by Sarah Dunant
He hears again the Pope’s booming voice, sees the deep laughter lines decorating his eyes. Even when he was raging, Burchard thinks, he seemed to be enjoying life. It is a trick he himself has never quite mastered. Might he have felt more if the Pope had felt less? He stares at the body on the bed. It seems impossible that all that energy is no more. He calls up his voice again, for the silence in the room is very deep.
When it comes to it, you will oversee my funeral too, yes? I would have no one else.
“You are not to worry, Your Holiness,” he says, “I shall see to everything.” And he is embarrassed to find he has spoken the words aloud.
He settles himself further into his chair. The Pope is dead and it is his job to keep vigil, not to try to bring him back to life. He starts the recitation of prayers, closing his eyes so that he can concentrate better.
Is it possible he dozes off? He would not like to think so. There is noise somewhere? A small rushing sound. Gone now. The light outside is fading. It is time to move the bier. He takes a sniff of the pomade he has kept next to him, for the smell from the body seems to have grown worse.
He will call the guards after he has done a last check of the vestments.
He starts with the feet, smoothing out the satin beneath the velvet slippers. They are newly made, but they are no longer the right size, for small mounds of flesh, like discolored rising dough, are overflowing the edges. Farther up there is no definition between foot and ankle. He pulls at the hem of the robe to try to cover the distressing sight. The mountain of silk hides the rest of the torso well enough, and it, in turn, is covered by the carpet. As ceremony demands. It would be a fine thing in winter, but in this heat? Still, it cannot be taken off. He moves along the body toward the head, preparing himself for the shock of the grimace he will find there, for the features of a face can go violently rigid at this stage of death. He has attended the lying in state of one dead pope and a good many cardinals, and has trained himself not to be affected by such things.
But Johannes Burchard has never seen anything like this.
The stage of rigor mortis is long past. In its place, the Pope’s face appears to have exploded. The flesh is the color of a split plum, with every feature appallingly bloated. Neck and chin have become one, the blown nose has spread into the jowls, while the lips, thick as eels, have forced the mouth open, and the tongue pokes out, livid and fat. From below there comes a slight gurgling sound. Burchard takes an involuntary step back in horror. Rodrigo Borgia is decomposing in front of his eyes. If there were no devils at the deathbed, they have surely crawled inside his body now, speeding its decay as they make him their own. Heaven protect them all!
He moves swiftly down the corridors. “Get guards in here now!” he shouts, his voice trembling. “We must move the bier to the basilica at once!”
Custom demands that the Pope be on show in St. Peter’s for a day. But is that possible? And if it is not, what will he do? Must he cut short the lying in state in order to have His Holiness’s body buried before it explodes?
Even in death this pope will break every rule.
For the first time in his long life, Johannes Burchard feels defeated. His eyes start to sting as tears form. His vision blurs, and he stops to try to collect himself, but the tears keep on coming. Soon it becomes clear, even to him, that he is crying.
Mourning. It is an essential part of the ceremony that accompanies the death of a pope.
CHAPTER 46
Lucrezia is sitting with her ladies over her embroidery, her needle moving in and out of the green stem of a lily, in search of the tranquillity of Corpus Domini. But the set of her face tells another story, and with every footstep or clatter of horses’ hooves, she is halfway out of her seat in anticipation.
When the dispatch comes, she reads its contents in the set of the rider’s face even as her fingers break the seal. It is in the Bishop of Venosa’s own hand, a hurried scrawl before he fled the scene: the language of the priest taking over from the doctor.
She folds the paper carefully, strangely calm. “And my brother?” she asks. “This says nothing of him.”
The man shakes his head. The only news is conjecture: that and the story of screaming. But if it is not written, he cannot tell it.
After he has gone she turns to her ladies.
“Our good father and our Holy Pontiff passed peacefully into the hands of Our Redeemer Lord God, on the afternoon of the eighteenth of August,” she says, the first tears sliding down her cheeks. “We were at vigil in the chapel here at that very time.” She stops to catch her breath. She is trying so hard. “I—I believe our prayers may have soothed his going.”
She attempts a smile, but it dissolves as the tears take over. They rush toward her, but she pushes them away.
“Leave me! Leave me be!” she says, almost angrily.
They stand helpless.
“Did you hear me?” she cries out suddenly. “Go to your duties. Put the house into mourning. Close the shutters, cover everything in black and bring me a bolt of the darkest cloth you can find. Go!”
They do as they are bid. When they return she has sunk to the floor and is sitting in a balloon of skirts as the sobs come.
“My lady, please. Don’t send us away. Our hearts are broken too,” Angela begs.
But Lucrezia will have none of it. She winds the black cloth around her. The fabric is hot and the crying makes it hotter, but she does not care. The Pope, her father, is dead. The man whose arms were always open to her, whose love encircled her like a golden fortress, is gone, and if that is not enough, her brother is dying too. What use her ladies now? They cannot protect her, for they are all abandoned. With each sob she swallows more sorrow until it feels as if her whole body is overflowing. Perhaps she will drown in it. Why not, for what else is there to live for now? Her father and her brother dead. A future without their love. Better to cry forever than face that.
