Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  Honours were not even, of course; the cycle of the vendetta never ends, and I wonder if Angela really believed a word she was saying or was simply trying to protect me. As it turned out, in a roundabout way, the bad blood between Borgia and Orsini would transform my life, but not yet. Not yet.

  Angela helped me to undress then tucked me into bed. The pallet stuffed with wool and horsehair felt as soft as a featherbed to my raw stomach and spinning head. Dabbing rosewater behind her ears from a small flask on the nightstand, Angela said she was returning to the dance and bade me goodnight.

  “I’m taking the candle,” she said, and with the sudden descent of total darkness on the small room which had now become my home, I fell into a profound and dreamless sleep. I was unaware of Angela coming to bed.

  ***

  I was excused attendance on Donna Lucrezia when she rose next morning, but summoned before her after the day meal in the small salon overlooking Saint Peter’s steps where she held her private audiences. Donna Lucrezia looked as though she had slept little; hectic spots of colour highlighted her cheeks like badly applied rouge and her eyes glowed like moonlight at the bottom of a lake. Though swathed in a cape of fur, she shivered intermittently, and I feared she had caught a fever. Donna Adriana was with her, and opened our interview, jowls atremble with indignation.

  “My daughter-in-law, Donna Giulia, was disappointed that you could not be presented to her last evening.”

  I bowed my head for fear the ladies would see me blushing.

  “As was His Beatitude, my father,” added Donna Lucrezia in a tone that might splinter glass, “who surprised and honoured us with his presence.”

  “Have you nothing to say, girl?”

  “I am truly sorry. I am unused to wine, and such rich food, and the emotions of the day…It will not happen again,” I finished lamely.

  A silence ensued. The cries of hawkers vending pasties and medallions of the saints on the basilica steps came to us, muffled by the glass in the windows. Donna Lucrezia glanced out, her carefully plucked brows drawn together briefly in a frown. I remembered that the Duke of Bisceglie, the father of little Rodrigo, had received the wounds which ultimately killed him on those steps, and wondered why, if she had loved her second husband as much as the avvisi said she did, she had chosen this room for her own.

  I was surprised in this train of thought by Donna Lucrezia’s distinctive laugh. “You met my dear brother, Cesar, though,” she said, using the Catalan form of his name even though she spoke to me in Italian. I wondered if perhaps it would be better for me to leap from the window and meet my own fate on Saint Peter’s steps. If, perhaps, the duke was this very moment, hidden behind a tapestry covering a secret doorway, drawing a dagger from his belt with which to finish me.

  “I was inclined to be severe with you, but both he and Cardinal Ippolito interceded for you, so I shall be merciful. I had intended that you should have three new gowns for my wedding celebrations, but now it must be two, to offset the cost of replacing the rug you ruined. Still, I dare say, with the camorra I gave you for your baptism, and the white velvet cloak, you will manage not to disgrace me.”

  “But…”

  Donna Adriana’s eyebrows arched alarmingly. “I told you you should have interviewed this girl more closely,” she said to Donna Lucrezia in a stage whisper. “Now she is answering back.”

  “My decision does not please you?” Donna Lucrezia asked.

  “No, madonna, I mean…you are very generous. I thought you would send me back to my father.”

  “And that is what you wanted.” It was not a question, but a statement, delivered in a low, compassionate tone. “Oh, my dear.” Donna Adriana placed a warning hand on her niece’s arm, but Donna Lucrezia continued regardless. “We have to learn to want what our fathers want.”

  ***

  The next few weeks sped by in a whirl of dress fittings and beauty treatments, petty, exquisite agonies of pins and hair plucking. Nor did Donna Lucrezia, conscious, no doubt, of the eyes of Duke Ercole’s envoys upon her, neglect her duties as godmother to me. She had been appointed regent at the Vatican, while the pope and Duke Valentino made a tour of inspection of the fortifications at Nepi and Civita Castellana, but nevertheless found time to accompany me to Mass every morning and to direct me in the correct ways to genuflect or cross myself or take the dry wafer these cannibals called the body of Christ, in my mouth. She supervised my needlework and singing, and graciously relented over the third gown when particularly pleased by my composition of a Petrarchan sonnet. Serene, smiling, and capable, she appeared to entertain no doubts that she would be happy with the homely man whose miniature she carried everywhere, suspended from her girdle by a gold chain.

