by Sarah Bower
“Ah,” she said as enlightenment dawned. “I suppose it had to happen.” She laughed. “I think it’s more likely cousin Cesare had to lock himself in a tower to protect himself from the voracious virgins than the other way around.”
“Oh. I suppose so.”
In the dark, I heard her sigh, then a rustling of bed-clothes and the click and rasp of flints striking. I looked across at her, acutely aware in the sudden flare of candlelight of my swollen eyelids and red nose.
“Come here,” said Angela, holding out her hand. I climbed into bed beside her and sat hugging my knees. Angela put an arm around my shoulders. “Don’t do this to yourself. He isn’t worth it.”
She lied.
Earlier that day, Cesare had given a display of bullfighting in Saint Peter’s Square, and we had watched from the loggia above the front door of Santa Maria. A cold, needling rain was driven against our faces by a wind from the river, but the weather had failed to deter the crowds who jostled the barricades set up around the square and warmed themselves with little hot pasties stamped with the arms of Este and Borgia. The vendors were specially licensed by His Holiness, in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. The Romans tend to see little difference between a Spaniard and a Jew, and they may be right. And though they are quick to blame either for all their misfortunes, two Spanish customs they cannot resist are bullfights and gambling with cards.
The square was pitted and churned by the wheeling of bulls and horses. Flags and banners snapped in the wind, compounding the fury of the bulls already roused to foaming, snorting rage by the work of picadors and banderilleros. Cesare dispatched each bull alone, on foot, using only a light sword. He relied solely on his own quickness and accuracy to triumph over the power and cunning of the animals. He danced with the bulls, twisting, sidestepping; he flirted, luring them on to the point of his sword whose fine blade he sunk deep into the place between the shoulder blades where the straight path to the heart begins.
He killed four bulls that way, with grace, precision, and perfect ruthlessness, and when he had made his final kill, he cut off the ear of the bull and presented it to his sister. A dwarf brought it, a black velvet purse of gristle on a small gold salver, up to our balcony, while Cesare stood below and bowed to madonna, his hair, bound with black ribbon into a thick braid, falling over one shoulder. He was naked to the waist, his skin glistening with sweat and rain, patterned with mud and blood as though he were one of the painted savages of the New World.
All the women leaned towards him like flowers turning their heads to the sun, including Angela, even cousin Geronima, whose corset of boiled leather creaked slightly like a new saddle, even Catherinella, her black, tattooed face shining, and the plump, sensible woman who had charge of the two little boys, Rodrigo and Giovanni, the Infant of Rome, who pressed his tearful face even more firmly into her bosom as she shifted her position.
Though I do not think anyone other than me went on looking once Donna Lucrezia had acknowledged the gift of the ear and he had turned away. I do not think anyone else noticed the way he squared his shoulders, bringing the shoulder blades up and together as though he longed to have wings, to be able to take off and be somewhere else.
“He is. I love him; I’m sure I do.”
She gave a snort of laughter. “No you don’t. You’ve had one dance with him, that’s all.”
“And how long had you known Ippolito when..?”
“That’s not love, you silly goose; that’s scratching an itch.”
“Well I have more than an itch; I have a terrible pain.”
“Tell me, where does it hurt?” She touched my breast. “Here?” I clutched at the neck of my nightgown; my body was Cesare’s and his alone. But Angela pushed me back against the pillows, her palm flat against my breastbone, then slid her hand down my body, pausing at the base of my belly, the warmth without meeting the warmth within. “Here?” she whispered, moving her hand lower, prospecting with her knowing fingers. I tried to press my legs together, but instead they parted. She lifted my nightgown and stroked me, my belly and thighs, the folds and pleats of my private flesh, exclaiming in a low voice at the darkness of the hair.
“There you are a Jew,” she said.
