Page 17 of Just for a Taste

T rue to his word, Duca de’ Medici was practically as clinical as an IV for the next feeding. Even the clothes he chose for me were plain and modest. I felt immense shame after that feeding—shame for using up all the carmine in my portraits, shame for the dreams I had been having that made me wake up with warmth between my legs.

My routine had become transparent to the household. In the morning, there was breakfast, gardening, and my morning bath. Afternoon consisted of lunch, time to research, and tea. Noor and I had grown closer, and I finally felt enough like peers to speak with her on a first-name basis. I became more and more transparent about my work, and soon it was an open secret between us. Then I had my unofficial book club with Duca de’ Medici in the aviary, dinner, and several beloved hours alone.

One night, Duca de’ Medici left the door to his parlor open, with an untouched charcuterie board and sparkling cider. From then on, I would spend the early hours of the morning in his room with a book and listen to the sweet sounds reverberating through that corner of the abbey. Sometimes he played a familiar tune; other times, I heard him stumbling about for hours to perfect a single section of an original piece. Both sounded just as enchanting to me.

I forced another bite of pasta alla Norma and grimaced. Even with its tangy sauce and delicious capers to tempt me, I hadn’t had an appetite for a while—not before evening tea, when my stomach seemed to be upside down. I looked at the pane siciliano , a sweet, nutty bread I normally devoured by the loaf, only to see it was entirely whole and still steaming. Lucia emerged from the kitchen.

“You need to eat more,” she teased playfully as she took away the dishes, “or Signora Carbone will scold you.”

“I know, I know,” I grumbled.

Signore Carbone had given me more than a few lectures on my duties as a beniamina , and Noor finally stepped in at one point to report my bloodwork was still adequate. After shoveling in a few more bites, I grumbled my thanks to Lucia and rushed off to the aviary. Idylls of the King was already in my bag, waiting for our meeting.

A delicate coo sounded from the corner of the room when I entered. “Hello, Leonore,” I said, as gently as I could, eliciting yet another satisfied coo from the dove.

As the weeks passed, she had become more and more comfortable with my presence. Though she still spooked if I moved too quickly or spoke too loudly, she had clearly become fond of me from afar. On one or two occasions, she even built up the courage to fly close to me. I smiled at the bird, who was peeking her head out from beneath a branch and eyeing me, and I whistled softly as I waited.

“What did you bring today?” I asked the second he walked through the door.

Duca de’ Medici chuckled warmly and unpacked his satchel. “Aren’t you an impatient one? Let me get situated, at least.”

He laid out his belongings slowly, in an organized manner. First was his copy of Idylls of the King, then a packet of sour grape drops—my favorite candy, I had disclosed one day, as they tasted like the happier days of my childhood. After that, he brought them every day to our time in the aviary, even if he winced with every bite. “I picked a few selections from Tristan und Isolde by Wagner, starting with the ‘Liebestod,’ of course,” he said, holding up a vinyl.

“Bit on the nose, isn’t it? Choosing that opera when we’re reading about ‘The Last Tournament?’”

“Pah,” he scoffed, plopping down next to me. “I prefer their story as a full-length romantic tragedy rather than some side plot.”

“I think both are pretty, in their own ways,” I replied with a shrug. Then, once it became too difficult to hold back my enthusiasm, I added, “But I think the full story is so much prettier—just wait until we finish it!”

Duca de’ Medici chuckled. “I’ll give it a chance for your sake. I must admit, though, the reason I picked out the ‘Liebestod’ first is more so because I’m quite the fan of a good Tristan chord, and—”

After having watched us from afar so long, Leonore landed on his shoulder.

Duca de’ Medici held out his finger, and the dove quickly hopped onto it with a satisfied coo. “Do you have any millet?” he asked without looking away from his beloved pet.

I was already taking it out of my pocket. I wasn’t sure if Duca de’ Medici noticed, but I had always been prepared for this possibility.

His eyes softened, and one corner of his lips curled ever so slightly. We listened far past the ‘Liebestod,’ well into the opera, as more and more finches gathered around Duca de’ Medici. Eventually, my stomach gurgled audibly, causing Leonore to flutter away.

Duca de’ Medici gave me a sideways glance, and now his lips were curling the other way. “Sorry,” he repeated, an echo from tens of minutes ago. “It’s already teatime for you, isn’t it? I didn’t mean to be distracted.”

“That’s okay,” I said with a small chuckle. “There’s always tomorrow.”