  Only on our weekly visits to the bathhouse did she relax and admit a little good natured teasing about Don Alfonso’s broken nose and unfashionably short hair. Of the more serious rumours about him, that he had been driven mad by the French disease and was prone to violent depressions during which he raged around the streets of Ferrara as naked as the day he was born, or that he kept a string of mistresses, she would hear no mention.

  “I know all I need to about the French disease,” she once snapped at Angela, when the rest of us put her up to mention it. “You of all people should know better.”

  “Forgive me, madonna,” whispered Angela, and I felt for a moment as though I had thrown my friend to a pack of stag hounds.

  We would troop across the garden to the bathhouse in nothing but our Neapolitan wraps, loose, diaphanous garments made fashionable by the Princess Sancia. Every time I put mine on I felt more naked than if I had been wearing nothing at all, and I could see the look of disapproval on Mariam’s face as clearly as though she were watching me from behind the fig tree which shaded the garden door and dropped sticky fruit in splashes of pink on the path. Sometimes I had a fleeting sense of other eyes upon us, of looks that made me blush and feel cold all at once, and tied knots in my stomach.

  The bathhouse was fashionably disguised to look like a ruined temple, with broken marble columns and statues of plump Venuses whose noses had been deliberately knocked off, but inside it was absolutely modern. A hypocaust running under the floor kept the water warm in the deep marble tub where we lounged on steps covered by towels. Catherinella and another black slave kept a second, smaller chamber filled with fragrant steam by pouring buckets of water onto a bed of hot charcoal mixed with sandalwood and lavender. Screened from the palace by a trellis of hibiscus, emboldened by the veil of steam, we giggled and gossiped and exchanged confidences.

  In this perfumed confessional one might admit that her belly was too prominent or her breasts too flat, while others debated the difficulty of persuading a lover to use his tongue where he would prefer to insert another part. I used to sit close to Angela, who would whisper explanations.

  “You can’t get pregnant from a man’s tongue, nor can it pierce the hymen. And besides, it gives much greater pleasure.”

  This was not, perhaps, the carnal education my mother would have planned for me, but my mother was long dead and I had grown up in a household of men with only the taciturn Mariam for female companionship, and the uninformed speculations of the girls at Santa Clara. It shames me now to say I felt no shame then, only a hungry curiosity that seemed to lodge as much in my growing breasts and the untouchable place between my legs as in my mind. This was something my new, dear friend seemed to understand, as she drew me through the steam to her own voluptuous, golden-skinned body, stroking my arm or my thigh.

  A small mirror hung on the wall of our chamber, an oblong in a plain silver frame just large enough to show us our faces. Angela would command me to take this down from time to time and hold it at the right height for her to trim her private hair with a nail parer. There she would stand, brazen in her nakedness, her skin glowing in the light of a brazier now the weather was growing colder, telling me to move the mirror a little to the right, or up a bit, or could I prop it up on the commode an
d hold the candle higher so she could see better. For a time, I performed this duty without query, too proud to admit that, to me, it seemed strange and indecent. If Donna Lucrezia’s cousin thought nothing of it, then this was obviously what ladies of fashion did and I would not humiliate myself by revealing my ignorance.

  Then, one evening when she had plucked out a stray hair with her tweezers and drawn blood from her groin, and we were already late to help Donna Lucrezia dress for a reception in the Vatican, I asked, “Why do you do this?”

  “For my sins?” she retorted with a quick laugh, then became almost serious, except for the telltale dimples in her cheeks, impressions left by her smile the way a head leaves its indent in a pillow. “Ippolito likes it.”

  “Ippolito? Cardinal Ippolito? You mean you’re...?” She had spent some nights away from her own bed recently, but had told me she was attending Donna Lucrezia, who was unwell. Donna Lucrezia was often unwell, so I had thought nothing of it.

  “You did me a favour, getting sick like that.”

  “And you let him..? I mean, you’re not married.”

