Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  CHAPTER 6

  FERRARA, FEBRUARY 1502

  Never simple, simply happy...

  As Duke Ercole was a widower, his daughter Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua was to welcome madonna to Ferrara. It was clear from the outset that Donna Isabella undertook her task with an ill grace. Her court had given shelter to many of those exiled from the Romagna by Cesare, including madonna’s first husband, Giovanni Sforza. She made no secret of her deep disapproval of her brother’s choice of bride and her resentment that madonna, as Duchess of Ferrara, now outranked her on her own home ground.

  Although Don Alfonso and Donna Lucrezia had decided to complete the journey to Ferrara by road, when Donna Isabella, accompanied by Don Giulio, met us in Malalbergo, she insisted we travel by boat.

  “It will make us late,” protested Don Alfonso, glowering at his sister.

  “But I rose at dawn to bring a bucentaur especially,” Donna Isabella countered, making a great play of raising weary eyes to her brother’s face. Donna Isabella was plump, with reddish hair, whose unfashionable curliness she disguised with coiffures almost as elaborate as Donna Adriana’s. She had a small, mean mouth and a crude, fleshy nose, but her eyes were very fine, and she knew how to deploy her forces to best advantage.

  Though she kept up her determined cheerfulness in public, those of us close to Donna Lucrezia knew how she had been dreading this encounter. Donna Lucrezia could handle men but the friendship of other women did not come easily to her.

  “I would rather she had sent her husband on this errand,” she muttered as Angela, Geronima, and I helped her dress. There was a general murmur of agreement. We had all met Don Francesco Gonzaga in Rome, and had been delighted with him, despite his thick lips and a nose which looked as though it had been squashed by a mis-kicked ball in Florentine calcio. He tended to wear a permanent frown, because he was vain, and believed frowning made his somewhat bulbous eyes look less prominent, but this could not disguise his love of pleasure. He was rumoured to loathe Donna Isabella, because she had a brain and liked to use it, and to enjoy many mistresses as well as some of his prettier pages.

  “Unlikely in the circumstances,” said Geronima, and even she sounded regretful.

  “Perhaps,” said madonna, raising her arms and turning her back so Angela could lace her corset, “we should find some opportunity to comment on his absence. As a reminder of the sort of thing that tends to happen to my husbands. If they displease my father. Or my brother.” Her tone contained just the slightest hint of irony, as though she had tried, and failed, to keep it out. “Good God, girl, not so tight. Do you want me to fall in a faint at Isabella Gonzaga’s feet? Let me out a little. It’s not as though there’s any danger of my looking fat in comparison to her.”

  ***

  “She looks like an overdressed toad,” Angela whispered to me later, as the two women smiled and embraced one another on the muddy shore and we stood to one side, Angela trying both to attract and evade the violet gaze of Don Giulio. Sleet drove into our faces before an icy wind. The countryside looked flat and brown and sad. As Donna Isabella temporarily forgot herself and attempted to board the little ship ahead of Donna Lucrezia, one of the horses waiting on the towpath raised its tail and defecated. I saw Don Giulio glance at the steaming turds, at his sister and madonna in a tussle of satin and sable, at Angela hiding her face in the fox edged hood of her cloak, and smirk.

  At Torre del Fossa we disembarked while the horses were unharnessed and the oars broken out for the final leg of our journey. Here Duke Ercole and all his court awaited us on the canal bank. The Este arms snapped from the top of the watch tower which gave the village its name. Snatches of music and conversation came to us on the wind from the deck of the duke’s own bucentaur, its prow almost as high as the tower and fantastically carved with the twin-headed eagle of the Este. A row of squat, homespun peasants blinked the sleet from their eyes as their new duchess, in her gown of drawn gold with crimson satin sleeves, her hair sparkling with diamonds and snowflakes, a pearl the size of a small pear rising and falling at her bosom, knelt in the mud to kiss her father-in-law’s hand. We held our breath. Duke Ercole raised madonna and kissed her on both cheeks then, stretching his thin lips in a smile, waved Catherinella forward to dust the mud from her mistress’s skirts. We exhaled shakily.

