THE PRINCESS
OF NOWHERE
PRINCE LORENZO BORGHESE
This book is dedicated to my mother and father, who have been married for more than forty years. They have taught me that communication is the secret to a successful marriage. Without it, love cannot grow, nor can it be complete.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
PRELUDE
PROLOGUE
PART I The Red Rose Beauty, Romance, Courage
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
PART II The Yellow Rose Warmth, Jealousy, Promise of a New Beginning
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
PART III The White Rose Innocence, Unity, Death
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
AFTERWORD
CHARACTER LIST
Copyright
About the Publisher
PRELUDE
His Excellency Prince Camillo Borghese and Her Excellency Princess Pauline Bonaparte Borghese invite you to celebrate the last evening of Carnival at their Villa on the fourteenth day of February in this year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred Four.
Everything glittered.
In its verdant setting just beyond the old city walls of Rome, the marble facade of the miniature palace reflected light from hundreds of lanterns—some hanging from the upper stories, others on dragon-headed poles fixed in the ground at intervals around the building. Carriages lined the drive, lamps gleaming. Fountains splashed in the moonlight. Servants in gold-trimmed livery and powdered wigs carried trays of glasses filled with champagne. In the supper room, glazed fruits in marzipan were stacked on gilt dishes. The guests, in fantastic costumes and even more fantastic masks, were a kaleidoscope of silk and jewels and feathers. Their eyes burned with a gay, fierce intensity; their gestures seemed to leave trails of sparks in the air. They darted from one activity to the next, drinking, eating, laughing, dancing, flirting. Tomorrow was Lent. Tomorrow would bring ashes and penance and gravity. But tonight was still Carnevale, and once again the Borghese family had opened their villa for the traditional masked ball marking the final hours of the eight-day celebration.
The February night was mild, and many couples were taking a turn in the small formal gardens encircling the building. Their walls and geometrically patterned hedges offered a few dark corners, but between the extra lighting and the hovering servants, no one interested in a serious indiscretion would find them adequate. The wilder (and unlit) groves beyond the neat walls offered better opportunities. That is why the hostess of the ball was now several hundred yards away from the nearest lantern, running down a tree-lined path with a masked cavalier in pursuit.
Pauline was not running very fast. After all, she was planning to be caught. Her pursuer, however, had been injured recently, and Pauline considerately paused on the far side of a fountain to let him rest. He did not seem to understand the rules of the game. Instead of pausing in his turn, he strode around the fountain and fell dramatically to his battered knees, with only a small gasp of pain.
“Angel! Goddess!” he said, stretching out his arms. “I beg you, flee no further! I mean you no harm!”
Pauline found this declaration extremely disappointing.
Her suitor evidently failed to see her scowl in the dim light, because he continued in the same melodramatic tone, “I shudder when I think that in the darkness you might fall or tear your lovely skin on a bramble! Slow your flight, my queen, and I will slow mine!”
Flowery declarations were commonplace in Pauline’s life, and this one sounded depressingly familiar. It was repeated almost word for word from the libretto of a popular operetta about a coy nymph. Why did men believe women wanted lovers to fall on their knees and declaim bad verse?
She had thought St.-Luc more promising than most of the young men she had met since arriving in Rome. He had followed her through the crowds at a masked revel on the third night of Carnival and, after a series of ever more suggestive remarks, had finally seized her and tried to kiss her. She should have let him have that kiss, Pauline thought. But some imp had prompted her instead to display her power. She had twisted away, smiling. “My kisses must be earned, sir, not stolen!” she had scolded.
“How may I earn them, then?” His black eyes had challenged her.
She thought for a moment. “In exchange for one of the Barbary horses. One horse, one kiss.”
The riderless horses were sent racing down the Corso just before sunset every evening during Carnival, and by the time they reached the end of the street, at the Piazza Venezia, they were very dangerous to approach. Prudent Romans watched the finish from balconies in the palazzi surrounding the square and placed bets on the aftermath of the race as well as on the contest itself. As the horses spilled into the plaza, daring young gentlemen would prove their courage by attempting to grab and subdue a slippery, furious animal who outweighed the would-be handler by upward of a thousand pounds. Even trained grooms were often injured in the process, and the ever-present possibility that the horses would maim or kill someone ensured a large and enthusiastic crowd each night.
“And if I capture two?”
“Two kisses—and a lock of my hair.”
“What if I am even more ambitious?” he asked softly.
“For three horses, you may name your own reward,” she said equally softly, very pleased with the turn the conversation was taking.
He bowed. “In that case, I shall take three.”
The Chevalier de St.-Luc had been as good as his word: he had caught three horses, one on each of the fourth, fifth, and sixth nights. He had also acquired two broken ribs and a badly bruised knee. That had not prevented him from limping across the piazza to the Palazzo San Marco after each triumph and saluting Pauline, like a gladiator saluting an empress. It was a dramatic sight: below, the bloodied cavalier, the sweating, trembling horse; above, in the midst of the wealthy spectators on their hired balconies, the exquisite young woman, her dark curls framing her mask. By the third performance, the revelers were more focused on this romantic display than on the winning horse.
