Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  ***

  Christmas morning brought a light sprinkling of slushy snow from a dirty yellow sky, just enough to mute the city’s colours but not to gladden the eye with a blanket of sparkling white. Although, much to the delight of Ferrante, Cesare’s young officer Vittorio had arrived in Ferrara on Christmas Eve, there was no sign of his master.

  We attended Mass in the cathedral where Ippolito preached on the iniquities of the census which had taken the Holy Family to Bethlehem. His meaning was not lost on any of us; it was common knowledge that the pope had recently imposed new taxes on the clergy to pay, it was said, for a new levy of troops for Cesare. We stole apprehensive glances at madonna, who sat beside her husband beneath a white silk canopy, holding his hand and wearing an expression of enigmatic gravity. We had to fight our way back across the piazza through a crowd which had gathered to hear a mendicant friar’s rant about the humility of the baby in the manger. Some appeared to be listening seriously, but as many were pelting him with cabbage leaves and doffed their caps reverently as we passed by, tall and stately in our pattens, our slaves holding skirts and cape hems clear of the slush of snow and crushed fruit.

  Halfway across the square, Fidelma hesitated and turned back towards the friar, who was mounted on the back of a flatbed cart. Elisabetta Senese walked into the back of her and lost her balance. Helped to her feet by a giggling Vittorio and a moon-faced youth who followed Elisabetta about like a pet dog but later died of smallpox, she slapped Fidelma across the face for causing the ruin of her new Christmas gown. The friar’s congregation was quickly distracted by the prospect of a fight. The friar looked across to see what was happening. Fidelma, apparently oblivious to Elisabetta’s slap and the red welt beginning to rise on her sallow cheek, lifted her chin to look over the top of the rabble; she was so tall in her pattens it was easy for her. It was as though her gaze was joined to that of the mendicant in his mud-spattered woollen robe and threadbare black cloak, by a taut, invisible string. I looked around for Angela.

  “Angela,” I whispered, tugging on her arm to distract her from dusting down the flushed and trembling Elisabetta, “Angela.”

  “What?”

  “I think that must be Fidelma’s Fra Raffaello. You know, the hedge preacher she thanks for her conversion. Look at them.”

  She turned. I noticed the gash of blood darkening the lapis blue of her skirt. “You’re bleeding,” I whispered. “I’ll walk behind you.” Due to the complexities of her love life, Angela had lost track of her cycle. She swore at me, then smiled and thanked me, but her change of mood was lost on me, Fidelma, and her friar forgotten. With a sick clenching of my bowels, and a flush rising up my neck as I contemplated what an utter fool I had been, I realised I myself had not bled for months.

  Not since Cesare left.

  My face burned. Cold sweat trickled down my sides, making me shiver. It couldn’t be… Angela had said… Perhaps it was just some lingering side effect of the pox. But oh God, what if it had made me barren? What hope of a good marriage then? “Come on,” I said, giving Angela a sharp shove in the back. “Madonna and Don Alfonso are almost at the Corte. We’ll be missed.” She cast me an irritated look but set off obediently to catch up to Donna Lucrezia, with me close behind as though I were helping to keep her skirts clear of the snow.

  ***

  “We’ll have to talk about this later,” she said as she bound on a pad and stepped into a fresh petticoat, and I dabbed at the stain on her brocaded overskirt with a damp towel. “We can’t do anything in a hurry and there’ll be trouble if we miss present giving.”

  “D’you think he might be there by now? In the Sala Grande?”

  “Dearest Violante,” she shook her head in a kind of benevolent exasperation, “he’s not coming. I doubt he ever was. It was just his get out strategy. I’ve known Cesare all my life and I’ve never yet known him do what he said he’d do. Deceit is like a drug with him. He has no idea when to stop using it.”

  I blinked furiously. I refused to cry and smudge the shading I had so carefully applied to my eyelids with a burnt stick. Whatever Angela said, Cesare might still arrive, and what would he think of me if my skin were blotched and my eyes swollen with weeping for him? What competition would I be then for the bewitching Dorotea Caracciolo?

