Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “Is it true?”

  “That I am Duke Valentino’s spy? No, Giulio, it is not.” Until now I had been buoyed up on some spurious elation, flattered that Ippolito should imagine Cesare would trust me enough to spy for him. Now, as Giulio raised the possibility for examination, it was bitterly clear to me how absurd a suggestion it was. “He could invade Ferrara this afternoon and I most likely wouldn’t know until next week,” I added, feeling a tide of black bile spread through my body. The concern in Angela’s eyes, her Borgia eyes, made me feel worse.

  “But you see his letters to the duchess?” he persisted.

  “She sees as much of them as the rest of us,” snapped Angela. “She sees rolled vellum and a red seal dangling from a purple ribbon. What transpires between my lady and her brother is anybody’s guess.” I thought she was lying, but about what I had no idea, and I was grateful for her intervention, for making me look less of a fool. I nodded my agreement.

  “Now we must see to your hand before it stiffens up completely.”

  With some unworthy pun on stiffening extremities, Giulio allowed himself to be led away, leaving me to return to my needlework, an abandoned Fonsi trailing on my heels. As Angela and Giulio were swallowed up by the dense shade of the cloistered arcade running along outside the Sala del’ Elefante, the garden seemed suddenly, shockingly empty. Not even the creak of a wheelbarrow or the oiled snip of shears interrupted the heavy silence. There was no breeze to tickle the lake into laughter or set the chestnut whispering, no music from the birds roosting through the heat of the day. From this side of the house I could not even hear the racket from the kitchen as the day meal was prepared. I was sunk in a bright dungeon of heat, the sun hammering on my head and scalding my lungs as I breathed, the edges of my corset chafing under my arms where my sweat-soaked shift had bunched into a swab of wet linen.

  I didn’t care if Cesare invaded Florence, or Milan, or Venice, or the Holy Roman Empire itself. I just wished he would get whatever he had planned over and done with and come here, and fill this dull Ferrarese court with jokes, intrigue, Spanish music, and all-night card games. I would personally climb that damned chestnut tree to pick its spiny fruit for a chance to watch him throw back his head and laugh at the sight of naked whores crawling among lamp stands in pursuit of it. Closing my eyes I could glimpse the point of his tongue caught between his white teeth, smell the perfume released by his hair as it tumbled down his back. Jasmine, olives, the salt air from Ostia when the wind blew from the west, and something secret and feral that was unique to him, the truth of him, perhaps. Or perhaps my famished memory suffering the delusions of hunger.

  Well, my wish was granted, but, as is the case with all the best wishes, not in quite the way I had imagined when I made it.

  ***

  Though we all retired to our rooms during the hottest part of the day, Angela did not join me in our chamber. She was, I suppose, giving Giulio’s bruised knuckles her undivided attention. It did not occur to me for one moment that Giulio might actually have taken up Ippolito’s instruction to return to the city; his status as the bastard of a much loved mistress made him a slippery eel to catch. By rights Fidelma should also have had her bed in our room, but whatever differences had emerged between Angela and I since we came to Ferrara, we were of exactly the same mind about Fidelma. She was humourless, pious, and not to be trusted. Any confidence shared with Fidelma would bounce off her like water off hot steel, to land heaven knew where and in what misconstruable fragments. We made sure there was no room for her in our chamber.

  Was it Angela’s urgent whisper, her hand rattling my shoulder as though it were a stuck lock, that woke me? Or had I come to my senses seconds before, roused by the cacophony of screaming, cursing, breaking glass, and wood splintering.

  “Violante. Wake up. I need your help with Lucrezia.”

  “What’s happened?” My eyes felt swollen and gritty, my head full of furry mould that had leaked into my mouth.

  “She’s had a letter from Cesare.”

  My heart seemed to squeeze shut like a fist. “Is he dead?”

  “Oh God give me strength. I said from him, not about him.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” I shook my head, rubbed my eyes. A torrent of Donna Lucrezia’s Catalan reached my ears from somewhere along the passage outside.

  “He’s taken Urbino.”

  “Urbino?”

