The Scarlet Contessa

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  The woman in the painting looked vaguely familiar. She was younger, but not as handsome as her brother, having inherited her father’s weak chin. Nor did she share either’s black hair; hers was golden and crimped in long, narrow ringlets, which she wore loose, like an unmarried woman.

  I drew my uncertain attention from it and quietly removed the golden heart Caterina had given me from my neck. I set it on the night table beside the flagon, and removed the crystal stopper.

  I glanced up at the mute girl. She did not move, but her breathing had quickened; in her troubled eyes, I thought I saw approval. Beside her stood the coal-colored form of the angel, from whom I sensed nothing at all.

  Between us, Cesare slept, oblivious, with the portrait of his sister, Lucrezia, beside him. I looked at his handsome face and remembered, with uncommon keenness, how he had appeared as the clever little boy who proclaimed he would be king. I remembered him lost outside Rodrigo’s pleasure garden, sobbing in my arms in the dark. I remembered, too, nine-year-old Cesare who could not bear to see his little sister hurt, Cesare whose father grabbed his wrist and slammed him to the floor. Sobbing, Lucrezia had thrown herself upon him and begged her father not to hurt him anymore.

  And young Cesare had sworn, I will kill whoever dares harm her again.

  My resolve began to falter. I looked away from Borgia’s face, away from his sister’s, and pushed the latch on my pendant. The golden heart sprang open, revealing the neatly wrapped paper that held the cantarella.

  I had removed my gloves; I dared not unwrap the paper, lest the powder scatter and I become its first victim. I looked about for something to cover my hands with, until I remembered Ser Luffo’s stiletto.

  It was a deadly little dagger, narrow as my finger and sharp on both sides, with a tip that could halve a hair. It was not long enough to reach the bottom of the flagon, but close enough, and I could use it to retrieve the paper after the poison dissolved.

  I lifted the golden heart carefully and tilted it over the decanter’s opening; the paper dropped into the garnet liquid. I swirled the decanter once, twice, then gingerly lowered the narrow blade into it and stirred, careful not to strike the glass.

  Perhaps it would be quicker, though not as satisfying, simply to stab Borgia with the poisoned blade and disappear. I looked over at him, his features relaxed and innocent in sleep, and thought again of him as a child, and of his love for his sister, Lucrezia. No matter what it had grown into, it had been pure then, as Matteo’s love had been for me.

  Abruptly, I no longer saw Cesare or the portrait, but only the blade in my hands, held above the flagon, its wicked tip dripping dark red wine.

  The key to your past, the angel had said. The key to your future.

  The Nine of Swords, with each blade dripping blood from a pierced heart.

  At once I recalled the bitterness on Count Girolamo’s face when he visited his brother’s tomb—his brother, whom he mistakenly thought had been murdered by Lorenzo de’ Medici. He had struck out, killing Giuliano instead, and wounding Lorenzo’s heart. Who knew what revenge il Magnifico had taken as a result?

  I saw the rage in Cesare’s eyes as he tried to protect his beloved sister, in myself as I swore to avenge my brother’s death. All the bitterness, all the hatred, all the blood, because we could not let go of our angry grief.

  I looked at the blade in my hand, and saw my own fury over Matteo’s death. I was no less a poisoner than Rodrigo and Cesare Borgia, no less a prisoner of hatred than the violated girl sitting in Cesare’s bed. The stiletto gleamed dully in my hand as I turned it in the light.

  An unbidden thought came to me: What would my brother think, to see me at this very moment?

  I looked to the angel. It had changed; its glittering blackness was swirling now, and tiny gaps as small as stars in the night sky began to break through the darkness, radiating blinding light.

  Vow to obey me even unto death, the angel said, and I will reveal myself to you.

  “I vow,” I whispered.

  I did not need to ask what to do; I had always known. I looked at the dagger in my hand, at the poisoned wine with a soggy bit of paper floating in it, and began to weep quietly.

  At the sound of my soft tears, Cesare’s body stirred beneath the covers. Apparently thinking it was his young companion, he began to turn onto his other side. But in mid-roll, his eyelids fluttered, and he sat up, swift as an asp, with a short sword in his hand.

