by Sarah Dunant
“Ah, my sweet lady,” he whispers, cupping a hand under her chin so he can hold her close and yet a little away. “Ah, you are too lovely.”
She sits frozen, her lips still parted, her breath coming fast.
“You are my siren, my muse—” He breaks off, as if this is too much for even his poetic skills. “But—”
“But?” she echoes. “I am the Duchess of Ferrara. Is that it?”
He shakes his head as if it is too painful to even think about.
“And if I was a siren married to someone else?”
He drops his eyes. “You are not,” he says simply.
“No, you are right. I am not.”
She hears herself laughing, a light frivolous sound. “Of course you know the story of Parisina and Ugo?”
He sits staring at her. It is so unlike him to be lost for words.
“Duke Niccolò’s wife and son?” she pushes. “Both of them executed because of their great affair. He was a most handsome, courteous man, they say, though not, I think, as talented with words.” And she is suddenly quite angry, though she does not understand why.
“Lucrezia, this has nothing to—”
“Do with us now? Of course not! For we are not adulterers, are we? Only courtiers. We make love with words, not bodies. Because if we did, if we did…who knows where it might take us?” Her voice is icy.
He winces. “You are laughing at me.”
“Oh no, Pietro. On the contrary, I am very serious. I am a woman who has the capacity to destroy any man I love.”
And though she is looking at him, she is seeing someone else; equally handsome, full of life and laughter. But the image turns and now she is looking at a body dragged from its bed, the face swollen and purple from the garrote of Michelotto’s hands. Not even marriage had saved Alfonso from her brother’s wrath.
She pulls herself out of his grip. “You will find it hard to change the course of Italian poetry with your neck wrung like a chicken’s.”
She is up and moving toward the door, calling loudly for her ladies. Outside they are standing far too close—paper and ink held out as their lame excuse for having just arrived. The alarm in their eyes brings her to her senses a little.
“Signor Bembo will need some time alone to put his thoughts onto paper,” she says firmly. “He will be leaving now.”
And she bows her head, offering him her hand to show that the audience is over.
He stands for a moment, caught between shame and confusion.
“My dear duchess,” he says with almost theatrical dignity before he turns. “The time I spend in your presence is more precious to me than life itself. There is no greater muse in my work and no sweeter woman walking the earth. Gli Asolani is your poem. It will never be anybody else’s.”
—
She does not cry for long. And when it is over she feels lighter, as if she has been wearing a bodice so tight for so long that it has begun to feel like her skin and only now, with it taken off, can she breathe freely again.
She retires to bed early, dismissing Catrinella. It is a balmy evening, and through the windows she can hear the bright strains of trombone and bombarde from Ercole’s palace. The duke may be a miser, but he is lavish with the things he loves. She had turned down tonight’s invitation on the excuse of a welter of correspondence to catch up with since the marchesa’s going, but now she wishes she was there.
The drum is beating the tempo of a saltarello. She taps her feet on the floor, humming the music line to herself. It is months since she danced to this tune. Such a different language one speaks on the dance floor. When the body is talking so loudly, there is little room for the mind. It is one of the reasons she loves it so.
She moves into the middle of the room, pulling herself up through her spine, her head floating back in readiness, adding an inch to her height so that the hem of her voluminous night shift lifts around her ankles. Unencumbered by shoes, her bare feet make contact with the grain of the wood floor. She holds her arms up high, crossed at the wrists so her hands are like twin birds rising in flight in front of her. It is a dance she loves, the saltarello, for it moves so easily between earth and sky; gliding, prowling, twirling and skipping, drawing geometric patterns inside and between a dozen dancers. She places them in her mind, marking out her path to come. With a rising shoulder and a graceful, infinitely slow unfolding on one arm in the direction of the imaginary partner to her left, her feet begin to move.
After a while the strains of music end, but she dances on, conjuring up the bright commands of trombone and drum to control her steps. She adapts joyfully to the lightness of her dress, moving more freely, her bowing and twisting exaggerated, her skipping taking her higher off the floor.
Yours is the radiance which makes me burn…my joy in seeing you is never done.
Bembo’s words twirl with her, shining like phosphorescence in a night sea. Her loosely braided hair has come undone and is dancing with her now. She tosses her head to feel its thick whip across her face. The other dancers in her mind have all fallen away, yet she continues.
And to you I look, as heliotrope looks to the sun…for each spark of yours untold Etnas are raging in my breast…
It is not that he does not love her. She knows that. How can one blame a man whose weapons are words if he chooses to move out of range of cannon fire? She claps her hands fast, increasing the tempo of her steps. Whatever pain has passed between them is being washed away in the dancing. She registers a familiar film of sweat on her skin and tightness in her calves. She stretches higher and feels the space under her ribs expand so that with the next breath she seems to lift off the floor.
Ah. My lady, there are times when I swear you are dancing on air.
