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Sins of the House of Borgia

Page 23

by Sarah Bower


  After a while he raises himself on one elbow and gives me a searching look. “What’s wrong?” He waits, but I do not know how to reply so he comes to his own conclusions. “Only now do you think of the consequences, eh?” he teases, tickling my belly.

  “It’s not that. Angela says no one ever gets pregnant their first time.”

  He looks sceptical at that, but all he says is, “What then?” I see realisation dawn. “I didn’t please you, did I? Well, well. What can I say in my defence? I wanted you so much, you see, have wanted you for so long, and I am overwrought with my sister’s illness…But excuses are not what you want, are they?” He strokes my private hair, prospects again for what it hides.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Truly, it doesn’t. Because his need has given me a glimpse of what it is to have power. I gaze up at his face, at the frown which has scored two lines of uneven length between his brows and the air of hesitancy flickering about his mouth and tell myself that, for this moment if no other, we are equals. More than equals.

  “Don’t lie to me.” He raises his hand from between my legs and licks his fingers. “Mistress Quim doesn’t.”

  I push a tangle of his hair back over his shoulder and, as I touch his damp skin, I have an unearthly, fleeting sense that we are fused, that I can understand. “Really,” I say, “it doesn’t matter.”

  Apparently satisfied I am telling the truth, he makes himself comfortable once again on our bed of cushions. Drawing me close, until I am lying with my head on his chest, my ear to his heart, his voice a tremor through the bones of my skull, he says, “I will tell you about Urbino, then. And by the time I have done that, we will be ready to make love again. And I will do better next time, I promise.” I wonder if he can feel me smile.

  As he speaks, he strokes my hair, in long sweeping movements down my back, ending just at the rise of my buttocks where he lets his hand rest for a moment before beginning again.

  “Do you remember,” he begins, which has almost the same magic power as once upon a time, “when the French occupied Rome in ’94?”

  “Only vaguely. I was just a little girl. And the Jews had their own militia. It was quite efficient. The French left us alone mostly, I think.”

  “Well I was nineteen. I had just been made a cardinal. I had a doctorate in canon law but no sword. Juan was in Spain, Lucrezia with her Sforza husband in Pesaro, Jofre…oh, I can’t even remember where he was; he was only a child still anyway. So it was just Papa and me and a handful of old churchmen. We had to take refuge in Sant’Angelo. Papa also brought along Giulia Farnese and my mother.” He laughs, and his tone changes to that of the gossip-mongering courtier who charms the visitors to La Fiammetta’s salons. “Can you imagine? Poor Master Burchard, who refused to leave Papa’s side, come what may, was terribly vexed by the order of precedence at dinner. Giulia was the current favourite but Mama, on the other hand, was the mother of the pope’s favourite children.

  “But that’s not the point. The point is this. While the women bitched and my father and the other cardinals planned how they would negotiate with Charles, I watched his army. It was the biggest army ever seen in Italy; it took them till long after dark to get through the Porta del Popolo, and I never saw so much as one foot soldier out of step. They had cannon with a bore the size of a man’s head. With an army like that at his back, even that slobbering little cripple could do anything he wanted. You know, Violante, it made my arms and legs tingle, cooped up in those horrible, thick-walled rooms in Sant’Angelo, thinking about what I could do with an army like that. It made me fall over my shiny new cardinal’s robes, so my mother would snap at me for being clumsy.”

  Moved by a surge of affection for this awkward, out-of-place boy he is describing, I lift my head from his breast and kiss him.

  “What was that for?” he asks, amused.

  “Nothing. Go on. You haven’t mentioned Urbino yet.”

  “You’re too impatient. There’s no hurry.”

  “People will be looking for us soon. What hour do you think it is?”

  He assesses the angle of the shadows fading across the brick patio. “Thirteenth, fourteenth. Sun’s going in, though. Where was I?”

  “Being told off by your mother.”

  “Plus ça change,” he says ruefully. “Yes, well, perhaps you know because it is one of those apocryphal stories they tell about me, that one of the conditions my father negotiated with Charles for his departure was that he could have me and Djem as hostages for everyone’s good behaviour. Considering what his men had already done in Rome, and elsewhere, you might say it was shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, but anyway, it was done. I escaped almost immediately. Papa and I had hatched a plan…”

  “I know. We used to talk about it at my school. We used to talk about you quite a lot at school. The main reason my friends came to my baptism was in the hope of getting a look at you. But you weren’t there.”