Camilla, who has been with her the longest, looks on from a half closed door. She has seen this disintegration of grief once before, three years ago when her lady’s husband Alfonso had been murdered. For days she had sobbed, lying in a shuttered room refusing all nourishment. They had finally tempted her back to life with her baby son. But there is no child here yet, more’s the pity. And with no pope to protect her…
“Send for Pietro Bembo,” she says.
Whatever the risk, the alternative is worse.
—
The horse takes longer than the wings of love, and he is not yet fully recovered from his own bout of fever, but they crowd around him when he enters, clasping his hands. “Please. Please. She will listen to you. This way she will make herself ill.”
Her crying fills the house. He approaches the door, opening it quietly, his eyes finding her in the gloom, a figure huddled on the floor, rocking to and fro. Oh, but she is consumed by sorrow. A woman’s tears: there is nothing, nothing that rends the heart more. The ancients knew it best: Andromache wailing as the body of Hector is dragged through the dirt around Troy; Phaeton’s sisters, weeping so much they are turned into willows forever, dipping their fronds into a river of tears. Such is the power of a woman’s grief. He must go to her.
He sees himself holding out his hands, taking her into his arms, caressing her hair, kissing away the salt on her cheeks as his own eyes weep for her sorrow. Two lovers melting into each other’s tears. And then? What then? He cannot stay. Others will be coming soon enough, and for her sake he cannot be found here. This is not only personal sorrow she is suffering. The Pope’s death is the stuff that states and wars are made of. And she will be most vulnerable now, for she has lost the very men who have insured her position in the world.
He has never associated her, this sweet gentle soul, with the stain of Borgia corruption. How could he? But in others’ minds the crimes run thick in the blood. Everyone knows how much Duke Ercole loathes the family. How will he look on her now, when both the incentive and the threat are dissolved?
Her crying tears at his heart. He must go to her.
And yet he hesitates. Perhaps she would not thank him for seeing her in such despair, so utterly undone. What if he could not find the right words to bring her back? Women’s tears; a man might drown in them.
I will write to her, he thinks. Compose the finest letter, drawn from the connection of our souls and a love deeper than any tears can wash away. And in this way I will also be able to advise her. For when her tears eventually dry, she will need to look out for herself.
He turns from the door and walks quietly out of the house, out of sight of the ladies.
He labors over it long and hard. It is indeed a beautiful, beautiful letter: compassionate, poetic, wise.
Platonic love has its limits.
—
In town, Alfonso has been pulled from his smelting to talk politics with the duke. A worker had been badly scalded, and he is busy seeing to him when the summons comes. The man’s wounds are still on his mind when he enters the ducal salon, to find his father exultant, scribbling at his desk.
“Ah, Alfonso! Such news, yes? This is a great day! A day of honor for Our Lord God and the universal welfare of Christendom. I am writing those same words to King Louis even now. Shall I add something in your name? For we can say what we like now that Satan has taken his own. The word is that it was not fever, but poison. They had set out to murder the new cardinal at the lunch he gave for them, so they could grab his fortune, but they got the glasses mixed and drank it themselves. Ha! And at the end, his bedchamber was filled with devils, dozens of them, tormenting him with pitchforks. Thank the Lord, our prayers have not been in vain.”
Yours perhaps, Alfonso thinks, for such ferocious piety has never left much room for anyone else’s intercession. “What about Duke Valentine?”
“Nigh unto death and fading fast.” Can a man’s smile grow any wider? “Even if he survives, without the Pope’s money and protection he is nothing. It is over. Finished. Everything he owns will be taken from him.”
“Does Lucrezia know?”
Ercole shrugs. “I would think so by now.”
“You have sent no message of condolence?”
He shrugs again.
“She will be much affected by this. It will plunge her into mourning.”
“Then she will find herself alone,” Ercole retorts fiercely. “There will be no black worn in my court. No public mourning of any kind. I have made that clear in my letter to the king. This is God’s will. And it comes not before time.”
Alfonso drops his eyes. How he hates his father’s mean spirit; so many years of praying, yet it has never come close to softening the heart of stone. A man would have needed to be a saint to earn his approval.
“But we must still note her loss. I will go and see her now.”
“Then you be careful what you say. Everything is changed by this, Alfonso. Montefeltro will be back in Urbino, the alliance between the children of Mantua and the duke is over, Venice will take whatever of his towns she can—and we may use it too.”
“And in what way would we do that, Father?” he asks coolly.
“You need an heir!”
“Lucrezia has already conceived once.”
“It died,” he says flatly. “And there’s no sign of another.”
My God, Alfonso thinks, is this an insult to both of them or only to him?
“We are still married.”
“Beh! You can always be unmarried. With the right pope it happens often enough.”
“I thought Ferrara despised Church corruption, Father,” he says, the sarcasm now heavy in his voice.
“Don’t lecture me on the Church, Alfonso! Without me this city would be half heathen. Anyway, why should you mind? From what I hear you still spend more time with your whores than with your wife.”