  The mute girl beside him covered her head with her arms and emitted a wail. All the while, the angel watched, growing so bright with each passing second that I soon could not look upon it. Instead, I studied Cesare’s threatening expression, and finally understood why I had come.

  “Dea,” Cesare said, marveling. “You’re Dea, Caterina’s lady-in-waiting, aren’t you?”

  In response, I obeyed the angel: I plunged the stiletto into the poisoned wine, and left it there. At once, all my grief lifted, replaced by weightless peace. I could be angry no more.

  Truthfully, I said, “I will not hurt you. I bear a message for you.”

  I moved to reach into the pocket of my gown. He tensed and waved his blade at me, but I made a reassuring gesture, and slowly pulled the card from my pocket and set it down beside the dagger and the cup.

  “This is yours now,” I said, pointing to the Nine of Swords.

  They did not kill me at once, as I had hoped. Perhaps the triumph card had given Cesare pause; before he called for his guards, he looked from me to the Nine of Swords with the awe one reserves for madmen and saints.

  By then, the sheer relief of revelation—assisted, no doubt, by the drug—had transported me to another realm, one where reality and consequence had little meaning. When the guards responded to Cesare’s shout, I smiled at them, and went so willingly that they laid not a hand on me.

  I walked cheerfully into the makeshift dungeon created in Ser Luffo’s wine cellar, where groaning, shivering men were manacled to the walls near the devices used to torture them: the rack, the boot, the strappado.

  I had experienced Heaven in Cesare Borgia’s bedchamber; now I experienced Hell.

  The French forbade the torture of women for political purposes, but Borgia’s men shared no such compunction. Despite the cold, they stripped me of my boots and gown, leaving me with only a filthy, torn chemise to cover myself. I was manacled to the wall, unable even to sit upon the freezing ground, and waited—still content and jubilant in my emotional freedom, and rendered passive by the drug.

  Then my turn came. It began with endless questions about Ravaldino—about the layout of the fortress, the artillery, the soldiers, the food and ammunition—and Caterina. What secret plans had she? Were the Milanese indeed coming? What had the last message from Duke Ludovico said?

  My general ignorance of the subjects cost me several beatings. I endured them well enough, for I as yet felt no fear. The pain was only physical; it would not last forever, and death would come soon enough. My only regret was that Borgia would use my imprisonment against Caterina.

  Then came the fateful question: How did you leave the fortress? The drawbridge had never been lowered. I must have left by another way, one that should be exploited.

  I vowed to obey you, I told the angel silently. Help me now to hold my tongue.

  I would not utter a word. The beatings grew more brutal; I lost a tooth and gained a cut, a swollen eye, and a broken jaw. I began to move in and out of consciousness, yet remained silent.

  This earned me the strappado. I was freed from my manacles and placed beneath a thick chain suspended from a pulley on the ceiling; the other end of the chain was fastened to something resembling a ship’s wheel. My arms were pulled behind me, bound together tightly at the wrists, and attached to the dangling chain. This seemed ominous enough, but my tormenter—a pleasant-faced youth wearing a rumpled papal army uniform and a benign expression—had not yet added the final touch: a heavy iron weight connected to shackles, which went around my ankles.
<
br />   With something approaching boredom, my lad repeated the question: How did you escape Ravaldino?

  With that, he gave the wheel a turn, to the clank and squeal of metal and the groan of wood. My wrists rose first, followed by my shoulders and elbows, both of which were forced into such an unnatural position behind me that the pain was immediately unbearable; the bones strained so hard against my flesh, I thought they would tear through the skin. I let go an involuntary cry as I was pulled higher.

  By the time the iron weight attached to my ankles cleared the floor, I was screaming. The searing anguish in my upper torso was now matched by the lower, as my hips, knees, and ankles were slowly being pulled out of joint.

  This made me consider loosing my tongue, but my sweet-faced lad was far from done. He gave another mighty turn of the wheel, and my wrists grazed the ceiling. I thought I could bear no more . . .

  Until the lad let go of the wheel. The chain went whizzing downward, and I with it, until the torturer abruptly clutched the wheel again, jerking me sharply in midair.