Pauline was never averse to being singled out for public admiration by conquering heroes. She had rewarded St.-Luc in full view of the crowd. After the first victory, she nodded and smiled. After the second, she blew a kiss. After the third, she tossed down her glove, with a note inside: “Find me at midnight Tuesday at the ball given by the Prince and Princess Borghese and you may claim your true prize.” It was signed not with her name but with the device on her carnival mask: a swan.
This was the great fiction of Carnival. For eight days, Roman society wore strips of gilded pasteboard on their faces and pretended not to recognize each other. The fiction made many things possible. Pauline Bonaparte Borghese, the new bride of a papal prince, could not openly encourage an exiled enemy of her brother Napoleon to seduce her. But a masked beauty could smile on a masked admirer. Everyone might be well aware that the lady behind the swan feathers was the Princess Borghese, and that the gallant with Harlequin silks across his face was the royalist envoy seeking papal support for the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France. But who would violate the unwritten laws of Carnival by saying so out loud?
Unfortunately, St.-Luc’s public wooing was not adapting well to more private circumstances. Chivalric adoration was all very well in a large piazza, but now, in the deserted clearing by the fountain, P
auline was hoping for something less bookish.
She looked down in exasperation at her kneeling worshipper. Over the gentle splash of the fountain she could still hear, faintly, the music and laughter of the ball. Had she left all that gaiety for badly delivered lines from an operetta? “Get up,” she said suddenly. “Take off your mask.”
He climbed slowly to his feet. “But we must remain masked until dawn. That has always been the rule.”
“Take it off!” She tore off her own, a shimmering concoction of gold and swan feathers, and tossed it aside. It landed in the fountain and floated, rocking gently in the moonlight beside a marble seahorse.
St.-Luc swallowed, then untied his own mask and let it fall. He was not as handsome as her husband, Pauline thought resignedly. His features were a bit irregular, and his dark hair was coarse and straight. But he had tried to steal a kiss, and he had wrestled with rearing, sweating horses in front of half of Rome for her sake. Above all, he was French. Pauline was desperately homesick.
“Do you know who I am?” she said.
He nodded.
“You have known from the first.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes.” It was little more than a whisper.
“If you dare, then, monsieur, meet me in two minutes at the Temple of Diana.” She pointed down the path, where white columns shone faintly at the end of the alley of trees. Then she walked away without looking back.
After ten paces, she flung off her domino.
After twenty paces, she stopped and untied her jeweled sandals.
As she vanished, barefoot, behind a marble pillar, she was slipping her gown off her left shoulder.
Camillo Borghese was looking for his wife. He had not been looking very hard, at least not at first. The satisfaction of escorting Rome’s greatest sculptor through rooms full of masterpieces collected by his ancestors was something to be savored. It was impossible, in any case, to move very quickly in the crowd. As host, he had forgone a mask; for his part, Canova disdained them. They were therefore a striking and recognizable pair—the tall young prince, with his open, wide-browed face and soft brown hair; the aging sculptor, with his intense stare and slightly stooped posture. Every few feet, another guest came up offering greetings and compliments to both men.
A servant hurried by just as one group of guests had turned away, and Camillo beckoned him over. “Have you seen the princess?” he asked in a low voice.
“No, Excellency.”
“Would you find her, tell her there is a special guest I wish her to meet?”
“Certainly, at once.” The servant bowed and retreated.
This was the third servant he had waylaid. He looked around the room distractedly, hoping to spot Pauline.
“Diana,” the sculptor was saying. He spoke loudly, so as to be heard over the music and conversation. “I shall represent the princess as Diana. With a bow, and a stag by her side.” He paused, frowning. “No, not a stag. The stag has been done; it is trite. Perhaps a dog. A lévrier. What do you think of that notion, Your Excellency?”
“A goddess? A pagan goddess?” Camillo stopped scanning the room and turned back to Canova. “Are they not usually represented nude?” He was slightly shocked at the thought of a naked statue of Pauline but tried to conceal his reaction. Canova still had the power to make him feel very unsure of himself.
Camillo was no longer the gangly schoolboy who had fled in embarrassment a dozen years earlier, when he had come upon the artist sketching in one of the villa’s galleries. In total silence, Canova had studied the sixteen-year-old with the same dispassionate thoroughness that he had given to the Roman mosaic he was copying. Then, without saying a word, he had turned back to his sketchbook. Camillo had avoided meeting the artist for years afterward.
Now, however, Camillo Borghese was a grown man. A prince. A prince who was offering Canova a spectacular commission. He had invited the sculptor to the ball to make the final arrangements for the new piece. And Canova, who had no love for the Bonapartes, had nevertheless consented eagerly. What sculptor would not want a chance to create a life-size portrait of Pauline Borghese? At twenty-three, she was universally acknowledged as the most beautiful woman in Europe, Venus to her brother’s Mars. Camillo had conducted all the preliminary negotiations in confidence; he had thought it would be a splendid surprise for Pauline to bring Canova to the ball and announce the portrait as part of the festivities.
