City of God by Cecelia Holland Read Free Book Online

key. The boy was shivering; his nose dripped. Nicholas sent him out to the corridor to wait while he read the note of thanks Madonna Angela had sent with the key.
    She had not written it; a secretary had. The fine chancery hand was almost identical to Nicholas’s. Nicholas folded the slip of paper and put it in a drawer of his desk. He opened the door to send the page away, but Piccolo had already gone, leaving a trail of waterdrops along the brown marble floor.
    When the legation closed its doors for the afternoon, Nicholas and Juan walked through the city to the house behind the Colosseo. The wild-growing yard stirred and moved in the rain as if the vines and sprawling shrubs danced to it. Nicholas walked once around the yard, but the rain had blotted away any footprints.
    The house was cold. A dead fire lay half-burned on the hearth. The furniture in the main room was slightly rearranged; one of the lyre-backed chairs near the center of the room had been turned to face the other. In the little kitchen, two dirty wine glasses stood on the stone sideboard. Nicholas sniffed at the drying residue in the bottom of one glass. It was not his wine. Whoever had come here last night had brought his own wine.
    He went through the main room and opened the door to the bedroom. The bed had been pulled out from the wall, and the blankets tucked under the mattress. He wondered if anyone had actually slept there.
    Juan appeared beside him on the threshold of the bedroom. “They were lovers, you see.”
    â€œPerhaps.” The blankets tucked under the mattress whetted his suspicions. Soldiers did that.
    Juan put his head into the room; he turned his head from side to side, birdlike, and let out a chirrup of triumph. Going to the bed, he picked something from the pillow.
    â€œProof final.” The old man held up a long pale hair, blond or gray.
    Nicholas turned back toward the sitting room. He did not want to believe that Angela Borgia had slept here with a lover. Something else she had said played on his doubts: Will you need some place to stay? I can provide one. Had she not meant that provocatively? He knew her for the kind of woman to whom his preference for his own kind was an irresistible lure. How could she have offered to entertain him elsewhere if she meant to be entertaining someone here? Yet when he considered the words he remembered her speaking, he found nothing really there but mild concern.
    He went back to the sitting room. His gaze traveled around the place, the painted walls and spindly furniture. All in a rush he loathed the way the place was appointed. He would have it changed at once, as soon as he collected his salary, to something classic and quiet. Tapestries perhaps. Something more solemn. He crossed the room to the hearth.
    Enough remained on the fire to reveal that it had been laid out in a cabin stack. Pleased with this new evidence, he knelt down to examine it. That was certainly a soldier’s work. The charred wood looked wet. The rain was soaking coin-sized patches in the deep bed of ash. Nicholas reached into the back of the fireplace. A long thin flake of ash crumbled at his touch. Had it been a piece of paper?
    Juan was going into the kitchen. Nicholas took down the heavy-bladed tongs from the rack beside the hearth and propped the half-burned logs up against one another and stuffed kindling from the bucket into the spaces. He lit the fire from his tinderbox. He allowed himself no more conjecture. When the fire was catching well over the logs he pulled the nearest chair over and sat down, his feet to the drying warmth, and waited for his dinner.
    With Valentino’s army eating up the countryside, the Florentines were forced by desperation into offering the Pope’s son a contract of employment as the Signory’s captain, as the Italian fashion was. In return for maintaining a certain number of armed men at the disposal of the Signory, Valentino would receive an extravagant amount