Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  Kept awake by my child, who seemed to be as active during the hours of night as his father, I would lie in the winter dark, made deeper by the absence of Angela’s breathing or the rustle of her bedclothes as she turned in her sleep, and speculate. Did she go to Giulio’s house, or did he meet her somewhere in the castle? I liked to think of her going to his house, masked, treading silently over the snow in her pattens, accompanied only by a link boy, their shadows long and blue and sparkling in the empty streets. I envisaged her stepping into his embrace in the dark vestibule, trembling as they climbed the stairs in a servantless hush, stretching her lovely body against his with a sigh of ecstatic release, because this was what she had been looking for all her life and now she had found it.

  The pope wrote to his daughter that Cesare would spend Carnival in Rome, where, he cheerfully anticipated, he will do a thousand follies and throw away several thousands of ducats.

  “If my father is so equable about Cesare wasting money, then he has indeed achieved the impossible,” madonna joked as she read the passage aloud to us while we decorated masks with gold wire embroidery and peacock feathers stolen from the birds in Duke Ercole’s garden. Cesare, the Holy Father went on, was to give the city of Camerino to his little brother, Giovanni, and I wondered what present he would make to our child. Urbino, perhaps. That would be fitting.

  We were shortly to be graced with a visit from Donna Isabella, who had written that nothing would please her more than to spend Carnival with her dear sister-in-law and celebrate with her her family’s great good fortune. She had sent her noble brother, Duke Valentino, a gift of one hundred carnival masks, twenty of them made of gold and patterned with pearls and precious stones, twenty of silver, and the rest of the finest silks and velvets. After the strains and fatigues which you have undergone in these your glorious undertakings, she had told him, you should also find time to amuse yourself. Cesare wrote to madonna that he was delighted with the masks, one of which was adorned with curling horsehair moustaches and a turban of cloth of gold, and reminded him of Prince Djem.

  He wrote to her, as ever, almost every day. I used to wonder, sometimes, how many calfskins, oak galls, and pots of gum Arabic were invested in their relationship over the years, whether it owed more to ink and vellum than flesh and blood. So, when she summoned me, one morning close to the Feast of Saint Valentine, and I found her seated at her writing bureau with a folded parchment in her hand I thought, at last, she had composed a letter to Cesare telling him about the child and wished to show it to me before it was despatched.

  “How are you?” she asked, rubbing her eyes. The February light from the deep window was poor, stifled between low cloud and muddied snow, and no lamps were lit; writing must have been difficult.

  “Well, thank you, madonna. The child is very lively, and growing, I think.”

  She smiled, but her gaze slid away from me and I could see she had not really listened to my response. “I have favoured you, have I not?” she asked.

  “Yes, madonna.” I was puzzled. I stared at the letter in her hand, wishing I could see through the dense, creamy surface of the vellum to the words folded inside.

  “I command your loyalty.”

  “Of course, madonna.”

  “I have chosen you, you see, because we stand in a special relationship to one another now.”

  “Chosen me for what, madonna?” Perhaps I was a little abrupt. I was annoyed by her slowness in coming to the point, but mostly because it was clear from the way she was talking that the letter in her hand had nothing to do with Cesare or me or our child. I noticed now that it carried no seal; had it been intended for Cesare it would certainly have been sealed by madonna in person.

  “To deliver this.” She held the parchment out to me and I grasped it, but she did not immediately let it go; as we remained in this impasse, the rectangle of creamy vellum stretched between us like a flimsy bridge, I saw the letter did not even carry the name of an addressee. Blank, blind, and virgin was the skin it presented to the world. “And you must follow my instructions exactly, mind,” she admonished as she finally released the letter into my care.

  “Of course, madonna.”

  “At the back of the bathhouse, where the gardeners come to collect the waste water. Strozzi will be waiting there, from the fifteenth hour. You will give him the letter, and anything he gives to you, you will bring straight to me.” She paused. “It would be best if you were not seen.”

  “Yes, madonna. I understand.”

  “Do not say that, Violante. Do not try to understand. Take Fonsi,” she added. “Then, if you are seen, you may say you are exercising him.”

