body. Cheap tapers, made of rancid-smelling tallow. She deserved beeswax for her death vigil. Of course, Anna had deserved a great many things. A silk dress, like that lovely young bride we’d watched in her wedding procession a fortnight ago. A caring husband, a loyal family. A kind death in a soft bed at sixty, not a horror of a death staked to a kitchen table at twenty-five.
    “Close the tavern today,” I told the tavernkeeper, who had started to fuss again. “I’ll stand vigil for her tonight, and see her buried on the morrow.”
    “I believe the dwarf’s in love!” The man raised an eyebrow, starting to grin.
    “Keep that filthy tongue in your head before I saw it off,” I said evenly. “She has no family to bury her, so I will.”
    “Well, it’s your money.”
    “Money won at a very lucky hand of
primiera
,” I told Anna’s still body when the tavernkeeper had tramped heavily out. “A
chorus
, four cards of the same kind! A rare hand, that one. I bought a book with it, but I’ll take it back. Should be enough to see you properly buried in a churchyard. Maybe even a Mass or two for your soul . . .”
    Anna lay still. A thick drop of congealing blood collected at the tip of her finger.
Just an ordinary tavern maid
, I thought. Plain-faced, limp hair a little grimy; illiterate, hard-used, and old at twenty-five. A hundred like her in every
piazza
in Rome. Nothing to set her apart from any of the others—except maybe that sweet dent of a dimple at the corner of her mouth when she gave her kind smile.
    “‘
Around him stood his comrades mourning.
’” I quoted Achilles’s lines of grief when he lost his friend Patroclus at Troy. “‘
With them, Peleus’s son, shedding hot tears as on his friend he gazed—
’” Yanking the remaining knife out of Anna’s still-staked hand. “‘
Laid on the bier, and pierced with deadly wounds . . .
’”
    “Who’re you talking to?”
    I turned to see two of the maidservants standing in the doorway, peering with nervous swollen eyes. “She’s not talkin’ back, is she? They say ghosts hover around the bodies of them who died violent—”
    “Just saying a prayer for her.” I saw their eyes dart away from Anna’s, which had reflexively slid open again to stare glassily at the ceiling. I smoothed down her eyelids, weighting them closed this time with the last two
scudi
from my purse.
    “God rest her soul,” one of the maidservants quavered, crossing herself. A girl not so different from Anna, but lacking that dimple and the streak of kindness that had gone with it. This girl been known to bump me with her hip as she passed, just to see if she could knock the cards out of my hand, but now her eyes were bloodshot and her chin quavered. “God rot those who did this to her!”
    “The tavernkeeper says you two saw them.” Casually I straightened the folds of Anna’s skirts. “Three men, wasn’t it? What did they look like?”
    “What do any of them look like?” the other maidservant shrugged. An older woman, harder of face and tight about the mouth. “Men out for a good time, that’s what they looked like.”
    “One had a
mask
.” The first girl gave a watery snort. “You know how these young bravos are. It’s all so terribly entertaining to dress up like it’s Carnival and go to the slums!”
    “So he was young.” I took some care smoothing the hair back from Anna’s blood-mottled cheeks. “How young? A boy, or a young man?”
    “Who can tell behind a mask? He was young, that’s all, and he had money. Splashing coin all about while he played
zara
.”
    “The other two?”
    “Just men,” the older woman said, impatient. “What’s it to you?”
    “Better if we know what