  Donna Lucrezia now joined the duke’s barge, leaving the rest of us to follow on. They were entertained by the court musicians and poets declaiming eulogies of the Este and the Borgia. We in the second barge were left to our own devices. We sipped hot, spiced wine and watched the dreary country slip by on either side to the creak and splash of the oars, flat fields crossed by irrigation ditches lying like strips of lead under the wintry sky, black vines and bony poplars, low buildings the same dun colour as the people who lived in them and the soil they tilled. My Spanish heart ached for colour. Glancing across at Angela, I wondered if she felt the same, but she looked so withdrawn I doubted she had noticed our surroundings. I looked away again, drawn to a concentration of shadow on the horizon, beyond the lattice of poplar branches lining the canal bank. As I looked, the blur resolved itself into a block from which four square towers emerged, and I had my first sight of the castle of the Este which was to become my home. It looked bleak, forbidding, and horribly cold.

  “You can almost hear Parisina Malatesta weeping from here,” said Angela with a shudder. Parisina and her lover, Ugo d’Este, who was her stepson and had been Duke Ercole’s eldest brother, were nearly as famous in those days as Dante’s Paolo Malatesta and Francesca di Rimini, but today, the dungeon where they were held and executed by Duke Niccolo, is famous for holding other prisoners and Ugo and Parisina almost forgotten.

  ***

  “You know the first thing he will show you is where the block was set up for the executions.” Triumph mixed with bitterness in Donna Isabella’s tone as she stared down at the diamond and ruby necklace which had once belonged to her mother and now adorned madonna’s slender neck. We were standing on the long staircase leading up from the main courtyard of the Corte Vecchio to where the head of the Savi and other civic dignitaries were waiting to make their speeches of welcome. Donna Isabella commanded the top step so Donna Lucrezia was obliged to look up to meet her eye.

  She had refused to come down the stairs to greet her sister-in-law in the courtyard. Too crowded, she said, surveying the melee of people, horses and mules, baggage carts, oxen, the litter the Holy Father had given to madonna for the journey angled like a stranded boat, its curtains dragging in the mud. But I think she was hoping madonna might trip on the worn, slippery marble, hoping she might break that pretty neck or at least dislodge the tiara of diamonds and sapphires and enormous pearls which had also once belonged to the Duchess Eleanora.

  She must have heard how madonna’s horse, startled by a sudden loud noise during the procession into the town, had reared up and thrown her. No doubt she was infuriated by the way madonna had turned the mishap to her advantage, once she had been helped to her feet and remounted, calling out to the crowd in halting Ferrarese, “You see, I have fallen in love with all Ferrara.”

  There had been much clapping and cheering and waving of little pennants in Don Alfonso’s colours of red and white. Then someone let off an arquebus, and the duke insisted madonna abandon her mount for something more placid or he feared she might fall again.

  If Donna Isabella was hoping Donna Lucrezia had exhausted her stock of charm and good fortune in extricating herself so graciously from the incident, she was destined for another disappointment as madonna said smoothly, “I believe the lady’s husband imprisoned Ugo and Parisina below the Torre Marchesana, where I am to be lodged. My husband has already warned me his father will wish to show me the place and that the doors to the prisons are very low.” She laughed her mischievous laugh as Donna Isabella straightened up and madonna drew her into a sisterly embrace. “Perhaps he thinks I am particularly accident prone and am in danger of striking my head.” She dabbed artl
essly at the tiara.

  ***

  Duke Ercole suggested madonna’s Roman ladies might like to accompany her on her visit to the execution site, where dark stains on one of the flagstones might have been damp or might have been the mingled blood of the ill-fated lovers. Though not generally considered an imaginative man, Duke Ercole entertained some lurid notions concerning the morals of young Roman women and felt bound to make it clear to all of us that the ladies of Ferrara were expected to adhere to higher standards.