  “He is very skilled.” She ran her hands over her unfashionably full breasts, down her flanks, and over the rise of her belly. “Very skilled,” she repeated. “And once his pious father dies, which can’t be long—he’s as old as Methuselah—cousin Lucrezia can find me a compliant husband, just like those men her mother has been married to. Most men are content to be cuckolded for a decent price. I swear old Della Croce used to count it an honour to have his wife poked by Uncle Rodrigo.”

  I marvelled. From the moment Angela’s eyes met those of the cardinal over my prostrate form, it seemed, she had begun planning a future for herself.

  “Don’t say anything,” said Angela. “Not before we get our feet under the table in Ferrara.”

  “I won’t. But Angela?”

  “What?”

  “Think of Monna Vannozza.”

  “I am. Four children with Uncle Rodrigo and she still enjoys his protection, even though she’s old and ugly now. She’s set up for life.”

  “But Lucrezia loathes her, Juan’s dead, and Jofre…”

  “Cesare adores her. That has to count for something.”

  I wondered what that something might be, though felt it safer to say nothing, even to Angela. Though she was my friend, she was Cesare’s blood.

  “Oh, don’t look so po-faced,” Angela went on. “If you purse your lips that way you’ll get wrinkles. You don’t want to end up with a mouth like a dog’s bum like cousin Geronima.”

  The image banished my pain and sent me into fits of giggles. Angela started to laugh too, bent double so the little pearl of blood at the edge of her garden smeared her belly.

  “Let me clean that,” I gasped, trying to recover myself, “or would your lover like you better for torturing yourself to please him?” I sat up, spat on my kerchief, and leaned towards Angela, but before I could attend to her wound, she gathered me up in her arms and kissed me full on the mouth, the tip of her tongue flickering over my lips.

  “You need a lover of your own,” she told me, stepping back, putting her finger to my closed mouth.

  “I shall be lucky even to get a husband if we don’t make haste to wait on madonna,” I said, hoping she would not detect the tremor in my voice.

  “Come on, then, help me dress,” and she began to whirl about the small room, picking up shift and hose in time to wild dance steps, her small, brown feet stamping down the rug beside the bed and the sprigs of dried rosemary which had fallen from among our bedding. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. I would have died for her then.

  CHAPTER 3

  ROME, OCTOBER 1501

  I can feel your body as truly as if we were still dancing for Papa, when your waist was tiny and my bones did not ache as they do today in the mountain wind. Listen to me. I sound like an old man getting sentimental over his first sweetheart—which you were, of course, and are.

  We lay side by side on Angela’s bed, pressed together for warmth. It was the end of October and, while sunlight rarely found its way into our room, which faced on to an inner courtyard at the old heart of the palace, the autumn winds off the marshes surrounding the city seemed to poke their fingers everywhere. Angela lay on her back, her face smeared with a foul smelling paste of pigeons’ blood and fresh cheese ground with peach stones and pebbles steeped in milk which she swore kept her skin fair. I lay with my head beside her feet and my own feet propped on her pillows in an attempt to reduce the swelling in my ankles brought on by too much dancing in unsuitable shoes the night before.

  As the date of our departure drew closer, the celebrations for Donna Lucrezia’s marriage grew more hectic. Every day there were spectacles in the city’s squares, races, tableaux, performances by troupes of clowns and actors, and poets declaiming the virtues of Donna Lucrezia and Don Alfonso and their houses. Remorseless cannonades from the Castel Sant’Angelo shook the air. The Holy Father, who loved to sail, could not be deterred from a river excursion to Ostia, despite warnings from his astrologer and Duke Valentino’s plain observation that it was pouring with rain and looked set to do so all day. Of the musicians who accompanied us, two singers caught chills and had to be replaced and a mandolin player slipped on the wet deck of the papal barge, fell overboard, and drowned. Baby Rodrigo was sick and madonna was beside herself in case he had caught a chill too.

  Every evening, after long and elaborate dinners punctuated by theatrical or musical interludes, his indefatigable Beatitude would command the ladies to dance, so dance we did, until our feet were bleeding and the musicians’ heads nodded over their instruments. Then he would order us all outside to watch firework displays from the Belvedere or the ramparts of Sant’Angelo before, with chattering teeth and blinded eyes, we were permitted to retire. I was thankful the pope’s eye never alighted upon me with anything more than his customary, general benevolence. How any of Donna Lucrezia’s ladies found the energy to resist, then graciously submit, to his advances, I cannot imagine. Perhaps it came from contemplating how well the Farnese family had done out of Giulia, or even Donna Lucrezia herself, the bastard daughter of a Spanish upstart and an innkeeper, about to marry into the House of Este.