  “Exactly,” said Angela, utterly misinterpreting the shock I could not keep out of my voice. “He’s totally overstepped the mark. Guidobaldo’s a popular ruler. Good God, he was even Uncle Rodrigo’s Gonfalonier himself at one time. And his wife is Donna Isabella’s sister-in-law. Lucrezia’s raging. If we can’t do something to calm her, I’m afraid for the baby.”

  But, though I went through the motions of tightening my bodice, pushing my feet into my shoes, hurrying after Angela, my thoughts were all centred on myself and my curious experience in the palace garden at Urbino. Had I known all along? Should I have told what I knew? No one would have believed me. I would have been dismissed as Angela dismissed me, as a moonstruck girl, sick with unrequited passion. Besides, what would I have had to tell? A mere whispered nonsense, a wraith of perfume, a breath which might have been no more than the winter breeze.

  We found Donna Lucrezia stalking the broad, arcaded walkway before the door to her private apartments. The sinking sun cast long bars of shadow which she crossed and re-crossed, a prisoner of the fury that shook her body as though it were possessed of a demon. Her hair hung in her eyes, her clothes were torn, the backs of her hands scored with bloody scratches. Her stockinged feet crunched heedlessly over shards of glass and pottery, splinters of wood from a broken stool whose leather upholstered seat now balanced precariously on the balustrade running along the open side of the passage.

  “She is mad,” I muttered to Angela. “There is nothing we can do. We must fetch her doctor. Or a priest,” I added, feeling myself blush.

  Angela shook her head. “We must just calm her down. Take her arm one side and I’ll take the other. If we can just get her to stand still long enough to listen to reason.”

  I doubted mere reason could make any impression on her, but lunged towards madonna as her steps turned in my direction, in an attempt to grab hold of one of her flailing arms. Seeing me, she stopped dead in her tracks.

  “You,” she growled, in the eerie voice of a fighting cat. She brought her arm down and pointed at me, jabbing at my chest with a finger whose nail was as ragged as a scullery maid’s. “Come with me.”

  I looked at Angela. She shrugged. Terrified, I followed Donna Lucrezia into her apartments.

  The rooms looked as though they had been sacked. Curtains had been torn down from the windows and lay strewn across the floor among clothes, jewels, and more broken glass and pottery. Bloody footprints marked everything like an angry skin rash.

  “Do you know what he’s done?” she demanded, turning on me before I had any chance to close the door to the little antechamber into which I had followed her. Neither Catherinella nor any of the other servants was anywhere to be seen. I could hear Fonsi whimpering somewhere, but I could not see him and did not dare call out to him.

  “N…no, madonna.” Why was she asking me? Did she know what had happened in Urbino, or was her question merely a rhetorical device?

  She seemed not to have heard my reply. “He promised,” she went on, speaking now almost in a whisper, shaking her head with a terrible, weary sadness. Then, “You promised!” she shrieked, her gaze fixed on me so for a moment I was scouring my memory for some promise I had made and failed to fulfil, until I realised she did not see me at all.

  “At Nepi. You promised, you swore you wouldn’t interfere.” She began pacing again, printing more blood spatters over the ones already drying on the torn curtains, clawing at her ears and tangled hair as though some foreign body were lodged in her head and she was trying to tear it out. Her fingers were soon bound as fast in long strands of pale hair as silk wor
ms in their cocoons. I feared for her eyes. “Why won’t you leave me alone? Leave me, let me get on with it, I can do it. Trust me. Is it the boy? Is that why?”

  At the mention of the boy she became suddenly calm. So, I realised with relief, she was not so deranged by the news from Urbino she had forgotten her responsibility to her unborn child. “It’s too soon,” she said, staring directly at me, hands folded over the rise of her belly.

  “Are you in pain, madonna? Perhaps you should lie down.” Though if her bed chamber was in anything like the same mess as this, God alone knew where she could lie. “I will send for the physician.” I stepped forward and tried to take her arm, but she shook me free with a grunt of impatience.

  Casting her eyes around the room as though she were seeing the chaos for the first time, she said, “I want you to see something.” She lifted a torn-down wall hanging to reveal the bureau where she kept her correspondence; balanced now on three good legs, it wobbled as the weight of the hanging was shifted from it and a half folded parchment slid to the floor. With an effort, Donna Lucrezia stooped to pick it up and handed it to me.