  We began our excursion in high spirits. It was three nights since our arrival and, though she had said nothing to us, Donna Lucrezia seemed content with her husband. Whatever his reputation for drinking and whoring and spending long hours in his foundry or his pottery kiln, one or other of which was frequently setting fire to the northern end of the castle gardens, he had been punctilious in his attentions to his wife. Each evening he made the short walk along the gallery linking the Corte Vecchio to the castle where he joined her for a private supper, and he did not return to his own rooms until first light. From madonna’s languid smile as we dressed her, and the dark shadows under her eyes which we concealed with lead powder and oil of violets, we deduced Don Alfonso had learned a pleasing trick or two from his whores. She had even conceived enough affection for her little dog to give it a name. She called it Alfonsino, Fonsi for short.

  In defiance of Duke Ercole’s purpose in bringing us to Ugo and Parisina’s place of execution, there was much giggling and flirting as we hitched up our skirts to climb down the ladders to the dungeons, displaying ankles and calves and even knees to the young men who waited at the bottom to catch us. Many of them had travelled with us from Rome and were pursuing flirtations which had developed on the road. But the hilarity flickered and died as we made our way through a mouldering wicket gate, along a narrow passage whose walls oozed slime, to stand outside the cell, not much wider than the sluices which controlled the water level in the moat, where Ugo d’Este had defied his father, rejected his confessor, and sacrificed his life for love.

  “Good source of food during a siege anyway,” joked one of the young men, scraping a snail from the back of the iron-bound door, but nobody laughed. I felt Angela shift and sigh at my side and reached for her hand, which felt clammy in mine. Though the duke offered madonna his arm, she gave a slight shake of her head, took a torch from one of the link boys, and, stooping under the lintel, stepped alone into the cell.

  When she re-emerged, her face was white and beaded with perspiration which sparkled on her forehead in the torchlight, her expression serious and inscrutable. Like a mask, it drew attention to her eyes where I almost fancied I could see the ghosts of the martyred lovers reflected on her dark, dilated pupils.

  Then the moment passed, the dank air stirred by polite laughter as she remarked, “It is as well neither of them had to suffer imprisonment in such a place for long. Your father’s anger and compassion were as happily blended as the traitors’ blood, your grace.”

  I have often wondered if she remembered her words in the years to come. Whether she came to regret them or not, they served their purpose that day with Duke Ercole. To Donna Isabella’s chagrin, he now conferred on Donna Lucrezia the family jewels which had not been given by Ippolito at her proxy wedding. He was captivated, not only by her wit, but by her success in bringing Sister Osanna to Ferrara and her excellent understanding of falconry. Angela saw the duke’s generosity as evidence of Donna Lucrezia’s way with men, though I, being my father’s daughter, I suppose, reasoned that the jewels were merely on loan whereas madonna’s dowry, the money to pay the expenses of her household, and still in a strong box in Duke Ercole’s treasury, was not. I was sure the jewels were a sop, and a certain ironical twist to Donna Lucrezia’s mouth when she admired herself in them made me certain she thought so too.

  “Such a hypocrite, that Isabella,” Angela remarked in the privacy of our room. “You know her eldest boy is to be betrothed to Luisa?”

  “Luisa?” What was she talking about? I had hoped, as we were yet again on the subject of the Este and their shortcomings, to lead the conversation around to Giulio, but instead she veered off in this new, and surely irrelevant, direction. Isabella’s son could not be more than a baby.

  “Yes, Luisa. Cesare’s daughter.”

  Of course she must have a name. Doubtless I had heard it before, but I did not want to know it, neither the name of his daughter, nor of his wife. The gentlemen of Cesare’s household who had accompanied us to Ferrara had stayed on, for Carnival, I had convinced myself, just for Carnival. But if that were the case, the duke would have sent them packing, to put up at inns or the houses of the better-off citizens. Duke Ercole was parsimonious about household expenses, unless they related to his orchestra or his nuns, or his pack of long-haired, blue-eyed cats from Persia, who had their own grooms and their own little doors cut into the bases of all the doors in the Corte Vecchio. Even though his frescoes were permanently threatened by damp and eruptions of fungi, he forbade fires to be lit before nightfall.

  Cesare’s young men remained in the ducal palace because they were awaiting the arrival of his wife, the Princess Charlotte, and her daughter, and because, in Ferrara, if you were not nodding and smiling at the Venetians, or keeping a weather eye on the Emperor, you were allying your interests with those of France. Whether Cesare himself would then come to Ferrara, or whether he would meet his wife in Rome, or somewhere in the Romagna, was not known.

