Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  ***

  “Lucrezia tells me she is thinking about your wedding.” Angela lay beside me reading her letter as I suckled Girolamo. I seemed to spend most of my time with him either latched to my breast or stretched across my knees for winding. He was a very hungry child. Like his father, madonna said, and I clung to her remark. However cold Cesare had become towards me, at least he had not denied Girolamo’s parentage to his sister. “She wants you married and back at court. She misses you and your…special services.”

  “You mean my courier services. We can speak freely here, Angela. We are in the outer reaches of the universe.”

  We were at Taddeo’s house in Occhiobello, a full day’s journey from Ferrara for a new mother and her child travelling in a litter. The August afternoon was hot, and we had taken ourselves into the shade of a walled orchard which grew on the north side of the house, facing away from the river and the miasma which hovered over its sluggish waters. Bees droned and a fountain splashed in the formal garden on the other side of the brick walls. We had spread an old rug and sprawled on it to enjoy a picnic of strawberries and frascati wine cold from the cellar. Angela had stripped to her chemise, and I had unbound Girolamo from his clouts and swaddling bands so he could kick and wave his arms freely. I had no fear for the straightness of his limbs. He was quickly becoming sturdy and was, to my eye at least, as beautifully made as his father.

  Donna Lucrezia had persuaded Angela to accompany me to my new home because, she said, it would add weight to the argument she intended to put to Duke Ercole in favour of a marriage between her cousin and Giulio if Angela could be seen to be capable of demure conduct and restraint, and loyalty to her friend. Besides, the duke was sending Giulio on a mission to Venice to try to woo the fashionable singer, Gian de Artigianova, away from service with the doge.

  As I transferred Girolamo to my other breast, Angela sat up and kissed my cheek.

  “What was that for?”

  “Because you look so beautiful. It suits you, all this—babies, the country. I begin to believe you might be happy.” In the absence of Giulio, and with Taddeo gone for much of every day on estate business, Angela and I had resumed much of our old intimacy. “Cousin Cesare will be well pleased with you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he will care much either way.” I had not believed I could say such words and yet, there they hung, in the air between us, among the butterflies and dancing dust motes, and I was no different, just in a different place upon the road. “He does not acknowledge Girolamo, you know.”

  “Not in so many words, perhaps. That is not his way. He does strange, reckless things, but deep down he’s as cautious and wily as any Catalan peasant, just like Uncle Rodrigo. He never makes a bet without hedging it.”

  “I suppose.” I had reached the same conclusion myself, but still the fear lingered that he did not believe Girolamo was his child and I was loathe to let it go because it might yet serve to cushion me against any more disappointments. I could not afford to think well of Cesare; I could not waste my store of love on him now I had my child to think of.

  “What presents do you think Giulio will bring me back from Venice? I asked only for a box of vanilla wax for I know he was snowed under with demands from Lucrezia and tips on where best to buy from Strozzi. But he will bring more, surely.”

  I laughed, but she was serious. Though Cesare’s gifts proved nothing to me, Giulio’s were everything to Angela because they were honestly given.

  “Oh Violante, I wish we could have been married before he went, then we could have had our honeymoon in Venice. Wouldn’t that be grand? I long to go there.”

  “We will. Madonna says we all will, in the autumn, because Don Alfonso wishes her to accompany him there. I expect by then you and Giulio will be married, so you will get your honeymoon.” I winded Girolamo and lay him on the rug to sleep. He grizzled a bit, until Angela tickled his belly with a feather and made him laugh. Then Angela turned the feather on me, tracing a fine line down my throat and between my breasts, staying my hands as I attempted to refasten my bodice. I put my arms around her and kissed her mouth and could make believe, with my vision blurred by closeness, that her fair, fine-boned face was that of my lover.

  ***

  We were still lying on the rug, drowsing in one another’s arms, Girolamo asleep at my side, when I heard Taddeo calling my name. Lifting Angela’s arm from across my shoulder, I struggled to my feet, straightening my clothes and smoothing my hair out of my eyes. Angela mumbled something, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

  “Get up,” I hissed, picking up her bodice and throwing it at her. “Taddeo’s back.” Girolamo began to whimper as Angela sat up, rubbing her eyes. She took the baby in her lap and began to dress him. He always resisted swaddling, and his whimpers soon turned to a fully fledged bawling.