  Were she and Strozzi lovers? I wondered as I made my way to the bathhouse with the little dog trotting at my heel. Certainly they were close, but I had always thought their friendship more like that of two women, founded on gossip and Strozzi’s skill at acquiring cameos, fine fabrics or rare perfumes at good prices through his connections in Venice. Then again, what about my friendship with Angela, before Cesare, and then Giulio, changed the balance of it?

  ***

  “The setting is appropriate, don’t you think? On the one hand, a Judas tree, on the other, a tank of dirty water.” Strozzi stepped out from behind the bathhouse, his cane crunching on the gravel path encircling its arcaded rotunda. He looked cold, his face pinched and bluish above the fur collar of his cloak. I wondered how long he had been waiting. Fonsi leapt up at him, tongue lolling, claws scrabbling at his boot.

  “I do not know, Ser Ercole. I only know I am to deliver this letter.”

  “She was wise to choose you. You keep your curiosity on a short leash. Good girl.”

  “I do not wish to know anything which might endanger my child.”

  “And how fares Saint Valentine’s little acolyte?” He patted my belly. The baby gave a kick and he withdrew his hand abruptly, though he smiled at me as if we had just shared an intimate joke. “Are you taking proper care of yourself? You have no cloak. You must not catch a chill.”

  “I no longer feel the cold. The child is like a little furnace in my belly.”

  “A sort of personal hypocaust.” We laughed.

  “He is growing very strong. He will be born in May, I think.”

  “And seems likely to be a good at calcio.”

  “As is his father.”

  “You see, Violante,” and I could read in his expression the way he saw me, a young girl made foolish by love, “how passion can take us out of ourselves. Be kind to your mistress. Do not judge her. Do you imagine for one moment she would willingly jeopardise her brother’s child? She trusts you because of him; she honours you, and if she is not thinking as clearly as she might, have sympathy. We can none of us choose whom we love.” He spoke with authority; he had lived for ten years in the shadow of a hopeless attachment to a woman married to a man so powerful his name was never mentioned.

  I thought of my brother, Eli, scrabbling in the mud for his eyeglasses, of La Fiammetta’s pitying laugh, and Catherinella, broken-necked in her cage, and I understood Strozzi with my heart. Love is random and entirely mischievous. “Do you have anything for me to take back with me?” I asked meekly. Strozzi handed me a folded parchment, anonymously sealed and addressed to Donna Nicola. I must have looked puzzled.

  “It is a name he favours, that is all,” said Strozzi with a shrug. Who, I wondered, but I would not ask. I felt the solidity of the Torre Marchesana at my back, weighing down upon the prison of Ugo and Parisina. I felt eyes in all its windows. And suddenly, for no reason I could think of, the words Sister Osanna had spoken during last year’s Lent came into my mind. You must look to the foundations, daughter. Fires may be set there. Do not give them air to breathe.

  I opened my mouth to bid Strozzi farewell, but he had vanished, as insubstantial, it seemed, as the wisps of steam coming off the tank of used water from the baths. Nor could I find Fonsi, though I called him several times. Strozzi’s footprints, unevenly spaced and punctuated by t
he full stop of his cane, were unmistakable in the gravel. I could not afford to loiter where we had met. I would simply have to hope the dog had gone back indoors without me. Besides, if madonna were expecting me to return with a note from a lover, concern for her dog was not likely to be uppermost in her mind.

  Then I heard him yapping, persistently, as though he were trapped somehow and trying to draw attention to his plight. The sound seemed to be coming from the direction of a walk of trellised peach trees which led away from the bathhouse in the direction of the old palace. As I stepped under its first arch, I saw Fidelma, the little dog wriggling in her arms, trying to clamp her hand around his muzzle to silence him. She looked as guilty as if it were she who had been keeping an illicit tryst, and the thought of that gave genuine warmth to the smile with which I greeted her.

  “I thought he was lost,” she said, her gaze sliding away from my face to settle on the rise of my belly. I once remarked to Angela I feared Fidelma’s disapproval would curdle my milk. Jealous, pronounced Angela, a good fucking is just what she needs and she isn’t going to get it from that whey-faced Fra Raffaello of hers.