  ***

  The present giving in the Sala Grande seemed interminable. The duke and his family were seated on a dais at the head of the hall, with the ladies and gentlemen of the household obliged to stand in packed ranks, gentlemen down one side, ladies down the other, leaving room for all the stewards, secretaries, treasurers, cooks, grooms, the head of Don Alfonso’s foundry and his chief potter, the tiny, bow-legged man who trained Duke Ercole’s racehorses, the poets and musicians and court painters, to process down the middle of the hall to receive their gifts. Slaves wearing new red and green tunics and chamois leather gloves carried the gifts from a long table set out below the dais, up to the duke and his family in the order in which they were to be presented.

  I tried to distract myself from my aching back and pinching slippers, and the odour of unwashed bodies inadequately masked by clashing perfumes, by wondering how much drill the slaves had been put through by the duke’s chief steward in order to ensure the under falconer’s wife received her jar of candied fruits and Sigismondo’s personal valet his set of embroidered handkerchiefs and not the other way around. I played a game with myself. If the groom responsible for Don Alfonso’s racing pigeons received his gift before the keeper of Ferrante’s peacocks, Cesare would arrive in the next five minutes. If I could count to fifty before the head brewer’s small daughter could cover the ground from the hall door to the dais, he would not come until dinner time. If more than three of the candles in the great bronze stands flanking the dais burnt out before Duke Ercole’s speech of thanks to his staff for their year’s service was complete, it would be tomorrow. Whatever Angela said, my stubborn heart refused to entertain the notion he would not come at all.

  Though I worried about the weather. By the time we were finally released to prepare for the evening’s entertainment, and were crossing the courtyard towards the Torre Marchesana, the snow had begun to fall more thickly. Straw strewn cobbles were transformed into a blue-grey carpet, splashed with sparkling apricot where the torches fastened to the gate towers caught it. Fat, silent flakes whirled out of the darkening sky, catching in our eyelashes. Angela turned up her face and stuck out her tongue. Her skin glowed; snow-stars glittered briefly among her curls before melting in her warmth. Swooping groundward, she gathered a handful of snow, moulded it into a ball, and threw it at me. It caught me on the side of my neck and slid down towards my shoulder, a slick of ice, melting, dripping from my hair, soaking my shift and bodice.

  The tears were hot; that was how I knew the difference.

  “Please, Violante, please.” Angela flung her arms around me and pulled me close, smoothing my hair, pressing her cold cheek to my wet one. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry. It doesn’t mean anything, Cesare not coming. You know what men are. Take Ippolito. Dear Ippolito has been sharing a bed with Sancia all the time he was in Rome, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t just as hot for me now he’s come back. Men have short memories. We may not like it, but we have no option but to accept it. It’s just the way the world turns.”

  I wondered if she would be so cool if it were Giulio who had been sleeping with Princess Sancia, but it would have been spiteful to say such a thing, and she was trying to cheer me up. But even if she was right, even if, when Cesare was with me, I had the power to drive all thoughts of other women from his head, I still had something to cry about.

  “What about the other thing?”

  “God, there you are.” Elisabetta Senese, the water mark still visible like the outline of a map on her yellow Venetian velvet. “Angela, you’ll have to talk some sense into her. She’s decided she wants a bath, it’s so cold. She’s already ordered the bathhouse prepared, but it will take hours to heat the water, and we sh
all be late, then the duke will fume and Don Alfonso will sulk and…”

  “Well, I can’t go to the baths; I’m bleeding. Besides, Don Giulio told me he and all his brothers are performing a new work by Tromboncino tonight. For six violas. Tromboncino will play the sixth. God knows what Sigismondo will do, but we had better not delay.”

