Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  They are brought down and fallen; but we are risen, and stand upright.

  I did not know the Christian prayers for the dead, and, being a woman, I could not say kaddish and besides, the words seemed somehow fitting for both of us.

  ***

  My instinct was to travel down from the mountains and try to regain the main thoroughfares. I could not hunt or easily build fires. I would have to risk the company of other travellers and spend some of Donna Lucrezia’s money on food and shelter if I were to survive. If my luck held, my sickness would keep others at bay as it had done Beppo’s murderers. Almost as though giving approval to my plan, the sun came out as I walked, at first casting a weak, primrose light and laying dusty shadows across my path, then growing in strength until its warmth on my back made me feel like singing and I tried to remember the words to Beppo’s marching songs as I tossed my baby in my arms and made him laugh.

  “We sacrificed Beppo to the sun and the sun is happy,” I shouted, then was suddenly, terrifyingly certain I was no longer alone. No matter. Look at me, listen to me. A mad woman with the pox. No one would come near me.

  “I don’t know who Beppo was, but I’m mighty grateful for his influence with the sun.” A voice both gruff and light in its pitch, a boy trying to sound like a man. An accent I did not recognise, guttural, full of tiny stones. “Are you alone?”

  “Except for my child.”

  “And Beppo was…your husband?” He hesitated, fearful, perhaps, of a woman who had apparently sacrificed her husband to the sun. I shook my head. A relieved smile spread across his beardless face. “Strange times,” he said.

  “Strange indeed.”

  We passed through a deserted hamlet, its silence imposing itself on us. A thin dog fixed us with a hopeful gaze and we both looked away.

  “How do dogs do that?” asked the youth. He wore a sword too long for him, and a corselet of overlapping leather plates which made him look like a skinny tortoise. A deserter, perhaps? But from whom, from what conflict? What was going on in the world down there? I lengthened my stride. The youth paused to peer into the village bakehouse, but the oven was cold, empty as my belly.

  “Come on,” I said, “there’s nothing to be had here. We should try to find an inn before nightfall.”

  “You have money? Or something to trade?” He sounded curiously disapproving for a soldier, but I had no chance to think about this before his gaze slipped from my face to a point somewhere behind me and a new sound reached my ears. A rhythmic rattle and squeak. Cartwheels, in need of greasing. My companion’s hand went to the hilt of his sword, but then he cracked a broad grin, gave a shout of laughter, and ran past me, arms outstretched towards the approaching cart.

  “Felice?” The man pushing the cart, which was more of a barrow, really, sounded as though he was habitually suspicious of good fortune.

  “Of course it’s Felice,” confirmed the old man in the barrow, his head supported by a pile of folded sacks, his wasted legs hanging like broken branches over the front lip of his conveyance, “for all she’s chopped off her hair and put on breeches.”

  I thought of Ferrante and Vittorio. I wondered if we were anywhere near Imola, and realised that, even if we were, I was not. I cast about and could not even find a shade of myself, an echo of the smooth-skinned, untrodden virgin who had become lost in the castle and had discovered a truth much pricklier than merely the way to the kitchens. As the two men and the youth who was apparently a girl greeted one another, I stayed apart, struggling with a second, older set of images, assailed by the memory of men and boys running and jostling, slipping and sweating, of eyeglasses trampled in mud and long, beautiful legs sheathed in silken hose. Fiammetta, Cesare’s boy-woman, receptacle for the love of a misfit.

  All this meant something, it had to. Such motifs do not repeat themselves accidentally in life any more than they do in art. But what? Girolamo began to cry and nuzzle at my breast. Felice and the two men looked at me. The outline of Felice’s figure was so clear to me now I wondered I had not noticed before the way the overlapping plates of her corselet lay not quite flat over her bosom.

  “We might as well stay here the night,” said the younger man. “The buildings will give some shelter. Felice, help me with grandpapa then you can take the cart and collect firewood.”

