by Sara Poole
“Who could he hope to make pope in della Rovere’s stead?” David asked.
Even as he spoke, the same thought seemed to occur to all three of us. It fell to me to voice it, reluctant though I was.
“From what I understand, Savonarola is a true fanatic.”
David nodded. “He is that and more, and he has the support of the common people because he claims to want to purify the Church of its venality.”
“Perhaps he does,” I said. “How better to cleanse Holy Mother Church than to take control of it?”
“Surely the cardinals would never elect him?” Sofia asked. The idea clearly horrified her, and for good reason. Venal popes bathed in corruption could at least be bought. But a true fanatic, imbued with the conviction that God moved through him … There was no telling what that sort might do.
“They will if they feel that they have no choice,” I said. “Let him bring big enough mobs into the streets, as he has been doing in Florence, and anything might happen.”
Papal conclaves were notorious under the best of circumstances. Crowds streamed into Rome from all points, most normal business was suspended, and the potential for mischief was always in the air. Add to that the inevitable tension people feel when a matter so touching on their own welfare is being decided and it does not take much to set match to tinder. Had the Church and her princes been better respected … had ordinary men and women seen them as anything other than venal hypocrites, it might have been different. But as it was—
“They must be stopped,” Sofia said. Her hands were clasped so tightly in front of her that I could see the knuckles gleaming white. “We cannot let this come to pass.”
“Indeed, we cannot,” I said. “But if we are to have any hope of preventing Morozzi from carrying out his designs, we must learn his whereabouts.”
We spoke for some time about how that could best be accomplished. With the rapid growth of Rome since the healing of the Great Schism almost eighty years before, the city had become even more of a warren of neighborhoods, streets, and alleys. Morozzi might be hiding anywhere. The three of us could not hope to find him on our own; we would need considerable help.
“Rocco will have to be told,” Sofia said.
With the memory of what had happened to Nando the previous year, I agreed. “And a safe place must be found for his son. I will see to that.”
I did not have to explain the necessity of finding a sanctuary for the boy before I could focus on the business of stopping Morozzi. Sofia and David were both well aware of my lingering guilt over the danger I had placed the child in.
We spoke a while longer about how best to find the mad priest, ending our discussion shortly before sunset when the streets leading into the Jewish Quarter would be closed. David departed a little ahead of me. He exited through the back door of the apothecary shop into the warren of alleys that made it possible for anyone so inclined to move about the ghetto unobserved. I knew he would find ready shelter with others who believed as he did that any people, Jews included, had to be prepared to fight for their own survival rather than rely on purchased tolerance.
Sofia saw me out through the front door. As we walked a short way together, she asked, “Do you have any idea why Rocco wasn’t at the meeting?”
“He didn’t say, but I’m sure he had a good reason.” In truth, I had not had any chance to think about that, what with one thing and the other.
We walked a little farther to the edge of the piazza. With David’s departure, Sofia’s concern for my well-being returned. Before we parted, she said, “You will remember what I said, won’t you, Francesca? If ever you wish to talk of matters weighing on your mind, I would be glad to listen.”
Reluctant to give her any false assurance yet equally unwilling to hurt her, I could offer only a smile and an embrace. Leaving the Quarter, I resisted the urge to turn around and see if she was still watching me.
10
I stopped on the way to my rooms to pick up the ingredients for a simple meal—a little culatello, the ham we soak in wine until it emerges rosy red, a small loaf sprinkled with rosemary, a handful of the good, meaty olives of Puglia, and a decent bottle of wine. Outside Portia’s door, I put my burdens down and knocked softly so as not to disturb her if she was asleep. To my pleased surprise, the top of the door was flung open. Standing on her stool, Portia grinned at me.
“There you are then, Donna. How has your day been?”
For reasons I could not begin to guess, Portia looked like the proverbial cat that had swallowed the canary. Her dark eyes glowed and her cheeks, beneath the bruises, were pleasantly flushed.
At a loss to understand her manner, and more than a little envious of it, I said, “Fine, I suppose.… I wanted to see how you are.”
“Have no worry for me, Donna. I’m fit as a fiddle. You just go on up now and enjoy your evening.”
As I intended to spend it alone, save for Minerva, I could only nod. Having gathered up my purchases, I made my way upstairs still puzzling over Portia’s mood. To add to the mystery, I heard her chuckle behind me.
I opened the door, eased my way in, and made for the small pantry, where I deposited my packages with a relieved sigh. Minerva was sitting beside the stone sink. She blinked and moved aside when I tried to pet her, her blue gaze fastened on something behind me.
I think I knew before I turned, feeling him in some way I could neither define nor deny. Perhaps I smelled him. At once, my body tightened and I felt a rush of warmth.
“Cesare,” I said in a futile effort to sound stern, for truly what right did he have to cajole his way into my apartment, as he had obviously done with Portia’s connivance. How daunting to think that not even the sensible portatore was proof against the charms of Borgia’s eldest son.
