Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire Read Free Book Online

one of the maids. “It makes my work easier.” She rubbed her bosom as if polishing a knob of furniture.
    â€œI like a man who needs forgiveness so obviously,” said Fra Ludovico primly. “It makes my work clearer.”
    â€œHe’s a young one, to have taken so many lives in war,” said Primavera. “Lives of his soldiers, lives of his enemies. Now, what cruel nonsense does his handsome head plot with our good master? Bianca, take this salver of cheese and fruit upstairs. Bianca! Where is the child?”

Lucrezia

    I NEEDED the air, I needed freshness on my skin. I needed to see what was to be seen. I didn’t wait for the hand of my brother to prompt me from the carriage. I, the daughter of a pope, I, who had been the governatrice of Spoleto at the age of nineteen, I never waited for prompting.
    â€œVicente. The comfort of reacquaintance.” I used our common Iberian tongue, toying with his Christian name as a courtesan teases a drunken courtier, with malice and pleasure at once. “Vicente, before you are seduced into intrigues of state by my brother, be so good as to favor me with your welcome.”
    I awaited a kiss but accepted his hand. It’s best to acquiesce to custom, at least when one is in the country. Avoiding his eyes, I trained my attention on the child instead, feigning an interest I didn’t possess.
    â€œWho are you, who looks on a Borgia with impunity?” I said, though the child had hidden her eyes behind her father’s legs. I couldexamine Vicente’s form while pretending to play find-the-child. A tiresome pretense, but even a young Borgia had to observe some proprieties, as scurrilous spies are always lurking about to report on our deeds and misdeeds.
    â€œBianca,” murmured her father, “surely you remember my Bianca?”
    â€œI haven’t taken her measure before,” I answered. “She was a shit-smeared froglet the last time I was by. Why, she’s turning into a person.”
    â€œThey do, you know,” said Vicente.
    â€œLet me see the cherubina, then,” I said. “Come to Lucrezia, child.”
    The child was wary. She didn’t obey me until her father nudged her forward.
    And we looked at each other, that girl and I. She out of childish curiosity and caution, I out of the need to have something to talk to her father about. I had no native interest in this child. I attest to that now. I would have been happy never to see her again. She was no more than a saucer of spoiled milk to me.
    Though she had her beauty, I’ll grant you that. She curved, rushlike, against her father’s well-turned calf. She had the face of a new blossom, a freshness and paleness one could imagine some sorcerer growing in a moonlit garden. Her hair was pinned up in a womanly fashion, despite her youth, and its blackness, under a net of simple unornamented cord, had a steepness to it, a depth. Odd how such things strike one. Her eyes were hidden from me; she wouldn’t look up. Her skin was white as snow.

I am a woman who slept with my
father the Pope

    I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope.
    They say I did, at least, and so does he.
    And who am I to make of the Pope a liar,
    And who is he to make a liar of me?

What I saw then

    S OME OF us are born many times. Some are born only once. Primavera says that some are born dead and live their whole lives without knowing it.
    I can’t say much about earlier childhood memories. One knows things with a complicated and unreliable conviction. The sky-blue sky is as blue as the sky. White beans in a brown pot are more delicious than milk. The purr of cats and the claws of cats are not the same thing. One can’t remember how one learned to breathe, at least the first time.
    But then one is born anew, usually at the moment that the breath begins again after it has been held.
    I released the air of my lungs, and breathed again, and looked at my father’s