Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “I have something for you,” she continued, handing me the little velvet bag. “Open it,” she commanded, as I stroked and probed it with my fingers, hoping against all the logic of my senses there might be a letter inside it. I opened it, loosing the golden strings with my nails. Delving inside, my hand closed around a stone, not large, perhaps the size of a lark’s egg, and mounted on a dainty stand of worked gold set with diamonds. As I drew it out, a faint fizzing sound came from it, like the sound of the tide running over fine shingle in the far distance.

  “It is the eagle stone,” said madonna as I held up the milk and water crystal to the candlelight and dimly discerned in its hollow centre tiny fragments which spangled and whispered as I tipped and turned it. “You see, it is like a tiny womb full of sparkling seeds. Its properties are beneficial in reducing the pain of labour and easing the birth. My brother sent it. It will make your child shine. You must keep it always on your right side.”

  And as soon as she said this, I knew it was her own contrivance. She had found the stone, perhaps from some quack on the Via dei Volte, and she had had the pouch embroidered with Cesare’s arms. I felt trapped, caught fast in the web that bound the two of them, gagging on all the words and thoughts that passed between them. I had to escape. I struggled to my feet and lunged for the door. My sleeve caught on a candle flame. As I turned to pat out the fire with my free hand, I caught my foot in the hem of my cioppa and fell.

  There was no pain as madonna and Angela and the rest rushed to help me to my feet and back on to the bed. Only once they had stopped fussing about me, plumping pillows, straightening the red velvet coverlet, trimming the singed edge of my sleeve, did a curious sensation begin at the base of my spine, a heaviness spreading between my thighs where it rested like sorrow until driven out by a desperate desire to urinate. The pot was brought. I lifted my skirts and squatted, supported under my arms by two of madonna’s ladies. In seconds, the pot was overflowing and the turkey rug it stood on saturated.

  “My waters,” I said. My voice sounded weak and plaintive, though I felt quite calm. As madonna bustled about, barking orders like one of her brother’s serjeants at arms, the first pain came. I felt as though a hand had reached into my belly and was squeezing my womb like an orange. Then its grip relaxed long enough for me to smile at the aptness of the image and the midwife, a thin-lipped woman with great, raw hands like rusty shovels, to remark that the smirk would soon be wiped off my face. No use in soft-hearted midwives, madonna had remarked when she first engaged the woman. I wondered how she had arrived so suddenly. I had the crazy notion that madonna had been keeping her in a press, and had fetched her out like a clean chemise or a change of bedlinen.

  Full of an energy that felt too big for my body to contain, I paced my little room, bumping into furniture, shaking off the anxious pawing of my attendants, railing at madonna that I must have fresh air, that if I could not escape those four muffled walls I would explode like a rotten melon.

  “Deep breaths,” ordered the midwife as the next pain came.

  “Of what? Smoke?” I shouted, doubling over a low chair whose back came away in my hands. I flung it at the midwife. She dodged it with a practised air. “Good job the father isn’t here,” she remarked to Donna Lucrezia. Donna Lucrezia pressed the eagle stone into my right hand.

  Later I felt tired, my back and legs ached, so I lay on the bed. I must have slept, because when I awoke the rugs had been cleared from the floor and the birthing stool squatted in the centre of the room. I had been talking to my mother. A cockerel’s head, she had reminded me; there must be a cockerel’s head nailed above the door to the birthing chamber to ward off the spirits waiting to snatch the baby. As I opened my eyes, Angela crouched beside me, dabbing at my forehead and temples with a cloth soaked in rosewater. I grabbed her wrist. The cool liquid dribbled into my ear, making my voice sound as though it could not escape from inside my head.

  “I need a cockerel’s head,” I told her.

  “What for?”

  “It’s a Jewish custom,” said Fidelma.

  “Then it has no place here,” said madonna.

  “Get that scrawny cow out of here,” I told Angela through gritted teeth as another pain came. I was aware of Donna Lucrezia’s grey, speculative gaze.

  “Send to my kitchen for the cock’s head, Angela. But let us tie the prayer to Saint Margaret about her left thigh also. We must do everything we can.”

