I had to focus on keeping my gaze steady, to not let him sense the anxious suspicion cresting inside me. “Giovanni? How can that be? He’s in Pesaro.”
“We heard otherwise. Not long ago, one of our informants reported that a man matching Giovanni’s description was seen slinking into Cardinal Sforza’s palazzo. Juan may have gone to meet him there; perhaps Giovanni was this masked stranger, though that seems too obvious a ploy for someone of his limited intelligence. Still, as you say, the piazza lies next to Palazzo Sforza. If Giovanni was hiding in Rome and didn’t want anyone to know it, where else could he lodge? But he’s not there now. We had it searched. He is gone, no doubt already back on his way to Pesaro.” Cesare paused, staring at me with an unsettling curiosity. “You’ve not seen him since he left? Cardinal Sforza was most emphatic when questioned that Giovanni had not come anywhere near the city since he made his cowardly exit.”
“No,” I whispered. I swallowed, strengthening my voice. “No. I have not seen him.”
“Well. There we have it. A report from an informant hired by us is hardly evidence, and if no one actually saw him in Rome at the time, then—”
“He’d never do something like this.” I cut him off before I could stop myself, wincing to hear the urgent need to inject incredulity into my voice. “Giovanni and Juan were friends. They liked each other. Everyone knew it. What would Giovanni gain from killing him?”
Cesare gave a chuckle. “Yes, we both know how well they liked each other. I thought quite the same: Did Juan arrange to meet your husband as a lover? Anything is possible.” Again, his disconcerting gaze fixed on me. “It might work, in fact. If you tell Papa what you saw that night in your palazzo between him, Juan, and Giulia, it would certainly spare us a protracted petition for an annulment. We could prove with one arrest that Giovanni is not only a catamite who never bedded his wife but is also a jealous one who killed Juan. It’s not as if our brother was faithful to anyone. He slept with half of Rome, if the rumors are to be believed.”
I was aghast. “But Giovanni would never…he had no reason to—”
Fleet as a raptor, Cesare rounded on me, grabbing my reins from my hands and tugging our mounts so close, his thigh pressed against mine. I heard the jangle of stirrups behind us as the escort likewise drew to a precipitous halt, keeping their distance.
“What do you know of Giovanni or what he will do?” he hissed. “Why do you defend that vermin, when by your own account you are well rid of him?”
“I do not defend him. I don’t defend anyone!” My own anger surged. “Unhand me.”
He released my reins. The vein in his temple now pulsed under his skin. He was hiding something. I knew it with a cramp in my stomach that reminded me of my intolerable condition and made me want to retch.
“Giovanni might be vermin, but he’d never dare,” I said, tasting bile. “He’s desperate to stay in Papa’s good graces. He’d never consent to such an act, while he still hopes to save our marriage.”
“Oh?” Cesare eyed me. I wanted to look away, but I knew that if I did he would realize at once that I too hid something. “If I recall correctly, your husband not only fucked Juan—or was it the other way around?—but he also ordered his own secretary’s hands chopped off for abetting your intrigues, not to mention that we’re about to charge him with impotency in your bed. It seems to me that a man in his position is quite capable of anything.”
Doubt assailed me. I thought of Giovanni’s brutal assault on me and how Juan disdained him for his botched effort, sending him away with an earful of threats. Had Giovanni obeyed or only pretended to do so, remaining in the city to plot his revenge, fearful that his role in my violation might be revealed? Juan had proven he cared for no one but himself; moreover, he was the only other witness. If Giovanni had paid for Juan’s death, it was just my word against his. He could counter the claim of non-consummation, demand an examination by midwives to refute my virginity, and then all of Italy would discover that I was in fact—
This time, I couldn’t hold back. Leaning to one side, I spewed onto the road. I gagged, my stomach heaving. With one hand clutching my saddle and another at my mouth, I gazed up in horror at Cesare, bracing for his denunciation that I’d concealed something so momentous from him.
He sat quiet on his horse, his eerie calm reminding me of the meeting between him and Papa that I had spied upon, when his very serenity had become a weapon Papa could not evade.
