Sara Poole

“We all make choices, Francesca. You are no different from anyone else in that regard. If you truly think otherwise, you are deluding yourself.”

“... I opened the door to a knock and found a ashen-faced messenger quailing at the prospect of facing an undead witch who was, as I shortly learned, the talk of Rome.The poor man thrust a package into my arms, declined any payment, and fled with such alacrity that I waited to make sure did not fall headfirst down the steps before stepping back inside my apartment.”

“Christ's breath, how do you even have the wit to live?”

“Truly, Francesca, if all women were like you, I would become a Turk solely for the purpose of assembling a harem.”

“In the aftermath, we lay side by side, struggling for breath. I reached out, brushing my fingers lightly down his arm. Cesare seized my hand and pressed it to his lips. We remained like that as slowly the world righted itself.”

“Something unfathomable moved behind his eyes. He sighed deeply.'Do you ever, even once,' he asked, 'consider the price of caring about you?”

“Giulia clasped her hands together just below her bosom, blinked moistly, and flung herself at Borgia's feet. 'My lord! My darling! How could I not be overcome with concern for you? Truly, the burdens you carry would crush any other man. How fortunate we are that Our Father in Heaven has endowed our father here on earth with such wisdom and strength to see us through this difficult time.'What amazed me - and still does - is that men actually believe such drivel. Even a man as worldly, as brilliant, and above all as cynical as Borgia will nod complacently and accept it as his due. Nor did Cesare so much as raise an eyebrow. I supposed he heard the same sort of thing often enough himself.”

“The thick murmur of my name on his tongue was almost enough to push me over the edge as I clung to the sweetly strange need to hold him safe within my arms. Even, dare I say, within my body. Is it the conceit of every woman that she can provide such a haven? Is it the dream of every man to find it?”

“We are all of us balanced on Fortuna's wheel, clinging as best we can lest we tumble needlessly into Fata's dark maw. Yet we can, if we dare, let go and in that golden moment find the strength of our wings unfurling.”

“How is it possible for people to have so much power yet be so stupid?”

“.... I am in no position to judge you or anything you do.''Yet you think I could be judged were you not so magnanimous as to forgo the exercise?”

“Who are you?''My name is Francesca Giordano.'Il re dei contrabbandieri paled. He pressed himself into the high back of his chair and stared at me in disbelief.'You can't be her. She's old and has warts.''Because she is strega? Ask yourself, why would any self-respecting witch go about looking old and with warts?”

“If his Holiness asks for me, tell him I am -" I was what? What excuse would be sufficient to hold off Borgia the Bull when he wanted, nay demanded attention?'Tell him I am attending to a gynecological matter but will return shortly.”

“You are bruised.''Am I? I hadn't noticed.''Lucrezia says you killed the bastard.'... Cesare's hands were shaking. Hard, sun-darkened hands made to hold a sword or lance unflinchingly, but they trembled against my pale skin.”

“He was then sixty-two years old, an age by which most men are in the grave or at least occupying a chair in Death's antechamber.”

“Men prickle for so many reasons it is often impossible to know what provokes them on any given occasion.”

“Popes come and go, empires clash, new worlds arise, but Rome is eternally Rome, which is to say that its people were busy as always sweating, swearing, eating, fornicating, occasionally praying, and without surcease, gossiping.”

“Sometimes it is in the empty, blank places that we find truth staring back at us.”

“Della Rovere knows," I said, "or at least he suspects." "What makes you say that?" "I saw him in the passage a short time ago. He looked. . . upset." "You know he is prone to constipation? Perhaps it was that.”

“He turned his head just then and for a moment, our eyes met. I would like to tell you that I saw the face of evil when I looked at the Grand Inquisitor, but in fact he seemed like so many men who serve Holy Mother Church: a bureaucrat for whom the suffering of humanity is of no account compared to his imagined visions of the will of God. It is said that the Devil enters through back doors and in disguise, but men such as Torquemada never seemed to consider that. He is dead now, as I tell this tale. I wonder how warmly the One he served welcomed him into eternity.”

“Though he may have been more tolerant than most of his brethren, being addressed without deference by a woman of no particular lineage was more than the priest could bear. A tic sprang to life in his right eye. Glaring, he turned away from me and addressed himself pointedly to Casare. "Signore, we are about to perform the final sacraments for our late Holy Father! Surely you can understand that your presence here and that of your-" He paused, no doubt condsiering what he would like to call me. Some sense of self-preservation must have won out as he said only, "-companion is not appropriate?"Cesare had many skills- I have alluded to several of them - but he was utterly lacking in even the rudiments of tact. Indeed, his notion of diplomacy revolved around the conviction that the best route to peace lies in the grinding of one's enemies into the ground so thoroughly that the very fact of their ever having existed will be forgotten upon the wind.But he was in Saint Peter's Basilica, next to Jerusalem the holiest place in all Christendom. And if he caused any real problems, he would have no end of trouble from his father.Accordingly, Cesare gritted his teeth and said, "Don't fuck with me, priest. Just show us how to get into the garret.”

“Most people don't know their ass from their elbow.”

“Who is Nando?" Cesare asked. "Rocco's son," I replied. "A child." Make no mistake, Cesare was a selfish and ruthless man. The entire course of his life proves this. But for all that, he could on ocassion actually be a man - and by that I do not mean that he possessed scrotum and penis, as does the rudest hog rooting in a sty. He had an instinct to care for those weaker than himself, especially children, whom he liked and valued far more than he did most adults. But just then he was very young and lacking in the thin - in Cesare's case, extremely thin - veneer of civilization that most men manage to acquire as they pass through life. That being the case, he gave voice to what was, in all honesty, my own instinctive response to Rocco's news. "Merda." I could not have put it better.”

“When he trapped you and the Jew?" "His name was David ben Eliezer." That he had a name, that he was a man, that he mattered, all had to be acknowledged by someone. The task seemed to fall to me.”

“Rest in God, my soul. He is the source of my hope”

“A few old men might cling to their mitres and mumble their prayers, but they were a dying breed. It was men like Borgia who were the Church now. They had transformed it into a mimers' play filled with posturing and pretense, a performance to distract the rabble while they went about their worldly business out of sight.Where was the sheperd to stand against such wolves?”

“Have you noticed that those who murder in the thousands invariably claim divine favor while those who kill on a far more modest scale, myself included, know in our hearts that God weeps for our sins?”

“He was a handsome man, not in the way of mercurial Cesare or the false angel, Morozzi, but with a calm steadiness that sat well upon him and shown in everything he did. The creations he drew from fire and air were possessed of great delicacy, but I was coming to realize that the man himself was as an oak, unshakable in the greatest storm.”

“True sleep eluded me. Morpheus is a capricious god; he comes easily to some and only with greatest difficulty to others. To lure him, it is best to pretend disinterest. Engage the mind in some pursuit unrelated to what is truly desired and allow no distraction from it. For me, nothing works so well as a walk through Rome.”

“We have all made mistakes, each and every one of us. The trick is to not keep making them over and over.” “I don’t,” I said, not modestly but truthfully. “I keep finding new mistakes to make. I suspect that I have a genius for it.”