Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “Gone.”

  “Gone where?” He grabbed her by her hair and bent her head back until I heard the bones crack in her neck.

  “Find Don Alfonso,” she whined.

  “And he left you to watch over your mistress. And this is how you repay her. By stealing what belongs to her.” His voice was barely above a whisper. He hauled the slave to her feet, turned her to face him, and yanked the necklaces from her neck. They slid through his fingers and clattered on to the dressing table. Catherinella began to jabber in her own tongue. As Cesare dragged her from the room, her embroidered satin slippers fell off and her broad black toes scrabbled at the rugs.

  “Michelotto!” he roared at the door. “Come here.”

  The thud of running footsteps, the jangle of sword and spurs.

  “Don Cesar?” He sounded breathless.

  “Put that somewhere secure until I have time to deal with it.”

  “Yes, Don Cesar.”

  ***

  By the time Ser Torella reappeared, accompanied by a dishevelled, red-eyed Don Alfonso, Donna Lucrezia had regained consciousness and I had persuaded her to take a little chicken broth, which she had managed to keep down, though it stung her bruised lips. In calm, matter-of-fact tones, Cesare told her about the baby. “Your womb was made to carry sons,” he concluded, and bowed to kiss her hand so he missed the sad smile with which she greeted his speech. I thought nothing, then, of her docility, putting it down to her weakness, and relief that she had not given birth to a dead boy.

  Towards morning, Ser Torella decided madonna was strong enough to endure a bleeding. “It’s a miracle,” he said, glancing in my direction as he made his selection from his case of fleams. “You have the gift, Monna Donata; there is no doubt about it.”

  “You are a good doctor, messer.” It said much for Ser Torella’s medical skill that he had the confidence and breadth of mind to admit the existence of natural healers, even though I thought it unlikely I was one of them. Most doctors dismissed such gifts as witchcraft or old wives’ tales. “And I believe the devotion of her husband and Duke Valentino must also have helped to restore madonna to strength.”

  Madonna nodded and smiled her agreement, though her gaze flicked uneasily towards the blade Ser Torella was now holding up to the light as he tested its sharpness on the ball of his thumb.

  “Is it absolutely necessary to bleed her, man?” asked Cesare, as though reading her mind.

  “The sooner the bad blood retained during her pregnancy can be drawn off, the sooner she will be restored to health and her husband’s bed. Otherwise the womb can suffocate.”

  “Let Ser Torella do his work,” Donna Lucrezia admonished gently, slurring her words a little through her damaged lips.

  The doctor elected to bleed her from her right foot, the moon being now in Virgo, and Virgo an occidental sign, cold and feminine like Pisces, which governs the feet. Though, he sighed, Virgo is dry and melancholic, while Pisces is wet and phlegmatic, but beggars can’t be choosers. He had me set up a low stool at the side of the bed, upon which madonna could rest her foot at a lower level than the rest of her body to aid the flow of blood, but still he had difficulty in finding a responsive vein. Eventually, he let Cesare hold her foot, and all the while he told jokes, and did wicked impressions of people we had known in Rome—dour Master Burchard, Cardinal Piccolomini who was nearing ninety and prone to snoring through Mass, Don Diego Lopez de Haro, the Spanish ambassador whose nose Juan Borgia had broken in a wrestling bout and who now always spoke as though he had a cold.

  He gave us Prince Djem.

  “Dear Djem,” madonna sighed. “Do you remember the times we had with him? How mercilessly Juan used to tease him. He adored Juan, you know, and Juan was the most fearful flirt.” Though her remark was evidently addressed to me, her gaze kept shifting uncomfortably towards Cesare. I remembered she had once said Cesare loved Djem, yet he was showing little respect for his friend’s memory now as he puffed out his cheeks and tucked his chin into his neck to emulate the prince’s portliness.

  “Sip the poppy juice, my dears,” he said in a sibilant wheeze, “so much more efficacious than a tisane.”

  “He grew some special poppies in a corner of the garden near the Belvedere,” explained Donna Lucrezia, “from seeds sent him by his brother the Sultan. The juice made you see…” Her voice tailed off briefly, then she asked, “What did you see, Cesar?”