  I felt reassured. For a while, it made the pains easier to bear. Some hours flew by, some dragged. When madonna said she must go to dine because the Imperial ambassador was visiting and had brought his wife, I thought she must already have missed one dinner and her concern for me made me cry, loud, coarse sobs that turned to groans and screams as the pains crushed my abdomen and forced the air out of my lungs.

  “I can’t do this,” I whimpered to Angela while the monster in my belly was drawing breath. “I want to die.”

  “No you don’t.” Her own face was pale and sweaty, hair hanging in her eyes and plastered to her cheeks. “Think…” Her gaze darted about the room, as though what I should think of were hanging among the cobwebs in the corners or dancing in the lamp smoke. “Think how soon you’ll be slim again, and have pretty gowns. And see Cesare.”

  I believe I hit her. I wanted to hurt her the way I was hurting. Most of all, looking at her long, grave face with its large eyes and high-bridged nose, and the red in her hair, I wanted to hurt Cesare. All those months of placid acceptance, of making excuses and building hopes. Castles in the air. Castles in Spain. I laughed, or screamed. He didn’t care. He had handed me over to Taddeo and moved on. I was like some small town he had conquered on his way to somewhere else, breeched and battered, stripped of its resources and left in the care of a meek, wage-serving governor.

  “You think I’d let that bastard stick his cock in me again? After this?”

  A silence, a stillness, as though the room itself were stunned with shock. A voice from somewhere among the shifting shadows, just a voice which could have belonged to any of madonna’s ladies. “You can’t talk about the duke like that.”

  “On the contrary, I seem to recall speaking of the Duke of Bisceglie in much the same terms when our son was born. All cats are black in the dark.” So madonna had returned. “How is she progressing?”

  The midwife grasped my ankles and pulled me down the bed until my buttocks were balanced on its edge, then rolled up my skirts and told me to part my legs and bend my knees. Her hand thrust inside me seemed to draw out memories of other hands, of my mother’s hand shielding the taper from draughts as she lit the Shabbat candles, of Mariam’s blunt fingers pressed into my scalp as she washed my hair at my first mikveh, of Angela’s wise fingers and the pads of Cesare’s thumbs grazing my nipples as he told me how Don Cristoforo had described the shape of the earth to his beloved queen.

  “The head is well down, duchesa, and the birth canal wide open. Time for the stool, I suggest.”

  My attendants helped me from the bed to the birthing stool and held me there, for it was nothing more than a simple v-shaped structure with a low back and no arms. Finally, with the wooden slats digging into the backs of my thighs and the midwife kneeling in front of me with her coarse, scrubbed hands cupped to receive the child, with a surge of panic inextricable from the next contraction of my womb, my situation became real to me. I was sixteen years old, unmarried, and about to become a mother. How could I bring up a child? I was too young, too tired. I had no mother to guide me. This had to stop now; it could not happen.

  “Stop it,” I pleaded, but no one seemed to hear me.

  “One more push,” said the midwife.

  “Now,” said madonna, and I felt her breath on my neck. She was kneeling behind me, her arms braced beneath my breasts. Angela and one of the Ferrarese ladies seized hold of either arm. “Push. As hard as you can. I won’t let you slip. The stone is there beside you and we have invoked Saint Margaret. All will be well.”

/>   I pushed because I could not help it, then because all that mattered in the world was to expel this incubus from my body. Suddenly, after the long months of being no more than the host of this new life, valued for nothing more than my body’s dumb, blind capacity to grow a child as nature grows trees or nettles or rain clouds, the beginning was in sight and I fought my way towards it. The blood pounded in my temples, my bones cracked. I inhaled salt and iron, beeswax, camphor, and stale perfume. I held my breath and pushed again, and then I was floating on the scent of lavender water, born up by angels’ wings fashioned from starched linen. The notion that I was dead drifted across my mind and I examined it with indifference.

  “A boy!” Donna Lucrezia’s face appeared above me, flushed and shining, hair dishevelled. I must do her hair, I thought, but I was so tired.

  “You have a perfect little son, Violante. Look. He even has red hair. Oh…”

  “What? What is it?” I struggled to sit up, feeling the sickly squelch of blood soaking into the bandages between my legs. Something in her tone brought the world back into sharp, fearful focus.

