The Borgia Bride

by Jeanne Kalogridis

  And then, seeing the purity of her grief, I understood with sudden horror that she meant her child.

  The baby. Cesare must have threatened her with the only thing that could possibly make her betray her husband, for there was only one in all the world Lucrezia loved more than Alfonso.

  At the moment that I hated her most, I understood her best.

  Shrieking my brother’s name, I raised my arms and beat vainly against the heavy doors until my hands were bruised and aching, while Lucrezia softly wept.

  XXXIV

  Along, dreadful silence ensued from within the closed apartment, broken only by my cries for Alfonso, and Lucrezia’s gentle sobs.

  At last, the doors opened, and Don Micheletto emerged.

  I rose and tried to move past him, to see for my own eyes the inevitable result of my brother’s return to Rome—but soldiers barred my entry and my view.

  ‘Donna Lucrezia,’ Micheletto said, his tone smooth and dolorous, ‘an unfortunate accident has occurred. Your husband fell and reopened one of his wounds. I regret to be the bearer of such sad news, but the Duke of Bisciglie has died of a sudden haemorrhage.’

  Behind him, from Pinturicchio’s frescoes, the sibyls glared mutely down at the ghastliest of crimes.

  ‘Liar!’ I shrieked, beyond all self-control. ‘Murderer! You are as evil as your master!’

  Micheletto was also as self-possessed as Cesare; he ignored my words as if I had never said them, and instead directed his attention to Lucrezia.

  She did not respond, did not stir at the commotion surrounding her. She remained dazed, seated on the floor with her back to Micheletto, silent tears still streaming down her face.

  ‘How terrible!’ the commander murmured. ‘She is in shock.’ He reached for her arm, to assist her to her feet; I leaned forward and slapped him on the cheek.

  He drew back, startled, but was too cold-blooded to redden; he composed himself at once.

  ‘Do not touch her!’ I cried. ‘You have no right—you filth, with your hands tainted by her husband’s blood.’

  He merely shrugged, and watched calmly as I helped Lucrezia rise. She did so like a puppet, with no will of her own; hers, after all, had been stripped away by her brother and father.

  Meanwhile, soldiers led away the arrested doctors, Clemente and Galeano, as well as Alfonso’s male attendants. The ambassadors’ representatives were firmly dismissed, and when the Neapolitan at first refused to leave, a blade was held against his throat until he yielded.

  A large group of papal guards then emerged, those on the outside trying to shield from view the burden their comrades in the centre bore: my brother’s body.

  Lucrezia turned away, but I pressed forward, trying to see Alfonso for the last time; I caught only a glimpse of golden curls, speckled with blood, of an arm swinging limply down. As the men passed, I tried to follow, but a pair of soldiers stepped forward, barring my way. They forced me back, and moved into position, flanking me and Lucrezia; they had clearly been assigned to guard us.

  ‘The King of Naples shall hear of this,’ I raged. ‘There will be recompense.’ I scarcely knew what I said; I only knew that no words would ever be strong enough to avenge the crime committed here. Don Micheletto did not even try to feign concern; one of the soldiers laughed aloud.

  Donna Esmeralda and Donna Maria joined us; the guards waited until Alfonso’s body had been far removed from our sight, then prodded us to move.

  In those early moments, my mind refused to accept what had just happened. Numbed, I shed not a single tear as we were led away. Once we had left the Borgia apartments, and were in a corridor leading out of the Vatican, I spied on the floor a heart-wrenching sight: a dark blue velvet slipper, one Alfonso had worn during his month of convalescence in the Vatican; it had fallen from his body as the soldiers bore him away. I leaned down and picked it up, then clasped it to my bosom as though it were a holy relic—indeed, it was to me, for my brother had the heart of a saint.

  The guards were wise enough not to take it from me.

  Clutching Alfonso’s slipper, I staggered outside into a landscape made meaningless and unfamiliar by grief. The voices of the pilgrims crowding Saint Peter’s piazza were a harsh, incomprehensible babble, their moving bodies a vertiginous blur. The gardens, lush and verdant in the humid summer heat, seemed mocking, as did the breathtakingly lovely marble entrance to the waiting Palazzo Santa Maria. I was offended: how dared the world parade its beauty, when the worst possible event had just occurred?

