Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “Then go to them for tonight. I will tell Cesare you are here and send for you in the morning. He must not suffer anything unexpected. He is not strong enough. I will let you have one of my men to escort you, then I will know where you are to be found.”

  Though tomorrow seemed impossibly far off, though nothing I had ever heard of Don Jofre led me to think him trustworthy, what he said made sense. His concern for his brother seemed genuine, even if it was prompted by a fear for his own skin should Cesare die. And he was not dead. Everything was still possible. I would see him tomorrow. He would get well. He would ensure the election of a friendly face to Saint Peter’s chair and we would all awake from the nightmare.

  Don Jofre found me a mule and made a mounting step for me with his own hands. As his man at arms took the reins and led me away, he called after me, “My sister is a cunning little vixen, you know. Never underestimate her.” I scarcely heard him. My mind was filled with Cesare and tomorrow.

  “Where do you want to go?” asked my escort as we turned into Saint Peter’s Square. I glanced at Santa Maria in Portico, which looked shabby and neglected, the window shutters sun-warped, the street door bereft of the smart footmen who had always stood there, overseeing our comings and goings with deep impassivity. Then, as I shifted my gaze across the square to the Vatican, something gleamed in the corner of my eye, the flat, bluish glint of broken glass reflecting the summer afternoon sky, and instead of the palace walls, its barred windows and guards in Cesare’s quartered red and gold, I saw a wooden stand decked with banners and packed with courtiers in all their finery. In the midst of it all sat the old pope, and I swear I could hear him laughing and his laughter did not sound as though it came from beyond the grave.

  A little to his right a girl in an emerald green camorra struggled against the grip of a handsome man whose fingers dug into the flesh of her thigh as he held her down, imprinting bruises there she would keep for weeks. Though I did not notice her until she escaped the man’s clutches and fled, screaming, in the direction of the basilica. Even then I could not see her clearly. I had lost my magnifying spectacles, you see; they had fallen off as I ran and been trampled into the mud by my fellow competitors. I could not see she was my sister; I could not see the bruises left on her by Valentino.

  “Mistress?” Don Jofre’s man was saying. “Where to?”

  “Leave me. I have the mule; I can manage.”

  “Don Jofre will want the mule back,” said the man doubtfully.

  “I will send it. Please, let me go; I will be quite safe, and you will know I have arrived at my destination by the return of the mule. Tell Don Jofre I dismissed you. I’m sure he has too much on his plate to bother being angry with you about me.” He seemed to see the reason in this and turned back towards San Clemente. From the set of his shoulders, I would say he was as relieved to be rid of me as I of him.

  To this day I cannot say for certain what happened to me that afternoon in Saint Peter’s Square. Looking back, I am inclined to think it was simply the trick of a mind exhausted by travel and ill health. At the time, however, that memory of recognising Eli racing with the other Jews, scrabbling in the mud for his broken lenses, that strange sense of being him rather than myself, seemed to be telling me to go home, just as I was, with my son and a mule. Tonight I would sit at my father’s table. I would wash and change, and light the candles as if I had never been away. My family would embrace me and call me Esther, and I would lie in my old bed and I would soothe my child to sleep with stories of all my names.

  Discarding the planchette with which Don Jofre had provided me, I got astride the mule and kicked it into a smart trot. There is a clock inside me which rings a bell in my brain about an hour before sunset. It is a Jewish thing, a need to be indoors before the rising of the evening star which marks the beginning of Shabbat. Some men stopped me on the Sant’Angelo bridge, but let me pass after I showed them Donna Lucrezia’s seal, and from then on my short journey was uneventful. I passed a few people on the road, but they hurried by, closed in on themselves, shoulders hunched and eyes fixed on the little patch of ground just in front of their feet.

  Ambassadors and avvisi write in apocalyptic terms about society breaking apart whenever there are riots about the price of bread or more plague deaths than there were last year or the Turk begins to rattle his sabre in our ear. But this, I thought, as the blue shadows lengthened across the Tiber and my mule’s hooves struck small, sharp echoes from the blind walls of shops and houses, was how it truly showed itself, in this fragmentation, each man withdrawn into his own shell, looking no further than a foot’s length into the future.

