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

nuns, get in alone, but I’d known I’d only have moments, if not seconds. I just snatched the reliquary box and ran.
    The box was empty when I took it. I’d have sworn an oath on that. But the hand’s dried palm must have caught on the broken edges of the viewing window as I bundled everything up, because later I found the dark curled thing tangled in my cloak at the bottom of my pack, after I’d sold the pieces of the reliquary for far less than they were worth. I’d stared at it in horror, but what was I supposed to do then? I’d already taken ship, the cheapest passage I could find from Venice to Ferrara. Even if the boat had turned around on the spot, I couldn’t have taken the relic back—I’d have been arrested for desecration of a church.
    I’d meant what I told Marco that first morning, sitting in those cramped little kitchens.
I can’t go back.
If I’d just stolen from my father—well, I’d likely be returned for whatever punishment he deemed fit. But a desecrator of church altars wouldn’t be forgiven. I didn’t know what punishment they had in Rome for desecrators, but I’d heard how other thieves of God had been treated. I could be strung upside down from a public gallows, hanging there while the crowds threw rocks and rotten vegetables at me, until the blood burst inside my head.
    And if they found out just who I was—what I had been in Venice—well, I’d be shipped back there, to La Serenissima and the hands of my enemies. And I’d face a far worse punishment than hanging upside-down on a public gallows.
    I shivered at the thought, tasting the sour tang of terror in my mouth again, and crossed myself as I looked at the dark shriveled thing in the nest of clothes. I certainly couldn’t throw it away like trash, but what
did
I do with it? I’d thought of leaving it at a shrine or an altar somewhere—but relics in the Holy City are a hundred to a
scudo;
likely the hand would just have been tossed away as rubbish. I couldn’t send it back to the Convent of Santa Marta in Venice, either; not without giving myself away.
    I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with the thing.
    I had to steel myself to touch it with my bare hand. I could cut a lamb’s throat for the kitchen spit as briskly and unsentimentally as any man; I could plunge my hand into a mass of still-steaming pig guts and empty them out for sausage casings; but I flinched as I picked up the withered hand and laid it on my bed. It felt dry and wrinkled to the touch, like a raisin.
    I hesitated, then dropped to my knees beside it. It might not be my patron saint’s true hand, but it had still been sacred to her, a relic of her church. If I gave my prayers to it, she would hear me. Only, what
was
the proper prayer to a saint whom you have robbed and desecrated?
    “Santa Marta,” I said finally, “don’t be angry with me. You know I couldn’t—you know I had to leave.” I was glad I didn’t have to get into that part of my story—the small matter of who I was. Being sanctified, Santa Marta would just
know
that without me having to go through all the sordid details. “I’m sorry I had to steal from you, I didn’t mean—”
    I stopped. This wasn’t going well at all.
    “Santa Marta,” I began again. “Help me to stay hidden here, and I dedicate all the dishes these hands of mine will ever make to you. The roasts, the fowl, the sauces, the sweets—all to your name. My hands and all their works, from this day, if you will forgive me my sins against you.”
    I looked down at my hands. Scarred with old knife nicks, the faded burn on my wrist where a too-hot sauce had once splashed, the calluses from wrestling with spits and jerking feathers from dead pheasants. What saint besides the patron of cooks would want hands like that?
    For the first time, I really looked at the curled-up hand now lying on my bed. A small hand like mine; useful for stuffing the cavities of small birds. Narrow fingers, one still wearing a