“You did not ask where Juan and I dined that evening,” he said at length, and he reached into his doublet, extracting a red silk handkerchief. He handed it to me. As I clutched it to my lips, inhaling the aroma of his scent on the cloth, he went on in a velvety tone, “We were with Mama at her villa on the Esquiline.”
The world capsized around me. “You were at Vannozza’s? Did she…?”
He leaned over in his saddle, retrieving the silk from my hands. Folding it over once, he proceeded to dab my lips. His breath smelled of cloves as he murmured, “She did not say a word. Ah, no. Wait.” His fingertips pressed harder, stifling my voice. “I am not finished. I knew she had visited you. I set Michelotto to watching San Sisto and he saw Vannozza leave, clearly distraught. He’d also seen your Pantalisea coming and going with linens and coverlets, as if you prepared for a long stay. I didn’t need Mama’s cards to divine what was afoot.” He paused, the soiled handkerchief clutched in his hand.
“Cesare…” My voice faded as he clicked his tongue, shaking his head.
“No, no. There’s no need for apology. I’ll not tell a soul, though you do realize that at some point Papa must be informed. This would ruin his plans, should it come to light. At the very least, he cannot claim you are untouched. At the worst, Giovanni will demand your return and we’ll have to oblige him.” He went silent for a moment. “Is the child his?”
Tears burned behind my eyes. “No. Juan, he—” I could not speak the words, not aloud.
The darkening of his face revealed that he didn’t need to hear the words. “Did you tell Mama?” he asked, and when I nodded, he still showed no visible upset, though I expected rage, his avowal to see Juan’s corpse dragged through the streets. Instead, he licked the edge of the cloth to wipe a trace of spittle from my cheek. “Juan forced himself on you. Is that it?”
I recoiled at the cadence of mistrust in his tone. “Do you think I would lie?” He did not answer. My voice rose, shrill. I was so incensed I no longer cared if the guards accompanying us overheard, if all of Rome overheard. “How could you, Cesare?”
He leaned back. I exhaled a furious breath, about to haul my mare about and proceed to the convent, when he said, “I’ve never believed for a second that you would lie to me about anything. If you say Juan did this to you, then he did. I suspected something terrible must have befallen you. Why else would you flee into the convent while we were in Ostia?”
“And you,” I retorted, “would you lie to me? You don’t seem surprised by any of this.” As I spoke, a horrifying notion surfaced. “Dio mio, was it Juan? Did he tell you? Did he boast of it to you?” The very thought tore at the pit of my being. Juan was capable of it; I imagined him drunk, taunting Cesare before our own mother at her table, exulting in his prowess, hoping to incite confrontation, as he’d so often done. I heard him as if his ghost hovered at my side: I’ll grant no quarter this time. None….I have paid back every insult, every time he made me feel as if I were unfit to call myself a Borgia.
And in return, Cesare would have killed him for it.
He startled me when he suddenly tossed his head, letting loose his familiar laughter, tinged with mordant wit. “You insult me. If he’d boasted of it and I sought to avenge you, do you think I’d have made such a mess of things?” His fingers, twined with the red silk, tapped his thigh. “Well? Do you? Of course not. Because you know well that if I had done it,” he said, his voice icy, “there would be no evidence—no moribund groom or tattling boatman. No corpse in the Tiber. Juan would have disappeared, which is a
ll he deserved—anonymity and an empty tomb, not a martyr’s funeral and public laments. Gone forever, as if he never existed.”
He turned away, nudging his horse. In the distance, sunlight shimmered upon San Sisto. The convent offered only the illusion of refuge now—this world I had sought to escape, if only for a brief time, could not be kept at bay even from within its walls.
Beware the man who covets.
As Papa’s cryptic words came back to me, I called out, “Cesare.”
He paused, casting a glance at me over his shoulder. His eyes were hooded. “Yes?”
“I…I am glad he is dead,” I said, and I felt my own revulsion at my callousness curdle inside me, like a taint of poison on my tongue. “I threatened Mama with the truth so she’d make Papa send him away. I cursed Juan; I longed for his death. I know you have only ever wanted to protect me, so, please…tell me the truth now. It will be our secret, ours alone. Did you kill him?”
He tilted his head, as if he were amused. “Alas, I did not. But had I known this, I assure you I would have.”