Then her fingers found a place which felt like the seat of my pain, for as she stroked it hurt so exquisitely I was forced to arch my back and would have cried out had Angela not silenced me with her tongue in my mouth. Yet hurt is not the right word for it because it would have hurt more if she had stopped what she was doing, until the point came where I felt as if not only my clothes but my skin had been peeled from my body leaving my nerve ends singing in the air warmed by Angela’s breath, fragrant with her sweat and her favourite tuberose perfume. I wanted to beg her to stop, but only animal noises came out of my mouth. She seemed to understand, though, because she straightened my nightgown and lay quietly beside me, her big, dark, Borgia eyes gazing into mine, her hair with the red lights in it entangled with mine on the pillow.
“Now what do you feel?” she asked softly.
“Free,” I said, without knowing that was what I was going to say.
“You see?”
But the second I had said the word, it had escaped me, and the space it left filled with embarrassment, guilt, and a yearning for Cesare which felt like a hunger for whatever had happened to happen again, or maybe for marzipan. I was so tired I could no longer distinguish between my senses.
“Go to sleep, little goose,” murmured Angela, kissing my forehead, “the world is such a big, bad place.”
I remembered, as I sank into sleep, that today was the 10th of Tevet, when Jews fast in memory of the siege of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar. A day of solemn repentance, marking the beginning of our wanderings, which will not cease until God thinks we have suffered enough to assuage His disappointment. How glad I was to have gone to bed on a full belly, I thought, burrowing into the bedclothes which smelled, oddly, of salt and iron and onions, and reminded me of the night of the chestnut feast.
CHAPTER 4
ROME, DECEMBER 1501
I could have used her any way I chose, she was so passive, though I did not. There would have been no joy in it.
One morning shortly after Christmas, as I was helping Donna Lucrezia to dress for a ride out to Tivoli, a messenger came to the door with a note for me. Santa Maria in Portico is a huge palace, its miles of passages leading to hundreds of rooms so convoluted I doubt even Donna Adriana, who had lived there most of her life, could have known them all. The only people who did were the messengers, old men mostly, or those who had been maimed in battle, or were too ugly to attend on us in our salons or dining halls. From their headquarters in a room behind the main kitchen, whose walls were lined with partitioned shelves to serve their arcane system of sorting mail, they carried notes to all quarters of the palace and beyond. Invitations to tryst or summonses to appear before the steward to explain a broken glass or a chip in the fresco of Cupid and Psyche in the Hall of Lovers, small gifts of thanks or appreciation, promissory notes for losses at cards, mislaid gloves or call outs to duels, all flowed around Santa Maria in the messengers’ battered leather pouches, and out into the city, or down the river to Ostia, or out of Rome’s great gates to Naples or Romagna, our lifeblood and the web anchoring us to our place in the world.
So a note in itself was nothing remarkable. What set madonna’s ladies abuzz, as madonna’s riding boots were buttoned and her hair coiled into a net of dark blue velvet, was the unprecedented fact that the note was for me.
“Well, well,” said madonna, snatching the note from the messenger before he could hand it to me, “our little Donata has a beau after all. You are a dark horse, Donata, and treacherous, keeping secrets from your godmother.”
“I assure you, madonna, it is as much a mystery to me as to your grace.”
“Maybe it’s one of the Ferrarese who has been admiring you from a distance and thinks this morning might be his lucky chance,” said Elisabetta Senese,
she who had once mistaken the Holy Father for a cushion.
“No,” said Donna Lucrezia, in a tone calculated to shatter crystal, “there is no mystery after all. This is the duke’s hand.”
The other women fell silent. I stretched out my hand for the note. It was as though I were the only person moving, breathing even, as though the palace had fallen under the enchantment of the sleeping beauty of Perceforest, and I had somehow, miraculously, escaped. Even Donna Lucrezia did not move, but held the note, on creamy vellum, between her thumb and forefinger, just out of my reach.
“May I see it, please, madonna?” Oh, how emboldened we can be by passion. Donna Lucrezia blinked several times, the way my father would if roused too suddenly from his afternoon nap.
“Of course,” she said, in a faint voice. “It is yours.”