“Yes,” he murmured, handing me my book and giving me a strange look. “I suppose there is.”

Just as I was about to leave, Duca de’ Medici tossed his book aside, shot up, and said, “Wait, Signorina Bowling.”

I looked him up and down, searching for the urgency, then finally asked, “Yes?”

“Can we have the feeding in here?”

“I guess?” I shifted from one foot to the next, not relinquishing hold of my bag. “I mean, I haven’t had panis largitoris. ”

“Does it really matter? I only have you eat it for Signora Carbone’s sake.”

“Okay.” I couldn’t find anything objectionable, but a pressing question came to mind. “Why, though?”

He sat and ran his fingers through his hair. “This is my favorite part of the opera. I would like to listen to it with you in my presence. But I understand if you’d rather not.”

I tossed my bag to the side and sat next to him. “No, it’s fine!” I said a bit too quickly.

Despite my initial hesitation, I warmed up to the idea quickly. After all, I couldn’t trust Duca de’ Medici’s room not to bring to mind certain undertones, and the exam room we used the second time had felt uncomfortably antiseptic. I looked down at my hands, trying to decide the best option to offer him to drink from. There was the inner wrist, like he did the first time. There was my inner elbow, like the second time.

And there was my femoral artery in my upper inner thigh. I saw it in my head, the scene of him on his knees on the ground, the ghostly feeling of his lips, his soft eyelashes fluttering against me.

I banished the thought with such ferocity, my face scrunched up.

“Are you okay?” Duca de’ Medici raised a brow.

“Uh, y-yes,” I stammered. “Just got an extra sour piece of candy, that’s all.” I thrust my hand toward him quickly, giving the choice over to him.

Duca de’ Medici carefully took my hands in his and looked me in the eyes. His breath hitched. It brought me relief to see he was also anxious, that there was also something in his mind that brought him unease. I was okay with this, as long as he couldn’t read mine.

He raised my hand slowly toward him and placed his lips on the most sensitive part of my inner wrist. Duca de’ Medici’s eyes closed, and I closed my own, tuning in to the sound of the music and the feeling of him.

He continued to press his mouth against me, then finally parted them, softly sucking on my skin. I tried my best not to squirm and focus on staying still, but I couldn’t help but let out a staggered exhale.

Then came the sharp pain of a single fang piercing my skin, one I had forgotten to expect. I grasped his hand, and he rubbed a gentle thumb across my fingers. I expected this subconscious movement to elicit an electric response from the vampire, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. Duca de’ Medici drank from me slowly and steadily, pausing now and then to squeeze my hand and swipe his tongue across my wrist, all the while not moving from where his mouth had originally touched.

“You were right,” I murmured.

“Hmm?” His mouth buzzed against me with a strange tickling sensation.

I suppressed a giggle, then explained, “The opera. It’s really pretty.”

“Yes, it really is.” After one last sip, he parted from me and looked up with a smile. “Have a lovely day, Signorina Bowling.”

And then he departed, leaving me a mess of dizziness and fluttering butterflies.

∞∞∞

Even after dinner, I didn’t have it in me to take off the cotton ball or bandage. Not that it would hurt or anything—I just didn’t want to. When I sat down for tea with Noor, she gave me a strange look but didn’t inquire. I was too distracted to explain myself, anyhow, as my attention was immediately drawn toward the satchel of books at her side. I didn’t recognize any of the titles, but they appeared to be archival, the sorts of things Noor had brought from local libraries in the past to help me.

“Are those for me?” I asked, taking a seat.

“I thought they could be,” she replied, her mouth set in a line. “But now that I’ve examined them more closely, I don’t think they would be of interest to you.”

“Why not?” I reached out and glanced at one. It looked old and said Medici , which was typically my only criteria.

“They are more recent than documents you are typically interested in—those from the seventeenth century.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” I replied, carefully reading her expression. We had tiptoed around the precise topic of my thesis, but if Noor was to help me and I was to avoid leaving the abbey anytime soon, she would need to know what to look for. I took a long sip of tea to steel myself. “What do you know about the Medici line?”

Noor shrugged. “Not more than most. They were a wealthy and influential family in Italy during the Renaissance, and they are still wealthy and influential today.”

I leaned forward in my chair. “And?”

“And nothing more.”

I frowned. “Don’t you know any details about what happened between then and now?”

“I do not need to know such details to care for Zeno.” Then, seeing my disappointment, she acquiesced. “But I am willing to hear them.”

“Really?!” I clasped my hands together.

“Yes, if it will help you.”