Those had been Stilts’s words to her in Spoleto. Or was it Gubbio? The towns and dance floors have all blurred together now. He wasn’t the first to offer such a compliment. When she had danced with her brother at the Este betrothal celebrations in Rome, the whole of the Ferrarese entourage had whooped and applauded. She had never been more unhappy, the memory of Alfonso’s body still thick in her blood, but under her smile no one had noticed, and if she was truthful, for that moment too she had felt released.
She executes a final energetic series of turns, her breath catching in her throat, and comes to rest, bringing her hands back to the position where they started, before executing a deep theatrical curtsy in the direction of an empty chair.
Who else could be sitting there but her father?
He has always been her greatest audience. The greatest and the first. How clearly she remembers the joy of his visits when she was a child: how he would sweep into the house, inviting them to climb all over him as he handed out presents amid gales of laughter. Later, when the boys had yelled and screamed their fill, she would dance for him; spreading her skirts in a wide curtsy before flouncing round the room, her childish face screwed up in concentration at the latest steps she had been taught.
“God has given you golden feet and a swallow’s grace,” he would say. “But there is one last thing you have yet to learn.” And he whispered the word in her ear.
When he had returned a week later, her head was high and her smile was a sunburst directed at any and all who watched her.
“Brava, bravissima. They will be queuing up for your hand in marriage. But I will never let you go.”
He had been right about the first, though that had more to do with his becoming pope than with her dance steps. But he had also, in his way, been right about the second.
It will be two years next winter since they said their goodbyes, she riding out in the snow and he rushing from window to window along the Vatican corridor to wave to her. Once this mad contest between Spain and France is decided, perhaps they could arrange a visit. Ferrara would put on a rich show for him: their Pope and their duchess’s father. How much she misses him.
—
The Mantuan viper has been visiting Ferrara, she writes before she goes to bed.
But I have not let her fangs pierce my skin. The redecoration of my apartments is almost complete and I am ordering new editions from Manutius’s printing press in Venice for my library. The viper is of the opinion that his prices are too high, but he is the best in the city and her collecting is known to be profligate in other ways. With my full allowance now paid, I have commissioned more music, and the Venetian poet Bembo is enjoying court hospitality as he works on his much anticipated dialogues on the nature of love. With God’s help, I intend to build a court here to rival any that Italy has seen. When you come I know it will please you. I pray for you every day and cannot wait until we might be in each other’s company again. For though I may be Este in name and proudly hold the title of Duchess of Ferrara, in my heart I remain forever,
Your loving daughter,
Lucrezia Borgia
CHAPTER 42
August, and in Rome it is getting hotter. The Pope and the Vatican court should have been in the country long before now, but who can go anywhere when two armies are at a standoff in the north and the news from the south is that Gaeta can’t hold out for more than a few days?
—
In Alexander’s bedchamber, the windows are flung open and he is covered only by his shift, but night brings little respite. He has a cramp in his left leg, his gut is grumbling and his farts are a long way from the scent of orange blossom. The sounds and smells of old men: such things had been repugnant to him when he was young and he feels no differently now. He heaves himself over onto his other side, his stomach collapsing like a small landslip next to him. How did he, who eats less than many thinner men, grow so fat?
Still, he is not the fattest. These days Rome is full of spreading prelates who like nothing more than to sit in front of full plates belching their pleasure for all to hear.
He had dined with some of them only a few days ago, he and Cesare guests of honor at a supper party at the country villa of one of the newly appointed cardinals, Adriano de Corneto. It had been an alfresco banquet, a groaning table underneath a loggia: roast pigs and pastas, rich sauces and sugar and ice statues melting fast in the thick clammy air. All he had been able to think about was going home.
Let us raise our glasses to the greatest family Rome and the Church have ever seen.
The sun had set and the candles been lit, though the heat was still unbearable, when their host had offered up the toast.
He had acknowledged it with a lazy fixed smile, but inside he’d been fuming.
The greatest family Rome and the Church have ever seen. What? They think he doesn’t read the insult in such craven flattery?
Sniveling hypocrites, all of them! Fifteen years ago he wouldn’t even have warranted a place at this table. If he had the energy he would get up and tell them what he really thought. For years most of you couldn’t bring yourselves to say the name Borja without hawking up spit. Yet now we are the greatest family the Church and Rome have ever seen! How stupid do you think we are?
A most memorable toast for a most memorable moment, gentlemen.
Cesare had been on his feet, glass raised high. Alexander had never seen him in such exuberant spirits, wine flowing, food untouched, laughing and talking with anyone and everyone, as if they were all long-lost brothers. He grew tired just looking at him.
As leader general of the papal army and on behalf of our loving pontiff Alexander VI, I offer another toast: To the Borgias and their allies.
“The Borgias and their allies.” The words rang out in a chorus of voices.
“What is wrong with you, Father?” Cesare had hissed angrily as the cheers rang out around them. “We are celebrating here.”
“What? With these oafs? They’re all made of straw. Bought and sold. Bought and sold…Not a real man of God among them.”
“Well, that’s what the Church is, Father. No point shitting on what you’ve made.”
Alexander had glared at him, fury tightening his chest. Father and son. Was this what it had come to: profanity and insolence? He will not stand for it. But in this heat he was suddenly too exhausted to fight.
