Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance - By Sara Poole Page 0,1

servants all, as though a great wind blew across the gilded reception room shaded by the columned loggia beyond and cooled in this blazing Roman summer of Anno Domini 1492 by breezes from the gardens filled with the scents of exotic jasmine and tamarind.

“In my house, this man I called to serve me was poisoned in my house!”

Pigeons in the cotes beneath the palazzo eaves fluttered as the great booming voice washed over them. Roused to anger, Il Cardinale was a marvel to behold, a true force of nature.

“I will find who did this. Whoever dared will pay! Captain, you will—”

About to issue his orders to the commander of his condotierri, Borgia paused. I had stepped forward in that moment, squeezing between a house priest and a secretary, to put myself at the front of the crowd that watched him with terrified fascination. The movement distracted him. He stared at me, scowling.

I inclined my head slightly in the direction of the body.

“Out!”

They fled, all of them, from the old veterans to the youngest servant, tumbling over one another to be gone from his presence, away from his terrifying rage that turned the blood to ice, freed to whisper among themselves about what had happened, what it meant, and, above all, who had dared to do it.

Only I remained.

“Giordano’s daughter?” Borgia stared at me across the width of the reception room. It was a vast space carpeted in the Moorish fashion as so few can afford to do, furnished with the rarest woods, the most precious fabrics, the grandest silver and gold plate, all to proclaim the power and glory of the man whose will I dared to challenge.

A drop of sweat ran down between my shoulder blades. I had worn my best day clothes for what I feared might be the final hour of my life. The underdress of dark brown velvet, pleated across the bodice and with a wide skirt that trailed slightly behind me, pressed down heavily on my shoulders. A pale yellow overdress was clinched loosely under my breasts, a reminder of the weight I had lost since my father’s death.

By contrast, the Cardinal was the picture of comfort in a loose, billowing shirt and pantaloons of the sort he favored when he was at home and relaxing, as he had been when word was brought to him of the Spaniard’s death.

I nodded. “I am, Eminence, Francesca Giordano, your servant.”

The Cardinal paced in one direction, back again, a restless animal filled with power, ambition, appetites. He gazed at me and I knew what he must see: a slim woman of not yet twenty, unremarkable in looks except for overly large brown eyes, auburn hair, and, thanks to my fear, very pale skin.

He gestured at the Spaniard, who in the heat of the day had already begun to stink.

“What do you know of this?”

“I killed him.”

Even to my own ears, my voice sounded harsh against the tapestry-covered walls. The Cardinal paced closer, his expression that of mingled shock and disbelief.

“You killed him?”

I had prepared a speech that I hoped would explain my actions while concealing my true intent. It came in such a rush I feared I might garble it.

“I am my father’s daughter. I learned at his side, yet when he was killed, you did not consider for a moment that I should take his place. You would have for a son but not for me. Instead, you hired this . . . other—” I caught my breath and pointed at the dead man. “Hired him to protect you and your family. Yet he could not even protect himself, not from me.”

I could have said more. That Borgia had done nothing to avenge my father’s murder. That he had allowed him to be beaten in the street like a dog, left in the filth with his skull crushed, and not lifted a hand to seek vengeance. That such a lapse on his part was unparalleled . . . and unforgivable.

He had left it to me, the poisoner’s daughter, to exact justice. But to do so, I needed power, paid for in the coin of one dead Spaniard.

The Cardinal’s great brow wrinkled prodigiously, leaving his eyes mere slits. Yet he appeared calm enough, with no sign of the rage he had shown minutes before.

A flicker of hope stirred within me. Ten years living under his roof, watching him, hearing my father speak of him. Ten years convinced that he was a man of true intelligence, of reason and