Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  To half-hearted cheers from the crowd, for whom the debacle of the boars was clearly a hard act to follow, a group of men dressed in black was stumbling rather than running towards the finish post. One fell, wiping his palms down his sides as he struggled to his feet. At first, through my jasmine haze, I wondered only how anyone had been able to round up the boars before they went on the rampage, and which had been declared the winner. Then, as my senses cleared, I felt a chill settle around my heart, a bitter pool of guilt and foolishness.

  The men were Jews. I could see now, with appalling clarity, the yellow stars stitched to the fronts of their robes and worse, that there were faces I recognised through the masks of dust and the distortions of exhaustion. Daniel Cohen, son of the cobbler who had made my trunk, Isaac ibn David, whose violin playing could reduce my undemonstrative father to tears. Worst of all, on his knees now, grovelling in the dust for the eye-glasses he had to wear to be able to see anything at all, bowed beneath the jeers of the spectators at the finishing post, my own brother, Eli.

  Images whirled past me, as though I too were running, faster and faster, in ever decreasing circles. I saw my mother, dying on the beach at Nettuno, and my father’s shuttered expression as he told me of his plans for me. Myself in white, floating like a ghost towards my baptism. Sister Osanna’s wounded hand, Angela’s pink, laughing mouth, the misery of Donna Lucrezia at the supper of the chestnuts, the set of Cesare’s naked shoulders as he walked away from the bull ring. Queen Esther kneeling to King Ahasuerus, but that was only a painting on a wall. I was running, and something was eluding me, running, but all my veins would burst before I found it. All this light and noise, so many people. How could I find anything?

  I tried to rise, to get away, but Cesare’s hand merely gripped my knee more firmly, his fingers digging into my flesh through the layers of my clothes. On my other side, Michelotto quietly took hold of my upper arm.

  “Not enjoying yourself?” Cesare enquired. Leaning closer to me, he hissed in my ear, “Little Esther Sarfati, did you think I was as sentimental as King…whatever his name was? You see that crowd? They’d tear you to pieces as surely as those damn pigs with their dwarf. And me. We’re both marrani. But they tolerate me because I keep them amused, and I keep their enemies away from the gates. And they rather like you at the moment because you’re pretty and you’re sitting next to me. Something for them to gossip about in their greasy taverns and round their nasty little hearths. I know your father helped us buy all this, but now we have it, the tables are turned, you see. Now you need me.”

  Someone had started to scream. A woman’s voice. Let me go! Let me go! People turning to look. The smooth-skinned boy with the brooch in his cap, a grin spreading like a wound across his face. Screams rising to the canopy, ripping through the striped silk, soaring up into the pale blue sky, one, then another, and another. A flock of screams. My screams.

  “Let her go, Michelotto; she’s beginning to bore me.” And I was floating after my screams, drawn by the threads of my voice, my arm throbbing, my legs light as air in their sudden freedom, lifting me over the bench, along the gangway into the Vatican, through the secret door which Michelotto must have left unlocked, back into the basilica whose ponderous serenity finally brought me to a halt. I fell to my knees and tried to pray to any god prepared to hear me, to show me a way out of the mess I was in. Strike me with a plague, I begged, send a stray boar to eat me, or Michelotto with a dagger. I was not afraid; I was already plagued, torn, pierced to the heart.

  “Duke Valentino has a…unique sense of humour,” said God, in a voice rich with innuendo, yet still unbroken. I looked up into a woman’s secret mouth, though made of gold, not flesh, and clinging with little gold frogs’ legs to the flanks of a golden horse. Two tiny arms held aloft a bow primed with an arrow. I blinked, and the curious ornament was replaced by the chestnut eyes of the youth from the stand. No youth, I realised, turning clammy with mortification, but La Fiammetta, her long, shapely legs set off to perfection in doublet and hose, her velvet cap pulled to a seductive angle by the weight of the gold pussy-goes-a-hunting pinned to it. She slid the tips of her gloved fingers along the shaft of a dainty dagger at her waist and laughed.

  ***

  I remembered nothing more until I awoke in my own bed, with Angela sitting beside me holding in her lap a bowl of something steaming that smelled like rotting leaves.

  “Drink this,” she said.

  “No.”

