Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  Word came just as the choir concluded the Te Deum, passing from mouth to mouth like fire jumping between buildings. The slave was dead. Somehow, she had acquired a length of rope, by which she had hanged herself from the great bolt in the roof of the cage that held the chain in place. Don Alfonso’s thick neck was flushed beneath the line of his short hair. Next to him, Ferrante’s head was bowed as if deep in prayer. I hope the All Merciful forgave him for what he did, risking his immortal soul for the dignity of a slave.

  THE BOOK OF BROKEN PROMISES

  She does know the earth

  is run by mothers, this much

  is certain. She also knows

  she is not what is called

  a girl any longer. Regarding

  incarceration, she believes

  she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

  Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer”

  CHAPTER 1

  FERRARA, SEPTEMBER 1502

  I gave you nothing but an empty casket and a borrowed verse.

  Angela told me I was lucky.

  “At least your face is clear,” she said, straightening up and blowing out the candle by whose flame she had been examining my private parts. I had believed it was just a severe chill, hardly surprising considering I had become soaked to the skin during the storm and had been obliged by Donna Lucrezia to sit with her for as long as it took to explain, so far as I was able, why her brother the duke had left Ferrara with nothing but some futile promise to return at Christmas. That, she railed, with a renewed vigour I was too tired and cold to feel grateful for, was no use to her. It was now she needed him, now when she had to face up to the Este having not only miscarried but miscarried a daughter. She made no mention of Catherinella, though the body was left hanging for a fortnight, until the crows had had her eyes and much of her flesh and people passing by in the square below marvelled that her bones were as white as theirs.

  Then Angela noticed me scratching. I cannot tell you which was worse, the shooting pains in my arms and legs which kept me tossing and turning all night in search of relief, or the itching and burning between my thighs which drove me into dark corners, behind screens or doors or garden trellises, anywhere I could scratch myself in private. I dreamed of sitting on ice blocks; I drank as little as I was able to avoid having to piss knife blades.

  “It’s just a chill on the kidneys,” I said, levering myself on to my elbows.

  “See for yourself,” replied Angela, handing me a small mirror which I angled between my legs until I could see the reflection of my privities. A small ulcer filled with yellowish pus perched on the lip of them, hard and painless to my touch. “He has definitely left you a little memento amoris.”

  “I thought he was cured.” My voice sounded plaintive.

  “Surely you don’t imagine he has been a model of monkish virtue since Torella’s famous mercury baths, you little goose. I suppose he has caught another dose himself.” Sickness smoulders in me like fire at the heart of a damp haystack; it ticks in the night like a death clock in the rafters.

  “I wish Torella was still here.”

  “Oh, we’ll manage. We need a frog. Or a chicken. That would be easier. The main thing is to keep it from Lucrezia. It will not help her marriage plans for you if she cannot pass you off as clean and virgin.” Since her recovery, this was madonna’s great project, to find good husbands for us all, good Ferrarese husbands to help repair the damage done to her standing by her miscarriage. Angela was supporting her cousin enthusiastically in her endeavours as Donna Lucrezia was now championing her own prospects of marriage to Giulio.

  “A frog?”

  “A live frog, split in two and applied to the sore. Or a chicken.”

  “In the same way?”

  “Yes. It’s one of Ippolito’s remedies,” she confided, “and it must work because I am clean.”

  “But how long is it since you lay with him?” Ippolito had not been in Ferrara since before the fever, and even before that, it was my understanding Angela had begun to decline his attentions. She blushed; she fiddled with the mirror which I had handed back to her while I straightened my clothes.

  “It’s difficult,” was all she would say.

  ***

  Though we made several attempts at catching a frog by means of flower pots and small keeping nets, pretending in front of madonna and the rest of her ladies that it was a game we had devised to ward off the chill of the autumn afternoons when we walked in the gardens, our efforts failed and a chicken had to be acquired. It was a messy process, for the bird had to be split and applied to the affected area while still alive. Lying flat on the floor, to save soiling my bedding and raising questions among the laundresses, with my legs spread and my skirts bunched around my waist, there was little I could do to help Angela keep a firm grasp on the protesting bird, a task made harder for her by her decision to wear a hawking glove to save her hands from its pecking and scratching.

