“What do you know of Niccolo Machiavelli?” Valentino said.
Nicholas glanced over his shoulder to see if the prince was talking to him; he found them both staring at him. He went to the hearth and knelt to light the fire laid there.
“A very interesting man, the creature of Soderini, the Gonfalonier. He’s been in the chancery for years.” The fire caught on a twig in the hearth. He laid it in among other twigs and puffed on them to spread the fire over them.
“Have you ever met him?” Valentino said.
“No, never. But I’ve read thousands of his letters.” Nicholas sat back on his heels and put more wood on the fire.
“He has a lot of opinions. Ideas about history and the abstracts of statecraft.”
“Yes,” Nicholas said.
“What do you think of him?”
The Pope came in, ringed by little pages who brought his cushion, his cup, a shawl. They bustled about getting him settled in the biggest chair in the room. Nicholas looked above the pages’ heads at Valentino.
“Actually, I understand he’s rather gullible.”
Valentino laughed, and the Pope looked up, his face sharp with curiosity. “Who is gullible? This room is clammy as a well. Messer Dawson, I pray you, do not block the heat of the fire.”
Nicholas moved away from the fire so that the Pope could enjoy its warmth. Valentino walked up to the hearth.
“We were discussing a certain Florentine diplomat I have been wooing like a bachelor. I went to see Lucrezia, whose love I am to bear you.”
They talked about Lucrezia a moment. Nicholas watched the fire, which he would have to feed to keep alive.
“So,” the Pope said. “You find time in the middle of plots and counterplots to visit your sister. That makes me very happy. What exactly is your situation in the Romagna?”
“I have been in touch privately with each one of the men who signed the contract against me at La Magione,” Valentino said. “I have assured each one that I will make peace. Vitelli and the Orsini are attacking Urbino for me, to retake the fortresses that rebelled against me.”
The Pope grunted. “God’s holy love, the treacherous bastards that they are. And when you make peace with them, what then?”
Valentino laughed again, and shot a look across the room at Miguelito. “Then I am going to kill them, every one.”
“The Orsini among them? You cannot kill two of that blackhearted tribe without drawing the rest of the scum down on you.” The Pope leaned forward, his dark eyes glittering. “Take them all. Now is the time to ruin the Orsini, once and for all.”
Valentino turned, swinging his head to face Nicholas. “What do you think?”
Nicholas coughed a little into his hand. “His Holiness is infallible, of course. By that same reasoning, it would be disastrous to attack the Orsini and fail.”
The Pope reached out and clutched Valentino’s arm. Valentino was standing, and the Pope sitting, and with the shawl draped like wings across his shoulders the old man looked hellish, hunched there, gripping his son by the arm. He said, “I mean to do it! I have waited years for this revenge. Since Juan’s death I have waited to avenge him. The Orsini murdered him! I will see them all dead.”
A movement in the corner of Nicholas’s eye brought his head around; Miguelito had folded his arms across his chest and shut his eyes.
Valentino said, “Had my brother lived, I would still be a Cardinal, and Juan would be Valentino. I have no revenge to take.”
“Do not speak so!” The Pope wrenched on his son’s arm.
Nicholas glanced at Miguelito again, who was still standing in the corner with his eyes shut and his arms crossed, as if he had gone to sleep. Shrilly, the Pope ranted against the Orsini, cursing them for the murderers of his son. That young man had died nearly ten years before; Nicholas remembered very little of the murder, done at night, like so many others, and the body dumped in the river. Valentino was watching his father impassively. His whole course had turned on that death. Would he have left the pivot of his fate to chance? Nicholas wondered if the Pope did not hate the Orsini the more because he feared they might not have killed his son than because he knew they had.
“We will see what is to be done,” Valentino said at last.
The Pope seemed to have tired. He sat slumped in his chair, drawing the shawl around him, and stroking the fringe between his fingers. “Ah, well,” he said, “that is all I can expect.”