  “Give him to me. You’d better make yourself decent.” Our eyes met and we giggled like a couple of schoolgirls caught out in a prank.

  “Here you are.” I could see Taddeo was trying to smile at the image I presented with my loose hair and dishevelled clothes and my naked baby in my arms. The pastoral Madonna. But he seemed unable to arrange his features quite right. His mouth stretched more in a grimace than a smile. He would neither hold my gaze nor look directly at Angela. With a sudden, furious flushing of my face and neck, I wondered if he had been in the orchard longer than we thought, if he had seen Angela and I together. Well, it was not a sin; only between men could such a thing be sinful because women had no bodily means of penetration. I tilted my chin defiantly.

  “We have been picnicking,” I told him. “Would you like a cup of wine?”

  “What..? No…I…I have news.” His tone filled me with foreboding. His words fell like drops of ice water into the drowsy heat of the afternoon. Angela finished lacing her bodice and stood up and stepped into her skirt. I held Girolamo against my chest, like a shield.

  “You will have to go. Both of you. Immediately. The pope is dead,” Taddeo blurted out.

  “Uncle Rodrigo? He can’t be,” said Angela, but of course he could be. He was more than seventy years of age. Angela began to shake; her fingers fumbled at the laces of her skirt. Low, keening sobs forced themselves down her nose, between her compressed lips, then she opened her mouth and started to scream. I tried to put my hand on her shoulder to calm her, but Girolamo was squirming and crying so hard I needed both arms to prevent him slipping from my grasp. Above the noise I scarcely heard Taddeo’s next remark.

  “Poison,” he said. “They say the duke will die too.”

  “The duke? You mean..?” My brain felt slow and sodden, like a wet sponge. It absorbed his words but could make no sense of them.

  “Cesare,” said Taddeo, coughing with embarrassment at his unaccustomed use of Cesare’s given name. “He is probably dead already.”

  I clutched my baby so fiercely I fancied the tiny cage of his ribs might fuse to the curve of my clawed hands. He gasped and fell abruptly silent. I braced myself for the onslaught of grief, but it did not come. Instead I felt angry, a cold, clear-headed fury which both urged me to hit Taddeo and cautioned me this was not my best course of action. “He is not dead. I would know if he were dead. He is not going to die.”

  Perhaps infected by my own ruthless calm, Taddeo finally managed to look me in the eye. “As far as you and I are concerned, madam, he might as well be dead. What power is left him without his father? How long before those he usurped come creeping back into their cities and he is flung into the Tiber one dark night like so much rubbish? Or his brother Gandia?”

  “You would be well advised to take back those words if you don’t want to wind up drowned yourself, sir. My lord’s eyes and ears are everywhere.” Angela, a Borgia from her dark red hair to her toes which curled in on themselves because she favoured sharp-pointed shoes, squared her shoulders and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “As are those who love him,” she added, putting an arm around my waist and fixing Taddeo with a look of grim i
mpassivity which made me think of how Cesare might have looked as he listened at the door to the upstairs dining room in Senigallia.

  “Love,” said Taddeo, in the tone, both regretful and resentful, of a man who has discovered the antique Venus he had set his heart on is nothing but a modern fake, “is somewhat like my pike. Introduce a little salt into their pools and they all die.”

  “Did you never mean to marry me, then? You knew the duke’s father was an old man and might have died at any time.”

  “Do me the honour of not doubting my word, madam. Have I not kept my promise to you, even though your duke has failed to acknowledge his bastard?”

  Now I felt the tears behind my eyes, the grief squeezing my throat, but I leaned closer to Angela and fought it.

  “So what has changed?”

  “Poison, madam, poison. That says to me the duke has got too big for his boots. He has become careless. Careless men will lose their states as easily as they might lose a pair of stockings or a throw of the dice.”

  “We will see what Donna Lucrezia has to say about this,” said Angela.