  I could answer nothing; pain consumed the entire world, leaving no place for the lad or the dungeon or even me.

  I must have fainted, for when I came to myself again it was night and the soldiers were gone. The tiny hearth, which had provided some slight warmth while the torturers did their work, was cold and dark; there was nothing but the groans of the suffering.

  I discovered that I was lying on my side on the floor, my ankles shackled to the wall. Although I had been freed from the strappado, it was still doing its work; every bone, every muscle in my body throbbed, and shrieked at the slightest movement. Yet the pain urged me to shift my position. Gritting my teeth, I pushed myself up to a sitting position, my back against the dank wall, my chained legs sprawled in front of me. It was then that I realized I was unsure not just of the hour, but of the day; my memory was blurred, distorted. I could not have said whether I had been in the dungeon for a day or a week.

  The drug had worn off completely, but my emotional relief and sense of revelation had not. Perhaps I had been mad not to use my opportunity to kill Cesare, but I did not care. Like me, like Girolamo, like Caterina, he had been wounded, and I could only pray that he lived long enough to understand his angry grief and transcend it.

  I heard squeaking, and shuddered as a pair of rats scurried over my legs; I would have lifted an arm to shoo them away had I been able. Instead, I closed my eyes and whispered to the angel.

  “If you are real,” I breathed, “you must appear to me now, because I have finally obeyed you unto death. Grant me that, at least, before I face the executioner.”

  In response, there came the patter of the rodents over the stone, and the faint sobs of a fellow prisoner begging God to let him die. I leaned my head back against the cold wall and hoped for sleep. The rat’s squeaks grew gradually louder, but none came close to me.

  Perhaps I dozed, for by the time I opened my eyes again, their squeals had transformed into a woman’s screams.

  I was no longer in Luffo Numai’s cellar, but in a place I had been only once, after the Duke of Milan’s assassination: Galeazzo Maria Sforza’s lavish bedchamber in the Castle Pavia. The beautiful strains of the duke’s choir singing Christmas carols emanated from the private chapel, two rooms away.

  But in the duke’s bedroom, the festive sound was muted by shrill screams. From my perspective on the floor beside the massive bed, I watched as a leering Galeazzo, his leggings bunched about his ankles, struck the young woman pinned beneath him; I sat too low to see her face. Galeazzo had insinuated himself between her legs and pulled her skirts above her waist, revealing the long sweep of her white flesh from hip to slipper.

  “I will not suffer this a second time!” she roared in French beneath him. “I will kill you, I swear! You have cost me my life, my sanity!”

  Galeazzo struck her again, then pushed his erect member inside her with savage force. Pushing his victim down with the weight of his body and covering her mouth with one hand, he began to rut.

  For the first time, I realized that another voice—high-pitched and childish—had been shouting all along. “Maman, Maman! Stop it, Monsieur, you’re hurting her!”

  I watched as a slender young boy ran up beside me and crawled onto the bed to try to pull the duke off his mother. “Leave her!” he shouted. “Leave her, please!”

  The duke reached back with his free hand to knock the boy squarely in the jaw; the boy fell backward and, unable to keep his purchase, slid onto the floor.

  I began weeping. “Stop!” I shouted. “Someone, help her!” I scarcely noticed that my words came out in French, like the boy’s; I struggled to lift a leg, an arm, but the violent pain kept me still.

  The boy was on his feet again. I feared for him; he was a lovely child of perhaps ten, tall for his age and slender, with hazel eyes and dark auburn hair. How like Matteo he looks, I thought, until I saw the blood on his upper lip, split right at the bow.

  Helpless, I watched as Matteo swiftly scanned the room and grabbed a heavy golden candlestick from the table near the hearth. Again he crawled onto the bed behind the prone Galeazzo; this time, he struck the back of the duke’s skull. The duke roared and turned the upper half of his body in an effort to seize the weapon from the boy.

  Matteo struck Galeazzo’s crown a second time, so fiercely that the candlestick shuddered and let go a faint, metallic ring. The duke fell still, and the woman pulled herself out from under his limp body.

  “Guillaume,” she said, holding out her arms to the boy. “My savior, my darling!” They embraced tearfully.

