by Sara Poole
It would have been the rankest hypocrisy—more even than I was capable of—to try to persuade her otherwise. Borgia was determined to control the lives of all his children now and forever. He intended them to at once further his goals and assure his immortality.
But first he would have to wiggle out of the morass of conflicting ambitions, rampant greed, and venal corruption in which he had enmeshed himself.
“If you continue to worry so much,” I said, “your bridegroom will think you are a poor, dour thing. He will flee all the celebrations meant to welcome him and ride hell-bent back to Pesaro as fast as his horse will go.”
A girl less confident of her own charms might have been taken aback by that. Not so Lucrezia. She merely smiled.
“No, he won’t. He will think me winsome and delightful. He will sprinkle rose petals at my feet and call me his beloved.”
We were laughing over the antics of besotted males when the servant returned bearing a fresh box of soap. She set it down on a nearby table and faded back into the wall.
Lucrezia had no actual need for the soap; it had merely been a ruse. We resumed chatting about the wedding gifts, her clothes, all innocuous matters. My eye drifted to the wooden box. I recognized it readily enough for it was the same sort I had been examining for months. The box came from Venice and bore the seal of the manufacturer on its lid. It was large enough to hold a dozen hand-shaped soaps made with olive oil and various perfumes. The soaps were a favorite of both Lucrezia and La Bella. Between them they went through an astounding quantity.
I leaned forward a little and lifted the top of the box, in the process breaking the maker’s seal. The same one that surely would have been broken had I inspected the soaps, as I inspected everything meant for any member of la famiglia, before replacing it with my own. The interior was separated into compartments, each holding a scented soap wrapped in different hues of silk to represent the various fragrances. I sniffed hibiscus, jasmine, rose, lavender, lemon, and thyme. There were two bars of each type of soap; every compartment in the box was filled.
“Is something wrong?” Lucrezia asked.
I let the lid drop back and smiled. “No, of course not, I was just admiring the soaps.”
“You’re welcome to them, if you like.”
“That is very kind of you.”
Still smiling, I turned to the attendant and asked, “Where did you get these?”
Deliberately, I kept my voice gentle and my tone light. It would not do to frighten her.
Even so, she paled and for a moment, I feared she would not be able to speak. Clearly, she knew who I was.
“Donna Lydia gave them to me,” she managed to gasp finally. “She is in charge of Madonna’s toilette.”
“Would you ask her to step in here?”
As the attendant fled to do my bidding, Lucrezia leaned her head back against the tub and looked at me silently. She said nothing, nor did I. We waited, but not for very long.
Donna Lydia bustled in. She was about my age, pretty enough, with creamy skin and well dressed in the manner of a wealthy merchant’s daughter not shy about showing off her fortune. Indeed, I marveled that she could move so gracefully, stuffed as she was into a confection of silk, velvet, and lace with a tightly boned bodice square cut above the breasts to reveal the transparent chemise beneath. All this was topped with a templette, fitted to the back of the head and coming forward at the sides, the whole edged with rosettas, the glass beads made in Murano that had become all the rage among those who could afford them.
“Do you require something, Madonna Lucrezia?” she asked, flashing a smile that revealed good teeth. She looked vaguely annoyed at being taken from her amusements but showed no concern whatsoever at my presence, thereby revealing her rank ignorance.
“Not at all, but I believe Donna Francesca does.”
“Madonna Lucrezia has very kindly offered me a gift of soap,” I said, indicating the box. “My favorite scents are hibiscus and jasmine. I would like to try both before deciding, but I don’t want to confuse the perfumes. Would you do me the kindness of trying one so that I may smell it, too?”
Admittedly, as ploys went, it was weak. Had Donna Lydia possessed a mind attuned to more than her own pleasures, she might have sensed that. As it was, she merely shrugged, helped herself to a bar of the jasmine, and with an impatient sigh, raised her long sleeves sufficiently to place her hands in a nearby copper brazier filled with cool water. The soap, being of the finest quality, lathered quickly.
