by Sarah Bower
Donna Lucrezia seemed unfazed. “I am the daughter of your Holy Father, Pope Alexander who, of his benevolence, purged your order of the heresies of Fra Girolamo in Florence. So you can listen to me, can’t you?” Her tone was sweet, but firm, one of those gelid confections which put you in danger of breaking a tooth on an ice crystal.
Moaning and rocking back and forth on her knees, Sister Osanna now clawed at her ears as though she wished to pull them off. “The devil tempts me,” she whined, “oh how he tempts me!” Then, still kneeling, but still now and straight backed, she said in calm, ringing tones, “but he cannot triumph. ‘And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations.’ I will listen to the voice of God, daughter.”
Donna Lucrezia looked relieved. “I have brought you to Rome so that you might accompany me to Ferrara, sister. My illustrious father-in-law, Duke Ercole, has long appreciated your great saintliness, for you bear the marks of Our Lord’s Passion and are blessed with the gift of prophecy, and wishes you join Sister Lucia of Narni in the house he has built for her.” She paused for the effect of her words to sink in; Sister Lucia of Narni was famous for her prophecies and Duke Ercole had gone to great lengths, some more orthodox than others, to have her spirited away to Ferrara from her convent in Viterbo. “Mother Abbess and your priest, Father Eustasius, are in agreement that you should thus spread your word out from Mantua.”
A certain set of the Abbess’s thin lips and a certain glow in Father Eustasius’s rheumy eyes told me their agreement had not been cheaply bought. I realised now the meaning of the bandages. Sister Osanna must carry the stigmata, the mysterious wounds in her hands and feet and side that were supposed to replicate the injuries done to Christ by the Romans. Or perhaps the Jews.
Sister Osanna nodded, all mild obedience since Donna Lucrezia’s reminder of the fate of Girolamo Savonarola.
“Then we understand one another,” said Donna Lucrezia.
“God moves in mysterious ways, madama.”
“Indeed he does, sister, indeed he does. Rise now, and come closer.” I saw the priest and the abbess exchange questioning looks as Sister Osanna did as she was bidden and Donna Lucrezia continued, “You see this girl at my side? She was born a Jew but by the mercy of Our Saviour and the intercession of the saints has come to Christ. Would it not be a great demonstration of His compassion for a sinner if you were to let her witness the marks?”
I was horrified, but when I glanced at Donna Lucrezia, the words of protest died in my mouth. Her expression was just that of our old neighbour, Señor Perdoniel, the cloth merchant, when he rubbed a piece of wool or linen between thumb and forefinger to assess its quality. Donna Lucrezia was a genuinely pious woman but, like her father, even when her heart was among the angels, her feet remained firmly on the ground, particularly that narrow, pitted stretch of it running between the stalls on the street of the bancherotti, the traders in foreign coins and pawned trinkets, where my father had started out on his arrival in Rome, while awaiting an audience with Cardinal Borgia. So she did have some reason for bringing me here other than to keep the humble conversa away from her magnificent brother.
At a nod from the abbess, the two other nuns stepped forward and began to remove the bandages from Sister Osanna’s hands and feet. Sister Osanna stood, docile as a child, with her eyes cast down, lifting her feet or turning her hands this way and that to make the nuns’ task easier for them. Both anxious and detached, she was like an artist unveiling his work before a patron in the knowledge that it is both his and not his, executed by him with materials paid for by his patron and the inspiration of the Holy Name. I wanted to look away, but could not, as the bandages became bloodier and a stench of putrefaction caused Donna Lucrezia to pull a kerchief from her sleeve and hold it to her nose and mouth. I swallowed repeatedly, trying not to gag. Then the nuns started work on Sister Osanna’s side, unfastening a row of hooks concealed in the seam of her habit.
Suddenly, we were all distracted by a commotion outside the doors. Raised voices, followed by a scuffling and scrabbling of soft shoes on the polished floor and a thud as something hit the doors, rattling the catch. Only Sister Osanna seemed oblivious, still and poised as the women on the wall panels as the rest of us looked in alarm towards the doors.
Cesare burst into the room, closely followed by another man whose head scarcely reached his shoulder, though he was powerfully built, with a face as pocked as a pomegranate and hard, glittery eyes like sparkles of marcasite in a broken rock. As the double doors crashed open, one handle chipping a lump of plaster from Queen Esther’s bare feet, I caught a glimpse of one of the doormen on his knees, a hand clutched to his bleeding nose.