  Tromboncino’s concerto for six violas notwithstanding, madonna insisted on her bath, but as Angela was indisposed, excused me to keep her company. We should wait in her apartments, she said, in order to oversee the new slave. The new slave had been sent by Cesare, and wore a gold collar embossed with his coat of arms. She was Dalmatian, he thought, washed up on the beach at Porto Cesenatico following the destruction of a pirate vessel by the guns guarding the port. A striking child, with high, sharp cheekbones, pale skin, and hair the blue black of crow’s feathers, she spoke no language any of us could understand and Donna Lucrezia had not yet given her a name.

  As I watched her moving silently around madonna’s dressing chamber, laying out her clothes, smoothing the nap of her crimson velvet bodice with tiny, deft fingers, polishing a jewel on her sleeve, despite myself I began to remember the beach at Nettuno. I told myself that part of my life was over, irrelevant, exorcised along with my Jewishness by the priest who had baptised me. But the human mind cannot, it seems, be made to cease its work; it continues scrabbling about among its old records like a tenacious scholar, seeking out connections. How could my mother’s pathetic end be without purpose, if the thought of it was what had spurred my father to make his decision, and the memory of it was what drove me to accept? If the road which began at Nettuno would end with my becoming a mother myself?

  “You can get rid of it, you know. I know lots of ways. From Sancia. No, you stupid girl, not like that! Two drops of musk in the rosewater. God, Violante, why did that lover of yours have to go and hang Catherinella?”

  He didn’t, I thought, but I kept the thought to myself. “W…what? Get rid..? Sancia? But you said it wasn’t possible to get pregnant the first time.”

  “Did he only enter you once?”

  “You know he did. I’ve told you often enough. Michelotto turned up.”

  She shrugged. “Well there is always an exception to prove the rule. And as I said, I know how you can get rid of it.”

  “As Princess Sancia did.”

  “Yes, darling, Sancia. I helped her ever so many times. Juniper’s the least painful but a needle is probably the most reliable.”

  I sat down abruptly on madonna’s dressing stool before my legs buckled under me. “Was it…were they…Cesare’s?”

  Angela shrugged. “Who knows? The only thing you can be certain of is they weren’t Jofre’s. All he ever did was watch.”

  “Watch. I see.”

  “You don’t, do you?” She squatted in front of me, taking my hands in hers. Hers were so warm. “But if you want to have this baby, well, that makes you family. So you might as well know what kind of family we are. Jofre’s impotent. He just likes to watch.”

  “And Cesare...?”

  “Well I don’t think her other lovers knew. But Cesare, well, you give him a stage and he’ll perform.”

  I twisted my hands out of her grasp. “I know what you’re trying to do, Angela, but it won’t work. I don’t care about those things. I love him. My baby is part of him. I’m not going to let you kill it.” I tried to stand, but Angela laid her head in my lap, its weight pinioning me to the stool. Her arms slid around my waist and I felt the warm vibration of her laughter through the layers of my clothes.

  “You’ve got quite a little belly there already,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “You’re going to have to tell Lucrezia. Sooner rather than later.”

  “Do you think she’ll be less angry if she knows it’s Cesare’s?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Angela, dropping her gaze. For a moment, she looked so like him it made my throat ache.

  ***

  I meant to tell Donna Lucrezia the following day, the Feast of Saint Stephen, but she rose very late and then only to receive a messenger from her brother. The man had struggled through blizzards to bring secret dispatches to the duke, Don Alfonso, and Ippolito, and a note for madonna whose brevity was chilling. Sitting up in bed swathed in a fur wrap, sipping her hot water and lemon juice, she turned the single sheet, folded and sealed, over and over in her hand, examining it from every angle before demanding a knife with which to cut the seal. I had made sure I brought her her morning drink alone, to give me the opportunity of asking for a private audience in order to tell her my news. Now I made to excuse myself from her presence while she read her brother’s letter but she commanded me to stay.

  “I have an anxious feeling about this,” she said. “Do not leave me alone with it.”

  I stood at her side, my hands folded into my sleeves for warmth, arms resting on the little rise of my belly, brushing against the sideways swell of my growing breasts. She read the entire letter aloud.