I waited, counting under my breath. When I reached ten, Donna Lydia began to scream.
20
“I will have the entire family executed! No! Better yet, I will have them hung in chains in the piazza without food or water while the entire city watches them linger in agony and beg for death!”
So Borgia declared in mid-stride, halfway across his office, where he paced back and forth in a fury looking for something, anything upon which to vent his rage. He was still in the heavy formal garments in which he had come from his meeting with da Haro, their discussion interrupted when I sent word of what had occurred. Best he hear it from me rather than another, was my thinking. His broad face was fiercely red and gleaming with sweat. Nearby, his secretaries quaked, unable to leave without his permission but rightly terrified to be in his presence when he was in such a state.
I had maneuvered myself so that his desk was between us. From that position of relative safety, I said, “By all means do so if it will make you feel better. But they are guilty of nothing worse than having a daughter too stupid and careless to notice that my seal was missing from the box. If Donna Lydia had suspected for a moment that the soaps were poisoned, she would never have tried one so readily.”
“It doesn’t matter! My God, don’t you realize, my only daughter, my precious Lucrezia could have been—”
I resisted pointing out that it was precisely because I had realized what could happen that it had not and said instead, “Donna Lydia has suffered severe burns to both her hands. If that isn’t enough, she managed to touch her face and it is also affected. If I am right about the cause, her condition will continue to worsen for several days. Blisters will form and eventually break, leaving lesions behind. These will continue to be very painful as they crust over. Eventually, they will heal, but it is likely that scars will remain.”
Borgia stopped, caught his breath, and looked at me. “She isn’t going to die?”
I shook my head. “I believe the soaps were tainted with oil from one of several possible plants—oak perhaps, ivy, maybe sumac. People come into contact with these all the time and develop similar symptoms. But in this case, the oil appears to have been concentrated, probably by distillation, with the result that the effect was more severe, but in no case would it have been deadly.”
“Then what is this about?” Borgia demanded. “If the intent wasn’t to kill Lucrezia, what was it?”
I had considered that since the moment I first suspected that all was not right with the soap. There had been an outside chance that Morozzi had acquired—or worse yet created—a contact poison equal to my own but, in all modesty, I considered that unlikely. All the same, with access to Lucrezia’s household, he could have slipped in poisoned food or drink that would have been far more devastating. The thought chilled me. Despite all my efforts, neither Borgia nor anyone else could ever be fully protected while the mad priest yet lived.
“He isn’t interested in her,” I said. “This is about you. Consider, if Lucrezia died suddenly, everyone would suspect poison and simply assume that one of your enemies had killed her. You might even get some sympathy for your loss. However, if she was suddenly overtaken by a dread scourge, seen to be in the state that Donna Lydia is now, wouldn’t people be far more likely to consider that a sign of God’s punishment for some grave transgression? Forgive me, Holiness, but it would be taken as evidence of your sins.”
I did not have to spell out to what I referred; Borgia grasped my meaning fo
r himself. His face darkened yet further, turning an alarming purple, and for a moment I wondered where the nearest foxglove might be found, that being a useful remedy for heart failure, although too much of it …
I digress. To my great relief, he took control of himself, albeit with a visible effort, and spoke almost calmly.
“If he has such reach, why didn’t he just kill me instead and be done with it?”
“Because your servants, unlike Lucrezia’s, are not foolish girls easily duped.”
I left it to him to realize, as I had with the benefit of hindsight, that allowing his daughter to be served by such lack-wits was a serious mistake.
“I want them all gone,” he decreed. “Every last one of them. She is to see no one but my own servants and whoever Vittoro judges absolutely reliable. Is that clear?”
“Completely, but her greatest safety lies in finding Morozzi quickly.” Finding and dispatching him to the Hell he so richly deserved.
