Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  Though she had been in bed when I left her, madonna was now lying on top of the covers, wrapped in her dressing gown, which had slipped from her shoulder and fallen open to leave one leg exposed. Her back was arched to a degree where I feared her spine must snap, her eyes had rolled up into her head, a foam of saliva slicked her chin, and the unearthly growling came from deep in her stretched throat. Fonsi, who was, as usual, sitting beside her on the bed, set up a frenzied yapping

  “We were just talking and…”

  “What? I can’t hear.”

  He tried again, but could not make himself heard above the dog’s ear-piercing racket. He grabbed the dog by the scruff of its neck. It whimpered; I winced. “Shut up,” he told it, and rapped its nose before replacing it at the foot of the bed, where it remained, snout on paws, perfectly silent. I wanted to be Cesare’s dog, I thought, lying at his feet, secure in the smell of him, to be kicked or kissed at his whim and grateful for his attention.

  “I can’t deal with this,” I said. “She needs a doctor.”

  “I brought Torella. She seemed quite well, so I sent him to rest. He’s not used to hard riding like Michelotto and I. Michelotto!” This in the direction of the door. “Where the devil is Torella? How long can it take to find someone in this bloody hutch?”

  No reply.

  “Now you must help me,” I told him; this was no time for deference, and if he thought me impertinent he could deal with me as he saw fit once the crisis was over. One way or the other. “We must put her on her side. There. You hold her steady while I pile the pillows behind her so she can’t roll back. And her tongue. In the falling sickness, they say people bite off their tongues.”

  Cesare remained with his hands clamped over his sister’s flank as though his flesh was fused to hers by the heat of her fever. “She doesn’t have the falling sickness,” he said, while I hunted about the room for some strap or stick to wedge over her tongue.

  “The fever can do it sometimes. I have seen it in others.”

  Nothing. Perfume bottles, hair brushes, tubs of cochineal paste, jewelled girdles, and hat pins. What was needed was…

  “Your sword belt. Give me your sword belt.” The sword was already unclipped from it and propped in a corner. But he stayed frozen, unable to move. “The sword belt,” I shrieked, leaning across the bed, only inches from his face. He started, straightened up, tried to unbuckle the belt but failed, his fingers all of a tangle. Racing around to his side of the bed, I squeezed myself between him and it, our thighs and bellies pressed together in a parody of lust of which we were neither wholly aware nor unaware. I unfastened the belt, clambered on to the bed, and, kneeling behind Donna Lucrezia, pushed it into her mouth. She tossed back her head and bucked like a stubborn horse resisting the bit. Attempting to soothe her, I rubbed her back. It was then I realised the bedding bunched and rucked beneath her was sodden.

  “Her waters have broken,” I told Cesare, twisting round on the bed to face him.

  “It’s two months too soon.” We stared at one another with the calm of complete hopelessness; even Donna Lucrezia fell quiet, coming out of her fit with a long, shuddering sigh then lying as if asleep, spared the pains of labour as though the child too knew there was nothing to be done. Then Cesare blinked and shook his head as though shaking off a dream.

  “Torella!” he roared. “Name of Christ, where are you, man?”

  The arrival of Gaspare Torella, still clutching a lump of bread and cheese, was immediately consoling. I had met Cesare’s physician on several occasions in Rome, for he was a man as well versed in the social graces as in the profession of healing, and I liked him. He came from Valencia and he used to make me laugh. Cesare, I knew, held him in great trust since Torella had cured him of the pox by a complicated regime of purgings, blood lettings, and mercury sudations which were the talk of the spa at Stigliano while Cesare was enduring them. Torella had then written a treatise on the cure, with the patient’s enthusiastic connivance, and had, from the proceeds of his growing fame, presented his young patron with a gold and enamel pill box in which to keep the pills of celandine and aloe he was supposed to take each day with meals to prevent a recurrence of his illness.

  Cesare fairly pounced on him as he entered the room, knocking the remains of his meal out of his hand. As the food hit the floor, I expected Fonsi to rouse himself and go scavenging for it, for he loved cheese, but he stayed where Cesare had put him, though his nose quivered optimistically.