  Nor was she certain how long the dying fowl should be kept pressed against the ulcer. Until it’s cold, was the suggestion of Ferrante, who had procured the gauntlet and kept watch outside our door; it was impossible to trust any of the rest of Donna Lucrezia’s women, for Angela and I were more resented than loved for being her favourites and the pious Fidelma had made herself a focus of hostility towards us, believing we led madonna astray and were probably responsible for her miscarriage by encouraging her to dance and keep late hours. We compromised. Angela kept the squirming, blood-pulsing mound of flesh and feathers braced against my privates until it fell still and its blood stopped flowing and it was clearly dead. Then she threw it on the fire and the stink of burning feathers made me cough as I stepped out of my soiled petticoats and sponged my thighs.

  “Perhaps we should have made a broth of it, for good measure,” I said.

  “I swear I will never eat anything made of a fowl again.” Angela flung the washing water after the fowl in an attempt to damp down the bitter smoke, but only made matters worse.

  “Well now we shall stink of giblets. You’ll have to lend me your perfume.”

  “Only if I can wear your rubies. Giulio says they bring out the colour of my hair.”

  That evening, there was to be a new play devised by Ercole Strozzi, and madonna was entertaining him to dinner beforehand. Despite his twisted leg and the receding forehead that seemed to thrust his eyes and nose forward like those of a large ferret, we all adored Strozzi because he made us laugh. Madonna’s friend, Barbara Torelli, was much given to intellectualising about the erotic power of laughter, and she should have known for she was sleeping with Strozzi; it was an open secret.

  ***

  Whether by luck or Angela’s healing skill, the chicken remedy worked and, as the autumn progressed and we began to look forward to the short season of Carnival before Advent, I felt wonderfully well. My appetite, which had tended to be modest since I joined Donna Lucrezia’s household with its Christian eating habits, grew ravenous. I devoured everything, from creamy risottos seasoned with juniper broth to crayfish we grilled ourselves over small braziers and ate straight from the shells when we “picnicked” in Donna Lucrezia’s apartments before donning our carnival masks and venturing out to join the revels in the town. One day, watching acrobats perform in the piazza, I ate so many sugared almonds and sweet cheeses Angela muttered she was afraid our stand would collapse and Fidelma permitted herself to wonder if I were fattening myself up in anticipation of the Advent fast, like a camel contemplating a desert journey.

  Though hunting and hawking were duties I previously undertook solely at my lady’s command, that autumn I rode out at every opportunity, savouring the meaty warmth of fresh-killed game mingled with the smells of horses and saddle soap and frost on water. I loved to watch Don Alfonso’s truffle hounds at work in the woods and to eat fine slivers of the pungent, earth-scented fungus fried in butter over woodsmen’s fires. The truffles were the colour of long-buried bones, and I wondered if this was wh
y the hounds were attracted to them.

  When the dressmaker came to fit us for the new gowns madonna was to give us for Christmas, he consulted his notes and found my waist had grown by half a hand’s width. My breasts, too, had acquired a more womanly gravity and, said Angela, with an unreadable look, I was developing a little pad of fat beneath my chin identical to that Donna Lucrezia had inherited from her father. She spent half an hour every morning with her chin raised and neck extended, massaging the flesh in an attempt to dissipate it.

  “I shall change your name,” announced Angela. “From now on you will be La Bolognese, because we all know how they enjoy their oral pleasures.”

  Something drew up tight in my gut in response to her innuendo and her casual dismissal of the name Cesare had given me. “My name isn’t yours to change,” I spat back, and tipped my platter of bread with oil and anchovy paste on to the floor where Fonsi snaffled it.