“Then damn well do it! The man is flesh and blood. He has to eat, drink, piss, maybe even whore if he has the coglioni for it. He is somewhere in this city—in my city—and I want him found!”
Vases rattled as this final pronouncement was made. The secretaries were white with fear and I confess that my hands, clasped at my waist and hidden within the long sleeves of my overdress, were more than a little chilled despite the heat of the day. Yet I understood Borgia’s sentiment well enough. The hunt had gone on long enough. It was time for the kill.
Borgia continued to rant but I did not hear him. Thus far, I had dealt with the situation calmly and reasonably, but now fear and anger born of what had almost happened threatened to overwhelm me. Lucrezia scarred, Borgia weakened, perhaps fatally, and my own self shamed, my reputation in tatters while my father’s murderer walked away laughing. And beyond that, Lux snuffed out, the world plunged into darkness, all hope for a world of light and reason extinguished.
Pain stabbed through my head. I closed my eyes against the sudden brightness, an explosion of light that turned the world white. A hot, urgent thrumming rose in my blood. Behind my eyelids, I saw darkness roiled by a red wave that moved before me, engulfing the room, the palace, the city, all of creation. I was drowning in it, unable to breathe. The wall was in front of me and the hole within it, admitting flashes of light that illuminated a landscape of sheerest terror and despair. Dimly, yet as close as a whisper in my ear, I heard a child whimper.
“Francesca.”
A child who was—
“Francesca!”
The crimson wave receded. I opened my eyes. Borgia was staring at me. My chest was so tight that I could not speak. I was leaning back against his desk, a stunning breach of protocol by itself, never mind anything else I had done or said. Had I spoken? Had the darkness? Had he heard it howling deep within me?
“Are you all right?” His Holiness demanded.
I managed a nod that clearly left him unconvinced.
“Get out,” he ordered, waving a hand in the direction of the secretaries. They, too, were staring at me, but scrambled to obey and fled, hardly delaying long enough to shut the doors behind them.
“Sit down,” Borgia said, and pushed me into a chair near his desk. I sat, overwhelmed with numbness, unable to move or speak. When next I was aware of anything, he was pressing a goblet of chilled wine into my hand and insisting that I drink.
I did so without tasting. My hands trembled. I grasped the goblet between them to keep from dropping it and finished the wine. Slowly, my senses returned. I was aware of Borgia’s scent close to me—sweat beneath brocade and velvet, the citrus soap he favored, and something more, some mingling of the man’s raw strength and ambition with an undernote of creeping fear.
“What did you see?” he demanded.
I bit back a sigh. His Holiness was convinced that under certain circumstances I was prone to visions. I had tried to dissuade him to no effect. Suffice to say, he did not seem to care where such visions came from—whether from God or the Devil—only what they could reveal.
“Tell me,” he insisted.
“I saw blood,” I said, as much to make him stop as anything else. “A sea of blood, drowning us all.”
He frowned. “All of us, not just my enemies?”
“Drowning the world.”
Clearly, this did not meet with His Holiness’s approval. He was silent for a moment before making his pronouncement.
“It was not a vision. You are overwrought, no doubt because of the danger you almost failed to deflect from my daughter. I forgive you for that. Now go and compose yourself. But don’t take too long. I expect you to deal with Morozzi without further delay.”
I nodded and stumbled to my feet, taking care how I set the goblet on the desk lest it fall and I shatter with it. Somehow I managed to collect myself sufficiently to walk from the room and out of the antechamber. I moved through a well of silence, acutely aware of the eyes on me from every direction. Every priest, every clerk, every hanger-on stopped and stared at me.
They might not have existed so far as I was concerned. The taste of copper lingered in my mouth. I waited until I had exited the Vatican Palace, then spit against a wall, discovering in the process that I had bitten my tongue. My blood stained the pale stone and dripped into the ground. I shuddered and moved on.
Despite Borgia’s admonitions, I was not inclined to return to my apartment at once. In the aftermath of what had happened, a strange restlessness overtook me. I felt an irresistible need to keep moving.