  Tonight, Duke Valentino was to throw a party for his sister in his private apartments. At least, Angela had remarked when the summons came, we were more likely to get a good meal. The duke, unlike his father, was famous for his appreciation of good food and wine. And we were honoured to have been asked; not all Donna Lucrezia’s ladies were to attend, as this would be an intimate function with only about fifty guests.

  “How you can think of food with the stench of that paste in your nostrils I don’t know.” It was doubly offensive to me, the mixture of blood and cheese; my senses were proving slow students of Christianity.

  “Don’t be so serious, Donata. And don’t make me talk any more; it’s all cracking round my mouth.” We lay for a while in silence, nothing but the soft hiss of tallow from our candles and, once, a crash followed by raised voices from across the courtyard in the direction of the palace kitchens. Then Angela suddenly said, “Donata. It’s such a pompous name, so...pious. You need a nickname.”

  “And Angela isn’t? Pious, I mean.”

  “Not at all. Angels simply are; gifts must be given and received and thanks made and all that. It’s too complicated. Besides, Lucifer was an angel. Angels have some side to them.”

  “So what are you going to call me? Lucifer?”

  “I don’t know. It will come to me. Now, help me wash this off. We had better not be late for cousin Cesare. I’m dying to see what La Fiammetta is wearing.”

  I tried to focus my mind on the notorious Fiammetta, the flame-haired Florentine courtesan who was the duke’s current mistress, as I helped Angela wipe the beauty treatment from her face. Yet I found myself wondering what our rabbi would think if he could see me now, irredeemably unclean of body and mind. Then realised I didn’t care; outcast I
might be, but with Angela’s newly clean skin beneath my fingers, I felt a sense of belonging I believed I had left behind in Toledo.

  ***

  I should have known; I should have realised what the duke must think of me, that his invitation was not a compliment, nor even an insult. He had simply selected those he thought suitable to participate in the entertainment he had in mind, and of course, given the circumstances of our first encounter, he would think me suitable.

  Insofar as he lived anywhere, the duke lived, not in his palace of San Clemente in the old Borgo which, for as long as I knew it, was in a continuous state of reconstruction, but in a suite of rooms directly above his father’s in the Vatican. These rooms had once belonged to Prince Djem and, despite the Holy Father’s ironic gift to Elisabetta Senese, retained much of the oriental opulence with which the prince of the Turks had surrounded himself. We dined at low tables, reclining on cushions like the ancients. Candles scented with vanilla and sandalwood sparkled in ornate brass stands, and the drowsy, sensual air was trapped by heavy curtains in some dark velvet.

  Men and women dined together, young gentlemen of the duke’s household, some of whom I recognised, a handful of the younger cardinals, solid blocks of scarlet among the shifting, shimmering silks and brocades of the ladies, a great many of whom, though they seemed perfectly at home here, I had never seen before. Donna Lucrezia lounged beside her father who, in consideration of his age and exalted status, sat in an ornately carved chair with one foot resting on a cushion and the other, in which he had the gout, propped on the shoulder of a small black boy who knelt before him.

  But the duke himself was nowhere to be seen. All through dinner he failed to appear until, just as the servants were clearing the fruit course and the musicians were shuffling the music on their stands to find the dances, the great double doors to the room swung open and he entered, preceded by two men in his red and gold livery, a tall, red-haired woman on his arm whom I took to be La Fiammetta. Beside her, the duke, clad as always in plain black and wearing very little jewellery, seemed almost to disappear among the shadows beyond the light of the scented candles. She was magnificent, with creamy skin and an erect bearing that made me think of the classical marble statues decorating the new facades of the great palaces such as our own Santa Maria. Except for the depth of her décolleté and the boldness of her makeup, you might easily mistake her for a great lady rather than a courtesan. She was, apparently, a skilled musician and could recite most of Ovid from memory, though some said that was because she put so many of the recommendations of the Ars Amatoria into practice with her lovers.