  The Jewish quarter looked shabbier than I remembered it, the streets meaner, the dogs thinner. I became aware of people turning to stare at me, and could almost entertain the illusion that I was as fine as the red leather harness on my mule. As long as I kept looking ahead, as long as my chapped hands and broken nails were out of my line of vision, as long as I avoided thinking about the holes in my shoes and the frayed hem of my skirt. I had to detour around a collapsed building which had completely blocked Via di Sant’Ambrogio, so by the time I dismounted and knocked on the street door of my father’s house it was almost dark and the evening star showed very bright in the alley of purple sky between the roofs.

  The door looked unkempt. Some of the timbers were splintered, almost as if an axe had been taken to them, though halfheartedly. The mezuzah my mother and I had carried from Toledo was still fastened to the doorframe, but at a crazy angle and swinging slightly in the breeze which had arisen with the sunset. I reached up to straighten it, though I could not really see what I was doing. No lamps appeared to be lit in the courtyard. I knocked a second time and was rewarded with the whisper of soft shoes on the courtyard tiles and a shrieking of unoiled hinges which made the mule waggle its ears in distress as the wicket was opened from within.

  “I’m sorry,” said an old woman’s voice, “I can’t lift the bar; it’s that bent. You’ll have to come in by this door.”

  “Mariam!” She was more bent than I remembered her, and fatter, and the light of her torch found out the pleats and creases of flesh around her eyes and mouth without mercy. For the second time that day I was confronted by someone who looked as though she had seen a ghost. “Mariam, don’t you know me? It’s Esther.” My voice sounded thin and wheedling, like that of a complaining child.

  “You can’t stay here,” she said, darting a glance over her shoulder.

  “What?”

  Before she had a chance to explain herself I heard Eli’s voice from across the courtyard. “Who is it, Mariam?” He sounded both fearful and resigned, as though he had plenty of evening visitors and none of them welcome. Where was my father? Mariam appeared at a loss for a reply. I stepped past her into our courtyard, clutching my sleeping baby before me like a shield.

  “Good God,” said Eli, then muttered a quick prayer to ask forgiveness of the Lord for calling Him by name. “I am astonished you have the nerve to come here.”

  “What do you mean? Where is Papa?” Mary’s welcome at the inn at Bethlehem might have been warmer than this.

  “As if you didn’t know,” thundered Eli, his ear locks quivering, his open mouth an angry gash among the black curls of his beard. Ear locks? When had he started to wear those? Papa always kept his beard and sideburns neatly trimmed.

  “I don’t know,” I said. My voice shook. Eli’s coldness, and then this sudden rage, had frightened me.

  “Ser Eli, perhaps…” began Mariam.

  “You are forbidden to speak. What are you doing outside the women’s quarter anyway?”

  Women’s quarter? What was going on here?

  “There was no one else to answer the door.”

  “It would have been better not to answer it.”

  With an exasperated sigh, Mariam stumped off towards the kitchens, though the set of her shoulders was anything but acquiescent.

  “Eli, what is going on here? Call my fath
er. He will not shout at me this way.”

  “Our father is dead, Esther. Will you pretend you did not know?”

  The courtyard seemed to lurch beneath my feet like the deck of a ship. I staggered, or perhaps I only imagined I did, because no hand reached out to steady me. I tried to take a step towards Eli, but he held arm across his face as though to protect himself from me.

  “I did not know,” I whispered, bowing to kiss my baby’s head, feeling my only comfort in the warmth of his skin beneath his bonnet. “When? How did it happen?”

  “Look around you.” Eli flung out his arm. I looked at my surroundings. The fountain, I now saw, was clogged with broken bricks from its supporting basin, which looked as though a giant, angry child had taken a stick to it. Many of the courtyard tiles were cracked or splintered. Tethering rings had been torn from the walls, bringing down clumps of stucco. The wisteria around the door to the vestibule, which had been my father’s great pride, though still living, now lay on the ground, smashed trellis-work poking out from among clumps of foliage and gnarled branches. “This is your lover’s work,” said Eli, spitting out the word “lover” with utter contempt. “All Rome knows it, and all Rome knows why. And you have the gall to come here, pretending innocence, asking for our father. You disgust me.” His gaze flicked over the baby in my arms, his eyes behind their lenses hard as pebbles. “That is his, I suppose. Oh, don’t try to deny it. I saw you, you know, sitting with his hand on your knee. I do not need my eyeglasses for everything.”