  I stumbled, and several times came close to falling: I believe Donna Esmeralda caught me. I was aware only of a rotund black-clad body next to mine, and a pair of familiar, soft arms.

  The soldiers spoke: I did not understand them. I know only that at some point, I found myself sitting not in my own chambers, but in Lucrezia’s more luxurious ones. She was there, weeping, along with Donna Maria; Donna Esmeralda sat next to me, and from time to time, asked questions which I did not answer.

  Had I possessed my stiletto in those first dreadful hours, I would have slit my own throat. It mattered not to me that I would have yielded to cowardice, as my father had: nothing mattered at all. A blackness had settled over me, one far more profound than that of my father’s chamber in Messina.

  In my mind, I was a petulant eleven-year-old rebuking my father for punishing me by separating me from Alfonso. It was not fair, I had told him, for my brother to be hurt, too.

  My father had smiled cruelly—as cruelly as Cesare Borgia—and taunted me. How does it feel, Sancha? How does it feel to know you are responsible for hurting the one you love most?

  For my efforts to save Alfonso by assassinating Cesare had directly resulted in my brother’s death.

  I have killed him, I told myself bitterly. I and Cesare. If I had never allowed myself to fall in love with Cesare, had never come to reject his offer of marriage, would my brother still be alive?

  ‘You lied,’ I told the strega, whether aloud or silently, I do not know. ‘You lied…. You said if I wielded the second sword, he would be safe. I was only trying to fulfil my destiny…’

  In my imagination, the strega appeared before me—tall, proud of bearing, veiled. Like the sibyls in the glorious Borgia apartments, she remained maddeningly silent. ‘Why?’ I whispered, with the same raw fury I had shown Lucrezia. ‘Why? I was only trying to save the best and gentlest of souls…’

  At last the initial shock of the event wore off and the brutal reality of my brother’s death overtook me. Cesare and my father became intertwined in my thoughts, as the cruel, dark-haired man who had taken Alfonso away—a cruel man I had helplessly loved, and also been forced to hate.

  As a child, I had cried when my father separated me from my brother; afterwards I had sworn that I would never again let a man bring me to tears. I had not cried when my father hanged himself, when Juan violated me, when Cesare rejected me. But the grief that welled within me at the knowledge that Alfonso and I were now forever parted was too vast, too deep, too violent to be denied. Involuntary sobs racked me, shook my body; I pressed my face to my knees and wept with a force that caused physical pain. For several hours I loosed the tears held in check for most of my life, until my skirts were soaked through; even then, I continued weeping, as Esmeralda gently lifted me and wiped my face with a cool cloth, then put a towel upon my knees to absorb the dampness.

  Alfonso, only my darling Alfonso, would ever have my tears.

  Eventually I grew exhausted and spent; only then did I become aware of Lucrezia’s loud wailing. I looked on her with a mixture of pity and virulent hatred; she was like Jofre, weak. Weaker, certainly, than I had judged. In her shoes, I would have struggled to find a solution, to save both husband and child…

  But perhaps she had never really wanted to. Perhaps her helpless love for Cesare had been even greater than mine.

  Regardless of the truth, all that had given my life meaning had been taken from me. I no longer had the heart or strength to care ab
out Lucrezia’s difficulties. And when she approached me, with the most piteous tears, and tried to embrace me as she begged my forgiveness, I resolutely—but not harshly—pushed her away. I was done with the House of Borgia and its duplicity.

  It was dusk when I finally noticed that Donna Esmeralda had gone to the antechamber door, and was entreating the guards. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Donna Sancha has just lost a brother, and Donna Lucrezia a husband. Do not deny them the opportunity to view the body and attend the funeral.’

  The guards were young men, sworn to obey their masters, but not pleased by the injustice of our situation. One, especially, was manifestly distressed by our grieving.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he replied. ‘It is out of the question. We have specific orders not to allow anyone to leave these chambers. No one in the household is allowed to see the body, or witness the burial.’ And then he flushed slightly, realizing that he might have revealed more than his commander wished, and fell silent.