  “What can I do?” I asked, wanting to banish my memories, to feel less apart. As Felice and the man I assumed must be her father lifted the old cripple from the cart and propped him against a crumbled dry stone wall, I felt I no longer belonged even to myself.

  “Feed your child, or we’ll none of us be able to hear ourselves think,” he replied, his tone full of warmth and normality. I was so grateful, so desperately grateful, to realise he looked at me and saw no more than a young mother with a hungry child, that my legs almost gave way beneath me and I sat down so abruptly beside the crippled grandfather, I felt the bones in my spine all jolt against each other.

  ***

  I travelled with my new companions for several days. I learned that Felice had run away with a Swiss pikeman a year before, and had carried on soldiering in his place when he had been killed in the service of a Tyrolean count by an exploding gun barrel. As his death had been an accident, the count had provided no pension, leaving Felice with little other option.

  “You could have come home,” her father said.

  Felice shrugged. “You say that now.”

  “Things have changed.” He seemed to direct his words more at me than Felice, but I must have been imagining it. I had told none of them anything about myself, not even that Rome was my destination, though I knew theirs was Citta di Castello, from where I hoped to travel on by river.

  Just outside Sansepolcro we hitched a ride on a half empty grain wagon. The weather, grumbled the woman driving it, hot as hell and then the rain, not to mention the fact that, since the Holy Father’s death, all the men were running about brandishing swords at one another instead of bringing in what harvest there was. She wished the duke a speedy recovery; he might sup with the devil, but at least he made sure the granaries were filled and the campesini got a fair price for their wares.

  “A fair man, the duke,” commented Felice’s father.

  “How can you say that after what he did to us?”

  “Hold your tongue, girl.”

  “So much for things having changed.” Felice sighed, folded her arms, and lapsed into a sulky silence. My curiosity burned.

  “If I bear the duke no malice, why should you?” demanded Felice’s grandfather.

  “Let us speak no more of him,” said her father, exasperated.

  “Very wise,” agreed our driver, nodding at me where I sat beside her on the cross bench, “for here’s a girl with no wedding band and an orange haired child.”

  I pulled my shawl closer around Girolamo as my cheeks flared, making the rash itch. I felt the eyes of my travelling companions fixed upon me, the warm afternoon air suddenly thick with their unspoken questions.

  “Let’s ask her, then,” said Felice. “If that’s the duke’s bastard, let’s see what she thinks.”

  “Felice…”

  But she was not to be stopped. “I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time, when the duke was besieging Imola, and the town was half flattened by his guns and we couldn’t retrieve the bodies from the streets because he went on firing at us all night as well as all day, a respectable man, a carpenter by trade, went up to the rocca with a delegation of other respectable men to plead with Donna Caterina to surrender before there was no town left. Donna Caterina threatened them with an arquebus and sent them packing.

  “So, after night fell a second time, the carpenter crept out of the city and presented himself at the duke’s camp. The duke’s men would have cut him to pieces there and then, but the duke was curious to hear what he had to say. The carpenter had worked on the fortifications of the rocca, he explained, and he knew a weak corner where they might be breached. He would give the duke this information in
exchange for his word that his men would neither loot the town nor rape its women, and the duke would make good the damage his guns had done out of his own pocket. The duke gave his word and the carpenter made him a little drawing. Sure enough, the rocca fell not long afterwards.

  “The duke was as good as his word. On the whole, his men behaved themselves and those who did not were hanged in the town square. The town was rebuilt at little cost to its citizens. Then one day, the duke sent for the carpenter, who went gladly, believing the duke would offer him some reward. The duke, however, explained to him that he could not be seen to condone treachery and must therefore, with great regret, punish the carpenter. He did not have him executed, as that would have seemed unjust to him. Instead, he had him tied to tail of an unbroken colt and watched while the colt galloped six times around the town square, dragging the carpenter behind him. After that, even though the duke’s own physician attended him, the carpenter’s body was too broken to heal and he was condemned to be a cripple for the rest of his days.

  “How do you like that?”