The vellum felt crisp and smooth to my touch. I unfolded it, running my thumb over Cesare’s arms embossed at the head of the page. The cunning bull of the Borgias, the keys of Saint Peter, the lilies of France. My thumb paused over the lilies, the emblem of his French wife. Did he care for her? Did he miss her? Had he tried everything in his power to prise her from the clutches of King Louis?
“Well? What does he say?”
“He…asks if his jockey may wear my colours at the races tomorrow, madonna. And if I will watch them with him.” I blushed fierce enough to warm the room without a fire.
“Well we shall all be watching. The finishing post is here, in the square.”
“Yes, madonna.”
“That is settled, then. You will reply accordingly.”
“Yes, madonna.” Though nothing seemed to me to be settled at all. I glanced at Angela, who was brushing madonna’s short cape. She shrugged. I picked up a tray of gloves and held them for madonna to select those she wished to wear.
***
“You made me no reply.” He was waiting in the stable yard as we returned from our excursion towards midday, muffled against the cold in a cloak lined with sable drawn up over his mouth and his black velvet cap pulled well down over his forehead, though this, I suspected, had more to do with concealing a cut he had acquired during the bullfight than warding off the weather. It was mild for the time of year now the sun had reached its zenith. He held my horse while I dismounted, careful to avoid stepping on Tiresias who was, as usual, milling about his master’s feet.
“Madonna says we shall be watching the races anyway, as they are to finish at the obelisk. I was to write to you, but there was no time.”
Cesare glanced across to where his sister stood chatting with Don Ferrante and, almost as if he had called her name, she cut short what she was saying and looked back at him.
“And does madonna say if my jockey may carry your colours?” he asked, his eyes still locked to Donna Lucrezia’s.
“She did not say, my lord.”
“Then give me something now, before she does. This will do.” I had been riding with a veil pinned to my cap, to protect my face from the darkening effects of sun and wind. Deftly, he unpinned it and tucked the pale gauze into his sleeve. “And this.” He brushed my lips with his own, so quick and light I wondered if I had imagined it. Except that my imagination, tutored by Angela, would have imagined nothing so chaste.
Then Don Ferrante said hot wine and cakes awaited us in his apartments, so off we trooped behind Donna Lucrezia to make the necessary adjustments to our costumes for this next stage of the day.
Angela told me later that Don Ferrante had paid me special attention, even refilling my cup personally rather than letting one of his slaves perform the duty. I had not noticed. It astonished me to realise I had drunk anything, for fear the wine would wash away the impression of Cesare’s kiss. I should be courteous to Don Ferrante; he was unmarried and second in line after Don Alfonso to one of the oldest and most powerful duchies in Italy. But I was dancing on the starting line of my life, the way Cesare’s horse would dance in the Campo di Fiori tomorrow.
“You are tottering on the brink of an abyss,” retorted Angela, “and I am going to see Ippolito, and tell him his brother has taken a fancy to my best friend. Ippolito has Donna Lucrezia’s ear.”
Donna Lucrezia. I remembered her icy response to Cesare’s note, her cool, grey gaze on us as he kissed me. “No!” I shouted at Angela as she dabbed carmine paste on her lips. “She will seize any opportunity to keep me away from Cesare. Please, Angela, say nothing.” Our eyes met in the mirror.
“I am trying to help you, Donata. We are friends, more than friends. But I will not go down with you. I can be no use to you that way.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You will, I fear. Now, how do I look?” She straightened up and turned to face me. She had loosened the ribbons at the neck of her chemise to reveal the beginnings of her breasts and had let down her hair. Her lips were as scarlet as the cardinal’s robes.
“You will please your lover,” I said.
She smiled and made to leave, but paused with her hand on the door catch. “I hope you will please yours,” she said. “Believe me, I hope it more than anything else in the world. I would pray for it if it were a fitting matter for prayer. I will say nothing to Ippolito, for now.”