  “Read,” she commanded.

  The document was in a hand I did not recognise, though measured and careful, the hand of a scribe.

  “Read,” Donna Lucrezia repeated, “out loud.”

  “‘This lord,’” I read, “‘is truly splendid and magnificent, and in war there is no enterprise so great that it does not appear small to him; in the pursuit of glory and lands he never rests nor recognises fatigue or danger. He arrives in one place before it is known…’”

  “Yes, yes, that’s enough. He sent it as a joke, you see.”

  I frowned. I did not see. Donna Lucrezia sighed, and explained. “It is a report from the Florentine embassy which came to him at Urbino. He had the messenger intercepted and the report copied. He sent it, he says, for my amusement, that I might see how easily he had charmed the ‘maidenly republicans,’ he called them. You see, he takes nothing seriously, Violante. What am I to do?”

  “You must write and tell him your mind, madonna. If he understands how he has hurt you, he will withdraw from Urbino; I am certain of it.”

  Though tears were sliding down her face, carving salt channels through the scratches on her cheeks so I marvelled they did not seem to sting her, she laughed at this. “If he had any consideration for me, he would not have taken it in the first place. The Montefeltri are my family now, and they were forced to flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs, according to Donna Isabella, who has taken them in.”

  “Cesare is your family also, madonna,” I ventured.

  “Cesare is…” Now she began to cry in earnest, greedy, gulping sobs that threatened to use up all the air in the darkening room. “The very devil,” she wailed, stringing out the syllables of the word as though making a sound picture of the devil’s own tail. She began once again her pantomime of pacing, scratching, tearing at her hair, and muttering about Nepi, and, without waiting to be dismissed, I fled to get help.

  “Why does she keep talking about Nepi?” I asked Angela as we hurried in search of madonna’s cowering servants and shooed them back to restore order.

  “Nepi?” Angela looked puzzled. “You, there, find madonna’s chaplain. And the physician. Go!” she roared at a scrawny boy I thought I might have seen with Ferrante. “Nepi,” she repeated, in a tone of dawning understanding. “Lucrezia fled there with Rodrigo after his father was murdered. He was only a baby, and everyone knew Cesare had killed Alfonso of Bisceglie. Not with his own hands, but as good as. Michelotto,” she mouthed, not quite prepared to release the feared name into the balmy evening air of Belfiore. “Lucrezia was heartbroken. She swore she would never speak to Cesare again. A few weeks later, Cesare stopped over at Nepi on his way to Cesena to join his army. No one knows what happened, except that Lucrezia returned to Rome all sweetness and light and life carried on as though Alfonso had never existed.” She shrugged. “That’s all I can think of.”

  ***

  Though Donna Lucrezia ceased her ravings, and waited with the docility of a child who knows she has been naughty and strives to make amends while her servants made good the damage to her rooms, restoring upset furniture and torn down hangings where they could, consigning the rest to a bonfire beside the muck heap at the back of the stable yard, she was clearly not herself. She fainted while making confession in the ducal chapel. Her physician pronounced that she was running a fever, for which he bled her, and recommended complete bed rest for at least a week. Madonna, however, was having none of it, insisting upon an immediate return to Ferrara. No doubt Angela had reported to her the uneasiness of Ippolito and Giulio and, with her husband in Milan with the French court, and Duke Ercole said to be on his way there in response to Cesare’s invasion of Urbino, she was determined to secure her position as duchess.

  “What if the journey puts the child at risk, madonna?” I remonstrated with her as I supervised the packing of her wardrobe and she lay on her bed, her swollen feet, clad in purple silk stockings, as round and shiny as melanzane.

  “If I am to lose the child, it must be in Ferrara,” she replied. “I am far enough advanced now for it to be seen to have been a boy.” The weather had turned. A flat, grey light filtered through fine drizzle, in harmony with her pallor and the determined lines drawing her mouth down towards her jaw. I had rarely seen her father without a smile on his face, yet in repose, this is what he looked like, fleshy and ruthless, sentimental and without conscience. I determined to say no more. For one reason or another, God was bound to be watching Donna Lucrezia.