  “You fainted. Your bleeding has started. This will help.”

  “Nothing that smells that bad can help.” I remembered Eli’s crushed eyeglasses, the dwarf’s leg in its breeches like a joint of meat wrapped for boiling, the exquisite savagery of Cesare’s little speech, La Fiammetta…he was probably with her now, enjoying some joke at my expense as he unlaced her hose and peeled them slowly over her perfect legs, his fingertips brushing the skin of her white thighs… “Nothing can help.”

  With a sigh, Angela picked up a folded parchment from the night stand. “This came.” She watched with her mouth compressed into an exasperated line as I opened the note and ran my thumb over the embossed insignia. Bull, keys, lilies.

  You will forgive me, he had written. I was not myself. As you know, I was somewhat upset by my sister’s nun. Sometimes I am ill. You will understand; you are not yourself either.

  Valentino

  “You know what he is calling you now?” asked Angela, taking the note from me and reading it with a shake of her head. “La Violante, the breaker of promises.”

  “Is he?” This pleased me, this pretty word with its ugly meaning. “I have my nickname, then. You said I should.”

  CHAPTER 5

  ROME, EPIPHANY 1502

  I have always known I could not live without you. It is a constant, just as the sun rising in the east is a constant, or the fact that I have five fingers on each hand.

  Shall I lay the trail of moon pebbles for you, Lucrezia, so you can find your way home?”

  Donna Lucrezia gave the Infant of Rome a wan smile and stroked his cheek with the tips of her fingers. Her nails gleamed pearl pink against his putty-coloured flesh. We had spent a good hour on her manicure the previous night, soaking her hands in a distillation of nettle root, massaging them with a rose-scented lotion, buffing her nails with fine glass cloths. Anyone would have thought, grumbled Angela, rubbing her stiff knees, that she was arriving in Ferrara tomorrow rather than merely setting out on a journey liable to take several weeks.

  “Ferrara will be her home, Giovanni,” remonstrated the Holy Father, his voice breaking with sentiment, “but we shall all go to visit her there, have no fear.”

  I saw Cesare swallow. Oh, I had become adept at watching him. I could sense when he entered a room even when my back was turned, by some brightening of candles or sweetening of the air. I was drawn to him as the Platonists say the soul is drawn to Beauty. Or so I told myself. Even the jump of his Adam’s apple above the neck of his shirt was an enchantment to me.

  Then he exhaled sharply, raked his fingers through his hair, and pushed himself away from the wall where he had been leaning, apart from the family group around the fire in madonna’s little sitting room overlooking Saint Peter’s Steps. He stalked across to the window and peered out. I wondered what he thought when he saw the steps where his assassins had attacked his sister’s last husband, but I could no more read him than I could the script of the Moors whom, they say, write backwards. All his demeanour registered now was impatience.

  Standing behind madonna’s chair, I could not look out of the window myself, but I could hear the din, even through the glass panes. The new Duchess of Ferrara’s entourage was too big to be assembled in the courtyard of Santa Maria and was gathering instead in the great square before the basilica. A continuous rumble and clatter was shot through from time to time by men’s shouts, the whinnying of horses, and the lowing of bullocks.

  “Right,” said Cesare, “we need to get on.”

  “Oh
but…”

  “Papa, if someone doesn’t go down there and set things in order, it will be nightfall before we leave, and it’s already beginning to snow. Violante, take the children to their nurse, if you please, and do not return. We have family matters to discuss.” He took Giovanni by the hand and led him to me. For a moment he was standing so close to me I could pick out every stitch of the gold embroidery on his black velvet doublet and inhale the scent of jasmine. I ached to look at his face but I dare not, so fixed my gaze on his hand, on the smudge of the powder burn and the tips of his sinewy fingers resting in the soft curl of his little brother’s fist .

  “I want to stay,” whined Giovanni. “I’m family. Let me stay, Cesare.”

  “Do as you’re told and I promise I’ll take you to see Bella’s pups later.”

  “When later?” He pulled Cesare’s fingers. When later? Was Cesare not coming with us to Ferrara? Had he not spoken only moments before of “we” leaving before nightfall?

  “When I say. It’s a promise between gentlemen so I would not dishonour myself by breaking it, would I?”