  Sometimes, we behave in certain ways only because we do not know why we are doing it. Once I realised I was eating to fill the empty place left by Cesare, though I was often still hungry at odd times of the day and night, the ache in my belly became confused with that in my heart as I waited for word from him which never came. I consoled myself with endless rehearsals to Angela of my small stock of memories, until her eyes became glazed, her smile fixed, and she nodded at me like an automaton. I made excuses for him. To begin with, he was with the French court in Milan. Perhaps his wife was there; even if she was not, as she was a cousin of the queen, perhaps it was difficult for him to get a letter to me without his infidelity being discovered. Then, once his letters to his sister and Don Alfonso informed us he was back in the Romagna, well, he was a busy man, with much to secure before he could return to Ferrara for Christmas.

  Yet scarcely a day passed without a letter for madonna. Sometimes she would share passages with Angela and me. The woman’s brazenness was scarcely credible, she told us one day, but Donna Isabella had written to Duke Valentino requesting an antique Cupid from the gardens at Urbino, “knowing that Your Excellency does not take much pleasure in antiques.” And this while the erstwhile duke and duchess were still in exile in Mantua. He had sent the Cupid, and an accompanying Venus, by special messenger; the gift had given him particular pleasure, he added, as the statues were not antiques but fakes, mocked up by the Florentine, Michelangelo. He had recognised the work immediately, because the Florentine had made some similar pieces for the vestibule of his palace in Rome. He had also, he added, sent Guidobaldo the De Consolatione Philosophiae from his father’s library, before having the rest of the books boxed up and dispatched to the rocca at Forli for safekeeping until he had decided what to with them. Though we all laughed, I felt only my laughter came close to the same bleak and mordant tone of the letter.

  Only once did I receive a message from him. Enclosed in a letter to madonna sent from Imola was a small sketch on a rough palimpsest. It showed Cesare’s head and shoulders, the expression on his face characteristically self-contained, his mouth drawn down at the corners, his eyes shielded by their long, thick lashes. Ghosts of a cramped, crooked handwriting shadowed his cheeks and had become entangled in his beard.

  Give this to Violante, madonna read. My engineer, Leonardo, did it while I was looking at a map he has made me of Imola, just as if he had flown over the city on the back of a great bird. He has made me look like an Old Testament prophet so our little Israelite should appreciate it. This Leonardo does me many services. The other day, as a group of us had dined together and were being treated to Sperulo’s latest panegyric on my achievements, he let loose on the table a small lizard with paper wings fastened to its back, each quartered red and yellow in my livery. Chaos ensued, most of the women screaming and running from the room, and Ramiro stabbed Torrigiano in the hand trying to spear the lizard to the board. When I asked Leonardo later if he was pleased his rival sculptor would be out of commission for some weeks, he simply said he had noticed I was falling asleep—the room was crowded, the fire banked high, the wine heavy and, to be honest, Sperulo’s version of the fall of this fine city somewhat tame for my taste—and so had devised this joke to wake me up.

  Madonna continued to read, though silently, now smiling, now frowning, leaving me to torture myself with thoughts of the women Cesare mentioned so casually. Who were they? The wives and mistresses of his dinner guests, or his own? Was Dorotea Caracciolo among them? Was she truly so beautiful Cesare had risked the wrath of Venice to have her? I stared miserably at the drawing clutched in my hand, this substitute of parchment for my lover’s own, warm skin, this reduction of the fires running in his veins to lines of charcoal.

  Donna Lucrezia, I thought, did not need even a picture of her brother, for his words conjured him up for her. His letters were the start of long, internal conversations between them as though they remained somehow physically present to one another despite the distance of miles and the worsening weather as winter set in and the Advent fast imposed itself upon us. My loneliness would have been incomprehensible to her, even if she had noticed it.

  But she did not. She was too busy repairing the damage done to her position by the loss of her daughter, passing her evenings and nights with her husband and her days in the company of his brothers. She would even, from time to time, listen gravely to Sigismondo as he expounded his plan for poisoning the rat king with the blood of a pig held upside down and beaten to death. Though she warmed, as always, to Ferrante’s wit and Giulio’s singing, it was Ippolito, now returned from Rome and full of news from the Vatican, who commanded most of her attention.