  “Ah, well, I didn’t know how beautiful you were then. I might have been prepared to enter a church for you.” He lifts my hair between his fingers and puts it to his lips. Then his fist tightens; he begins to pull, only stopping when my hiss of pain makes him realise he is hurting me. “But they killed Djem,” he says, in a voice as flat and dangerous as ill-tempered steel.

  “Donna Lucrezia says he died of a fever.”

  “He was poisoned, for sure. Charles realised how my father and I had planned my escape when he discovered my baggage train contained nothing but rocks and empty boxes, so he thought to spite Papa by depriving him of the money he received from the Sultan for Djem’s keep. Djem was as strong as an elephant; he would not have succumbed to a fever that easily.”

  “You were very fond of him, weren’t you?”

  “He let us be ourselves. You have no idea how rare a thing that is for people like us.”

  I think of myself, of my fair looks and three names and the language I sometimes dream in but no longer understand, but I keep silent because I want to find out who Cesare is when he is himself.

  “Entering his apartments was like walking into a dream. He lived in a sort of tent, with bright silk hangings rigged up like sails from the ceiling, and floors covered with cushions and silver trays on little curly legs, full of sweets.”

  I glance up at the canopy above us, feel the textures of silk and velvet against my skin, the tiny, random pricks of loose feathers. Perhaps Djem is watching us, from wherever the Mussulmen go when they die.

  “He burned incense because he liked the smell, not to ingratiate himself with some deity that didn’t give a damn about him. He taught us to cook lokum in a bronze pot hung over his fire, and encouraged us to drink poppy because he said there were all kinds of secrets locked up in a poppy seed that only the heat of our bellies could release. Lucrezia could never understand why you couldn’t just inhale the perfume of the flowers, but of course, they have none. I will never forgive the French for Djem.”

  “But they are your allies. Your wife is French.”

  “Why must you keep harping on my wife? She is my wife, and the French are not my allies; they are my tools, them and Spain. I will tell you one thing about my time in France and one thing only.”

  My heart begins a heavy, wet thudding, as though someone is pounding laundry inside my chest. I am not sure I want him to tell me anything about France.

  “While I was there, I realised something. It was, I suppose, the effect of distance, a kind of mental perspective if you will. I realised that if Italy were ever to be anything more than a playground for the kings of France and Spain, then she must become a state herself, with a king of her own.”

  “You?”

  He shrugs. “That does not matter. What matters is this.” He turns to face me, burrowing deeper among the cushions, and I know he has nearly reached the end of his story because I can feel he is ready for love again. With my arms around his waist, I draw him against me.

  “I took Urbino because I could,” he whispers, “bec
ause I wanted it, because I’m never going to be anyone’s prisoner ever again. I’m never going to do anyone’s will but my own.” He is on top of me now, his hair veiling our faces as we kiss, and I am opening to the sweet pressure of his desire…

  “Don Cesar?”

  In seconds he is on his feet, pulling his shirt over his head, shaking his hair out of his eyes. “Michelotto.”

  Time starts to move again.

  ***

  Michelotto stood, legs crossed, leaning against one of the white marble pillars of the arcade with the air of a man who had seen all this before. Cesare’s sword belt was slung over his shoulder, his spurs hanging from it as well as the sword, and the black tabard of the Knights of Saint John, in which Cesare had arrived in Ferrara in another lifetime, folded over his arm.

  As I scrabbled among the cushions for my discarded clothes he said, “Salvatore’s here. Says he’s intercepted a summons from Cardinal Orsini to Vitellozzo. And he’s got the assessment of fortifications at San Leo you asked Leonardo for.”

  “It begins, then. Good. Let’s lance the boil once and for all.”

  Michelotto cast me a suspicious glance as Cesare hauled on his hose and breeches. “Not a problem,” he said, in answer to his lieutenant’s unspoken query. No problem indeed; I had no idea what Michelotto was talking about, though soon all Italy would be talking about it too.

  Michelotto tossed him the tabard. He pulled it over his head and stepped out of the loggia. As he buckled on his sword he turned to me and said, “Bid my sister farewell for me. Tell her... tell her we will spend Christmas together.”