  “He is…marked.” She placed my son in my arms. Still unwashed, he squirmed on his blanket slick as a skinned rabbit and gave me a long, steady look out of dark blue eyes. His carroty hair stuck to his scalp in whorls like flattened snail shells and his long fingers made complicated gestures in the air as though they had yet to learn the limitations of human hands. On his left thigh, just where the medal bearing the prayer to Saint Margaret had left its outline in the flesh of my own thigh, was a smudge of bruise-blue skin. This mark, I noted, had the shape of Spain on my father’s maps. The smile inside me broke out into laughter.

  “It is the mancha mongolica. All my family are born with it but it fades to nothing by the seventh year of life.”

  “But what does it mean? Is it a curse, or good fortune?”

  “It shows he is a Jew,” I said, but madonna did not seem to hear me. Turning to Elisabetta Senese she said, “Have the clerk bring my household book. We must record the time of the birth and have his horoscope cast.” From the midwife she demanded, “Did you note the hour from the candle when you cut the cord? It was a little after the eighteenth, I think.”

  “Yes, duchesa, about half way between the eighteenth and the nineteenth. And you will see I left a good long tail so he will be man enough when he grows.” A few giggles rippled around the room; a few coarse jokes were exchanged. In this room, in our womb-fug, we had long since abandoned any show of treating our menfolk respectfully. Let the world praise them for making sons. We knew better.

  Then something began to nag at my complacency, something I had to do, something prompted by talk of tails and cutting.

  “What will you call him?” madonna asked, as one of the women prized my baby from my arms to wash and swaddle him. Bris mila, that was it; I could call him nothing before his circumcision on the eighth day.

  “Have you not decided?” madonna prompted.

  “Girolamo,” I said quickly, feeling the shining eyes and expectant smiles of all these Christian women upon me, “for my father.” I surprised myself by saying this. It was true I had not thought about names. I had, I supposed, somewhere very deep within myself, expected to have those seven days of the Creation in which to find his name. And even then, I had not expected to find my father’s name.

  “Good. Very suitable. And you will add Cesare, of course.”

  I looked at my son, lying in Angela’s lap as she began to bind him, straightening his arms before wrapping the linen band around his shoulders. My eyes devoured the vanishing perfection of his nakedness, just as the Creator had made him, as He had made his father.

  “And Giulio,” said Angela. “Giulio must be one of his godfathers. Girolamo Giulio Cesare. How does that sound?”

  “Almost as long as he is.”

  “He’ll grow to master it.”

  And he would grow complete, with no part of what Cesare and I had given him taken away. He could not be improved by pain. “Will you be his godmother?” I asked her. “I can think of none better.”

  Angela glanced doubtfully at Donna Lucrezia, who waved her glance away. “I am his aunt,” she said. “Best to share the honours, give him as many protectors as possible.”

  “And presents,” added Angela. “What will you have for your baptism, baby boy? Silver spoons? A damask bonnet? A hobby horse?” None of her suggestions seemed to impress Girolamo. He had begun to grizzle at the imprisoning of his limbs, a thin, fractious, magical sound which drew the milk tingling into my breasts.

  “Let me have him,” I pleaded. “I think he must be hungry.”

  As I put him to my breast and felt the sturdy pull of his mouth on my nipple, a kind of calm strength spread through me, a rich sense of well-being that banished the griping in my belly and the discomfort of the bloody cloths wadded between my thighs. Bending to kiss his fuzzy scalp, I was overwhelmed by the miracle of his existence. Gazing into his unblinking eyes I wondered what thoughts he had brought with him from the dark waters of the womb, and if they were mine, or Cesare’s, or all his own.

  ***

  An outbreak of fever in the town made madonna determined Girolamo should be baptised immediately, long before my churching. As I would be unable to attend the ceremony, it became even more important to me to choose the right man to stand as his other godfather, and I wanted to choose Ferrante. Yet, since the death of Catherinella, I had found it difficult to be in his company. His presence was like my guilty conscience made flesh, and it soured my precious memories of Cesare, but I knew what he had done had shown the kind of courage and compassion I would wish for my son and could not, apparently, find within myself. I wanted Girolamo’s new life to atone for the cutting off of Catherinella’s.

