by Sarah Dunant
No one ever holds her like that. No one.
He lifts his other hand again, and this time it connects, so that she is inside both his arms. Her body sags against his. It is as if she had asked without words and he had heard without listening.
Time passes. He sits, trying to ignore the rising cramp in his leg. No chance of moving it now. No, like being the blast of the furnace, he will stay for as long as it takes to get the work done.
—
In the antechamber, the ladies wait, straining their ears to detect any change in her sorrow. Catrinella sits huddled in a corner, her hands half over her ears so she does not have to hear the distress.
Eventually, the door opens and Alfonso comes out, brushing down his clothes and frowning, as if he is somehow embarrassed by his success.
“I think you may go to her now,” he says curtly, not directly looking at anyone, for he has never been at ease with these giggling, flirtatious girls.
Outside, he waits on the portico for the groom to deliver his horse.
“My Lord Alfonso?”
He turns to find Catrinella, standing small and upright, in front of him, too close for courtesy.
“I have something to say,” she announces loudly, like a defiant child, taking a hurried breath and talking before anyone can stop her. “You should come to her more often at night. That is the only way now.”
He stares at her dumbfounded. But by the time he has thought of any response, she has turned and disappeared back into the darkness of the house.
Later, as the stories of the Pope’s death grow as rank as his body, Alfonso will think back to his father’s talk of devils cavorting with pitchforks and he will see again Catrinella’s small fiery blackness and it will make him smile. Such courage. She would not be out of place in his workshop, for they are familiar with the skin tone of devils there.
—
After he is gone Lucrezia agrees to take a little food but refuses all attempts to be led out of the room, insisting instead on sleeping on the floor, her head on a pillow they bring her, with Catrinella on guard in a corner. With the dawn she lets them bathe and dress her in black, before inspecting the decorations in the house for the mourning. At each stage she falls easily into tears, and she spends hours in the chapel praying. But she is no longer undone.
The composition arrives early from Pietro Bembo. She reads it once, twice, alone, sheds a few more tears, then folds it up and puts it away in the box where she keeps their correspondence, locking it with a small silver key. But she does not return to it, as she has done to so many others of his letters.
Later something else is delivered. It must be from him too, some gift—a book perhaps to help move her mind toward sweeter things, except it is not the right shape for a book. She sends her ladies away—their incessant fussing is more than she can bear—and lets Catrinella unwrap it.
Inside, carefully protected by cloth, is a majolica vase, finely shaped and decorated in green and blue washes: a scene of hunting, a man and woman on horseback chasing something into the undergrowth. The draftsmanship is artless, but there is a certain life to the figures. Whoever painted them knows what it is like to be on horseback.
And with it, a folded piece of paper.
Catrinella waits shyly, slyly, saying nothing. Lucrezia stares at it for a long time.
“It is from my husband,” she says at last.
Catrinella nods. “He makes things like this in his workshop,” she says casually.
“Does he?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Who says?”
“Kitchen gossip. One of the women has a son who works with him in the foundry. They all love him, she says, because he has no airs or graces.”
Lucrezia’s finger traces the figure of the woman on horseback, her fair hair caught up in a net. She is remembering their early hunts around Ferrara: the cold soup of fog and the warm blanket of horseflesh. It is the first time she has ever received something from him that was not part of a preordained ceremony. She is on the edge of tears again.
“Well, we must put it somewhere,” she says, distracted.
Catrinella takes it from her hands, sending a fast glance down toward the letter still resting in her lap.
“He asks to visit me tonight. Of course it is impossible. I am in mourning.” She frowns. “What?” she says as she realizes the girl is talking.
“I said I think he was moved by your grief, my lady. When he left, I noticed he had tears on his cheeks.” For one who was not born into Christianity, she has never quite understood confession—what was there in her life that she needed to confess? But she knows the difference between a venial and a mortal sin. And a lie like this does not, on its own, merit hell. “I think he would have preferred it to have been his own father who’d died. Everyone knows how badly he gets on with him, the pious old goat.”
“No! You must not say such things,” Lucrezia tells her with sudden ferocity. “Not say them, nor even think them. Especially not now, do you hear me?”
She has not been in such grief that she doesn’t see the traps ahead. Her first marriage had been annulled even though everyone knew it had been consummated. With the right pope and with a king behind him, the duke could do whatever he wanted now.
“But my la—”
“Don’t you understand, you stupid girl, we are not safe in Ferrara now. Without my father’s protection Duke Ercole could easily get rid of me.”
“Not if you were with child, he couldn’t,” Catrinella says bluntly.
Lucrezia stares at her. With child. No. If she were with child he would do nothing.
—
When my father dies I will struggle to find even a single tear to mark his going.
He has shared so few intimate thoughts with her, but one thing she knows without being told: he would not want another marriage. How could he? It would mean leaving his precious foundry, dressing up and sitting through all those interminable ceremonies again. Even if he cared nothing for her he would hate that with a vengeance. She puts her hands over her stomach. This time last year she was nursing a dead baby in her womb. But they would make an army of boys together. He had promised her that, as if, then too, he had really cared.