***
The morning of the races dawned fair. As I unfastened our shutters, and inhaled the steam of the kitchens which this morning smelled of chicken broth and reminded me of home, Angela groaned and turned her back on even this pale light, muted by the high walls surrounding the inner courtyard. Once again, she had crept back into our room in the early hours. But the city’s sparrows were in full voice, our square of sky was cloudless, and this was no day for hangovers or homesickness. Quite another sickness tied my stomach in knots so I could not touch my breakfast and felt as though I were floating somewhere up near the ceiling, watching myself as I sat on the edge of Donna Lucrezia’s bed, straining my eyes under the shade of its brocade canopy to make a small repair to the bodice she had chosen, from which the topaz eye of a bird had come loose. He would send for me, of course he would; he was not a man to bow meekly to his sister’s whims.
“Donata,” said Donna Lucrezia, as I put the finishing touches to her coiffure, fastening a square cut emerald the size of a miniature portrait around her forehead with a silk ribbon, “I should like you to stay behind with me awhile. I have a commission to discharge for my father-in-law this morning. I’m afraid it means we shall miss the horse racing, but I believe the duke has more races planned so we shall not have to miss all the fun.”
“Yes, madonna.”
Donna Lucrezia drew in her breath sharply between her teeth. “That is a little too tight, Donata.”
“Sorry, madonna. The stone is so heavy I feared it might slip.”
“Loosen it.”
“Yes, madonna.”
“Good, that’s better. Now, the rest of you may go. Donata, accompany me to the Sala delle Donne. This will interest you, I am sure.”
The Sala delle Donne, so called because its walls were decorated with painted panels depicting the lives of virtuous women, adjoined the piano nobile where I had had my first meeting with madonna. I had been such a different girl then. Glancing at the panel to the left of the great double doors, which depicted Queen Esther kneeling before King Ahasuerus, I no longer felt the tug of recognition I used to experience when I still thought of myself as Esther Sarfati. This morning, in fact, I would have identified myself far more strongly with the mutinous Queen Vashti, but I kept my counsel, carefully lifting madonna’s train as she seated herself in the gilded, throne-like chair she used for public audiences and dispatched Catherinella to “fetch the nun.”
“You may sit,” said Donna Lucrezia, indicating a low stool at the foot of her chair.
The nun arrived accompanied by a priest, her abbess, and two other nuns, all clad in the black and white habit of the Dominicans. I shuddered, hoping madonna had not noticed. I could not help myself; there is nothing more terrifying to a Spanish Jew, even one who fled the c
ountry as a small child, than the sight of the magpies of the Inquisition. But the nun was small and frail, supported on either side by one of her attendant sisters, as though she could not stand unaided. I feared she might be a leper, for her hands and bare feet were bound in dingy bandages. As she approached us, Donna Lucrezia slipped from her chair and knelt, signalling Catherinella and I to do likewise. It took all my self control not to flinch when the nun laid her bandaged hands on my bowed head in blessing.
“You do us great honour, Sister Osanna,” said madonna as she rose. “I hope your journey was not too onerous and you are comfortable at Santa Maria.”
“I would be more comfortable if the church were not built on the foundations of a heathen temple,” retorted Sister Osanna in a surprisingly strong voice.
Donna Lucrezia bowed her head reverently. “Will you take some refreshment?”
“A little water only. I am fasting until I return to my sisters at Mantua.”
At this, Donna Lucrezia’s expression filled with consternation. “But has nobody told you..? Do you not know why you are here?”
“I listen only to God, daughter.”
“We have tried to explain, but…” The abbess shrugged, appealing with her eyes to the priest, who merely shook his head.
“I see.” Donna Lucrezia sat forward in her chair. A hardness came over her face, almost as though its soft mouldings of flesh had been fired in a kiln. White patches appeared either side of her fine nose and her eyes glittered. “Do you know who I am, sister?”
Instead of a response, Sister Osanna let out a wail which reverberated around the room, bouncing off the smooth, white brows of the virtuous women on the walls. She fell to her knees, doubled over as if in pain, clutching her side with her bandaged hands. Her two escorts knelt beside her, plucking at her sleeves and making cooing noises like concerned doves.