“Get me a plate of sardines,” he growled.
—
That had been five days ago, and he has not felt well since. Yesterday—the eleventh anniversary of his accession to the holy throne—he had been too tired to mark the occasion. It must be the tension of waiting on Gaeta. There is a joke going round the Vatican (of course he is not supposed to have heard it) that if only they had launched the Pope instead of cannonballs, the city would have fallen immediately. It is the kind of thing he would have laughed at normally—everyone knows him as a man who prefers to be in good humor rather than bad—but instead it had left him depressed and surly. A man who has vanquished so many of his enemies ought to be savoring life more.
He moves his head onto the cool of another pillow. If only Lucrezia were here. She always found something to make him smile. Even after all this time, the missing of her is still a splinter in his soul. Those tight-fisted Este! He has given them a jewel and they treat it like a glass fake. Her last letter had brought tears to his eyes. Of course, she will have a great court of her own, and if her allowance is still not enough he will send her money of his own. No daughter of his will ever have to stoop to ask.
Such a boost it would give him to see her. It had been written into the original marriage contract that they would meet within the year at the shrine of Loreto, but all the fighting and her illness had made that impossible. In which case they will do it next year instead. She will be pregnant by then, for what man could resist such a wife? And how well it will suit her. She had been a beauty when she was carrying Rodrigo. Just like her mother. He tries to conjure them both up in his mind, but their faces keep dissolving. He has not seen Vannozza for years—though she is surely still a handsome woman. And Lucrezia—well, the only likeness he has of her is in Pinturicchio’s fresco in the Hall of the Saints as a young Santa Caterina, and she had been little more than a child then, all puppy fat and earnest shyness. I should never have let her leave me, he thinks. I will ask for a portrait. Though everyone complains that Venice sucks in the best painters, there must be a few artists still worth their salt in Ferrara. Yes, yes, a portrait would help.
But what would help him more is to sleep. Around the four posters of his bed the winter curtains have been replaced by wet sheets that the servants change every few hours in an attempt to keep the temperature down. It works for a while and there are moments when he is almost dozing off, but then he hears the angry drill of mosquito flight. The morning after the banquet his face had been like a pincushion. This summer they are more plentiful and insolent than ever, and there is a limit to the number of smoking pomades that a man can bear in hot weather. He imagines the insects gathering like flying artillery, ready to attack, his body a banquet laid out in front of them, the courses going on forever. He lifts himself farther up the pillows and hears the creak and snort of boards above. Cesare must have company tonight. Such stamina! He used to be the same not so long ago: ruling Christendom in the day with the same energy with which he entered heaven at night.
But these days Alexander doesn’t long for women’s flesh. Only a cooler place to put his own.
In the rooms above, Cesare is not between the sheets. He is the soldier not the lover now, and women have become a part of the catering, a dish to be delivered when he feels hungry, then removed as soon as he is finished.
“I shall not be available for a while,” Fiammetta had told him as she plaited her hair and fixed it up under her silken hood and cloak before leaving his apartments a few weeks before. “It is hot and I shall be going to the country.”
“What if I need you?”
“You don’t need me, my lord; you just need a hole to put it in. I can think of a dozen others that would serve you as well. Perhaps when your taste becomes more refined again…”
It is not easy for anyone who serves him. As the rest of the world grows slower, stunned by the heat, h
e is speeding up. By night he works on the business of the Romagna: reading and composing reports for the governors who are overseeing his cities. Administering peace is more time-consuming than waging war, and he has his eye on everything, already impatient for the reply to his dispatch, which they will not receive till the day after tomorrow.
At dawn he still hunts, the morning air briefly wiping clean the headaches that Torella’s potions now seem unable to touch, before returning to the military and political reports of the day. He is poised to leave Rome the minute the news he is waiting for arrives. But still Gaeta does not fall. In the worst heat of the day he may lie down for an hour or so, though not to sleep because he is thinking too hard, and then comes the entertainment; a snatched female meal or a banquet, such as the one he and his father attended a few days before, and from there back to the night dispatches. He is like some street juggler, moving twirling torches through the air so fast that they resemble a circle of fire.
Torella watches from the sidelines, hawkeyed. He has seen this manic energy before, during the dark days of the conspiracy in Imola, and while he knows better than to interrupt, he is also wary of letting it continue unchecked. Finally he requests an audience. He is refused, only to be pulled from his bed before dawn the next day with the news that the duke will see him now.
“I wanted to know how you are, my lord,” he says, having doused his head into cold water to seem more alert.
“Never better. Can’t you see?”
“Except you’ve not slept for more than a few hours for almost a week. It is not usual for a man. I am wondering how your head is.”
“As clear as a bell, even when it chimes too loud. You should be pleased. Your cure has made me twice the man I was. I would let you patent it, only who needs stronger enemies?”
And he laughs, for this is surely the best joke in the world.
“The real question is not why I do not sleep, but why other men sleep so much? Explain it to me if you can. Why are we not awake all the time? We would get so much more done.”