“Here you are, you treacherous little hussy,” shouted Cesare, staring at me. Tiresias barked in support and stared at me too, for all that he was completely blind. Flinging my veil to the floor, Cesare went on, “Well, I hope it will gladden your hard heart to know we won anyway. Mantua’s horse led all the way, but threw its jockey somewhere around the pyramid in the Borgo.”
“Startled by something in the crowd,” growled pomegranate face. I wondered who he could be, a man who could interrupt Duke Valentino with impunity.
“Doubtless,” said Cesare with a nasty smile.
“My lord duke, Don Michele, what is the meaning of this interruption? Have you no piety in your souls? Look at this woman.” Donna Lucrezia gestured towards Sister Osanna. Don Michele dropped to his knees as if felled and crossed himself extravagantly. Cesare merely glared at his sister.
“You knew of my invitation to Signorina Donata. What possessed you to cross me in this?”
Donna Lucrezia had scarcely opened her mouth to reply when Sister Osanna turned away from us to face Cesare, who was standing a little way behind her. I saw the flush of anger drain from Cesare’s cheeks and his skin turn as white as Sister Osanna’s wimple. His dog cringed, laid its face on its paws, and began to whimper.
“The kingdoms of men are but as a straw fire,” said Sister Osanna in her strange, strong voice. “How bright you burn, how utterly you will be snuffed out. Beware, little duke, beware the hand of the Great Avenger.”
Cesare swayed. I thought he would faint. I started from my stool to run to his aid, but Sister Osanna, even though she had her back to me, raised her hand in a stalling gesture, the bandages falling away to reveal a blood-crusted puncture wound. I stood, stunned, as though I had run into an invisible wall. The room felt suddenly colder, even the portraits on the walls seemed to shiver. I saw Father Eustasius chafe his upper arms as though he, too, felt a draught. Whatever script he and the abbess had written for Sister Osanna, the lines she had just spoken were not part of it.
Cesare’s lips moved, but no sound came from them. He tried again. “Twenty eight,” he said eventually, in a hoarse whisper.
“Twenty,” replied Sister Osanna, and for some reason, that made him laugh.
“You flatter me there, sister,” he said, and the spell was broken. Sister Osanna turned her back on Cesare, almost with contempt, it seemed to me.
“My bandages,” she commanded her attendants, though they paused, glancing from their abbess to Donna Lucrezia for direction. Donna Lucrezia nodded and they began to re-bind Sister Osanna’s wounds. Catherinella returned with the water, inscrutable in her blackness, or perhaps in her experience of serving Donna Lucrezia.
“Come on,” said Cesare, holding out his hand to me. “They have held up the boar racing until my return. You will miss nothing more.” I fancied Don Michele’s hand moved a fraction closer to the hilt of one of the daggers in his belt.
“Madonna…?”
“You may go, Donata. As Sister Osanna is to accompany us to Ferrara, you will have plenty more opportunities to benefit from her sanctity.”
I looked to see what effect this news might have on Cesare, but it was as though Sister Osanna was of no more consequence than any other nun he might encounter in the street or the public audience chambers of the V
atican. Tucking my hand under his arm, he began to trade odds with Don Michele, leaving me to luxuriate in the warmth from his body as he guided me through doorways, along passages, down staircases, until we reached a small, plain door I had never seen before. Don Michele unlocked this with a key Cesare gave him and stood aside to let us through. Cesare ducked to avoid hitting his head on the lintel. From one of the low, winding passages in the oldest part of the palace of Santa Maria, we stepped out into the cavernous, incensed space of the basilica, cool and silent save for the whispering footsteps of the priests making ready for the next service of the day. And now the spurred boots of Cesare and Don Michele, and my own shoes, as we crossed the nave and passed behind the altar to a second small door concealed behind a screen bearing a triptych of the martyrdom of Saint Peter.
“The hours I’ve spent on my knees in this place,” remarked Cesare as he hunted in the purse on his belt for another key. “It makes them ache just to remember it. You know I was a cardinal once?”