“Another push, my lady,” urged Pantalisea. “This time with all your strength.”
She bent over me as I straddled the upholstered birthing stool, my body aching, my womb pummeled from within. Suora Leocadia stood like a sentinel at the door, while Suora Paulina, convent herbalist and now apprentice midwife, knelt at my feet as I drew in another shallow lungful of air, tensed, and bore down, every muscle shrieking.
“I cannot,” I gasped. “Please, no more. Just let me die.”
I spoke through a sweat-drenched veil, which Suora Leocadia had insisted I wear to cover my shame. Only she, the herbalist, and Pantalisea were permitted to attend the birth, which began a day ago with a sudden pang and gush of bloodied water. Now, after an agonizing night spent in this smothering room, during which the being within me defied every effort to coax it out, I sat with my chemise plastered to me like a suffocating second skin, longing to howl like the demented captive thing I’d become.
“You will not die.” Suora Leocadia thrust her mole-pocked chin at me. “I forbid it. Our Holy Mother forbids it. You will deliver this babe first. You will bring it into this world and then we shall wait on the Almighty’s will. Now, push.”
The sound that came out of me then was like the frantic cry of the slaughterhouse animal that knows it is doomed—half sob, half shriek, fraught with despair.
“I cannot!”
As Suora Leocadia flinched and drew back, Suora Paulina murmured, “Madonna must not dwell on the pain. Cast your thoughts elsewhere and let your body do its work.”
“Cast my thoughts elsewhere?” I gazed at her in disbelief, for I had never felt more imprisoned within my body. “What do you suggest I think about?”
“Anything,” interrupted Pantalisea. “Only do not fight it.”
Suora Paulina was already reaching again to my bruised private parts, eliciting a moan of pain from my lips. I shut my eyes and tried to be anywhere but in this fetid room I’d come to despise, pretending I had taken wing to soar above this convent that had been my cage.
At first, all I felt were Suora Paulina’s fingers probing me. Clenching my teeth, I cast my mind further away, remembering how slowly time had passed, my days regimented by the unassailable hours of the liturgy, my belly swelling until I no longer fit into my clothes. Pantalisea had made furtive trips to purchase cloth, fashioning new gowns in a voluminous style that concealed my girth and accentuated my enlarged breasts. She laced me into one of those gowns on the day the Curia summoned me to declare myself virga intacta, unspoiled by man.
Seated before the cardinals, my hands clasped demurely across my lap as I took in their prurient gazes resting, as if transfixed, on the creamy mounds of my chest, I delivered a speech that astonished even me with its sincerity. I knew from letters smuggled into the convent by Pantalisea—who met weekly with Perotto, suborned by Papa to deliver important news—that the annulment proceeding had turned acrimonious. Giovanni had declared our marriage consummated “many times over” and railed to his cousin Il Moro in Milan—who wasted no time in maliciously relaying the accusation to his envoy in Rome, thus ensuring all Italy heard of it—that His Holiness had other unspeakable motives for wanting to separate me from my husband. I trembled when I learned this, thinking of the time when Giovanni came upon Cesare and me, entangled in each other’s arms in the villa above Pesaro. But his bid to defame our name only succeeded in rousing Papa’s wrath.
“Do people say I am both her father and lover?” Papa railed before the Curia. “Let the common vermin of this world, as ridiculous as they are feebleminded, believe the most absurd tales about the mighty! Our good or evil can be judged by only the highest power.”
He left the cardinals of the Curia without any doubt as to which verdict he expected them to deliver. Papa had no patience for obfuscation. He threatened reform, Pantalisea informed me, culling gossip from Perotto. He refused to grant any requests that carried a hint of corruption; he condemned venality and abolished indulgences. He even went so far as to send Sancia and Gioffre along with Cesare to see the new king of Naples crowned, to prove he was repentant, depriving himself of the solace of his own family. Every cardinal had something to lose from Papa’s new stance; none could afford inquiries into their private affairs. By the time I appeared before the Curia in my new gown to attest to my virginity, their sentence was a foregone conclusion.