  And grinned, and blew me a kiss, and was gone, my last impression of him the clanking of his spurs overlaid by some choice remark about the state of the road to Milan. A saying of Plotinus came to me, one which had been a favourite of my father’s, that the life of every practical man is a bewitchment.

  ***

  I do not know how long I remained as I was, lying half naked in the loggia. My body ached with frustrated desire, yet my limbs, as I stretched them, felt impeded by a kind of heavy languor, as though I were under water. The air I breathed had become oppressively hot, yet my sweat was clammy and the damp patch where Cesare’s seed had trickled out of me made a cold brand on my right buttock. It was that which roused me, the thought of my maiden’s blood staining Donna Lucrezia’s cushions. What would become of me if it were discovered? Shame burned my cheeks. Rolling on to my side, I looked over my shoulder. Thank God, neither my skin nor the cushions showed any marks, and I remembered what Angela had said about horse riding, and some of the things we had done together. My virginity had slipped away from me like a thief in the night, leaving no trace of itself.

  I gathered up my clothes and began to dress, smoothing my rumpled shift and lacing my bodice as best I could with fingers that seemed reluctant to obey me. I rushed, I fumbled, both panicked by my nakedness in this place I had no right to be and thrilled by it because it marked my transition to womanhood in the arms of this man I so adored, who could—and did—have any woman he wanted and had chosen me, filling me with his intimacies until I thought I might burst with excitement.

  Thunder rumbled. The gods, it seemed, were sceptical. I smiled defiance as I fastened my shoes and the first drops of rain smacked on to the leathery leaves of the orange trees and spread dark stains on the patio. No mere summer storm could threaten me, for I was the mistress of Cesare Borgia, the man the Roman gossips called the son of God. When people looked at me from now on, they would see the imprint of his passion on my body, the fever in his eyes reflected in mine. Anyone who brushed past me in the street might inhale the scent of jasmine clinging to my hair.

  I could hardly wait to tell Angela everything, yet not everything. There are some transactions between lovers which, like the ancient paintings on the walls of the catacombs hollowed out beneath the streets of Rome, fall to dust on exposure to the air. How could I explain to Angela that the true change in me had been wrought, not by the physical act of penetration but by the power of words? It was like the powder burn all over again, to hear the terrible Valentino describe himself as a clumsy boy who got on his mother’s nerves and had a weakness for Turkish sweets. The child in the man had made a woman of me.

  Dragging and dawdling like the idiot girl with the wall eye who sold violets by the Porta Mare in the spring, I made my way back to the Torre Marchesana. The rain sluiced down now, veiling the empty piazza, streaming from the cloisters. I began to be aware of unfamiliar pains in my body, muscles stretched in my thighs, my lips bruised and chin stinging from the abrasion of Cesare’s beard, a burning in my cunny that could not be described as purely pain. He had gone, he had made no promises, and my body was teaching me how loss feels.

  Then a whiff of rosemary came to me through the dank smells of old, wet walls and moss-choked guttering. I stopped beside the bush clipped in the shape of a sword to breathe in its scent. Rosemary for remembrance. I glanced down at the moat, pocked by the rain until its surface resembled that of a battered pan, and thought of the baby, sleeping in the soft mud, among the quiet fishes. How right it was that she should be there, this child who had rejected the medium of air even before she had been pushed out into it. How far wide of the mark my own instincts had been, and how perfect Cesare’s. How he humbled me, how lucky I was to have been chosen to bear the stigmata of his passion.

  A crack of thunder which must have been directly overhead, putting up a pair of swans from the moat, brought me to my senses and the realisation that my feet were sodden, my shoes probably ruined. Even worse, I was sure to have been missed by now. I must try to sneak back to my quarters to change my clothes without being seen. With any luck, everyone would still be too busy attending Donna Lucrezia to notice me. Though I hoped Angela might be in our room to wrap me in a towel and hear my confession.

  “Well, my dear, this is fine weather for mooching among the oranges.” Ferrante, holding open the door at the end of the walkway. “I went to condole with your lady, and found her very peevish for want of her ministering angel. She said Duke Valentino had unaccountably left without bidding her farewell and you had disappeared. I did try to suggest you might be resting, but you were seen. Gossip and the smell of boiled cabbage—both can somehow get into every corner of the building. I must say you look…well, perhaps try to wipe that smile off your face before you enter the presence. She has just lost a child.