  “Thank Christ. We were just talking and then she had this…this fit and now…”

  “Yes, yes, your grace. If you would be so good as to sit quietly while I make my examination. Monna Donata? Will you assist me?” Torella was not a man for nicknames. I suppose it is a physician’s business to look behind masks.

  As I removed the pillows and turned madonna on to her back, she woke from her sleep with a groan of pain and clutched at her abdomen.

  “No,” she whispered, turning her grey, pleading gaze on me. “Please, no.”

  “Your waters have broken, madonna.”

  Hearing her speak, Cesare leapt out of the chair where he had been perched, fiddling with his sword, whose loose buckles made an irritating rattle against the scabbard. He knelt beside the bed and took her hand, obliging Torella to abandon his attempt to take the pulse of that wrist and move to her other side. This he did with almost paternal forbearance, as Cesare spoke low and passionately, in rapid Catalan, to his sister. She nodded and smiled, then another contraction gripped her and she turned from him, frowning, squeezing her eyes shut. “You must go now,” she whispered in Italian. “You will just be in the way. You can come and see your new nephew when it is all over.”

  He tried to resist but she was adamant.

  “It will only distress her further if she thinks you are witness to her suffering,” I said. “Go to Don Alfonso. He will be in need of company.” And I touched his cheek with the tips of my fingers, as though it was the most natural thing in the world to me.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Finding Don Alfonso was not difficult. He was already pacing around outside the bed chamber like a performing bear chained to a pole. Catherinella and two girls bearing armfuls of clean bedlinen cowered against the walls, though I think they were more afraid of Michelotto’s bloodshot, appraising eye than Don Alfonso’s impotent distress for his wife. Michelotto was seated beside a small table, a large wine jug at his elbow which, by the ease with which he lifted it, I determined to be nearly empty. Leaving madonna’s husband and her brother locked in a tearful embrace, I returned to her bedside.

  ***

  The child was born towards evening, when the sky outside the bedroom window was suspended between light and dark, and birds going to roost were beginning to be indistinguishable from the ash floating up from the plague pyres. At the final moment Donna Lucrezia suffered another fit, arching her back and growling like a dog as her daughter slid into the world in a pool of blood and mucus. Now she lay unconscious as I struggled to clean her and bind strips of linen between her inert legs to absorb her blood. Half of me waited for the baby’s thin, new cries to cut through the tolling of the evening Angelus; half of me knew she was dead. Prodding and turning the little corpse laid out in a silver dish, holding it up to the fading light, Torella pronounced the child to have been dead for several days at least.

  “Skin brownish, wrinkled, chest sunk, no vernix.” He peered into her ear, parting the whorls of gristle and skin like a gardener looking for a worm at the heart of a rose, then nodded, as though the ear had somehow confirmed his diagnosis. “Nothing to be done,” he said, handing the dish to me. He had not covered it; that was not his job. “I will speak to Don Alfonso if you will bring me to him.”

  There I stood, nodding like an idiot, cradling the dish against my ribs. “I will call the girls to change the bed, and Catherinella to comb her hair before…she must look her best for him.”

  “Monna Donata,” said Torella more gently, “she
is dying. There is not much time, I believe. Find Don Alfonso. And her priest.”

  “And Don Cesare?”

  Torella gave a resigned smile. “And Don Cesare,” he agreed. “Cover the dish,” he added, causing me to pause in my flight towards the door.

  I set the dish down on a table and looked at the dead child who, for all the months of careful anxiety and elaborate preparation, had slithered into the world as easily as a rabbit stripped of her skin. She was perfect, from the damp spikes of lashes fringing her eyelids to the bare cleft of her sex to the dawn grey nails at the tips of her toes. And suddenly I was glad she was dead, so she could never be changed the way I had been changed, or her mother, or any other woman in this man’s world.

  “Tell one of the servants to get rid of it,” said Ser Torella, then, mistaking the reason for my hesitation, added, “It’s nothing, it was not baptised, no need for ceremony.”