  ‘Please,’ Donna Esmeralda pleaded. She persisted until the guard relented.

  ‘Have them come quickly, then, to the loggia. If they stand out on the balcony, they will be able to see the procession pass by.’

  At that news, Lucrezia rose. Wearily, I did the same, and followed the soldiers to stand in the warm night air.

  Shadows, that is all I remember of it. Perhaps twenty flickering torches surrounding a coffin borne on the shoulders of a few men, and the silhouettes of two priests. I knew my brother’s body had been treated like those of other Borgia victims: washed hastily and stuffed into a wooden box.

  Alfonso deserved a grand funeral, with hundreds of mourners; his goodness had earned him the most beautiful prayers and eulogies, with parades of popes and emperors and cardinals, but he was buried in haste in the dark by men who did not know him.

  I decided then that God, if He existed, was the cruellest of them all—more treacherous than my father, than Pope Alexander, than Cesare—for He was capable of creating a man filled only with love and kindness, then cutting him down and disposing of him in the most heartless, meaningless fashion. One thing was true in life: there was no justice for the wicked or the good.

  Lucrezia and I watched as the little procession headed not for Saint Peter’s, as was my brother’s due, but for a small, obscure chapel nearby, Santa Maria delle Febbri. There, I later learned, Alfonso was unceremoniously stuffed in the ground, with only a small stone to mark the site.

  Donna Esmeralda brought me parchment and quill, and gently prompted me to write a letter to my Uncle Federico concerning Alfonso’s murder; I paid no attention to what happened to it afterwards, for I permitted myself to descend into darkness again at once. I did not sleep, eat, or drink; spent by weeping, I merely sat, too overwhelmed to do anything but sit and stare out from the balcony at the gardens.

  Lucrezia was likewise helpless. In the presence of my brother’s love, she had blossomed; when he had been wounded, she had found in herself a will and strength none of us had known she possessed. Now, all of that had died within her, and she had no heart for revenge. She did nothing day and night but weep. She could not even care for little Rodrigo. Morning dawned, and the nursemaid appeared at the door, clasping the sturdy toddler’s hand.

  ‘He has been crying, Madonna, and asking for you,’ she said to Lucrezia—but the mother lay abed, her face turned to the wall, and would not even acknowledge the boy. ‘He has not seen you or his father today, and he is worried.’

  His soft sobbing wakened me from a condition deeper and darker than slumber. I blinked, and rose…then knelt, and opened my arms, for the first time letting go of Alfonso’s slipper. ‘Rodrigo, darling…Your mother is tired this morning, and needs a bit more rest. But Tia Sancha is here, and so happy to see you.’ Some unexpected grace permitted me to smile; cheered, the boy ran to me, and I enfolded him in my arms. As I buried my face in his hair, I understood Lucrezia a bit better; at that moment, I would have sacrificed anything for that child.

  But there had to have been a way to avoid sacrificing something equally as precious: Alfonso.

  A wave of tears threatened: how like my brother he looked, with his curls and his blue eyes! But for Rodrigo’s sake, I steadied myself, and kept the smile upon my face. ‘Shall we go outside? Shall we play?’ He was fond of races—like his aunt and his mother—and he especially liked me to run against him, since I always let him win.

  The guards were kindly; they gave us leave, and one accompanied us at a distance. I led the boy out to the gardens, where we played hide and seek in the hedges; in my nephew’s blessed presence, I found a temporary respite. But when the time came for the boy to return to the nursery, I returned to the palazzo and relentless grief. I found my brother’s slipper where I had dropped it, and once again clutched it desperately to my breast.

  For two days, I remained with Lucrezia in her quarters, both of us under constant surveillance. During that time, His Holiness did not come to comfort her, nor did he bother to send his condolences. I heard no word from Jofre.

  On the second day after Alfonso’s death, Lucrezia was summoned to meet her brother Cesare at the Vatican.

  This was no casual summons, nor a simple family conference: Cesare sat at a table with his sister in a grand hall, the two of them surrounded by no fewer than a hundred of the Captain-General’s armed guards.