On the Ponte Sant’Angelo, I stopped and stared out toward the southern bend of the river. At that time of year, the Tiber is a sluggish beast writhing its way through the heart of the city. Matters are different in winter when late rains can swell the river’s banks to bursting, but just then a twig dropped from where I stood would have had a leisurely trip down the length of the river and out into the Tyrrhenian Sea less than a hundred miles away. When the wind is right, the scent of the sea overlaid with the perfume of the country it passes through fills the city. But just then hardly a breeze stirred the torpid air.
I watched as the ferrymen pulled their long, narrow boats up onto the muddy bank. During the day, vying for customers, they were as cutthroat as any competitors could hope to be. But with food and their beds beckoning, they worked together to hoist the boats up onto the road. There the ferrymen’s children waited to help their fathers carry the vessels back to their humble dwellings. In the morning, the operation would be reversed. In another city—perhaps the city of Plato’s Republican dream where all men dwell together in peaceful congeniality lacking even the need for laws, far less lawyers—in that city, the ferrymen would leave their boats safe on the riverbank and return with the dawn to find them still there. But Rome is a city of thieves or, if that seems unkind, of scavengers, many of who live in tumbledown wooden shacks huddled along the river where they find their livelihood trawling for anything they can sell. An unattended boat would be gone in the flick of an eye with not so much as a splinter to mark its passing.
But the Tiber takes even as it gives. Stand on the bridge below the looming hulk of Castel Sant’Angelo long enough and you are assured of seeing at least one body drift by. Daily, the dead inhabit the river. Whether the victims of violence or of their own hopelessness, they tend to look the same, bloated remnants of the souls who once possessed them. Very few of the bodies are those of children, and it is even rarer to find a baby, but that is because they tend to be so small that their remains lodge in the pillars beneath the city’s bridges, where they escape notice.
I leaned against the stonework, grateful for its coolness in the day’s lingering heat, and tried to forget what had happened in Borgia’s office. No doubt he was right that I was overwrought, though I hated to think of myself in such terms. I was sleeping badly, as always. The Devil’s wind that had blown through the city of late had robbed me of appetite. I longed for Cesare … ached for Rocco … worried that I would never be able to avenge my father
properly … and wondered, when I dared, why I could not simply be like other people, living a life of blessed ordinariness.
It was an affectation, of course. No one really wants to be ordinary. As much as they looked at me askance, more than a few women—and a great many men—happily would have exchanged their humdrum lives for the wealth and power that I possessed. No doubt they would laugh at me for longing after what they had.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps just a few were wise enough to appreciate the virtues of love and honor, faithfulness and humility. They might well pity me.
But I was damned if I would pity myself.
I went home. I fed Minerva. I changed out of the heavy formal clothing I wore within the Vatican into the boy’s attire that I resorted to on those occasions when I wanted to move about the city unrecognized and unhindered. I awaited word from Alfonso and when very shortly I got tired of waiting, I left and walked across the river into Trastevere.
Twilight was fast approaching when I entered the piazza in front of Santa Maria. I took up my post a little off to one side and waited. The square and the nearby streets began to empty out. I watched the shapes in the shadows, tracking their movement. Soon enough, one approached me.
“I didn’t recognize you at first,” Alfonso said. He grinned cheekily at my boy’s garb.
“Have you ever tried to chase someone while wearing a skirt?” I asked.
“Can’t say that I have. There’s been no sign of him, if that’s what you’re here to ask. He’s gone to ground.”
“No, he hasn’t. He has sent a message. We cannot wait any longer.”
Alfonso looked skeptical. “What do you want us to do?”
I told him. When I was done, he puffed up his cheeks and let his breath out in a rush. “You’re sure about this?”
“I think it is the only way.”
“Well, then … here.” He reached into a pocket and withdrew a small wooden whistle, handing it to me.
“What is this for?”