Couriers galloped to Pesaro, carrying the Curia’s official dissolution of my marriage and Papa’s ultimatum: Giovanni could retain my dowry—a considerable sum—providing he pleaded impotency. Already in negotiations for a new wife, offered by his former in-laws the Gonzagas (who evidently were undeterred by his dishonor), Giovanni agreed. For the first time since Juan’s death, I burst into laughter when I received the news, scandalizing the sisters toiling in a nearby herb patch.
Papa had wiped clean my sordid past. Publicly, I was immacolata once more.
“It’s almost here! Push, my lady—I can feel the crown of its head!”
Suora Paulina’s excited cry brought me hurtling back into my body. As my screams erupted, loud enough that surely they must have reverberated throughout the convent, my legs flew apart to welcome a release so vast it was like a flood washing over me.
I sprawled on the stool, breathless. I could not lift my head as movement burst around me—a blur of stained hems and clogs clapping along the floor. Suora Paulina barked for scissors, the witch hazel, and a basin of water. Through my half-closed eyelids, I glimpsed a bluish tail that bound something to me. Then I heard splashes of rosewater, its scent drenching me.
“Is it alive?” Pantalisea asked anxiously.
A fraught silence fell. More whispering, followed by an abrupt thwack and an outraged wail. I finally looked up. Suora Leocadia flung the door open and marched out, letting in for a moment the sound of rain pattering upon the cloister. From where she knelt by my feet, Suora Paulina offered me a squirming bundle swathed in white linen.
“A boy, my lady,” she said. She set the baby in my arms, resting him on the still-distended bulge of my belly. “My lady must stay seated awhile longer,” she advised. “The rest of the birth must come out. If it stays inside, you will sicken. I’ll fetch a robe and fresh chemise.”
“And a mop,” muttered Pantalisea as the nun left. “When it comes to anything more than brewing chamomile or taking honey from the hive, they don’t have the sense of a mule.”
I wanted to laugh, but everything hurt. Peeling aside the swaddle, I revealed a tiny, puckered face, eyes like slits, and the toothless pit of a mouth. Another impossibly loud cry issued from that mouth, causing me to gasp. “Madre di Dio. He looks like an old man.”
“He looks like His Holiness,” said Pantalisea. “Sounds like him, too.” She smiled at me. “What are you going to call him? He will need a name for the christening.”
A lump filled my chest. “I made my decision. He must be reared by whomever Papa chooses
. He—he cannot stay with me, nor can he ever know I am his mother.”
“You’ll never be able to do that now,” Pantalisea said softly. “You may not feel it yet, but I can already see it in your eyes. He is entirely yours.”
I started to look away, but the babe began to kick, crying and beating his fists. Instinctively, I hoisted him higher upon my chest, parting my sodden chemise to release my breast. The clamp of his mouth on my nipple sent a jolt of pain-laced pleasure through me.
“See?” Pantalisea sighed. “You cannot resist.”
My arms cradled him. I felt a near-imperceptible shift in my heart, where something stirred to fragile life, unfelt until now.
“My son,” I whispered. “I have a son….”
As I pressed my lips to his still-soft and misshapen head, I realized what I felt was not only the joy of unquenchable love but also the awakening of inescapable fear.
A Borgia, twice over. What would be my child’s fate?
They left me alone with him for almost three weeks. Three endless blessed weeks, during which I woke every morning to find my boy blinking at me from his makeshift crib by my bedside. The wintry light seeping through the grated window turned to rose upon his flawless skin, his hands opening and closing as if he were attempting to show me something, before his hunger erupted in a bellow that was music to my ears. Drawing him into my bed, which I had piled with wool coverlets and furs, I unlaced my nightdress so he could clasp onto my breast to suckle with a single-minded fervor that left me in no doubt that he was indeed a Borgia.
I resisted naming him. I thought I could not love him. I even feared I might hate him, fruit of a savagery that had shattered my trust. I had told myself I’d be happy to relinquish him, if he did not die first, as many newborns did. While I awaited his birth, I’d complained to Pantalisea innumerable times of how much I longed to be free of this burden. I wanted to return to my palazzo, to my silks and jewels; I longed to forget and be Lucrezia Borgia once more, the pope’s beloved daughter.
The Vatican Princess Page 30