  I sensed other eyes watching me from the house, flitting between half-closed shutters, gleaming in the arched shadows of the arcade. I felt small and shabby and foolish. What could I say? That I had my lover’s child but not his confidence? I kept silent.

  “Now get out. Go to him. Share his fate if you have a single loyal bone in your body. May the Judge of Men have pity on you for I cannot. I no longer have a sister.” He turned his back on me and was swallowed up in the dusk gathering beneath the porch, the skirt of his dark robe catching on a twisted finger of wisteria as he went inside and the door banged shut behind him. At a loss what to do next, I simply stood where I was. Despite Don Jofre’s warning, I supposed I must go to the Vatican. I had nowhere else. Donna Adriana might receive me, perhaps, but the palace of Santa Maria had appeared to be empty when I had passed it earlier in the day. Besides, Donna Adriana was married into the Orsini and had very likely decided it was wiser to throw in her lot with them than with her Borgia relatives now Alexander was dead and Cesare so desperately ill. I would have to go to Cesare, whatever the risk. He could not refuse Girolamo now. He needed a son. If he were to die, what use to him was an infant daughter in France? Night was falling fast. I must make haste.

  “Miss Esther.”

  “Mariam?” I found myself whispering also, straining my eyes to see where Mariam was hidden.

  “This way. Towards the kitchens.”

  As I approached the arch in the courtyard wall which led through to the kitchen block behind the house, a hand shot out and grabbed my arm. “Quickly,” said Mariam. “Come to my room. No one will think to look for you there.” I realised the truth of this with some shame; I had never been to Mariam’s room, had never even considered how and where, in the warren of buildings behind the main house, she lived. I resolved to do better, when Cesare was well again, and everything returned to normal, and he set Girolamo and I up in our own house in Rome.

  Mariam half dragged me, stumbling along dark, unfamiliar paths, under a lintel so low even I had to duck to avoid hitting my head. While Mariam busied herself lighting a lamp, I stood listening to the roar of my blood in my ears and the comfortable rustle of roosting chickens somewhere nearby. A taper flared, then warm light spilled from a lantern with waxed paper shutters, revealing a homely room. The beaten earth floor was covered with a bright rag rug. Sturdy, well-polished stools flanked the hearth and a chest crudely painted with a pastoral scene of shepherds and shepherdesses doubled as a table in the centre of the room.

  “You can have my bed tonight,” said Mariam, setting the lamp down on the chest. “You look dead on your feet.”

  “I have walked a lot of the way.”

  “From Ferrara?”

  “My horse was stolen, then…”

  “Shhh. Sit down.” She took a stub of candle on an iron dish and lit it from the lamp. “I’m going to the kitchen for hot water and some food. If anyone comes near, you blow out the lantern and you hardly even breathe.”

  “I’ll go. I don’t want to get you into trouble. I have my mule. I can get to the Vatican in no time.”

  “And what do you suppose you would find there? You’re going nowhere till you’ve had a bath, a supper, and a good night’s sleep. Your brother should be ashamed of himself. Calls himself a righteous Jew and won’t even open his house to his own sister when she needs him. Your parents would turn in their graves.”

  “Mariam, what has happened here?”

  Understanding my need to know was greater even than my need for food and rest, she sat down opposite me, resting the candle on the floor beside her stool. “Last spring the pope levied new taxes on the Jews. It was supposed to pay for a new public well. As you know, the only one we have is the one in the Piazza Giudecca and that almost dried up last summer. But we soon discovered the money was going to pay for troops for your…for the Duke Valentino. So a lot of people refused to pay. Beatings of Jews increased. There were groups of young louts hanging around the synagogue on Saturdays, shouting, pushing us around. Nobody actually said they were the duke’s men but everyone knew it. Your father negotiated a meeting with the pope to try and sort things out. I don’t know what happened but he came back bulging with rage like an angry toad, and that night the duke ordered raids on the homes of all the leading Jewish families. They stole money and jewels, even our menorahs. When they came here, your father tried to reason with them, but one of them hit him with his pike handle. He died three days later.” She reached across to pat my knee, to comfort me, though I felt no grief, not then, just a cold fury which seemed to turn my vital organs to ice, one by one, brittle and sharp.