  But something, surely, to mark her passing, this tiny girl whose arrival in the world had been so keenly and lovingly anticipated. Some words, a smile, a touch. “I will do it myself. Best not to let the news get out among the servants before Don Alfonso learns of it. I will do it, and then go to find him.”

  Ser Torella nodded. “Sensible girl.”

  I would give her to the fever carts. That way, at least she would have some words said over her by the poor Franciscans with their streaming eyes and smoke-hoarsened voices who prayed beside the lime pits and sometimes, stricken themselves, fell in among their congregation and burned. I would go now, carrying my basin as if it were no more than a full chamber pot or an empty dinner plate, across the courtyard and out into the piazza. There was always a cart near the cathedral, waiting outside the Porta di Guidizio from where the dead are carried out of the church for burial. I knew there would be another close by, at the locked gate to the Jewish quarter on Via San Romano, but I would not go there. People were saying it was Duke Ercole’s tolerance towards the Jews that had brought God’s wrath down on the heads of the Ferrarese, and it was not only the fever they had tried to shut out when they locked the gates.

  I had not even begun to think how I would persuade the porter to let down the drawbridge for me, when I heard my name called out of the abnormal silence of the closed and shuttered courtyard.

  “Violante!”

  In the deepening twilight, thickened by the smoke from the last of the day’s pyres, the voice was eerie, disembodied, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Was it the voice of my conscience? No. I had done no wrong. I wanted nothing more than that the child should be able to rest peacefully.

  “What are you doing out here all alone?” Cesare. Oh God, no, not yet. I gripped the basin tighter, drawing it close as though I could hide it under my clothes. What could I say if he asked? Though as he emerged from the gloom and I saw his face, the furrows pinched between his brows, the strained, almost pleading expression in his dark-circled eyes, I realised there was nothing to say. “Why are you not with your mistress?” he demanded, his tone veering between hope and dread. “Is the child born?”

  The lip of the basin dug into my ribs. Perhaps, if I pressed hard enough, the bones might part and swallow the child. “Yes, my lord. I was looking for you…and Don Alfonso, of course.”

  “Out here? Alfonso is bird watching. On the roof with his lenses and a wine jug.” I thought of the loose panel in madonna’s ceiling. He knows already, then, I thought, relieved.

  “You are here,” I said in my defence.

  “Needed some air.” He gave an ironic cough, but there was no humour in it. “Tell me, have I a nephew? How is my sister?”

  “My lord…Cesare…”

  “Tell me. Do not mince your words.” He grasped me by my shoulders and shook me. I clung to the basin. The smell of wine and sleeplessness was heavy on his breath.

  “The child was stillborn.”

  His hands dropped to his sides. My glance flickered over the basin. Seeing where I looked, he lifted the corner of the cloth. I cringed from him, hugging my burden to my belly, but I could not stop him.

  “A girl,” he said, covering the bowl again with careful deliberation. “Good. If she had lost a son at this stage, it could have been catastrophic for us.”

  How could he be so cool? Had he not looked, had he not seen? Her tiny fingers, splayed like frogs’ feet, her mouth that had been made to suckle and chatter and one day kiss her lover? Inside me, something broke. “Her daughter,” I yelled, “your niece. Dead.” In that moment, I hated him. “If it hadn’t been for you, she might have carried a child of either sex safely to term. If you hadn’t invaded Urbino, she never would have become ill. Tell me, are you here out of concern for her or your own ambition?”

  “They are one and the same,” he said, then paused, looking at me as though he had only just recognised me. “Torella should never have asked you to dispose of it.” Even through my tears, I was aware of something in his tone which made me anxious for Ser Torella. “Give it to me.”

  My grip tightened. “What will you do with her?”

  “Just give it to me.” He wrenched the bowl from me and, stepping up on to the ravelin alongside the drawbridge, emptied its contents into the moat, the little corpse slipping from beneath the linen cloth just the way the dead slide off the shrouded board when they are buried at sea. He stood for a moment, a dark silhouette, staring down into the water, and when the body did not sink, he stooped to pick up a loose stone from the walkway and threw it after it. As the stone hit its mark, and Donna Lucrezia’s daughter sank from view, something snagged at my memory.