  “And there is another thing you should know before you go up to her. Another loss. The slave, Catherinella.”

  With all that had happened, I had quite forgotten Catherinella.

  “She is hanging from the Torre Leone in a cage,” Ferrante continued, his tone flat, without emotion. “There is a wooden plaque around her neck. It says, ‘Catherinella, slave, displayed at the command of the illustrious Don Alfonso for showing disrespect to his noble wife, the Duchess Lucrezia.’” We stared at one another; we both knew whose command lay behind that of Don Alfonso. “It is an unfathomable love they bear one another, your inamorato and his sister,” said Ferrante, and I looked away.

  “How long must she hang there?”

  “Until she dies. It will not be long in this heat, without water. For that we must thank God.”

  Everyone has a price, he had said.

  “But it’s raining. We must get her down.”

  Ferrante looked at me as though I had proposed dislodging the moon from her orbit or asking the sun to shine at midnight. “How? And what could we do with her? Alfonso would never let your mistress take her back, even if she wanted to after she had shown such dishonesty.”

  “She wasn’t stealing, Ferrante, she was…oh, never mind. But she wasn’t stealing, I know. How are the cages hung? We must just do the same in reverse.”

  “The gaoler’s men just throw them over the parapet. They fasten the chains into rings set into the roof and throw them over.”

  I thought of the cage, spinning and smashing into the wall of the tower, bouncing over pedim
ents and window frames. “Well it wouldn’t take much to haul it back. Catherinella doesn’t weigh heavily; she’s only small, not much more than a child I think, though it’s hard to tell.” Sometimes she seemed as ancient as Africa itself.

  “Violante, be reasonable. It cannot be done. We would be discovered. Alfonso would surely have the slave killed and we would be punished also.”

  “What can he do to us? He is not duke yet, remember. Besides, we both know it wasn’t him who imposed the sentence, whatever the plaque may say. We will do it. You must find someone to help. What about Vittorio?”

  Ferrante sighed. “Vittorio is Cesare’s creature, Violante. I tolerate it because he has certain…attributes I find irresistible. Cesare knows that. That is why he chose him to escort Donna Lucrezia to Ferrara.”

  “God, Ferrante, you’re such a…such a woman! I will find someone and do it myself. A couple of madonna’s footmen. That’s it. She will protect us—even from Cesare.”

  “You think so?” he asked quietly. “What about Urbino?” His question surprised me. Somehow, I had never considered the possibility that Ferrante interested himself in politics. He waited a moment then, when I made no reply, went on, “There is something. A shoddy compromise, I’m afraid, but Alfonso would tell you that is my forte.”

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Don’t ask, child.”

  I’m not a child, not any longer, I wanted to point out, but Ferrante’s tone had been sympathetic, not patronising, so I held my tongue. I had to trust him.

  “Now go to your mistress. I am sure the distraction of your…adventures will aid her recovery.”

  I stood at the door a moment longer, watching Ferrante trudge back along the walk towards the orange garden, his shoulders braced against the echo of himself Cesare left everywhere like a malign and charming sprite. Why did I love him? I might as well ask why my heart beat or my lungs breathed.

  ***

  The following morning, as a company of us were crossing the square to attend Mass in the cathedral to give thanks for madonna’s recovery, we were distracted by a commotion among the knot of onlookers gawping up at the slave in her cage. People pointed and muttered. Instead of standing still, the small crowd whirled and shifted in agitation. Even the street hawkers, who rarely took much notice of prisoners hanging from the tower, had paused beneath Catherinella’s cage with their necks craned upwards, regardless of light-fingered beggar boys making off with apples or apricots or hot pumpkin tarts from their trays. I looked up, but could see nothing other than the plank floor of the cage which emitted fine points of yellow light through its cracks. I glanced at Ferrante, standing beside Don Alfonso with his missal clutched across his chest. He refused to meet my eye. I saw him pluck at his brother’s sleeve and try to urge him on, but Don Alfonso was already despatching one of his gentlemen to find out what had happened.

 

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