  “The future,” he replied with a dismissive laugh, and moved on to the Holy Father’s Greek secretary, Podocario, who had become somewhat deaf in his old age.

  When Don Alfonso excused himself to answer a call of nature, for excessive drinking was always prone to loosen his bowels, he extended his repertoire to include Donna Isabella, so that by the time Don Alfonso returned, we were all, including Ser Torella, weeping with laughter, Donna Lucrezia clutching her bound breasts and begging her brother to stop for she could not bear the pain of laughing with them so engorged. The pain of the bloodletting she scarcely noticed.

  “Now,” said Ser Torella, setting aside the basin of blood for examination and cleaning his blade with a soft cloth, “you must rest, madonna. Perhaps you would like Don Alfonso to remain with you until you fall asleep?” It was a subtle choice. Ser Torella clearly understood that Cesare would be her choice, but also, perhaps, that I might persuade him away from her side. Cesare hesitated.

  “We will not go far,” I promised him. “Come, my lord, walk with me in the orange garden.” The orange trees grew in lead and terracotta pots on a roof terrace overlooking the moat from the Torre Leone. From madonna’s apartments you reached it along a cloistered walk running the short distance between the two towers.

  “Stop ‘my lording’ me,” Cesare ordered, slipping his arm through mine in comradely fashion as we stepped out on to the walk. “You and I have been through something of a campaign together this night. It makes equals of us.”

  “That is very republican—for a duke,” I teased, emboldened by his familiarity. Bushes of lavender and rosemary lined the walk, clipped and trained into the chalices, swords, money, and batons of a pack of playing cards. Cesare snapped a stalk of rosemary from the tip of a sword, rubbed it between his fingers, and held it to my nose. I breathed in, the sharp, hot fragrance filling my lungs and making my nerves tingle with new energy.

  “Government by the people has much to commend it,” said Cesare. “My cities in the Romagna all have their own council of elders. They appoint their own judges and suchlike. They are even permitted to raise their own militias, within certain limits. I have found men fight far better if it is their own homes and families they are protecting.”

  “They are still your cities, though.”

  “You know, Violante, I have acquired some great reputation as a soldier. It is because my father likes to arrange triumphs. He wants the Romans to see me as some kind of latterday Caesar. But truth to tell, most of those cities surrendered to me of their own free will, happy to escape tyrants who ruled by whim. I negotiated with them. That’s what the best generals do; they avoid battles if they can. They remain loyal to me because my taxes are systematic, my justice predictable, and my capacity to buy grain when harvests fail almost unlimited. Money and good management. If you read Caesar, which I don’t suppose my father has since he was a boy, you will find he says the same. The rest is putting on a show. The people like that too.”

  Something did not ring quite true about this practical Utopia he was describing. “What will you do about Catherinella?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The slave.”

  “Why? Does it matter to you?” He turned to me with a slow, lascivious smile. “Is that your price, then, the slave’s life? Nothing more?”

  “I do not know what you mean.”

  “Of course you do. Everyone has their price. I will spare her, if you like.”

  I felt humiliated, and angry that he should try to make Catherinella’s fate my responsibility. Part of me knew that w
as his way, but part of me struggled to deny it. I wanted him to be worthy of my love. “You should spare her for your sister,” I said. “For myself, I love you anyway.” There. The words were out. Not as I had imagined, with tears and maidenly tremblings. Not syrupy with lust, but strident with indignation. If he were worthy, I realised, if he were noble and forgiving, fair-minded and unselfish, he would hold no fascination for me at all. The store of love inside me shifted a little, away from myself and towards Cesare.

  He leaned over the parapet of the walk and gazed towards the cathedral. A light, warm breeze was blowing, carrying the warbling of the doves which nested among its friezes and statues. Its pink marble façade glowed like flesh in the rose-tinged early sunlight. “Leon Battista Alberti,” he announced. “Built the campanile,” he added, seeing me look puzzled. “The man who says there are no rules. None to break and none to guide us, just each of us alone with his own ingenuity.”

  I placed the flat of my hand against his back. The tips of his red curls licked my fingertips like flames.