  “I was just walking him.” Now it was my turn not to look at her. She had followed me, I was sure of it, but why? And what had she seen? And with whom would she share her knowledge? I felt the letter in the bodice of my gown where I had concealed it, the stiff parchment digging into one tender breast. Surely Fidelma must know it was there. I could not take it straight to madonna. I must throw Fidelma off the trail first.

  “Look,” I said, “I absolutely have to go to the privy. This young man,” I patted my belly, feeling like a great, overblown rose beside tall, skinny Fidelma, “is sitting right on my bladder. You take Fonsi back, and make sure nobody else hogs that chair I like for sewing in, you know, the one with the high back.”

  She hurried away without another word, struck dumb by my brazenness, the little dog still squirming in her arms, looking back at me beseechingly out of his black button eyes.

  I went to Angela’s and my room, though by a circuitous route, entering the castle at the Torre Leone and through a series of rooms linking it to the Torre Marchesana which were currently being redecorated and visited by no one but the workmen. Once there, I dragged out my trunk from beneath my bed with the aim of hiding the letter at the bottom of it, but as I lifted out the loose compartments, my attention was distracted. There, at the top of the slim pile of my letters from Cesare, was the sketch done by Leonardo which he had sent me. I gazed at the likeness which was both his and not his, which captured perfectly a particular look he had when thinking or reading, his eyes veiled and lips in a loose pout of concentration, yet sacrificed so much else. How many expressions, I wondered, actually crossed that agile, intelligent, beautiful face in the time it took Leonardo to make the sketch? I put it back in the trunk and hid it beneath his letters, because there was a danger in committing that one image to memory. I might forget all the rest, all the humour, impatience, affection, sadness, passion, and anger that change the shape of a mouth, the light in an eye, the hue of a cheek, which both mask and reveal the ultimate mystery of the faces we present to the world.

  What expression would he wear, I wondered, when, eventually, he found out about our child?

  “Here you are.” Angela. “Fidelma said you’d gone to the privy, then Lucrezia said you’d been far too long and she was worried and sent me to find you. What are you doing?” She crouched beside me on the floor. “Not mooning over cousin Cesare? Still?” Her tone was gentle, but more exasperated than sympathetic. “You know it will not matter to him; that’s how men are. They sow the seed and leave us women to tend it.”

  I believed she was wrong but I could not say why. “But it matters to madonna,” I said in my defence.

  “That’s because…” but she never finished her sentence. Her attention was distracted by the letter Strozzi had given me. “What’s this?” She picked it up, testing the quality of the parchment, fingering the dog-eared corners from where it had been crushed against my breast. “Who’s Nicola?”

  “No one.”

  Angela looked briefly puzzled, then gave a shout of laughter as revelation dawned. “I know that hand,” she said, “it’s Bembo’s. Nicola. Of course. He has a favourite sister or cousin or…God, could be his housekeeper. Anyway, I know there’s a Nicola in his life. It’s a nom de guerre, isn’t it? That’s why Lucrezia’s prowling about like a cat on hot bricks. It’s nothing to do with you having a miscarriage; it’s that letter. From Bembo. To her.”

  “Bembo and madonna?”

  “Of course. It’s no surprise really; she’s been going on about his pretty mouth and beautifully rounded vowels ever since Strozzi’s party. If you weren’t so wrapped up in your own affairs you’d have noticed.”

  Angela could talk, I thought. She had not spent a night in her own bed for weeks. “If you were ever here we might have talked about it.”

  “Violante,” she sat back on her heels, her wide, grey eyes fixed on mine, “if Cesare were here, living in a palace half a mile up the road, alone, and he wanted you, how many nights would you sleep in this room? What is it about people in love that they always think they’re the only ones? Darling, it’s not that I don’t understand, probably more that I understand only too well. I don’t crow over your pain; so don’t you deny me my pleasure.”

  “Sorry. I just feel in limbo, you know, waiting. For the baby. For her to tell Cesare so everything can be out in the open. As things stand, everyone knows it’s Cesare’s child, yet everyone pretends they think it’s Taddeo’s and he and I have to play up to the improbable notion that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other until after the marriage. And when will that be? He won’t even commit himself to a betrothal ring until he sees what Cesare is going to do for the child and how it might benefit him.”