  She was a beautiful woman, with ebony hair and eyebrows, and striking features. I thought at first I looked upon myself, but there were differences; her dress and hair were long out of fashion, her cheekbones and chin more becoming than mine.

  She released her son to spit upon the duke’s still form. “She is yours, you bastard, and you know it,” she hissed in his ear, “and you have cost me my marriage, my life, everything. Will you not even take responsibility for your own child?”

  And then she turned and held out her arms to me. “Desiree,” she said. “Sweet girl, we must hurry! We will find no help here!”

  “Maman!” I gasped. I tried to open my arms and reach for her, but could not. I squeezed my eyes shut, sobbing, and when I opened them, she was gone.

  I was back in the unlit dungeon, trapped by the agony in my limbs as much as by my shackles. Yet my mind was working to piece together what I had just witnessed. I understood why the pious Duchess Bona had treated me so kindly all those years; she was trying to make amends for another of her husband’s sins. Once Duke Galeazzo was dead, her obligation to me ended. What more perfect solution than to send me off to Rome with my half sister?

  As I considered these things, the anonymous form of the angel appeared before me. Once again, its glittering blackness was slowly fading, replaced by larger and larger gaps of blinding white light until I was forced to shut my eyes and look away. Even then, the brilliance increased steadily, until it pierced my eyelids like the naked sun.

  “Dea,” a man’s voice whispered, and laughed softly. “Dea, look at me.”

  I opened my eyes. The dungeon was illuminated by a gentle golden glow.

  Beside me crouched Matteo, dressed in the same tunic he had worn the day he set off for Rome. He was radiant, as if from an internal light, and he grinned broadly at me. The scar upon the bow of his lip had disappeared.

  “Matteo?” I whispered. “You are the angel?”

  “I have always been with you,” he said. “I never left.” He put his hand upon mine, and my pain vanished. I reached out to him, and pressed my cheek to his, and sobbed.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, embracing me, and I let myself melt with him into the bliss of overwhelming love. “Dea, my existence is pure joy. And none could be happier than this moment. Don’t you see?

  “Duke Galeazzo, your father, could not be redeemed. But you have reclaimed
our mother’s work, and allowed me to know the joy of spiritual union. And you have led your sister, Caterina, away from her father’s dark legacy. You, who thought you had no family, have saved us all. And I will be with you forever.”

  I held my brother and felt my heart soar, free from the fetters of fear and sadness. “I can die now,” I whispered to him. “I am happy.”

  Matteo drew back and gazed down at me tenderly. “Your service has only begun,” he answered. “You have obeyed me unto death; now you are a true magus.”

  I bowed my head and whispered, “I surrender to my fate.”

  At once, the door to the dungeon swung open.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  When the door opened, I looked up toward it to discover that I had returned to the dungeon completely; back were the pain, the shackles, the aching cold. A guard and Luffo Numai, holding a torch, were walking toward me. No doubt they were coming to take me to my execution.

  Numai’s lips parted in shock when he set eyes on me, but he soon recovered enough to address me as the guard knelt down to unlock my shackles.

  “Madonna Dea,” he said solemnly, “we have come to release you.”

  I tried to speak and found I could manage no more than a hoarse whisper. “Why?”

  He looked on me with genuine pity. “It’s over. Ravaldino has fallen.”

  I sobbed at the news; the sounds emerged from my throat as grating rasps. Caterina, then, was dead.

  Even with my shackles gone, I was too weak to rise. The guard bent down and slipped his arms beneath my armpits, then lifted me straight up as I let go a yelp. I could not bear any weight upon my hobbled ankles, so he scooped me into his arms and carried me away from the stinking dungeon, up the stairs to Ser Luffo’s house.

  I was taken to an empty nursery and laid upon a bed. Two female attendants came and washed my face and hands, then dressed me in a clean gown, gloves, and slippers, and wrapped me in a fine woolen cloak; a third brought a bitter potion, which I drank eagerly. Numai and the guard returned again, and held me upright between them; I could not bear the pain of holding on to them, as both my shoulders were dislocated, but they supported me well enough so that, as we approached a well-lit sitting room on the ground floor, I was able to stagger a few agonizing paces through the open door.