No, the injury had been intended for him. Every time he opens his mouth it is to deliver another insult.
“Was there ever a moment when I did not disappoint you, Father?” he mutters under his breath.
“What? What is that?”
“I asked you if you could ever afford to pay back the dowry,” he says with no attempt to hide his anger.
Rodrigo Borgia and Ercole d’Este, Pope and duke; both born in the same year, both living through tumultuous times and both growing more intransigent as they move toward death. How might it have been if the fever had been worse in Ferrara this summer? Alfonso is thinking as he leaves the room.
Lucrezia’s cries have not stopped. On the other side of the door, her ladies hover, pale and lost, faces streaked with tears.
“Why is no one with her?”
“She won’t have us, my lord. She won’t have anyone. She has been locked in there for hours, ever since the news came.”
He has ridden straight from the palace with no time to wash or dress himself, the dust of the road now adding to the grime. He takes an offered bowl and wipes a wet cloth over his head and neck. The ladies’ faces act as his mirror. Well, it has never been his destiny to comfort women with his looks. His eyes slide past them to the closed door. As to what he will do or say next, he has no idea.
Her keening voice fills the shuttered darkness of the room.
“Lucrezia?” he says tentatively as he moves toward the crumpled heap on the floor. She does not seem to hear him.
“Lucrezia.”
He is in front of her now, but though his voice is louder there is still no sign of recognition. He can stand at the mouth of an open furnace for hours without any ill effect, but he has never been able to handle a woman crying. Yet his disgust at his father’s lack of pity leaves him no option.
He lowers himself onto the floor, curling his legs to one side awkwardly, until he is on a level with her. He can feel the warmth coming off her even from here. She cannot fail to notice him now.
“I am most sorry for your father’s death. It is sad news and I have come to offer my condolences.” He waits. “If, if I…can be of help to you in this…”
She puts some effort now into holding back her cries, succeeding enough to look up at him. He sees her face, hot and swollen ugly by the flood of tears, a trail of mucus running from her nose to her mouth and a mass of wild tangled hair. The black cloth has fallen from her shoulders and her breasts are heaving with the force of her sobs. No sign of refined courtly beauty here. She looks more like a woman of the streets.
“Lucrezia—”
“No, no!” She lifts up her hands in front of her face as if to ward off some threatened violence. “No, go away. Go away, please. Don’t look at me. I am undone and not fit to be seen.”
“I can’t see you anyway,” he lies with surprising ease. “It’s too dark in here.”
At the same time his eye picks out a run of tiles on the floor nearby where the grouting is uneven. The palace was finished fast, another of his father’s instant extravaganzas. Such waste. When he has the time…And the power…
The sobbing has taken her again, rocking her backward and forward. It feels as if her heart must break such pain is she in. How deeply this family feels toward one another, as if they are connected by more than blood. Everyone knows how the Pope wept for days after the murder of his son. At least this grief shows how much you loved him, he thinks. When my father dies I will struggle to find a single tear to mark his going.
Except it seems he may have said the words out loud, because she is looking at him again, more directly now.
“Oh, yes, you are right, I did love him,” she says almost angrily. “So much. No one will ever understand. He was not the monster everyone says he was. Not to me. Not ever…How could anyone—” And she turns away as the flood breaks through again.
“No, I don’t think he was a monster either,” he says firmly. “I only met him once. I was barely old enough to tie my own breeches. But he was most gracious to me, spoke highly of Ferrara. He seemed a man happy with his state. The whole of Rome was celebrating, processions, fountains flowing with wine. And you and that f
ancy Farnese woman were like his handmaidens, such golden beauties both of you. Everyone was amazed. I remember thinking how much I envied my brother Ippolito, to become a cardinal in a city with so many pretty women.” He laughs bitterly. “In all my life it’s the only time the Church has ever appealed to me.”
He wonders if he is telling the truth. Had he really felt those things? Does it matter? Certainly these are the sweetest words he has ever spoken to her. She is staring at him, the tears held back in a series of small snorts. Now she gives a much louder one. The kerchief she has grasped in her hands is soggy with tears. He digs out his own, clean enough except for the usual grime, and hands it to her. She takes it and blows her nose. Such a deeply unpoetic noise. He risks it all now on a single gesture, putting his arm awkwardly around her shoulders. To his astonishment she does not resist. He pulls her a little closer until he is holding her against his chest. She is crying again and her flesh is moist and hot and her smell most particular: the morning’s perfume overwhelmed by hours of summer sweat. It makes him feel almost comfortable, for the women he frequents don’t bother with sweet smells.
He holds her tighter, his other hand hovering in the air, as if it might complete the circle of the embrace, but in the end he leaves it where it is. It does not seem to matter; she makes no move to pull away. She is weeping a little less now; perhaps it is the way she is crushed to his chest or perhaps there is something strangely familiar for her here too: a reminder of all the times she had been half smothered inside her father’s sweaty embrace, his great bulk clutching her to him as if he would never let her go.