  “He never regained consciousness. He suffered very little, thanks be. The pope sent a message of condolence and promised Eli the duke would see his men suitably punished.”

  Oh, he is very good at suitable punishment, I thought. Mariam waited for me to say something, but what I had to say was not to her. With a sort of embarrassed clucking in the back of her throat, she rose, picked up her candle and went to the kitchens for food and hot water.

  I submitted to her kindness, allowing her to strip me of my worn and travel-stained clothes and sponge warm water gently over my shoulders as I sat hunched before the fire in a small laundry copper. She tutted at my sore nipples and went off to rummage for some salve or other among her simples. While I dried myself, she unpicked the rest of Donna Lucrezia’s gold from my bodice and piled the coins carefully on top of her chest before dumping all my old clothes on her fire, even Beppo’s doublet, though its wool padding threatened to stifle the blaze. Then she gave me underclothes, and a gown to put on which I recognised.

  “This is one of my old ones,” I exclaimed. “It’ll never fit me now.”

  But it did, it fitted me passably well, though it was a little short in the hem and tight in the bodice, and I realised how brief a time I had been away.

  “Have you kept all my clothes?” I asked, as Mariam thrust a dish of artichokes fried with oil and garlic into my lap.

  “You never know when things might come in handy. Now, eat up while I see to the baby.”

  The artichokes were one of Mariam’s own specialities, but they tasted bitter and metallic, as though they had been left too long in the skillet, and the sliminess of the oil made me nauseous. My skin glowed from the bath but my blood still felt cold, my tears for my father frozen. I set the food aside and tried to take pleasure in watching my son luxuriate in the warm water, wriggling his stout legs and arms and squealing w
ith glee as Mariam splashed his belly and tickled him with the corner of the wash cloth. She showed great confidence with him for a childless woman. For as long as I had known her, since I was handed into her care by Señora Abravanel at the end of our journey from Toledo, Mariam had been old, with no family but ours. Perhaps by now Eli and Josefa had children. I thought of asking her, then decided I didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter anyway. Mariam dried Girolamo then laid him on the rug and set about applying goose grease to his thighs and bottom to ease his sore skin.

  “Not circumcised, then,” she observed, with a slight pursing of her lips.

  “Neither is his father,” I said, and saw how she was about to say more, and how something in my expression stopped her. I wondered if she had ever been with a man, ever even seen a grown man naked, and felt suddenly far older than her.

  “How little I know about you, Mariam.”

  She shrugged. “Nothing much to know,” she said, beginning to wind Girolamo in clean bands.

  “Leave him. He likes to play.” I remembered him lying on the rug in Taddeo’s orchard while Angela and I ate strawberries and drank frascati. I had not thought of Angela once, I realised, since leaving Medelana. Guiltily, I tried to imagine how she must be feeling, now that she no longer had any prospect of marrying Giulio, but any emotion other than my anger at Cesare was beyond my grasp. I was filled with it, lying like a rich meal in my belly, the taste of it in my mouth, its colours in the shadows which wavered across Mariam’s walls.

  “I have thought too little of my family’s honour for too long, Mariam.”

  “You were obedient to your father. What more can be expected of a girl? If you ask me…”

  “My father wished me to serve Donna Lucrezia and make a good marriage.” We both gazed at the baby, who smiled and gurgled and stretched his long fingers like the petals of a lily opening to the sun.

  “He knows he’s the centre of attention.”

  “Yes.” Like father, like son. I scooped him up and held him close, wrapped in the clean shawl Mariam had found for me. He fixed me with that unblinking stare of his. Madonna used to say babies look like that because they are born blind, but even if that were so, Girolamo was not blind now. He was hungry for the world and all it had to tantalise and enchant his senses.