  Illustrious lady, she began, then paused to sip her drink and grimaced at its sharpness, and beloved sister, we beg to inform you that this morning, the Feast of the Nativity, we have had executed Ramiro da Lorqua, formerly governor of the Romagna, for the crime of embezzlement.

  Madonna gasped. “Ramiro? Ramiro has been with him…oh, I can’t remember how long. Longer than Michelotto even. It is impossible.”

  Ramiro, I thought, though I said nothing, that same Ramiro of whom he had written fondly only weeks ago when describing the incident with the winged lizard. Madonna read on, her tone weighed down with doubt and dread.

  On Saint Stephen’s Day we shall leave here for Senigallia, to receive the surrender, and we would request your prayers for our safe journey.

  Your devoted brother, who loves you as himself,

  Caesar Valentinus

  Given at Cesena the 25th day of December, the year of Our Lord 1502.

  The letter was in the hand of Cesare’s confidential secretary, Agapito Geraldini, and countersigned by him.

  “Prayers?” demanded Donna Lucrezia, frowning at me. “Since when did Cesare ask for prayers?” She shivered. “Send word to my husband and ask him if he will see me, then come back and dress me right away. Call the Dalmatian. Where is Angela?”

  “I will fetch her immediately, madonna.” Angela, I knew, was waiting in our room for news of my meeting with madonna.

  “And Violante, perhaps we had better pray…”

  “Yes, madonna.”

  For the rest of that day and most of the next, we ladies were left to our own devices while madonna consulted with her husband and his family over the contents of Cesare’s despatches. Though we passed our time mainly in the Camera Dal Pozzolo, where our small looms and embroidery frames were set up and we kept a good supply of poetry books, song sheets, and a couple of old lutes, even there the frisson of nervous excitement pervading the Corte reached us. Every time we heard voices in the gardens, or hooves in the courtyard, someone rushed to a window or out into the stairwell to look and listen. Around the middle of the second day, a disconsolate Strozzi called on us in our tower, but though he did his best with rhymes and jokes and banter with madonna’s clowns, even the Ferrarese girls, to whom Cesare was little more than a name, a cold breath on the back of the neck, a ghost in the guise of a knight of Saint John, remained distracted and serious.

  I was in agony. I tried to pray, but my prayers came back to me, useless as echoes. To what god could I pray, a conversa asked to pray for an atheist? What did he mean by his request anyway? Was it some kind of code? If so, clearly madonna did not understand it. Or had something occurred which was enough to frighten Cesare into a reliance on religion? Had Lady Fortune deserted him? Was he dead? Surely I would feel it if he were, now his seed was growing inside me.

  Then it happened. The message came. I dropped a ball of yarn I had been winding with Fidelma and, as I bent to pick it up, my eye picked out a tiny lion in the design of the rug beneath my chair. San Leo
. All this had begun with the rebellion at San Leo. I forced my mind to go back over Michelotto’s rude interruption of my tryst with his lord. What had he said? What exactly? He’s got the assessment of fortifications at San Leo you asked Leonardo for. He had asked his engineer to undertake a survey. As if he already knew, as if he were planning something of his own.

  I handed the yarn to one of the others, saying I needed to answer a call of nature. Angela threw me a meaningful look, a frequent need to urinate being, she assured me, one of the certain signs of pregnancy. Closing the door quietly behind me, I raced to the duke’s apartments in the Corte. Needless to say, I had never entered them before. But as I stood outside the door to his solar, waiting for his doorman to find out if Donna Lucrezia was there, I felt no nervousness, just a consuming desperation to reassure madonna that her brother was not in danger.

  I could hear voices behind the door, the rumble of the men’s, the occasional, lighter interjection from madonna, but I could not discern what they were saying. Suddenly Fonsi started yapping and a hound growled in reply, and there were murmurs of strained laughter. One of the duke’s exotic cats shot through the flap in the base of the door, its tail puffed up like a flue brush. Then I heard the footman’s voice, a brief, gruff response from the duke and the footman’s soft shoes whispering back towards the door. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and stepped into the room.