  “Oh,” I said. Charlotte d’Albret was reputed to be one of the most beautiful women in France, a cousin of the queen, virtuous and devoted to her husband, even though he had spent scarcely four months of their marriage at her side. What else could I say?

  “I wonder when she’ll turn up? Charlotte, that is. Maybe for carnival. All foreigners love to see an Italian carnival.”

  ***

  The Princess Charlotte did not come for Carnival, prevented, it was said, by the weather in the Alps.

  “She could have sailed,” said Angela. “I wanted to meet her.”

  “Perhaps Cesare will come anyway,” I replied.

  “Perhaps.”

  But he did not; only his wife, it seemed, might have lured him to Ferrara.

  So I had to make do with watching the antics of his gentlemen from the loggia over the great arch that gave on to the piazza from the Corte Vecchio. We wore masks and threw eggs, tiny works of art exquisitely decorated by Don Alfonso with the paints and enamels he prepared for his majolica. It was rumoured the whores gathered up the broken shells to display in the shop fronts whose storerooms and back parlours they used to ply their trade, as a mark of Don Alfonso’s favour. As Don Alfonso was known to be something of a connoisseur in that area, they found it good for business to have his seal of approval.

  If we leaned out far enough over the balustrade, we could just see the bronze statue of Duke Borso flanking one side of the arch, sporting a conical paper hat with a horsehair plume. By craning our necks the other way, we could see his father, Duke Niccolo, his stern face covered by a cuckold’s mask adorned with rough-hewn wooden horns. No one knew who climbed the columns supporting the bronzes to mock Borso’s sagacity with a dunce’s cap or remind the city how Niccolo was deceived by his wife, but it happened every year, and Duke Ercole, though a proud man, never attempted to find the culprits or remove the decorations, and the people loved him for it.

  ***

  The privations of Lent were exaggerated for us by Duke Ercole’s continuing refusal to hand over madonna’s bride money. Several of her Spanish musicians had been forced to return to Rome when she ran out of funds for their keep, though the singers seemed glad to go because, they said, the marsh air was ruining their voices. Now her goldsmith, her candlemaker, and assorted grooms were obliged to follow. Perhaps madonna hoped, when the Holy Father saw how his daughter was impelled to reduce her circumstances, he would threaten the old duke with excommunication if he did not take the padlocks off the coffers. Whatever her belie
f, she continued resolutely to smile and charm and acquiesce in all the new arrangements, and if she cried herself to sleep at night, we did not know it because she spent every night with Don Alfonso. As they were newlyweds, a papal dispensation had been granted from that aspect of the Lenten fast.

  Our days were marked by attendances at Mass, followed by visits to Sister Osanna in her new quarters in the convent of Santa Caterina.

  “I expect it will make Sister Osanna feel more at home, to see a familiar face,” remarked Donna Isabella, who accompanied us on one of our visits. “Of course, all Mantua is honoured by your highness’s interest in her, but I always doubted she would travel well.”

  “She seemed perfectly content all the way here,” said Donna Lucrezia as we waited for our carriage door to be opened in the convent courtyard. “Do you not think, Violante?” Once again, I had been chosen to be madonna’s companion on this visit in the interests of my Christian education, and as custodian of Fonsi, who now went everywhere with her.

  “No doubt she caught the mood of us all, madonna.”

  Donna Lucrezia gave a faint, but grateful smile. She looked pale, and the flesh had fallen somewhat from the bones of her face, making her so like Cesare I could hardly bear to look at her and was relieved my situation obliged me to keep my eyes cast down for most of the time. If I ever forgot him, it was only the way we forget the world of nature surrounding us, merely to be drawn back into consciousness of it by the exquisiteness of a frost-furred cobweb or the sharp, lonely bark of a fox in the depths of the night.

  “All the same,” countered Donna Isabella, popping a crystallised mint leaf into her mouth, “I had the feeling she was about to begin prophesying and the upheaval was bound to set her back. I would have counselled leaving it a little longer, had anyone asked my opinion.”