  “I dare say she will do as her husband requires of her, at last.”

  “Come, Violante, we will return to Ferrara.” She pushed me in front of her, turning away from Taddeo with a haughty toss of her head. “You will allow us horses, Ser Taddeo, if only to hasten the hour when we are out of your sight.”

  He did not reply immediately and though I refused to look back at him, I could sense some struggle taking place within him; it seemed to disturb the thick, peach scented air as we passed through it. Then he said, more gently, “You may have my coach, Violante, and whatever supplies you need for the journey.”

  Even a fake may have some value, if it is good enough.

  ***

  On arriving at Ferrara, we found the castle deserted and the court removed to Medelana. We sent the carriage back to Occhiobello and set out on horseback to make the journey into the mountains, riding astride, with stirrups, like a couple of camp followers, said Angela, and I think we both wondered if something of the sort was what our suddenly terrifying and empty future might hold for us. We had no escort, and it was very likely our future held nothing more than a band of brigands with long knives and a sharp eye for expensive horse furniture. But the road was quiet and the air grew clearer as we left the city behind us and climbed away from the river plain. We even sang from time to time, to humour Girolamo, who lay in a reed basket lashed to my pommel. Angela called him Moses.

  There was an inn, we knew, at Quartexana, where parties travelling from Ferrara to Medelana would usually break their journey. I was all for stopping there only to change our horses but Angela insisted we stay the night. It would be madness to travel after dark.

  In the inn parlour, rumour was rife. Though we sat in a private booth to eat our evening meal, the conversations of our fellow guests were clearly audible through the drawn curtains, hot words turning the food to ashes in our mouths.

  “They say the Holy Father was heard making a pact with the devil with his dying breath.”

  “By his confessor, of all people.”

  “Pleading for a few more years, I heard.”

  “And the devil there beside him in the guise of a black monkey.”

  “I heard the old sot was so bloated they couldn’t ram his corpse into its coffin.”

  “And the duke’s men looted his apartments so thoroughly there weren’t even the vestments left to bury him in.”

  Attempting to force the innkeeper’s wife’s stringy mutton down my throat with a gulp of thin wine, I stared at Angela, and saw my own wretchedness reflected in her miserable expression. How long had the pope been dead? I wondered. Even rumour can only travel at the speed of a fast horse. Even if Cesare had still been alive when these myths of his father’s end fled Rome, he might well be dead by now, suspended like a daemon between his final breath and the first whisperings of the tales that would become his legend. I imagined our fellow guests were talking this way solely for our benefit. I was certain they knew who we were. The curtain shielding us was somehow transparent to them if not to us. We were mocked, degraded, defenceless.

  “We should travel on tonight,” I muttered to Angela, half choked by a gobbet of gristle. “We’re not safe here.”

  “Nobody knows who we are, sweetheart; how could they? And I swear, any more of that road tonight will shake out all my teeth.” She flashed me a wide smile. “Imagine if I were to present myself to Giulio transformed into a toothless crone.”

  “Do you think Cesare is dead too?”

  “Cesare? He has the constitution of an ox and a digestion to match. I doubt there’s a poison invented that could kill Cesare.”

  I thought of the sick child madonna had conjured for me, living on bread sops and goats’ milk, gasping for air on hot afternoons, his lips and fingernails blue as sloes. “But if someone has tried once, they will try again. With something a little more certain. A blade, or the garotta.” His own favourite.

  “If they have tried—and remember, we do not know that for sure—they will not get a second chance. Come now, we’re exhausted. It will all look less bleak in the morning.”

  She was right. It was impossible, even after the landlady’s execrable breakfast of rye bread fit to sole shoes and a cheese so salty it stung the tongue, not to feel optimistic. The verges were studded with tiny flowers, fragrant cushions of saxifrage and juniper, gentians like flakes of virgin blue chipped from the face of the sky. Pale grey stones crunched like sugar under our horses’ hooves, and when we stopped to drink, the water in the swift running streams tasted of the clean air of the hills. But as we clattered through the gate into Medelana and looked up at the villa which dominated the slope above the town, I shivered to see how its high, blind curtain wall cut into a sky the fragile blue of a robin’s egg.