I ran and grabbed several books, which contained Medici portraits, and sprawled them out along the table.

“You see, I was recently researching the family in the seventeenth century, but my interest actually stretches a century beyond it. I’m mostly fascinated by the Medici succession of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

I gave her a moment to butt in and make some excuse to leave, like so many had before her, but to my joy, she remained silent and still. I was flustered to have an audience for my lectures for the first time in so long. “Um, well, at that time, Cosimo III de’ Medici faced an unusual problem, right? More specifically, the likely extinction of the Medici dynasty. Cosimo and his wife had three children—Ferdinando, Gian Gastone, and Anna Maria Lucia. Sorry, that’s a lot of names to remember, isn’t it? Please stop me if you get confused. Actually, I guess these portraits here can help? Um, anyway, Ferdinando, the eldest son and presumptive heir, died before Cosimo could pass along the throne, and in desperation, Cosimo proposed a bill to allow for female-line succession so that Anna Maria Lucia could inherit the family name. Unfortunately for him, this law was revoked after his death, leaving the Medici name in the hands of Gian Gastone.”

By this point, I had fully fallen into my lecture and forgotten to feel self-conscious.

“Like his sister, Anna Maria Luisa, Gian Gastone’s marriage was barren—in his case, because he was not interested in women, and in her case because she was infertile, probably because of syphilis. After Gian Gastone’s death, it was known to all of Italy that although Anna Maria Luisa may have inherited the Medici family’s treasures, the dynasty was already dead. That was, however, until Anna Maria Luisa revealed Ferdinando had secretly sired a child prior to his death. So it was that in 1740, Enzo Armando de’ Medici, a bastard and a vampire, emerged from the shadows to claim his title as Grand Duke and revive the Medici family.

“There was plenty of mumbling at the time that Enzo Armando was an imposter introduced by Anna Maria Luisa on her deathbed, but the nobility was too afraid to say anything. The Grand Duke had several children and grandchildren who became artists, bankers, and even popes. It was at this point that vampirism became associated heavily with the Medici family. Now, centuries later, historians are even more skeptical. After all, the Medici family had been sparse on vampires, and many doubted Ferdinando would have been a carrier for the mutation, much less have encountered a presumed prostitute who was also a carrier. So, many wonder who the mother of the Grand Duke was, and why Enzo Armando kept himself secret. Being a bastard was scandalous but not worth abandoning a fortune, right?”

I could’ve sworn Noor grew darker by the second, but words were spewing from my mouth uncontrollably. I had already said this much.

“Well, when I was doing a research paper on Enzo Armando as an undergraduate, I read through quite a few letters that one of my professors had found between Anna Maria Lucia and Enzo Armando. Nothing was explicitly said, but there were enough clues left that I have a theory. I believe that Ferdinando himself was the result of an affair between Cosimo’s wife and a French vampire noble—you know that French nobility has a lot of vampires, right? Furthermore, I believe that Ferdinando unknowingly had his child with the niece of that noble, his own first cousin! Enzo Armando wanted to go into the clergy, so of course he couldn’t admit he was the product of incest.”

“That’s—”

“—a stretch, I know. But there’s more evidence floating around too! Genetic records, family trees . . . I know I’m close to making a proper argument. I just need a few more things. I think I have a good lead too! See, there was this vocalist nicknamed La Bambagia that Ferdinando fell in love with—he adored music—but nobody knows who she is. Anyway, I know there’s this daughter of a famous French opera singer he was a patron of who died of syphilis shortly after Ferdinando died, and Ferdinando was a known carrier of syphilis, and—”

“Cora,” Noor finally cut in, her voice low and serious, “I will help you find what you need. I will even search around Sicily and Tuscany. Just don’t tell Zeno. He may find all of this a bit too . . . familiar.”

“What do you mean?”

Noor gave a long, slow sigh, as though blowing out the smoke of a cigar, and moved her chair from the table. On cue, Signora Carbone entered the room, gathered up the porcelain, scooped up the tea caddy in a swift motion, and hastened out with it. I wondered how long Signora Carbone had been lingering outside of the room with a tray, or if she’d heard any of what I had said.

I wondered how much I would regret mentioning any of this.

Noor stood, looked me deep in the eyes, and repeated, “Don’t tell Zeno. Your thesis is none of his business, and his past is none of yours.”

While her words were not cruel, the whiplash of the day made me feel sick. She pressed the satchel of books into my chest.

“I need to put these away, I think,” I grumbled. I ran away before she could say another word.