  “I…I could not say.” I had tears in my eyes, but not for the carpenter. It was rather that Felice’s story had for a moment made Cesare so vivid to me, so immediate I could not believe he might actually be dead and wept with relief.

  “Leave her be,” said the old man gently. “I did what I had to and so did the duke. We understood one another. I would not have it different.”

  “Well I would have a republic, like they do in the Swiss cantons. There are no wars in Switzerland.”

  “Aye, and they are a colourless lot who make cheese that tastes like tallow.”

  Everybody laughed and the tension relaxed, but at the gate to Sansepolcro, while they were arguing with the tax collector about how much was due on the grain, I left them one of Donna Lucrezia’s gold pieces and slipped away. They had been good to me and I did not want to put them in danger. I have thought of them often since, and wondered if the scars left on them by Cesare healed any better than mine did.

  ***

  I bought myself passage to Rome on a barge carrying tufa and Carrara marble. The river traffic passing through Sansepolcro was brisk, and I could have found myself a quicker boat, but the bargee was travelling with his wife and children, which made me feel more secure. And the marble blocks, showing gashes of glittering white through their waxed linen wrappings, reassured me. Rome was still building. The world had not come to an end. Who knew, perhaps some of the stone was destined for Cesare’s own palace. Perhaps he was even now poring over plans with his architects or chivvying his workmen, because he would have to move out of the Vatican once a new pope was elected. He would have, finally, to come to a decision about the siting of his mews and whether or not to build a loggia on the roof. The thought made me smile, and the bargee’s wife smiled too. She worried about me, she said, a young woman so solemn and sickly looking, and with a child to raise.

  Perhaps it was the quiet way she cherished me, as if I were just another of her flock of grubby children, or being able to spread my clothes over the great stone blocks to dry, or simply the chance to rest, to sit with my back to the warm, rough-textured tufa and my face to the sun, but by the time we passed under the city walls of Rome, nothing remained of my illness but a slight dryness of the skin of my hands and face. I felt strong and lean from my days of riding and walking in the mountains, well rested and calm. If he were dead, I could cope, but he was not dead. If he were dead, I would not feel this lightheartedness, this bubble of happiness swelling up in me like a song. Soon I would see him, perhaps as soon as today. We would tie up at the Campo Marzio dock, and it was only a short walk from there through the Borgo to the Vatican. I determined to pass by San Clemente, in case he was already there.

  Although we were all compelled to remain aboard the barge for some time after mooring, what transpired gave me hope, and hope made me patient. Almost before we had tied up, armed men approached us, one staying ashore to hold the barge horse’s head, two more boarding the vessel. They were not the regular tax collectors, so the bargee, with his wife at his elbow, challenged them. The shorter of the two drew a dagger and held the point to the bargee’s chin.

  “We’re Borgia’s men,” he said. He had a thick Spanish accent. “He’s not done yet.” His words fell on my ears with the rhythm of a dance.

  “And I owe duty to the city, not Borgia,” growled the bargee. His horse tossed its head, almost swinging the man holding it off his feet.

  “We just want to make sure you’re only carrying what’s on your manifest,” said the taller boarder with a cold, conciliatory smile. “Let’s say we want to make sure the city gets its dues on everything you’ve brought in.”

  The bargee cast an unhappy glance in my direction. His wife dug him in the ribs.

  “Family,” he mumbled, which had a range of possible meanings in the circumstances.

  The taller one laughed. “Mine is in Naples and I make sure they stay there. Have a look,” he ordered the Spaniard who swaggered the length of the deck lifting the covers from the stone with the point of his dagger and grinning a pirate’s grin at the bargee’s children; one of his upper front teeth had been replaced with a plug of gold.

  “Nada,” said the Spaniard, sounding disappointed.

  “Thank you,” said the other to the bargee, and handed him back his manifest with a slight bow. “We can’t be too careful. There’s a French army to the north of us and a Spanish one to the south, and Don Cesare would rather parley with their generals than their spies.”