  No smoke, no sulphur. No fires were burning. The air was perfectly clear. Both of us realised at the same instant. We turned towards one another, each about to speak, but neither of us said a word. And this is where time slows, then stops, and my life’s direction changes forever.

  ***

  Lips parted for speech meet in a kiss. Tongues which have teased and flirted, reproached, defended, or explained now speak only the dumb language of attraction. Perhaps because I am so tired, I am both engaged in the kiss yet watching myself, floating outside myself somewhere in this new, clean air which shows me my intentions without any obfuscation. At base, beneath our silk and linen, we are not so different from the dogs that copulate in the gutters, I think, and with that thought comes a surge of dirty lust, driving my body against Cesare’s, sluicing from me reason, propriety, and common sense. My eyes close with the weight of it; my breath quits my lungs and enters his.

  And just when I believe my rapture will drown me, when all my organs seem to have turned to syrup, he saves me.

  “Thank you,” he says, pulling out of the kiss, though he continues to hold me, so close I am still lost in the landscape of his face. This near, it is a geometer’s landscape, all planes and angles, and I see it still, despite the years and the ocean, with the eyes of the heart that knows nothing of the passing of time.

  “For what?” I ask, in the now of then, when I was a girl.

  “For saving Lucrezia’s life.”

  “I did nothing. It was your Ser Torella who saved her. You must thank him.”

  Removing one hand from my waist, he makes a dismissive gesture. “He will be rewarded. I have a pair of fine carriage mules to give him. The best. From Poitou. In France,” he adds, seeing I do not know where Poitou is.

  “Where your wife is.” As I hear myself saying it I wish I could snatch back the words.

  He gives an exasperated sigh. “Violante, did I not tell you once I had no time for wooing virgins? Your conscience is your own affair, not mine.”

  “And yours?”

  “I have none. Didn’t you know?” He grins suddenly and hugs me close, grazing the lobe of my ear with his teeth. “I am a monster,” he growls, softly, in the back of his throat. “I turn into a wolf when the moon is full and feast on the hearts of all those unwise enough to fall in love with me. Roasted, with trompetti de morte.”

  “Mine you must have with rosemary,” I tell him, my breath hot against his neck. For rosemary is the herb of the sun, which eases the heart and cleanses the mind. Lest there be any doubt in me about what I am doing.

  “And oranges.” He takes my hand and leads me into the orange garden, weaving a path between the trees in their pots and the little braziers where fires are lit to keep them warm during the winters. The fruit all ripen at different times, so the air is rich with the mingled scents of the fruit and its blossom, with hot stone and the drone of bees nosing among the waxy white flowers. A loggia runs along the back wall of the garden. Deep in its recess is a broad stone bench beneath a brocade canopy, piled with cushions of satin and velvet, plump and glossy as fruits on a market stall.

  Cesare leads me under the white marble arcade, into the blue shade of the loggia. His magic blinds the eyes at the castle windows and bridles the tongues of gossips in the piazza. Nothing matters but the sinuous curl of his fingers and the heat of his palm pressed against mine. I watch as he takes the cushions from where they are stacked and spreads them over the bench. Apparently careless, his actions are fastidious, considered. I am fascinated by the way in which his grace of form can transform even such domestic commonplaces into a kind of physical poetry, each cushion picked up, each twist and stoop at the waist a stanza. The cushions, I think, are line endings, and this thought makes me smile, and my smile makes him pause to intercept it with his own.

  He holds out his hand, the one with the powder burn. I take a step towards him and begin to slide my arms around his waist, but he takes my hands and presses the flat of my palms against his chest. His shirt has come unlaced so we are flesh to flesh and the sweat dampened hair on his chest coils around my fingers, knots us together. The hair is dark, it has no red in it, and his heart beats so steadily compared with mine, which is dashing itself in a frenzy against my breastbone.