You must make sure your husband comes to you every night…every night. Open your arms to him, make him welcome and never complain when he leaves you.
Her father’s advice, delivered in the last bear hug between them, feels like a lifetime ago. You are a Borgia and deserve to be worshipped—but…well, it is how men are.
Drowning in this river of sorrow, she has not heard him once: but he is back again now, strong and clear in her mind, that rumbling dark voice always as close to laughter as it was to shouting.
You are a Borgia…
If Cesare is dead, she is now the only one. Who will hold the family fortune now? There will be no marriage of his baby daughter to Mantua. Even her own son will be cast aside—another stab of pain—though perhaps she might plead to have him come to stay with them. But not yet. To ask for anything, first there must be an heir.
The fate of the family lies in her loins. She will grieve later.
She writes a short note and seals it fast.
“See that this goes at once. And organize supper to be delivered to my room.”
Catrinella cannot contain her joy. “Oh, it will be a boy this time, my lady, fine and healthy, I am sure. The first of many.”
“You are sure of that, are you?” She cannot help but smile. “Tell me how it is that the most committed virgin in Ferrara knows so much about these things?”
Catrinella shrugs, pursing her mouth so that her lips look like the sweetest pinkest rosebud in the world. She has never been so pleased with herself.
Lucrezia stares at her. Tears in his eyes. Had she really seen that?
“I think, Catrinella, that you may be the oldest young woman I have ever known,” she says, and she opens her arms toward the girl.
As th
ey embrace, Lucrezia buries her face in the rough frizz of black hair. She thinks back to the image of a child holding her train in the palace of Rome, tongue caught between her teeth in fierce concentration. She remembers the fearful expression as the young girl washed her body after the wedding night, and hears again her tirade against poetry and the fate of Laura and Beatrice.
My father is gone; my brother may be dead, she thinks. But I will not die for lack of love. And neither will I let my family down.
—
That night, Catrinella lies on her pallet looking up into the darkness.
The noises she hears from inside the bedchamber are familiar ones: rising grunts and pants and little half throttled cries. She has heard such things a number of times: from this same room, or from the basement, where one of the laundry girls brings a boy who has promised to marry her, or in the antechamber, where Angela hides herself with the duke’s bastard son. Some women say that it makes their stomachs curdle with envy to hear such sounds, while others claim to feel only relief that it is not them. Lucrezia’s voice flutes upward, gasping, stopping, dying away. Now it is his turn. Such a meal he makes of it. Always has done and no doubt always will. It is hard to tell if it is pleasure or pain. No, she has no need of it, whichever one it is. Eventually it is over. She lies still, listening for the door to open and for him to leave. Tonight of all nights she must check to see how her lady is. But there is no noise, except perhaps the quietest mumble of voices. She waits some more. Nothing. Could it be that the duke elect will stay with his wife tonight?
She curls in on herself like a small animal ready for sleep. How long before they are duke and duchess together, governing Ferrara with a string of children at their feet? Because even the most cantankerous old men must die eventually. Birth, coupling, death. The more she thinks about it, the more it seems that that is all there is: a wheel turning over and over, moving so fast that sometimes you cannot even make out the spokes. It is a wonder there is any room for poetry.
TEN YEARS LATER
Wishing to present myself to Your Magnificence with a token of my deepest respect…I have found among my possessions nothing that I value higher than my knowledge of the deeds of great men…a knowledge acquired through my long experience of modern affairs and a lifelong study of ancient times.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513
Epilogue
SANT’ANDREA IN PERCUSSINA SOUTH OF FLORENCE DECEMBER 1513
When evening comes, Niccolò Machiavelli puts on a clean undershirt and a velvet tunic, deep burgundy, with embroidered sleeves. It had been made for him at great expense—the cloth alone cost four and a half ducats—while he was on an embassy to the emperor Maximilian in Germany some years before, and though the nap has worn thin in places, it is barely noticeable in lamplight and it pleases him to be well dressed when he is in esteemed company.
He has spent the day, as he does most days now, in country matters: walking his small estate, catching thrushes, discussing the price of firewood, reading poetry and playing tic-tac at the local tavern across from the farmhouse, but as the sun sets he returns to eat with his family; such joyful chaos the children bring. Then, when they are in bed—more often than not Marietta falls asleep settling the sickly new baby—he takes the lamp and makes his way to his study. A stone sink carved out of the wall nearby marks where visitors once washed their hands for dinner, but a man in political exile hosts no suppers, and these days he uses it only to clean the ink stains from his fingers.
Not that he is lonely. Not at this moment certainly; for once he is settled at his desk, his precious books lined up like a cohort of soldiers in front of him, the room will start to fill with ghosts, men summoned from history to help him in the composition of a short treatise on the government of principalities and the skills needed in a prince to be a secure and prudent ruler.