I did know. All Rome had buzzed with the scandal, and nowhere more than the schoolroom at Santa Clara, when, shortly after the murder of Don Juan, Cesare renounced his religious calling to take up his brother’s post at the head of the papal armies.
“Such a waste of time,” he added, shaking his head. But before I could ask him what he meant, the second door opened on to another series of stairs and passages, better lit than those in Santa Maria, with marble floors and walls hung with tapestries. I guessed we must be in the Vatican, and sure enough, within seconds we emerged from a first floor window on to a short bridge leading to the stand set up in front of the palace for the pope and his guests.
As we stepped on to the stand, beside the pope’s chair, the noise of the crowd seemed to slam into my chest, almost knocking the breath out of me. The spectators were packed behind wooden barriers, waiting for the races to begin. A surge opposite the stand caused planks to begin to buckle and splinter and guards in Cesare’s livery to ready their halberds to prevent a break out. Their blades glittered in the hard winter sun. The great square was ablaze with banners bearing the arms of Borgia and Este, hanging from every window and fastened to every roof cornice, silk bulls on the rampage, white eagles hovering over their prey. Above our heads the scarlet and gold striped canopy of the stand snapped and rustled in a stiff breeze, and I rued the fact I had not had time to fetch my cloak.
Cesare paused to acknowledge the crowd, gripping my hand so I was obliged to remain at his side, aware also of Don Michele standing close behind me, the smell of his garlic breath mingled with the sharp scent of new wood and the perfumes the guests wore to mask their sweat: attar of roses, sandalwood, bergamot, and lavender. I felt awkward and exposed; I had not even kissed the Holy Father’s ring; surely even he would register such a slight, despite his tolerance of all the laxity of the household of Santa Maria in Portico.
Cesare did not smile or wave or bow, merely stood, his features as composed as the masks he favoured, waiting for the silence he knew would come. I found myself wondering how the bulls had felt, a few days before, when the barrier was lifted and they were goaded into the ring which had now become a race track, and they had come face to face with that potent stillness amid the contrived chaos of his cuadrilla.
The hubbub died in seconds, only the cries of the hawkers of miracles and roast chickens on little wooden spits still unravelling loose threads of sound across the piazza. Cesare turned to Don Michele and said, “How long to the Campo at a gallop, Michelotto?”
I did not hear his reply. Michelotto. Of course, I should have guessed. To whom else would Cesare entrust the keys to secret doors than to Michelotto, the Navarrese condottiere known as his left hand, because when Cesare hatched a sinister scheme, it always fell to Michelotto to carry it out? Not least among his victims had been the Duke of Bisceglie, it was said. Even the pope feared Michelotto, because he could not bring himself to fear his son.
“The boar race will commence in twenty minutes,” announced Cesare, his voice not loud, but pitched to carry across the square, “and in the meantime, to atone for the delay, my servants will come among you with cakes and wine.” At once the crowd began to whirl and eddy around gold and scarlet liveried figures bearing great trays of cakes and earthenware jugs, who seemed to have popped out of the very ground itself, like Jason’s skeletons.
Only now did Cesare take his place on the cushioned bench beside his father’s chair, a mighty piece of carved Spanish oak upholstered in red leather; the stand beneath it creaked ominously every time His Holiness shifted his bulk. Seated to the right of Cesare, with Michelotto at my other side, still breathing hard from his dash to the Campo di Fiori to start the race, this was the closest I had ever been to Pope Alexander. Leaning forward on the pretext of straightening my skirt, I stole a glance at him.
His face, framed by a close-fitting cap of white velvet and the ermine collar of his cloak, was full of the contradictions that seemed to define his life and exasperate all who had dealings with him. His mouth, settled between opulent, smooth-shaven jowls, was full and sensual, but he had the eyes of a wealthy peasant set deep under fleshy brows and the swarthy complexion of a man of action rather than the pallor of prayer and contemplation.
I had heard tell that in his bedchamber was a painting by his favourite artist, the little painter from Mantua, of himself kneeling in adoration before the Virgin Mary. The model for the virgin had been Giulia Farnese. Thus it was with him, the sacred and the profane jumbled together. Devout in his calling, he believed the temporal power of his office should match its spiritual gravity and, head of this church of celibate priests, saw no objection to using his son’s sword arm and his daughter’s womb to achieve his ambition. I noticed the pope had taken Cesare’s hand and that Cesare’s head was inclined towards his father’s as the pope spoke to him rapidly and emphatically in Catalan, all the time pressing his son’s hand hard against the carved arm of his chair. From across the square, where Donna Lucrezia had now joined the rest of her ladies in the loggia above the front door to Santa Maria, they must have looked a picture of mutual affection.