  Don Juan. There had been a witness, I recalled, a watchman guarding a consignment of logs on the riverbank overnight, who had seen Don Juan’s body slipped into the Tiber from the rump of a horse. The horseman, a well-dressed man wearing gloves with jewelled cuffs, had been obliged to spend some time throwing stones at the dead man’s billowing cloak until the corpse sank. The body, they say, is lightened by three pounds when the soul leaves it. The watchman had thought nothing of it; bodies were dumped in the Tiber every night.

  Then Cesare stepped down from the ravelin, out of the shadow of its salient, and he was merely a man in his shirtsleeves, his hands bare, his expression tired and shuttered and sad.

  “Did you make a wish?” I asked him. He looked puzzled. “When you threw the stone,” I added.

  “Ah.” He paused. I was certain he was only now thinking of a wish, and wondered why he would bother, why he would not simply lie to me. “Yes,” he said, “but before I tell you what it is, you must tell me what you meant. Concerning Urbino.” It was not a request, though his tone was light enough.

  “You would know if you’d seen her. Crying and screaming. Tearing at her hair and face. She even ripped the curtains down and broke most of the furniture at Belfiore.”

  To my utter confusion, Cesare started to laugh. “Did she indeed, the little cat? Well, she must learn to trust me better.”

  Sweat was breaking on my brow and upper lip. I wiped my palms on my skirt and felt the damp flesh between my breasts prickle in the breeze which had risen with the coming of evening. He took a step towards me, pressing his body, clad now in nothing but his shirt and breeches, against mine.

  “Now you know my wish,” he whispered. I felt short of breath, my heart was hurling itself against my ribs like a madman in a cage. I lifted my face, inhaled jasmine and sweat and stone dust, let my eyes graze the lean curve of his mouth. I was opening, wide as a pond lily, a blown rose…

  “You must go to her. Ser Torella says it will not be long.” Shaking as if I, too, were coming down with the fever, I turned away. Now was not the time.

  “She is dying? She will not die, Violante; you will prevent it.” He took my arm, though more like a gaoler than a lover, and turned me towards the Torre Marchesana. “Tell her…tell her Guidobaldo of Urbino was planning to go to the defence of Camerino.”

  I could feel through my sleeve and my skin the frailty of his bones against mine, and it cam
e to me suddenly that this great physical strength of his, this wrestling with peasants and bending horseshoes and beheading bulls, was just another performance, another mask. This thought gave me confidence. Donna Lucrezia would not die; I would save her. “Tell her yourself,” I said.

  ***

  When we entered her bedchamber, it seemed at first that Donna Lucrezia was completely unattended. Clean linen had been put on the bed, and madonna’s breasts had been bound to stop her milk, but she was still unconscious, her cheeks sallow, her eyelids tinged with blue, her mouth bruised from my ramming Cesare’s sword belt under her tongue. Cesare went straight to her side. He lay beside her on the bed, his head close to hers, and spoke softly to her. Taking strands of their hair, where it mingled on the pillow, he began to plait it together, the dark red and pale gold. It seemed too intimate a scene for me to witness, so I began to busy myself about the room, tidying away the detritus of Ser Torella’s trade. Where was he? Had he simply given up on her and gone away? It was then I noticed Catherinella. She was seated at madonna’s dressing table. This was behind the door, which explained why I had not seen her before. A gold circlet set with jewels sparkled in her springy hair, necklaces covered her breast.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted.

  “Madonna dyin’,” she replied. I raised my hand to hit her, then, catching a glance at her reflection in the polished silver mirror, lit by candles burning on the dressing table, I saw, not the slave taking advantage of her mistress’s incapacity but my Madonna of Strangers.

  “Are you praying for her, Catherinella?” I asked, more gently, but before she could reply, Cesare was upon her, wrenching the circlet from her head. A few strands of hair, curled tight around the gold band, came away with it, causing the slave to cry out.

  “Where is Ser Torella?” he demanded, thrusting his face so close to hers she flinched as though his breath had scorched her.