Valentino turned to Nicholas again. “I want to know what Machiavelli is saying of me to your Gonfalonier. Find out.”
“I need not. Excellency—he is advising the state to support you. It is the scandal of the chancery.”
A smile spread across Valentino’s face. “Excellent. I knew I had judged him right.”
The Pope was rising, complaining of the cold again, and with a start Nicholas saw that the fire had died down. The meeting was ending, anyway. Valentino went with his father to the door, talking to him again of Lucrezia. In the corner, Miguelito opened his eyes.
Nicholas went out behind the Pope and his son, back to the great room where now under the masses of blazing candles the whores danced in rows with rows of gilded gentlemen. The Pope’s humor brightened. He spread his hands in an exaggeration of the blessing and said an obscene rhyme in Latin. He clapped Valentino on the shoulder, and with a new life in his walk started off across the room.
Nicholas watched him go, circling the rows of courtiers who all bent down on one knee as they saw him, so that Nicholas could easily see him even on the far side of the room, at the table where Stefano was playing cards. Stefano was kneeling too, of course. The Pope took his place at the table, and the other players rose.
Stefano saw Nicholas; hastily the young man turned back to his chair, putting his back to Nicholas.
Valentino said, “Do you miss him? What an ass you are.”
Nicholas twitched, startled, and his ears and neck grew hot. Valentino was standing right behind him. He poked Nicholas hard in the side with his forefinger.
“Forget him. I removed him from your sphere because I want nothing to distract you from your service to me.”
He poked Nicholas again and strode off across the room. A moment later, nimble as any courtier, he was dancing with a whore down the middle of the figure. Nicholas’s face was still burning with embarrassment. Under lowered lids he looked from side to side, to see who might have overheard Valentino’s remarks. Dozens must have heard, dozens of other men. He sidled away to the nearest door.
In early December Nicholas found another note on his desk, this one commanding him to attend Mass at Santa Maria in Aracoeli the following morning.
He went reluctantly. The steep steps that climbed the hill to the old church were obstacle enough; and he had nothing to tell Gianpaolo except lies. All the world knew now that Valentino had made a truce with his rebel captains; surely Gianpaolo knew it, and Nicholas found it idle of him even to have arranged this meeting, idle and devilish.
Midway up the Plague Steps, he decided that he would not lie to Gianpaolo.
His legs hurt him from thigh to ankle and there were dozens of steps still to be climbed. He tried to lose himself in thoughts but his aching muscles nagged him back to the immediate moment. He paused to rest. Below him the broad piazza lay, its dusty oblong empty even of street vendors at this early hour; dawn had just broken, and darkness still obscured the broad expanse of the Barbi Palace across the way, although the sunlight picked out every brick on the face of the Aracoeli. Nicholas trudged on. He thought over this warm-heartedness toward Gianpaolo Baglione, Stefano’s cousin. He wondered if he would have been tempted to betray Valentino with any other of the rebels.
The church bell began to toll. He dragged his feet from step to step. The strokes of the bell shivered in the air above his head. He heard the chanting of the Franciscans inside the churc
h.
The vast, dim hollow of the building enveloped him. On either side a line of columns towered up to the distant ceiling. The columns did not match, having been brought here centuries ago from all over the city, some fluted and some plain, and some still bearing inscriptions from the classic age on their scrolled heads. The Plague Steps had been brought here also from somewhere else, he forgot exactly where. Plundered from an earlier Rome. The bell stopped tolling, and at the far end of the aisle between the columns the Mass began.
“Oremus.”
Behind Nicholas, footsteps sounded. Expecting this, Nicholas did not startle when a low voice murmured, “Outside.”
Gratefully he left the church. Beside the building was an arbor of grapevines, covering the walk over toward the Palace of the Senator on top of the Campidoglio hill. The grapevines, pruned to a web of twigs, let through a watery confusing light. Nicholas removed his hat and went in among the crisscrossing shadows; a man in a mask stepped forward from the shelter of the church wall.
“Well?”