He had a drink in his hand—one of my best goblets, I noticed when I turned to face him. His dark hair with a slight reddish cast was loose and brushed his shoulders. In features, he resembled his mother—the redoubtable Vannozza dei Catannei—far more than his father, having her long, high-bridged nose and large, almond-shaped eyes. He had been in the sun even more than usual and was deeply tanned. In public, he wore the expected raiment of a highborn young man but that night he was dressed for comfort in a loose shirt and breeches.
Apparently, he had been in my apartment long enough to make himself at home. Besides finding the wine, he had removed his boots and was barefoot.
“Let me see you,” he said, and put down the goblet.
He undressed me there in the pantry, stripping my clothes away garment by garment. I did not help him but neither did I offer any hindrance. Women’s clothing held no mysteries for him; he made short work of the task. When I was naked, he stepped back and scrutinized me slowly from head to toe.
“You are bruised.”
“Am I? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Lucrezia says you killed the bastard.”
I did not question how the Pope’s daughter knew of the attack on me. Young though she was, Lucrezia understood the value of information and cultivated her own sources for it.
Cesare’s hands were shaking. Hard, sun-darkened hands made to hold a sword or lance unflinchingly, but they trembled against my pale skin.
Something broke within me. Sofia believed that I did not allow myself to feel but she was wrong; I felt far too much. Terror when the nightmare came upon me as it so often did, pleasure when I killed, and always wrenching longing for the life that might have been mine if only I were an entirely different person, so that I was locked in a paradox where I could never have what I yearned for without my own extinction.
All of that rose up in me in the moment that I touched Cesare, ran my hand down his muscled arm, curled my fingers around his, and went forward quickly, without thinking, to take his mouth with mine. He allowed this, my dark lover, because hunter that he was he seemed to understand and accept my need.
In truth, I think a part of him gloried in it. You may assume that life came to him easily by v
irtue of his unvirtuous birth but in fact everything he valued he took for himself through the sheer force of his will. Everything except me. Even that first time under the gaze of Callixtus, I took him.
Some while later, I remember him laughing as he picked me up from the slate floor of the pantry where we had lain oblivious to discomfort and carried me across the salon to my chamber. We tumbled across the bed, limbs entwining, mouths searching. Drugged by pleasure, I scarcely felt the tears running down my cheeks until Cesare caught them on his tongue and touched the saltiness to mine.
“Will you ever tell me what haunts you?”
I turned my head away, letting my tears fall onto the pillow at the same time I tightened around him, drawing him deeper. He groaned and closed his eyes, the question and all else forgotten, if only for the moment.
Later, while I lingered in the bed, my breathing slow and regular, my mind mercifully mute, Cesare rose and went into the pantry. He came back with wine, bread, cheese, sausage, and Minerva. This man, who had lived all his life with hosts of retainers waiting to serve his every need but who to the end of that life preferred a simple meal whether in a camp of soldiers or in the bed of a lover, waited upon me.
We ate, feeding each other and sipping from the same goblet, laughing at the kitten’s antics until she fell asleep curled in a white ball at our feet.
“Do you know who did it?” Cesare asked at length. He lay propped up on his side, the palm of his hand cupping his cheek. He looked young, as he was, and disingenuous, as he most certainly was not.
I had been expecting the question. What bound us together all those years was not merely bedsport. Make no mistake, for all his volatile temperament, Cesare possessed rare intelligence. The praise of his tutors who taught him Latin and Greek while he was still a child and his performance at the universities of Perugia and Pisa where he distinguished himself attest to that. I will not claim that the clarity of his mind was chief among his attributes where I was concerned, however it did make all our dealings at once more appealing and more satisfying. When all was said and done, we were allies. Almost to the very end.
“He was wearing della Rovere’s colors,” I said.
He raised a brow, challenging me to draw the obvious conclusion.
“You see your father’s hand?”
“Who wants della Rovere dead more than he?” Cesare challenged. “They’ve been rivals for years but it’s worse now, much worse.”
Indeed, it was, but I was not about to tell Cesare that his father had ordered me to find a way to solve the problem. Let him discover that for himself.
“There’s another, more likely explanation,” I said.
By the time I finished telling Cesare about Morozzi, the languor of our interlude was gone. He was all keen attention and honed instinct, this man Il Papa was determined to make into a desk-bound redskirter.
“Are you certain about this?” he asked.
I nodded. “He was followed to Florence and observed there, then followed on the way here. Apparently, he has allied himself with Savonarola.”
Cursing under his breath, Cesare rose and walked naked from the chamber. He returned moments later carrying his clothes and mine.
“Get up,” he said, tossing the garments to me. “My father must hear of this. He will have questions for you.”
I had some experience in not bringing information to Borgia’s attention in a timely manner and I had no intention of making that mistake again. I threw off the covers, rose, and began quickly to dress.
“I can’t say I’m eager to tell him—” Accepting that the task was necessary did not make me relish it. I had been subject too recently to Borgia’s wrath to want to experience it again so soon.
Pulling on his trousers, Cesare grinned. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell him. He’ll hear it from me and he’ll realize that he needs me at his side.”
My dark lover was relishing the situation, I realized, pleased with the opportunity to be of service to Il Papa on his own terms, as though Borgia might yet be persuaded to let his eldest son have the life he longed for. That would not happen, of course. I knew it, and perhaps in some way so did Cesare. But just then he was still hopeful enough to try.