  The two little boys, Rodrigo and Giovanni, had looked enchanting in the velvet caps she had sent them and were thrilled with the parrot. The Holy Father remained, God be praised, in robust health and as sharp in his mind as ever. His pride in his children was undiminished, though he grieved for Lucrezia’s loss and was currently exasperated by Duke Valentino’s mysterious silence and inertia. Overhearing Ippolito’s conversations with Lucrezia, I learned that the fortress of San Leo, in the Duchy of Urbino, had rebelled against Cesare in October and a league of his enemies had been signed against him at the Orsini stronghold of La Magione. Yet Cesare, apparently, did nothing but go hunting around Imola and trade jokes with Leonardo. The ground is burning beneath their feet, he had told the Florentine orator, and there is not enough piss in any of their maidens’ bladders to put it out.

  I was afraid for him. I longed to confide my fear in Donna Lucrezia, to hear her tell me she knew he was in control, always a step ahead of his enemies. But it was clear from her tense and doubtful smile that she was as much in the dark as her father. Then I remembered Michelotto mentioning San Leo when he found us in the orange garden, and I realised that the balance had tipped. For once, I knew more about Cesare’s plans than his beloved sister or even the pope. I hugged my knowledge to me as if it was a lover, a comforter, a shield, but I said nothing to Donna Lucrezia. If I shared what I knew, its power would dissipate. She would ask me questions I could not answer. She might come to believe me capable of betraying Cesare and warn him away from me. So I kept my counsel, and told myself there was nothing to fear.

  On Saturdays madonna, accompanied by Duke Ercole, was in the habit of visiting Sister Osanna. She took me with her only once, but the holy clairvoyant’s reaction to my presence was so curious and unnerving that, without anything being said, the decision was taken to leave me behind in future. The very moment I entered the visitors’ half of the parlour, a few steps behind madonna and carrying her ermine wrap, Sister Osanna fell into a kind of fit, toppling sideways from her chair, her back arched and rigid, legs twitching, a foam bubbling between her lips and dribbling down her chin. Her left hand remained raised, the index finger pointing crookedly in my direction, until Sister Lucia, who was accompanying her, suggested to madonna that she send me away.

  Doubts were expressed about the authenticity of my conversion and I was sent to see Father Tommaso. Fidelma took my place on the Saturday visi
ts, though I do not think this pleased the duke as well as my presence did. Fidelma’s Christianity held so much more conviction than mine, she did not need the exposure to the holy sisters to ensure her place in heaven. And I was more attractive to the old man’s eye than the scrawny Mantuan, especially since my gowns had been altered to show off my new, womanly shape. He no longer kept a mistress, but he was inclined to pinch my buttocks occasionally when he had drunk a cup too many, and on several occasions sought me out to try jewels on me which he was thinking of giving to madonna. As our colouring was so similar, he explained.

  Father Tommaso set me meditations on the Holy Martyrs and prayed over me in Donna Lucrezia’s chapel until my head was spinning like Saint Catherine’s wheel and my unchristian stomach growled for something cooked on Saint Lawrence’s gridiron. Secretly I meditated on the coming of Christmas, and my own saint, my Saint Valentine. Perhaps he would stay until Epiphany. As an honoured guest of the family he would no doubt be given rooms close to madonna’s, to which he could invite me. I saw him standing at the door to his bedchamber, clad only in a fur-lined robe, a blazing fire and the corner of the bed visible behind him. I felt him envelop me in his arms, the two of us skin to skin, tented in fur. We would have entire nights in which to perfect our lovemaking and mornings jewelled with frost on which to ride out hawking. Perhaps the lake would freeze over and there would be skating parties. Beyond the range of the lanterns we would glide together where the ice threw back a perfect reflection of the star-spangled sky so it would be as though we were flying through the heavens themselves, the ring of our skates echoing the music of the spheres.