  I pressed my lips together and willed myself to swallow the questions bubbling up in me. Was Cesare well again, or bluffing? Where was he? Who was with him? Did he hold the city, or just the Borgo?

  “Any news of a new pope?” asked the bargee conversationally. The taller man turned, one foot on the gunwale of the barge.

  “Not yet. Their eminences are all shut up in Sopra Minerva like hens in a coop.”

  “Sopra Minerva? What’s wrong with Saint Peter’s?”

  “You’d have to ask Don Cesare that.”

  As soon as the guards had gone, I left the barge with hugs and tears and prayers for good luck from the bargee’s wife, and set out for the Vatican through the old, winding streets that netted the Campo Marzio. This was normally the most crowded quarter of the city, where people had lived, said the historians, since before the days of Aeneas. And some of the houses looked at least that old, retorted the wags. But today it was virtually empty, the narrow, rutted walks and slipshod tiled roofs left to the cats and dogs and pigeons. The lower reaches of the walls still carried tidelines of dried salt from recent flooding. Split rice sacks and broken down log piles littered back yards and passages between buildings. When the Tiber flooded, the people here usually sought shelter in the Castel Sant’Angelo, whose raised aspect and curtain walls afforded protection from the river.

  But they usually came out again as soon as the water began to fall. Where were they now? What had happened here? I shivered and Girolamo, catching my mood, started to grizzle. I sat down to feed him leaning against the parapet of a well, where I washed my face and feet, though did not drink for fear the water had been spoiled by the flood. I knew San Clemente was just around the next corner, bordering one side of the piazzale which gave the palace its name.

  All the street windows were shuttered, and sunk in late afternoon shadow, giving my lover’s home an aspect both hostile and forlorn. I felt instantly he could not be there, though a gaggle of men milled about in front of the barred street door and four bronze mortars were drawn up in the piazzale, mouths gaping at the row of arcaded shops opposite. As I paused, hesitating whether to speak to the guards or simply make my way to the Vatican, one of them detached himself from the group. Though he walked in my direction, I was clearly not the object of his attention for he did not see me until I thought I would have to step out of the way to let him pass. He was a tall man, with curling, red-tinged hair and a face dominated by a narrow, aqu
iline nose. His neat beard disguised a somewhat weak chin. He was extravagantly dressed, in padded hose, slashed sleeves, and gloves with jewelled cuffs. When he caught sight of me, his large, protuberant eyes widened and his already pale complexion blanched as though he had seen a ghost.

  “Lucrezia?”

  “My name is…” and while I was debating which of my names to call myself, it dawned on me who he was. “Don Jofre,” I said.

  He looked suspicious. “Who are you?” His right hand hovered over the hilt of his sword.

  “I am a friend of your brother, Don Cesare.”

  His eyes flicked over me, taking in my worn dress over which I still wore Beppo’s doublet, though more as a keepsake than because I needed it now the sun had reappeared, my undressed hair, Girolamo swaddled in my dirty shawl. “Another one,” he said wearily. “I wonder he had the energy left to govern his state he spent so much on getting bastards to populate it. Don’t waste my time, woman.”

  He would have walked on but I stepped into his path. “I am here at the behest of the Duchess of Ferrara. Wait. Here.” I thrust my son into his arms and he waited, looking amazed and awkward with the baby balanced across his forearms, while I rummaged among my petticoats for madonna’s letter of recommendation. “You know her seal?” I asked as I took back Girolamo and handed it to him. He nodded, broke the seal, and read the letter.

  “So what happened to you?” he asked when he had finished.

  “It’s a long story. Where is Cesare?”

  “Still in his apartments in the Vatican. Violante…I may call you that?” He touched my arm with his gloved fingertips. “He is still terribly ill. I am far from sure he will live.”

  “Take me to him. I am a good nurse. He knows that. He will believe I can make him well.”

  “Why?”

  I told Don Jofre about Donna Lucrezia’s fever the previous summer, and what Ser Torella had said about me. He thought for a moment, then said, “My sister’s letter says you have family in Rome.”

  “Yes.”