  Ferrante was not permitted to visit me during my confinement as he was not a relation, though he did send presents, a tiny taffeta cap and mantle for Girolamo, sunshine yellow with deep scarlet fringes, and a porcelain box of sugar-coated sweets and pane bianchi to help me build up my strength. I tried to write to him, but each time I tried to put pen to paper, the lines on the page seemed to transform themselves into the tattooed circles on Catherinella’s cheeks. Then I would find myself in tears, my tears dropping on to the page and smudging out my words.

  Of the men at court, only Taddeo, as my betrothed husband, was allowed into the lying-in chamber. So, in the end, I asked him to be Girolamo’s other godfather. He blushed with pleasure, and could not look me in the eye, and stretched his mouth in the smile of a foolish suitor as he agreed, but I was not deluded. I saw where his gaze alighted as he told me how honoured he was and how this would cement his bond with my son and how he would be a father to him in all but blood.

  Earlier that same day, a boat had arrived from Cesenatico. It had taken six mules to carry its cargo from the dock to the castle, so Angela told me, her tone mixed between excitement, teasing, and a kind of wary admiration. All this cargo was destined for me, or rather, Girolamo and me, and came under the supervision of a steward of Cesare’s household. My already cluttered room was now piled high with his gifts and I sat in my bed, with my infant in my arms, as though I were presiding over some Turkish bazaar.

  There were lengths of fabrics of all kinds, from Egyptian cotton and Brussels lace for swaddling bands to heavy, figured velvets and brocades to make fitting gowns for the mother of the Duke of Romagna’s heir. Folded beside his crib were hangings of white damask, embroidered in gold with the signs of the zodiac, waiting to be pinned to the newell posts. A set of silver spoons sprouted from an ivory and enamel cuchiaiera. Standing in a corner of the room, hemmed in by a wooden fort festooned with tiny flags bearing Cesare’s arms, was a flautist in his master’s red and gold quartered livery. He seemed to speak no Italian. I think he was French, or possibly from somewhere in the Empire, but by means of signs he gave me to understand he was charged with playing the baby to sleep.

  Gold coins were scattered over my bed like a ma
p of Cesare’s campaigns, Venetian ducats and Medici florins, louis d’or and Spanish doblons, coins from the mints of Urbino and Pesaro and some bearing Saint Peter’s keys. They fascinated Girolamo, who gazed without blinking at the pattern of bright discs on my crimson coverlet. Taddeo stared at them too, as he helped himself to Ferrante’s sweets. “I think we shall be content,” he said.

  “I’m sure we shall, my dear, but now, if you will forgive me, Girolamo will soon need feeding.”

  There was a letter to accompany the gifts from Cesenatico, which I had tucked under my pillows, and I ached in my bones to read it. As soon as Taddeo had made his farewells, and edged out of the room around the bolts of cloth and boxes of perfumed wax, I drew it out and tore open the seal.

  The hand was not Cesare’s own but that of his secretary, Agapito.

  To the worthy and virtuous Monna Violante, the letter began, and I blushed fiercely to think how the secretary and his lord might have sniggered at the choice of address. I read on with a chill in my heart, as though all the warm blood in my body had rushed into my cheeks.

  We offer our most hearty congratulations and thankful prayers on the safe delivery of your son… “Your” son, he had written; not “our” son, not “my” son, but “your” son. Well, he was just being cautious, choosing his words with half a mind to the powerful interests of his wife’s family. Surely the extravagance of his gifts proved he acknowledged Girolamo as his, even if he thought it wiser not to say so. I scanned the lines hungrily for some sign, some coded phrase that would make his pride and pleasure and love plain to me.

  There was nothing, a mere half page of formal platitudes concluding with his official signature, Dux Valentinus. Struggling against the weight of a sudden, awful loneliness, I left my bed, crossed the room to the fire, and flung the letter into it. I watched the wax seal bubble and smoke, the bull and the keys and the lilies melt away. Very well, I thought, very well. It is just Girolamo and me, then, Girolamo and me against the world.