  ***

  We were met by Ippolito. Standing in the courtyard, his soutane blowing against his legs in the dusty breeze, he banished the groom and held our horses himself as we dismounted. Though he gave Girolamo, whom he had not yet seen, a perfunctory smile as I gathered him up out of the basket, it did nothing to dispel his grim, preoccupied demeanour. He did not kiss either of us; he made no comment on our arrival, unescorted, hatless and sunburned as a couple of peasants.

  “I had to tell her,” he said. “Dear God, I wish you two had been here. It was dreadful. I thought she had run quite mad.” Remembering the scenes at Belfiore when she had heard the news of Cesare’s invasion of Urbino, I could well believe it. “And the best I could find to deal with her were Fidelma and that empty-headed Elisabetta Senese.”

  “You will take us straight to her?” asked Angela. Was no one ever going to get to the point?

  “What news of Cesare?” I demanded. Ippolito shook his head. My legs, still shaky from long hours of hard riding, threatened to give out completely. Tripping over a loose thread in my skirt, I longed to fall, to rest my cheek against the cool, worn flagstones and never rise again.

  “She had a letter from Cosenza this morning. Cesare’s hanging on, but only just, by all accounts. He has the Vatican under siege. No one goes in or out, not even for His Holiness’ funeral. Michelotto’s in charge. Cesare is raving most of the time, they say. Cosenza does his best to be encouraging, but reading between the lines, it sounds like Dante’s inferno in there.”

  “Was it poison?” asked Angela.

  “Cosenza doesn’t think so. The physicians all agree it’s the tertian fever. It’s been a particularly bad summer for it, apparently. The trouble is, with Cesare keeping them shut in the palace, in his very bed-chamber, Cosenza says, there’s no one to make an announcement so the rumour-mongers are having a field day.”

  “He has lost his judgement then,” said Angela, a flat note of finality in her voice. Cardinal Cosenza was a reliable reporter, an old and loyal friend of the household at Santa Maria in Portico and a palace cardinal of long standing.

  “But he can get well.
Many survive the tertian fever, and he is young and strong.”

  “Oh Violante, if your love were medicine, he would be well already.” Angela gave a little laugh and squeezed my arm, but Ippolito looked dark and preoccupied. The hearts of women were clearly far from his thoughts.

  “Who is here?” asked Angela, trying to sound casual, as we climbed the wide, shallow stairs from the courtyard to the first floor whose arcade was smothered in dusty bourgainvillea leaves. The flowers were all gone this late in the summer.

  “Giulio is at Belriguardo with our father. Alfonso and Ferrante are there too. I am only here because I had to bring her the news about her father.” He gave a gallows laugh. “Being the priest in the family, I suppose they thought I was best placed to bring her comfort.”

  “And have you?” asked Angela, arch with disappointment.

  “See for yourself.” He stopped before a closed door and knocked. We waited. He knocked again with greater insistence. The door opened a little way and the wan face of the Dalmatian emerged from the shadows.

  “Tell your mistress her cousin and Monna Violante are here,” said Ippolito, speaking loudly and deliberately, as if that would make him understood. The Dalmatian’s inability to speak or understand Italian had, it seemed to me, developed into a positive act of will, a way to deny the collar around her neck and keep the road home clear in her mind’s eye. Her face disappeared again, a sallow moon swallowed by cloud. Ippolito pushed the door wider and stood aside to let us pass.

  All the window shutters were fast, and at first I could see nothing. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I realised there was, in fact, almost nothing to see. The room was bare of furnishings except for a pallet on the floor, up against one wall. There madonna sat, hugging her knees, her hair hanging lank and loose to either side of her face. Her gown was coarse black linen, her chemise frayed where the lace had been torn from it. She wore no jewellery but her wedding ring, and the ash cross of mourning was marked on her forehead. I was not sure she had noticed our entrance, then I saw the whites of her eyes gleam briefly in a bar of afternoon sunlight shining through a gap in the shutters as she glanced at us and looked away again.