A distant rumble began to vibrate the air. The crowd fell silent and turned as one towards the southern end of the square from where the boars would race to the finishing post beside Caligula’s obelisk. The watchers in the stand leaned forward, releasing a sweat of excitement into the stale air under the canopy. Suddenly I realised I was the only woman among men, that the other ladies, apart from Donna Lucrezia’s household, were collected on the other side of a gangway bordered by rope handrails. I pressed my hands together in my lap and stared at them, fancying all the men’s eyes on me, although I knew they were watching the point where the race would debouch into the square, betting slips crumpled in clenched fists as the rumbling grew louder, as though a storm were rolling through the narrow streets.
“Up there,” murmured Cesare, close to my ear, or perhaps I would not have heard him, “are Julius Caesar’s ashes. Is his spirit there also, do you think? Does he laugh at our games?”
As I looked up at the golden sphere on top of the obelisk, clouds of brown dust bloomed above the ancient tiled roofs of the Borgo and belched into the piazza, making the crowd at that end start to cough and wipe their eyes. The hinges holding the wooden barriers together began to rattle. Guards vaulted to safety, flinging their halberds over before them. Then the first of the boars charged into the square, squealing and tossing its head as it tried to rid itself of the dwarf on its back, who clung on with the aid of powerful, bandy legs and a rein fastened to a ring in the boar’s nose. The furious beast veered away towards the barrier just below Donna Lucrezia’s vantage point. The crowd fell back with a collective gasp like the sighing of the sea. Plunging its tusks into the planks, the boar catapulted its jockey over the barrier, where he was caught by several spectators and tossed back again.
By now, several more boars had entered the square, some with their dwarf jockeys still clinging on, some bareback. One
, with a bloody rag caught on its tusk, foaming with sweat, eyes red with terror, charged the unfortunate jockey whom the crowd had thrown back on to the track and gored him. The man fell beneath the hooves of the rest, and the race ended in barbarous confusion as the boars stopped short of the finish and began to eat their victim.
“Well I never,” said the pope, leaning back in his chair. The stand emitted a soft shriek. A high-pitched, manic laugh was coming from Michelotto’s barrel chest.
“Look,” said Cesare, digging him in the ribs. “See those two with the leg. Five hundred scudi says the brindle one gets it.”
“Done,” Michelotto replied. “Shall we have the winner for supper? A boar with a man’s leg in its belly, now there’s a novelty.”
“I have plans for this evening.” Though he did not look at me, his hand was gripping my knee and it was clear what he meant. I felt as though my skull had cracked like an egg boiled too fast, letting in all kinds of conflicting emotions. Disgust at the spectacle of the pig killing the dwarf vied with the fascination of the living for death and dying. The humiliation of sitting unchaperoned among men, of a man with his hand on my knee in a public place, was overwhelmed by a sense of reckless excitement, of being caught up in Cesare’s own aura of invincibility.
From deep within me, perhaps in the place Angela could touch with her knowing, loving fingers, I felt a force of yearning that moved my leg fractionally closer to his and did not resist when he slid his hand a little higher up my thigh, one of his rings catching a loose thread in my green camorra. I closed my eyes to shut out the clamour in my head, my cheeks burning and my heart crashing against my ribs. My senses were filled with the scent of the jasmine oil he used to perfume his beard and a dangerous, feral musk it did not quite conceal.
“You should watch this,” he said, his voice laced with a languid menace that cut through my dream. I opened my eyes and glanced at him, but he was looking straight ahead, his mouth curled in an enigmatic smile. Someone was looking at me, though, drawing my gaze. A beardless boy richly dressed in dark red velvet, a large gold ornament pinned to his cap, had turned to face me from a lower rung of the tiered seating. Fine, chestnut brown eyes above smooth, creamy cheeks appraised my body with bold curiosity. I dropped my gaze just as Cesare nodded a curt greeting to the boy and he turned abruptly back to face the square.