  No, I thought, and a little worm of anxiety began to burrow into me.

  “No. All right then.” He transferred his hand from Cesare’s to mine, his skin still warm with the warmth of Cesare’s, but I had to let him go to lift Rodrigo from his mother’s lap.

  A thread of Rodrigo’s gown had become entangled in the pearls sewn on to madonna’s bodice.

  “Give me a moment,” she said, though it was clear she was not in the least concerned about the pearls coming loose. She stroked her son’s back, kissed his hair, pressed his nose with her fingertip which made him laugh. Her hands hovered and flapped around the entangled threads as if she half knew what they should be doing but could not quite remember. Cesare moved around behind her chair and placed a hand on her shoulder. I saw his knuckles flex and whiten as he began to squeeze. She turned to him, eyes raised in supplication. He nodded, then they both looked directly at me, their eyes moving in such unison you would think they had rehearsed it, their expressions so alike the one might have been copied from the other. There was a moment when I felt they were trying to tell me something, then Giovanni tugged at my arm and said, “Come on, or it’ll be too late for the puppies by the time the grown-ups have finished talking,” and the spell was broken, whatever I had glimpsed hidden from view before I could discern the true shape of it.

  ***

  Of the ladies who accompanied Donna Lucrezia, only I had ever been outside Italy, and that hardly counted because I was too young to remember it. Most had never been further than Tivoli, or the baths at Stigliano. But if anyone was apprehensive, she put a brave face on it. We were, after all, a wedding party, though such a large one we were more like a city on the move, with our cooks and tailors, our locksmith, our saddler, and Alonso, the goldsmith, who never washed his hands for fear of sluicing away a few grains of gold. Three bishops accompanied us, not to mention Donna Lucrezia’s two chaplains. Two, said the gossips, because one was not enough to bear the weight of Donna Lucrezia’s sins. We had our aristocracy, our share of gallants to swagger and gamble, drink too much, flatter us ladies-in-waiting, and seduce our maids. We were accompanied by scions of the Orsini and the Colonna, prepared to remain on speaking terms so long as they were living at the pope’s expense, and by more than thirty of Cesare’s gentlemen.

  A hundred and fifty carriages had been bought, built, or requisitioned from the wealthier Roman families to transport this household, not to mention the horses, mules, and oxen which numbered far more than I had been taught to count. By the time Don Ferrante’s household was joined to our party, we numbered, I am told, more than a thousand people. Even in the slushy vastness of Saint Peter’s Square we jostled for space, the mules nipping one another’s necks, grooms’ feet broken by restless hooves, those who should have known better elbowing one another out of the best positions below the windows of the Vatican where the pope stood to wave his beloved daughter farewell. As Angela remarked, the makers of shovels must have done well out of Donna Lucrezia’s marriage. The stable boys were going to have a devil of a lot of shit to clear before this journey was through. Like all her family, Angela was a peasant at heart; even her words must be made to have more than one meaning, like the bones of today’s joint made into a broth for tomorrow.

  When we finally began to file out of the square into the old, narrow streets of the Borgo, the men at arms provided for our escort by Cesare were forced to use the shafts of their halberds to knock onlookers aside to make way for us. Long before we reached the gate, we in the vanguard, riding immediately behind Donna Lucrezia, who was escorted on either side by Ippolito and Cesare, were separated from the rest of our party when an ox cart became jammed on the Sant’Angelo bridge. Cesare despatched a man at arms to see what had happened, then, as the delay lengthened and the snow began to fall more heavily from a darkening sky, went back himself to investigate. I tried to catch his eye as he rode past me, but he continued to look straight ahead, eyes straining in the murky light to see the cause of the delay, his mouth set in a snarl of frustration. I shivered, wound my reins around the pommel of my saddle, and thrust my hands deep into my lynx muff. What if he really was not coming with us? What then?

  “They’re dismantling the bloody parapet to get it through,” he called to Ippolito on his return. So we all dismounted and milled about, fretful and cold, with wet feet and a sense of awkwardness, like guests who had outstayed our welcome. Cesare and Ippolito escorted Donna Lucrezia under the shelter of a nearby stall selling sweetmeats, and we looked on enviously as the astonished proprietor, hands shaking, served dishes of sugared almonds and preserved ginger to his unexpected guests.