  That is all Lucrezia would tell me of the meeting—and that she only revealed gradually, over the course of several hours. She returned afterwards, so deeply shaken she dared not weep. But immediately on her return, she had little Rodrigo moved from the nursery permanently into her chambers. I have no doubt Cesare reiterated his threat on the child’s life, lest Lucrezia publicize the murder or make any appeals to her father that would cause Alexander to sympathize with Naples instead of Cesare’s choice, France.

  Within a day after her harrowing encounter with Cesare, Lucrezia’s tears returned. She refused her father’s summons to supper, then to audiences, where he wanted her to sit on her little cushion on the step beneath his throne, as she had in the past.

  Lucrezia would have none of it. She had cooperated to save her child, but her grief was too great, her rage too deep, to pretend that Alfonso’s murder had not happened. She lay in bed and ignored all her father’s appeals.

  Alexander soon grew angry, to the point of sending Lucrezia a missive stating that he no longer loved her.

  Lucrezia batted not an eye; her father’s disapproval no longer evoked in her desperate attempts to please. In response, she announced that she would seclude herself, along with her child, at a pastoral estate she owned in Nepi, just north of Rome.

  She spoke as though she intended to remain there forever. No one dared tell her what all of Rome knew: that the Pope and Cesare were already planning her next marriage. Seeking the alliance that would bring the best political advantage for the House of Borgia. Meanwhile, Donna Maria busied herself with packing most of Lucrezia’s belongings—with the exception of the beautiful gilded and bejewelled gowns, worn in happier times. In Nepi, there would be no ceremonies, no celebrations, only the wearing of black.

  Lucrezia desired to have me in her company at all times; I wondered why, since I could no longer show her the unrestrained warmth I had before her complicity in my brother’s death. Nor could I provide comfort: I was lost in my own grief, unable to emerge from it for anyone save my nephew. Perhaps she wanted my presence out of a yearning to be close to whatever reminded her of Alfonso; perhaps she did so out of guilt.

  Regardless of her reason, she invited me to accompany her to Nepi. I accepted only because little Rodrigo was going; Donna Esmeralda took charge of gathering the belongings I would need during my long absence from Rome.

  While armed soldiers stood outside my open antechamber doors (since Alfonso’s death, I was frankly guarded at all times, Lucrezia more subtly so), I sat in the bedchamber and supervised Esmeralda in her task. It had been more than a month since I had entered the rooms that had for so l
ong been my home. In my absence, many things had been taken: the fine draperies, the silver sconces, the fur carpets and the gilded brocade coverlet from my bed.

  Once again, I wanted little of Rome: no sumptuous gowns, only the plain black dresses I had brought with me as a new bride, which were better suited for mourning. I wanted my dog-eared copy of Petrarch, the slipper which had fallen from my dead brother’s foot, and little else.

  While Esmeralda worried with my clothing, I went to my cache of jewels, hidden carefully in a secret compartment in my armoire, thinking that perhaps I should take a few of the most valuable of them—not because I wished ever to adorn myself again, but because I was already thinking of a possible escape from Nepi, if I could convince Lucrezia to bring the boy with us to Naples. I would need bribes for the guards, and money to run the household.

  With that in mind, I surreptitiously pored over my casket of jewels, and hid the largest and most valuable of them between my breasts.

  It was then I caught sight of the innocuous-looking slender glass vial, small and green amidst the glittering gems.

  The canterella.

  My heart skipped a beat. I still lived beneath the shadow of the darkest grief, and I knew I remained with Lucrezia at present only because of His Holiness’ tolerant attitude towards his daughter. Once Cesare persuaded Alexander, I would be either imprisoned or murdered. I had no desire to live as a prisoner of the Borgias—and I would not give Cesare the pleasure of being the one to take my life. I would far prefer eternity in Hell as a suicide.

  I slid the little green glass vial beneath my bodice, into the special pocket for my now-confiscated stiletto. It fit neatly.

  God Himself arranged the timing: no sooner had I hidden the vial than I heard marching in the corridor outside my door.

  I rose, and was composed and calm when I faced Cesare’s soldiers, led by none other than the apologetic Don Micheletto.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You have come for me at last.’