“Diana wears a tunic,” the artist said. “In any case, the princess would only model for the head.” He looked around impatiently. “Did you not say you would present me to her? Or has she already retired?”
Where was she? He had sent servants out into the walled garden twice; he himself had been searching the rooms (admittedly with many interruptions) for nearly half an hour. His eye fell on the youngest of Pauline’s attendants, and with a hurried excuse to Canova, he pushed his way through a knot of drunken young men to the corner where she was standing.
“Sophie, do you know where Pauline is?” he said.
She flushed. “I am sorry, Your Excellency,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I saw her earlier when you were both receiving guests, but now it is so crowded. She—she was complaining that her mask was uncomfortable, so that she might have changed it for another, and perhaps, if she went outside, she took a domino as well.”
He saw Sophie’s hands clenching her skirt, but he did not need that telltale sign to know that the girl was lying. Sophie idolized Pauline and shadowed her everywhere on public occasions. What is more, even if Pauline had changed masks and thrown a domino over her costume, the hooded cloak could not fully conceal Pauline’s distinctive costume of gold tissue or the even more distinctive sandals, decorated with intertwining jeweled straps. Each strap had cost more than Camillo’s entire outfit.
“Is she on the terrace?”
“Yes, I think so. Yes, I saw her there a few moments ago.” Then, as he glanced toward the doors that led out to the terrace, she added hastily: “Or perhaps—perhaps she has gone back to the supper room.”
Lying. Lying, lying, lying.
A familiar, bitter taste filled the back of his mouth. But he concealed his anger from Sophie and managed a crooked smile. “I will look for her there, then,” he said.
He would not find her. She would not be in the supper room, or on the terrace, or in the formal garden. The grounds of the villa covered acres and acres of land. She could be anywhere—by the lake, in one of the grottoes, in the ruins. He certainly could not send servants after her. Nor could he leave his own ball to search for her, especially with Canova frowning at him and looking more and more suspicious. Camillo was trapped at his own ball with an offended genius and five hundred guests, and Pauline was off under a tree in the dark with someone’s tongue down her throat.
PROLOGUE
Rome, 1845
Sophie had arrived a little early, and now, just outside the doors into the salon, it suddenly occurred to her that there might still be people—most likely male—admiring Pauline.
“Wait here, Agnese,” she said, looking down at her companion. “I don’t think your father would want you to go in if there are strange gentlemen visiting. Give me a moment to make sure that Matteo is alone.”
Agnese hoisted herself obediently onto a marble bench. Her feet dangled high above the floor; she was very small for a nine-year-old. “Bettina says that the men who come to see Aunt Paolina are wicked,” she observed, looking sideways at Sophie. “Bettina says that if I go to see her, she will have to pray for me.”
“Bettina prays for you every night in any case,” Sophie pointed out. The old nurse was probably praying right now, while she waited in the carriage. Praying was one of her favorite activities, especially when it involved Agnese. Bettina—and most of the population of Rome—had idolized Agnese’s mother, a beautiful Englishwoman who had died while tending the poor during an epidemic. The entire city had mobbed the streets for Princess Gwendolyn’s funeral, and there we
re reports of miracles at her tomb. Agnese, in Bettina’s eyes, was the only surviving child of a saint.
Unfortunately, another one of Bettina’s favorite activities was comparing Agnese’s mother to her predecessor as Princess Borghese, Pauline Bonaparte. Bettina called them the angel princess and the devil princess. Sophie was fairly sure that Bettina had told her nursling all the lurid tales about Pauline by now. Still, Sophie did not want Agnese to overhear the sort of comments that gentlemen frequently made during their visits to this particular part of the villa. It was one thing to hear your old nurse talk about Jezebel, and another thing to hear a stranger snigger and make lewd remarks.
She hurried across the corridor and went through the double doors. No one was there except Bettina’s brother Matteo, another ancient Borghese family retainer. He was trimming the wicks on the candles, glancing possessively every so often at the young woman in the center of the room. She was always shown by candlelight to important visitors, and apparently Matteo had decided that the daughter of one princess deserved proper ceremony when visiting another.
The woman was reclining on a massive, funereal daybed, one arm propped on the cushions and the other resting gently on her thigh. Her garment had slipped down to her hips, where it lay in a suspiciously appropriate V-shaped fold just below her navel. Above that fold the bare skin stretched up smoothly: first the soft abdomen, then the ribs gently curving out to support her small breasts, then shoulders, neck, and the proud little chin. A mocking half-smile on her face suggested that she was well aware of the effect her appearance created.
No matter how many times Sophie walked into this room, the effect was always the same. No one—no one—could be that beautiful. But Pauline was.
There was a faint sound from the corridor, and Agnese peered around the edge of the doorframe.
“May I come in now?” She did not wait for an answer but skipped over to stand by Sophie. “Oh!” she said. And then, after a long pause, more softly, “Is that Aunt Paolina?”
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