Nicholas glanced behind them; the way back to the church stretched out empty into the sun. He faced Gianpaolo.
“I sent your message to Valentino, my lord. He said that you should keep faith as you would, and come to him when he summoned you.”
The black mask hissed. “Is that all?”
“No more than that.”
“You know that he has signed a truce with us? That we are all to meet at Senigallia, to talk over a new alliance?”
Nicholas inclined his head. “That is certainly apt, isn’t it? Senigallia—the camp of the Gauls.”
Gianpaolo said a round oath, one Stefano had used once. He took off his mask. “What do you mean by that?”
“You have a young cousin, named Stefano.”
Gianpaolo put his head to one side. “I understood that you had my cousin, Messer Secretary.”
“Not any more. Valentino has seen to that.” Nicholas paused a little, considering this; Gianpaolo was looking at him with distaste. He said, “The Gauls were great loppers of heads, Messer Rebel. Heads will fall at Senigallia.”
He turned and walked down the sloping path under the arbor, expecting to be called back; Gianpaolo seemed unsubtle to him. But no one called. When he reached the steps, he paused to put on his hat, and looked quickly back over his shoulder. Gianpaolo was gone.
Nicholas blew out the breath in his lungs, wishing he had not done it, and yet delighting in it. He knew he was a fool to betray Valentino, and Gianpaolo was careless with secrets: Valentino could well learn of it. Even while he realized that, stiffening at the thought of the consequences, he longed for Valentino to find out and make the vengeance perfect. He hurried down the Plague Steps. Perhaps this would exorcise Stefano from his thoughts. He strode away down the pavement of the Corso; he was already late to his desk.
In January of 1503 Cesare Borgia met with his rebellious captains at Senigallia, and there his faithful men surrounded the rebels and took them prisoners. Oliverotto da Fermi and Vitellozzo Vitelli were strangled at once; Don Miguel da Corella noosed them with a cord. The two Orsini, Paolo and the Duke of Gravina, were made prisoners until such time as the rest of their family could be dealt with. Gianpaolo Baglione did not come to Senigallia.
Everyone expected that Cardinal Orsini would flee Rome or be arrested with his kinsmen. Yet one evening in the dead of winter Bruni received a summons to dine at the Orsini Palace.
“It’s madness,” Bruni said. “The man’s gone mad.”
Nicholas lifted the invitation by the corner of the page and read it through again. He said, “I hope they do not kill the fatted calf. He’ll have to invite all Rome to have company on either elbow.”
“I certainly cannot go,” Bruni said. “Our position with the Pope is already ambiguous. I cannot risk displeasing His Holiness.”
Nicholas put the invitation down again. Alexander had brought a young man’s energy to the task of arresting the Orsini. His men were seizing every member of the family in Rome, even women and children. It was said that Alexander personally had signed the documents for each seizure and that he kept on his person a stack of warrants for the execution of every one of the Orsini, as soon as they were all collected.
Bruni said, “You must go.”
“I,” Nicholas said, astonished.
“Cardinal Orsini has always been most friendly to me. I will not reject his invitation entirely.”
“What about offending the Pope?” Nicholas said. “What about my neck, if it comes to that?”
“You know everyone in Rome,” Bruni said, with a little twitch of his hand. “Even the Borgias will forgive a visit to a friend.”
Nicholas said, “I shall be ill. Much too ill to go to an evening dinner.”
On the other side of the desk, Bruni planted his elbows firmly down and hunched his head and shoulders between his hands. He gave Nicholas a broad, kind look. He said, “I expect to write soon to the Gonfalonier. Perhaps I will mention the salary due you—a considerable sum, is it not? A few thousand crowns?”
Nicholas put his lips firmly together. Although he refused to yield out loud, he knew at once that he would go to the Cardinals supper. Bruni knew it, too; with an indulgent smile he took the invitation and folded it and put it away in a drawer of his desk.
“You may leave, Nicholas.”
Nicholas left.