  “She should have told him by now.”

  “Can you speak to her?”

  “Not about that. No one can ever speak to either of those two about the other. You know how they are. They play by their own rules.”

  “I hate your family. One minute you’re all smiles, including everybody, the next, up go the shutters and no one’s good enough.”

  “Aren’t all families like that?”

  “How would I know? Mine bartered me away. I was just part of the package my father put together to help your Uncle Rodrigo buy Saint Peter’s keys.”

  “And has it never occurred to you that Lucrezia, and I, even Cesare, were also part of that package? Though perhaps, since Senigallia, Cesare has enough credit to pay the piper himself.” We remained for a moment in silence, each thinking her own thoughts, then Angela said, “Come on, let’s not argue. If you want to continue in Lucrezia’s favour, you had better deliver that letter, or baby or no baby, you will find yourself banished to Occhiobello with no one but Ser Taddeo’s prize pike to talk to.” She rose and gave me her arm to help me to my feet.

  “Fidelma saw me collect it; I’m sure of it. That’s why I brought it in here. To hide it until I could find a better time.”

  “Give it to me. She has a jewel case with a false bottom. We’ve used it before.”

  “Before?” I was surprised. Donna Lucrezia somehow gave the impression of having a constant heart, but she was a good actress. She had to be.

  “Lucrezia has always had lovers, you silly goose. This is nothing new. I’m only surprised it’s taken her so long to choose someone. It’s the longest she’s been faithful to anyone except poor little Bisceglie.”

  ***

  The following week, Donna Isabella arrived from Mantua, plunging our household into a chaos mirrored by the city’s preparations for Carnival. Donna Isabella and her retinue occupied Duke Ercole’s apartments in the old palace, the duke moved into Don Alfonso’s rooms, and Alfonso went to stay in a hunting lodge in the Barco which belonged to Ippolito, who was in Rome. With Cesare, perhaps.

  Except for Donna Isabella’s old Spanish duenna, who had been with her
since she was a child growing up in the Castel Estense, none of her Mantuan staff knew where anything was and were perpetually getting lost; if Donna Isabella wanted hot water, it would be cold by the time it reached her; if she asked for candied lemons she might well be offered writing paper by some bewildered maid who feared to return from a mission empty-handed. In this topsy turvy atmosphere, nobody noticed my furtive trips to the bathhouse to meet Ercole Strozzi beneath the Judas tree.

  Whatever Bembo wrote in his letters to madonna, it seemed to please her. I had never known her so light-hearted and girlish, though Angela said this was the truest she had been to her real self since her return from her self-imposed exile at Nepi and the announcement of her betrothal to Don Alfonso. Her energy seemed inexhaustible. This year she did not merely watch the Battle of the Eggs from the loggia over the palace gate, but went down among the crowd, cloaked and masked, and joined in. She took to rising early to go hunting with the men, riding out among her hounds and falconers while the morning mist still clung to the bases of trees and scenting was at its best. Every evening she devised entertainments for Donna Isabella. She choreographed wild Spanish dances with castanets and tambourines, in which she and Angela were the principal performers, tossing their long, loose hair and drumming their heels like gypsies.

  Donna Isabella lacked the agility to do more than spectate at these events. She was a poor horsewoman and too heavy to dance well, and even if the Duchess of Ferrara was content to have her cloak pelted with eggs and her fine, kidskin boots caked in mud and horse shit, the Marchioness of Mantua had her dignity to think of. I kept her company when she was not with her father, or making visits to the homes of her friends in Ferrara. She talked incessantly of the betrothal of her son, Federigo, to Cesare’s daughter, Luisa. I wondered if she feared he might have greater ambitions for Luisa since the success of Senigallia. I wondered if she knew he was the father of my child also. It was impossible to tell with Donna Isabella; picking out what was important in her conversation was like looking for a safe channel in a perilous stream. She could shift from the balance of power between France and Spain, to the uses of allegory in painting, to how I could best impose my authority on Ser Taddeo’s household when I married, to the latest fashions in Milan, without drawing breath.