He plans to dedicate the work to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the new ruler of Florence since the fall of the republic last year, in the hope—though hope is in short supply in his life these days—that it may find favor enough to get him back into government, the Eden from which he has been so violently ejected.
Alexander the Great; King Darius; Spartan, Greek and Roman generals; emperors and philosophers, they have all visited him during this long summer and autumn, their exploits, successes and failures placed alongside those of figures of recent history; kings, popes, dukes and the power blocks of Italian families and factions. For though the past has long been his teacher, it is Niccolò’s intention in his book to illuminate the present and parlous state of Italy: the work of a diplomat whose career in politics and observations of power have given him a great many “opinions” of his own.
Tonight he is working on a chapter about the place of fortune in men’s lives. How far she, Lady Fortuna—for throughout history she has always been a she—can be seduced or resisted. How, like many women, she seems to respond best to rough handling from energetic young men. But how she can also turn against them, and that when she does, it is like a tumult of nature, a river in such full spate that it breaks everything in its path, for a man’s essential character makes it hard for him to adapt or change his stroke and so he often drowns in the flood. Such ideas and images have been percolating within him for many years. The irony is that now, at the age of forty-four, Niccolò Machiavelli can bear painful personal witness to fortune’s power.
His own fall had been as brutal and undeserved as the torture inflicted upon him in Florence’s Bargello prison: the strappado, the same device they used on Savonarola, a wooden crane that hoists a man high into the air by his wrists, only to drop him so violently that his arms are half torn from their sockets.
From the moment the aging della Rovere Pope had turned his snarling, warring face directly against the French and her allies, fomenting Medici opposition inside Florence, the fall of the republic had been predictable. Not even Michelangelo’s herculean statue of David, which amid much civic celebration had replaced Judith on the plinth outside the Palazzo della Signoria, could help stem the tide and a year ago this November Niccolò had found himself dismissed from government. His closeness to Gonfaloniere Soderini would always have compromised him in the eyes of the next administration, but who but Lady Fortuna could have known that his name would be found on a scrap of paper in the pocket of a man arrested as a conspirator against the new Medici state? He had been entirely innocent. But that did not stop them from inflicting six drops of strappado to make him confess. No man knows how strong he will be until he is tested. Two of the convicted conspirators had gone to their deaths while he sat in a cell that stank of his own despair, the walls alive with lice as big as butterflies. His silence under torture and the lack of any other scrap of evidence had saved him. But it has done nothing for the recurring ache in his soul when he contemplates his future.
At least such blows of misfortune put him in interesting company, and tonight he will again spend some hours with that most complex of characters, Cesare Borgia.
—
It is not the first time the two have met here in this room. Though the duke himself is long dead (killed six years ago in a skirmish in Spain, where he spent the last years of his life as a prisoner), there are many things about his astonishing flight toward the sun that mark him out as a most effective prince.
There will be those who will find Niccolò’s admiration startling, for in recent years the Borgias’ name has grown even blacker, dragged deeper into the mud by the enemies who survived them. But the pain in his shoulders is its own reminder—should he need it—that history is only and always the story of human nature in action, and that in an imperfect world, men who set out to make their mark must work with what is, rather than what one might like it to be. And judged against this backdrop in an Italy riven with violence, factions and foreign invaders, it is his belief that Duke Valentine was, for a time at least, a remarkable player, a warrior and a prince who combined the strength of the lion with the cunning of the fox.
I tell you, I had given attention to everything that might happen in the case of my father’s death; had prepared for all of it, except this one thing: that I myself would be brought nigh unto death at the same time.
How clearly he remembers the duke’s words from their first meeting in Rome. It was October 1503 and the eve of the papal conclave following the Pope’s death. What a time that had been. He had left behind him a wife and his new baby son (he is white as snow but his head is like black velvet and he is hairy just like you and so he seems beautiful to me, though he fills the whole house with noise) and was heading for the city of his dreams. Yet, there had been no chance to savor it, such was the mayhem and violence everywhere. The Borgia duke and his bodyguard of men were holed up in Castel Sant’Angelo, while armed gangs of the Orsini and the Colonna stalked the streets, searching out anyone with a sniff of Borgia loyalty to skewer on their swords.
They had not seen each other since the campaign of Sinigaglia, and Niccolò barely recognized the man who sat in front of him. Half dead with the fever, that was what everyone said. Looking at him, he would have put it closer to three quarters, for this most manly of figures had been quite eaten away. The full-length robe worn to disguise his gauntness only showed it up further. His head seemed too big for his body, his hair and beard were wild and his skin waxy yellow, eyes dull in sunken sockets. The most handsome, the most feared man in Italy. Where was he now?
“Signor Smile.” His voice had been breathy, as if his lungs could no longer pull in enough air. “You’re surprised to find me thus, yes? It is not often a man rises from the grave to fight again, but I am proof it can be done. Did you pass the Spanish cardinals on your way in? No? They are here all the time, eager to find out how I would have them vote, for in this papal election there is no greater kingmaker than I.”