The great Orsini Palace looked almost as if it were deserted. The front gate was unattended and Nicholas could not find a porter to admit him, although he shouted through the grillework into the courtyard and banged on the knocker. When he leaned on the grille to look into the corner of the yard, the gate swung open. He went in by himself across the brick yard.
There was garbage heaped in the corners of the courtyard. A scarred cat sprawled across the marble balcony above the left-hand wall of the palace. Even in the right-hand wing, usually let out as dwellings, there seemed no life stirring. Many of the windows were open to the wind, the shutters gone. He went up to the door into the Cardinal’s palace.
“Messer Dawson.”
The door cracked open enough to allow a man inside to look out and identify him. It was the porter. Nicholas said, loudly, “I am here in the name of His Excellency the ambassador from Florence.”
The door opened wide. The aged porter let him into the palace. He had been a source of news and gossip to Nicholas for years; in fact he knew the servant better than he knew Cardinal Orsini. He gave the old man his hat.
“What is happening here? Has he been taken, then?”
“Don’t say it.” The old man rubbed his nose. He led Nicholas across through the hall. The black and white marble floor was tracked with dirty footprints, all leading toward the double door on the left. The footman was leading him there too. Nicholas tried again.
“Why has he not left the city? He’s been implicated in the plot, I know that. The Pope surely—”
The old man cleared his throat in a report like a cannon, silencing Nicholas halfway through the word. He opened the double doors in a dramatic gesture.
“Messer Nicholas Dawson, of the Republic of Florence.”
Nicholas went into the great room beyond. For a moment, in the vastness of the hall, hung with figured rugs and tapestries, and painted with scenes from Roman myth, he did not notice the few living people who were there. The banquet tables, reaching the length of the room on either side, were set for guests, but the benches and chairs were empty; no one moved or talked. It was like a haunted room, or one visited by plague. Then he noticed the dozen men seated at the head of the table, and he relaxed. Suddenly the room seemed warmer.
Cardinal Orsini in his red soutane rose to greet Nicholas.
“I might have supposed that you would come. I sent five hundred invitations—you see how many answered.”
“Your Excellency, you oug
ht to be well away from Rome.”
The Cardinal laughed. His voice was mellow and soft as usual. “You are not original, Messer Dawson. Each of these who preceded you here has said very nearly the same thing. Will you sit and join us?”
Nicholas bowed and mouthed appropriate greetings to the half dozen men who sat around the table. He barely knew any of them; they were private men, of lesser rank than the bulk of the Cardinal’s friends, low enough to escape the scythe. A servant in the Orsini livery took him to his place and brought him wine.
“Where were we?” the Cardinal said. He swept up his silk skirts and took his chair again. “Yes, Raimondo, you were tempting the muse. Successfully, may I remark.”
Raimondo was a minor member of another old Roman house. He stood up in his place and began to recite in Latin. Nicholas searched the other guests with his eyes. If the worst happened, he could claim that he was here to report on this utterly strange event for the Borgias. As soon as the notion formed in his mind he was ashamed.
Under the distraction the servants brought in the meal. Nicholas hardly tasted the fish, the soup, the roast doves in a sauce of wine and mushrooms. There were few servants and the pace of the meal lagged; the man on his right was carving meat from a dove while the crisp-skinned fish, turning cold, was still on Nicholas’s plate. Raimondo had done with his bad Latin and another man rose and began to read a sonnet of Petrarca from a small leather-bound book.
Nicholas could not shake his mind free of the image of the plague supper. Every time the servants’ door creaked he expected news of a dead rat; the smell of the place was like a death house. He longed to get away into the open air.
A thick compôte of fruit and honey passed before him untouched. One by one the guests rose to recite. Soon his turn would come. He sat still in his place, panicked, wondering what he would say.
The man beside him at the table rose and mouthed an indifferent sonnet and sat down again. Nicholas found himself on his feet. He fastened his gaze on the Cardinal, at ease in the midst of his Mends, and the words of Solon came to his tongue.
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