  CHAPTER 8

  FERRARA, AUGUST 1502

  You are my first and last and only love.

  It began with a member of the duke’s chapel choir. We were attending a service to celebrate one of the innumerable saints’ days which claimed our obligation. If I had known what would result from this particular Mass, perhaps I would have remembered which it was, and burned candles, or named a child in his honour.

  But all I knew was that the day was hot, and the incense-laden air of the chapel stifling almost beyond endurance. My fan seemed to raise the temperature rather than reduce the stuffiness, the way stirring a cauldron serves to release clouds of steam. How Donna Lucrezia could breathe through the heavy veil covering her scarred face, I could not imagine. I tried to concentrate on the service, but found my attention fixed instead on the dark patches of sweat beneath the choir master’s arms, rhythmically appearing and disappearing as he conducted the singers; on a single dust mote standing in the hard stream of light from the chapel windows.

  Suddenly there was a commotion in the choir. A boy, his sweat-shining face like polished ivory, dropped to his knees and slumped sideways. The music faltered, stumbled. With a series of rapid, emphatic hand movements the master steered them back on track. A couple of acolytes, feet tangled in their lace-trimmed albs, hauled the boy off through the door to the baptistry. Our worship continued unabated, and I felt sharper now, as though the faintness I had been experiencing had engulfed the choir boy instead. When we heard later that he had died, an irrational and unexpected sense of guilt overcame me, almost as if his death had been meant for me.

  We began to hear of more deaths. The fever started like marsh fever, with sweating and shaking and aches in the joints, but within hours the victims were seized with vomiting so severe it tore their vitals and left them bleeding from every orifice. Though the quarters in the Corte Vecchio set aside for the choir were thoroughly cleaned with hot water, and pomanders of ambergris and camphor hung from the roof beams, two more boys fell ill. The passage linking the castle to the Corte Vecchio was locked, and incense set to burn before the gate, but even so, Donna Lucrezia’s doctors stepped up their campaign to persuade her to leave the city once again. Don Alfonso was sent for from Milan, however, and she was determined to see him and take his advice.

  He and his father reached Ferrara about two weeks after the death of the choir boy, by wh
ich time the dead carts were collecting bodies from outside most of the humbler doors of the city each morning, and an intrepid group of Franciscan friars had begun to hold mass funerals on the edges of the lime pits which had been dug outside the Porta degli Angeli to receive the dead. The lay clergy had retreated within the walls of the cathedral, where masses were sung continually and those who could came to beseech San Giorgio to fight off the dragon of infection and San Maurelio to absolve them of whatever sins had brought this calamity upon them.

  Don Alfonso let it be known he would see his wife once he had met with the city council to see what might be done to alleviate the people’s suffering and slow down the rate of infection. That gave us three or four hours’ grace to devise some means of disguising the scratches which still scarred madonna’s face. Lead powder was Angela’s solution, but not too thick, I warned, or Don Alfonso would think madonna sick of the fever also. Elisabetta Senese set to work with pestle and mortar to concoct a paste of lead powder, carmine, and rose oil which would match madonna’s own complexion. Madonna, meanwhile, to my unease, spent an hour closeted with Fidelma.

  When Don Alfonso arrived in madonna’s apartments, he was still in his travel clothes, though he had made a cursory attempt at washing his face and hands and had beaten the worst of the dust from his cloak and boots. Like an artist’s sketch half erased, he wore a smudged, unfinished air, his eyes distracted and unfocused, his mouth working with anxiety. When madonna, accompanied by Fidelma, came through from her dressing chamber to the Camera Dal Pozzolo, her face was unveiled and bare of makeup. I heard Angela, beside me, catch her breath, sensed her draw her hood closer over her head. Don Alfonso stared at his wife, the hand he had lifted to kiss stranded in his great paw with its grimy fingernails. Recollecting himself, he bowed, let his beard brush the back of madonna’s hand, then straightened up and glared around the room at us as though he wished we would melt into the walls.