  I am suddenly rigid with anticipation and uncertainty. I feel my palms begin to sweat and pray he will not notice. But he does.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  My cheeks burn in the fire of his eyes. “I…I am not La Fiammetta, or the Princess Sancia…”

  He presses two fingers to my lips. I smell the camphor used to preserve the cushions from moth. “You are more precious to me than either. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nod. I do know it, though I do not understand why, when I have no city, no land, no name or titles nor any amatory skills other than what Angela has taught me. Knowledge without understanding is not enough to make me relax. With a wry little smile he scoops me up, one arm under my shoulders, the other beneath the backs of my knees, and lays me gently down on the cushions.

  “Then what are you afraid of?” he asks, pulling his shirt over his head. His chest hair makes a pattern the shape of a goblet, the bowl narrowing to a stem just under his ribs. “What are you thinking?” he tries, when I do not reply. I tell him. He laughs and sits beside me. “Show me.”

  I raise my hand to a point next to his left nipple, dark as a mulberry. I watch my hand as though it belongs to somebody else; it is stained violet by the light filtering through the canopy. As I trace the outline of the goblet with the tip of one finger, following the ridges of his ribs to the muscular flat of his belly, Cesare flinches and laughs. He is ticklish, I realise, and my heart somersaults. But he is deadly serious again as my finger comes to a halt where the stem of the goblet extends below his navel.

  “Don’t stop,” he says, loosening his breeches. Freed from constraint, his sex seems to yearn towards my hand. “You see, you are the lodestone of desire,” he murmurs, but my hand is paralysed, as though it has its own sense of modesty quite apart from anything my brain might try to impose upon it, and my whole body trembles in the grip of this war between them.

  And Cesare, who understands war, sits back, tugs off his boots, then stretches himself out beside me on the cushions and begins, with slow, assured fingers, to unlace my bodice. Dressed in haste for nursing, I am not wearing a corset. I lie with my arms stiff at my sides, fists clenched, nails dug into my palms, aware of nothing but his sex pressed into the dip between my belly and my Venus’ mound. He loosens the neck of my shift and kisses my breasts, one after the other, making a circle around each nipple with the point of his tongue. I think of Angela.

  “Did you know,” he murmurs, “that Don Cristobal Colon, the governor of the Indies, once wrote to Queen Isabella that the earth is the shape of a woman’s breast and the Garden of Eden is on the very nipple of it.”

  I do not ask myself how he knows this. Desi
re washes from my throat to the parts of me that have been secret until now, waiting for my conquistador with his wise hands and his smile that dares the devil. Shifting his position slightly, he slides one hand beneath my skirts, pressing my thighs apart, seeking out this new world.

  “You don’t believe in the Garden of Eden,” I remind him.

  “Oh but I do,” he assures me, and I think of Don Cristobal, and of how I am the whole earth cupped in my lover’s hand.

  His fingers stroke and probe, but they do not find their mark, and I want to tell him, to reach down and guide his touch, but I do not know how. I want to make him happy; I want him to love me, so I pretend, squirming and sighing, and I believe he is deceived. Abruptly, he twists free of me and rises to his feet. Removing the rest of his clothes, he stands over me, and I am suddenly seized by a desire to laugh.

  He looks so foolish, foolish and vulnerable with his sex stuck out in front of him, thick and coarse, the dark flesh ridged with gristle. It seems not to belong to the rest of his fine-boned, long-sinewed body, his skin unblemished except for a small, red scar the shape of a sunburst just above the line of his private hair. Nothing is written on his body; even in his nakedness he is an enigma. I bite my lips and hunt for something serious to think about. Kneeling between my legs, he bundles my skirts around my waist, opens me with two fingers, and pushes himself inside.

  This is impossible. He is too big. I will tear; everything inside me will be ripped and ragged. The pain is deep and sharp, sudden, focused, but where, I cannot tell. I moan, I shake my head, I squeeze my eyes shut. Again I am misunderstood as he drives further into me. Now something changes. My thighs strain apart, my hips arch up to meet his; I am all greed, nothing but a mouth, sucking and salivating. He shudders, gives a muffled groan which I feel against my neck, and lies still. I feel his skin cooling against mine; I feel like a child who has been offered a sweet, only to have it snatched away as she reaches out to take it. I breathe in deeply, willing my blood to slow, my heart to steady, my legs, which are clasped around Cesare’s waist, to relax their grip, to let him go.