As I have said, Rome was safer in the early days of Borgia’s reign than it had been for some time. Even so, I would not have ventured out alone after dark if I could possibly avoid it. Cesare had no such hesitation nor did he seem to see the need for any sort of escort. He suffered himself to wait only until I had myself more or less in order, then we were off.
For the sake of his dignity, Cesare ordinarily would not have risked being seen traversing any part of the city on foot. He kept a stable of splendid horses, all lavishly cared for, and never looked more at ease than when he was mounted. But the present circumstances required discretion, hence his willingness to forgo the usual trappings of his rank.
The night air stirred heavily under the weight of a late season sirocco blowing out of the distant desert far across the sea. It brought with it the usual oppressive mugginess that clogs the head while still managing to sting the skin with a thousand tiny pinpricks. Some say that the incessant wind also brings madness borne on the breath of foreign devils but I am skeptical of that.
It being that hour when the last sot has sought his bed and the first peddler has yet to leave his, nothing moved in the streets save the ubiquitous rats, scurrying here and there. I imagine them as the descendants of their kind who saw Augustus and Constantine, who watched civilization rise and fall, and who now see it rise anew for however long the Almighty allows us before we are struck down again. Truly, Fortuna betrays us all in the end.
It was well past midnight when we climbed the steps to the Vatican Palace. A drowsing guard leaned against the entrance with his halberd all but slipping from his grip. He straightened up abruptly when Cesare kicked him in the shanks.
The guard’s expression of righteous outrage turned to horror when he recognized the Pope’s son. Shocked to attention, he muttered, “Sorry, sir, very sorry, didn’t realize it was you.”
With one hand on my elbow, Cesare brushed past the guard and up the wide marble stairs to the papal offices. Even at that hour, several hapless secretaries were loitering, half asleep on their stools, in case Il Papa should require them as the insomniac Pope was known to do even in the depths of night.
Cesare roused one with another well-placed kick. “Where is my father?”
He was not, as we had expected, with La Bella. To the contrary, he was in his office and he was not alone.
The moment I saw the dark head in the seat opposite his desk, my instinct was to leave. I had met Borgia’s second son only a handful of times and had no particular opinion of him save that he lacked his elder brother’s wit. But he and Cesare together in the same room was never a good idea and especially not when matters were already so fraught.
Cesare, however, seemed of a different opinion. He strode into the room with a broad smile and exclaimed, “What an unexpected pleasure! Brother, you are well, I hope?”
The Borgia charm seemed on full display but the appearance was deceptive. Whereas his father was genuinely outgoing, boisterous, and high-spirited, Cesare’s nature took a much more secretive and inward-looking turn. He was inclined to suspicion and the nurturing of grudges, although he did his best to conceal both inclinations. Over the years, he had mastered the trick of reflecting back upon his father what Borgia most wanted him to be—a young version of himself, ultimately his means of cheating death and assuring his own immortality.
But the cost of maintaining this simulacrum was high. I was one of the very few who knew that Cesare was prone to episodes of lethargy and despair during which he lacked even the energy to rise from his bed.
Juan, lately made Duke of Gandia, stood. His tone was cool, if superficially cordial, but he did not have either the good sense or the will to fully conceal his enmity. It shone too clearly in his eyes, all the more so when he glanced at me, only to avert his
gaze quickly.
“Well enough, brother. We were just speaking of you.”
I stepped back a pace, unwillingly fascinated to see these sons of Borgia together. They both had their father’s height although Cesare had the better form, even allowing that I was prejudiced in his favor. Chance had graced them equally with the looks of their mother, who it was said had dallied with the young Giulio della Rovere in the days before he became a prince of the church. Their affair supposedly ended when Vannozza came to Borgia’s notice, though some still say that the rivalry between the two men had its origins in her bed.
That lively lady’s sons stood, backs erect, shoulders squared, hands reaching for but not quite touching the hilts of their swords. Had they ever been friends? Perhaps as very young boys; there was little more than a year between them, they naturally would have been drawn to the same games and pastimes. But not for most of their lives, pawns as they were in their father’s great game.
Unhappy, rebellious pawns, I saw, and not just Cesare, for the same tension shimmered in Juan. Having come second since the day of his birth and now tasting what it meant to be first, if only in his rival’s eyes, he would be reluctant to yield the smallest part in the struggle that seemed inevitable between them. Almost I could believe the rumor then circulating in the city that Juan had gone so far as to threaten his brother’s life should Cesare lay claim to any of the honors and benefices that Juan regarded as his right.
Borgia did not appear to see that or, perhaps more correctly, he did not care. They were his sons; they would obey him. To remind them, his voice snapped as a whip cutting through the fragrant night air wafting off the terraces lined with orange and lemon trees.
“Sit down, both of you.” When they had obeyed, however reluctantly, he turned his attention to me. “And you, Francesca, don’t be shy, join us.” As I took the chair he indicated, he demanded, “Have you come as surety for my wayward son’s behavior?”
Before I could reply, Cesare said, “She has come to answer the questions you will have when I tell you what I have discovered.”