  Finally, the cart was freed and, as it creaked into view in a haze of animal breath and steam rising from the coats of the straining oxen, we remounted and set off once again towards the gate. There we paused a second time. Ippolito bowed over Donna Lucrezia’s hand and wished her Godspeed, then rode off to talk to his brother. Cesare leaned from his saddle, took both madonna’s hands in his, and kissed her cheeks.

  Still holding her hands, her little crimson gloves so bright against his black ones, he said, “Scatter the moon pebbles, cara mia, so I can find you.” They laughed, then Cesare and Ippolito wheeled their horses back to face the city. I glanced at Angela. Tears were running down her cheeks but she did not seem surprised. She must have known all along that Ippolito was not to accompany us, but not Cesare. Surely she would have told me. Perhaps nobody had known. Perhaps the decision had only been made that morning, when he had promised to take Giovanni to see the puppies.

  Perhaps, seeing me near at hand, he had chosen to speak to madonna in Italian to be sure I would hear and understand his words. That was it. There was some message there for me to, if only I could decipher it.

  As the two men passed us, Ippolito reined back almost imperceptibly and nodded to Angela, who dipped her chin a fraction in acknowledgement. All I saw Cesare do was lift one black gloved hand from his reins to wipe the snow from his eyes, then put the spur to his horse’s flanks and ride on, weaving back through the procession towards the broken bridge and the Vatican. Not a word to me, not even a glance.

  But he had joked with madonna about the moon pebbles. Like the resourceful child in the fairy tale, he wanted to be sure of finding his way back to the treasure.

  ***

  Two weeks after leaving Rome, we reached Urbino, where we took over the ducal palace, compelling Duke Guidobaldo and his wife to lodge in a convent outside the walls. Even though we were packed in like a cargo of slaves, we ladies forced to sleep on the floor of Donna Lucrezia’s ante chamber with only our own cloaks for bed linen, I thought the palace the closest thing to heaven I was ever likely to see on this earth. After the rigours of the journey, perhaps anywhere we had the prospect of staying more than a single night would have seemed like heaven. The mountain roads had been treacherous with mud and snow, often blocked by lands
lides. Sometimes there were rushing streams where our maps showed none, and we had had to make lengthy detours to find fords. One night, unable to reach our planned destination before nightfall, we had been forced to camp in the open, ringed about by our wagons like gipsies, and I had fallen asleep to the wild sorrowing of wolves, and imagined myself a soldier in Cesare’s army.

  The evening of our arrival in Urbino, the walls of the palace glowed rose in the light of thousands of torches as we wound up the hill from the town. Poised on a sheer cliff, invisible in the darkness, it shimmered as though suspended in air. The following morning, the sun made one of its rare appearances, and the marble cloisters around the main courtyard glittered as though studded with diamonds. Whereas the palace of Santa Maria was stuffed with art works and antiquities simply because someone had told Donna Adriana such and such a painter or tapissier or vendor of Cupids with chipped noses was the fashion, everything about Urbino was a testament to good taste and thoughtfulness. If Santa Maria was like an old tart whose mouth was crammed with sweetmeats, the palace at Urbino was like philosophy made concrete, designed to nourish the spirit. There were breathing spaces between the paintings, box-edged walks or avenues of pleached limes between the statues in the gardens.

  Following the duchess on a tour of halls and salons hung with rich tapestries which had been freshly beaten for our visit, so they glowed even in the grey, winter light, I began to understand why my father had made me learn geometry. It will show you your place in the world, he used to say. I thought he was referring to the matter of calculating a position by the stars, and wondered what use that could ever be to me. Then I wondered if it was something to do with comparing myself to my brothers, who would very probably go to sea in pursuit of the family business. Now, admiring the marquetry trompe l’oeil panels in the old duke’s studiolo, how cleverly they depicted his armour hanging in a cupboard and his favourite books piled on a shelf, I wished I could tell my father I knew what he meant; I wished I could thank him. What geometry shows us is how to measure proportion, how to build and paint and plan gardens which do not oppress us by being cramped or overawe us by being on too great a scale, but make us aware that we truly are made in the image of the Holy Name.