Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “Keep him for me, Mariam. Have him circumcised. Have him taught Torah. Bring him up a Jew. Keep the gold, that should cover much of the cost of him and I have no need of it.” Now I knew what I wanted to say to her the words were falling over themselves to escape my mouth.

  “You know I can’t. You know Ser Eli would forbid it utterly. You can stay here tonight and be gone before dawn. That’s the best I can do for you, for your mother’s memory.”

  “Please, Mariam. It’s me Eli’s repudiated, not Girolamo. He’s a baby. You can make anything of him. He doesn’t have to be a Borgia. He can be a Sarfati, grow up with Josefa’s children, go into business with my brothers. I named him for my father, you know.”

  “You think you can give your child away just like that?” Mariam did not raise her voice, but spoke to me in a furious hiss, like an angry goose. “You think your poor mother dragged you all the way from Toledo and died doing it just so you could go giving away babies as if they grew on trees? He it is who gives us children and only He can decide to take them away. You lie with the son of a pope and believe yourself greater than the Almighty?”

  “I just want him to be safe.” I sounded like a plaintive child myself.

  “Safe? There is no safe in this world, but Esther…”

  “Yes?”

  “There is love. You follow love.”

  “And duty?”

  “You follow love.” Her eyes shone among the soft creases of her face and her liver-spotted hands plucked at her skirt. She made it sound so simple, yet what if love tore you two ways? Mariam, it seemed, had no more to say on the matter. She bossed me to bed, just as she had done when I was a child, tucking my son into the crook of my arm. I had only the vaguest memory of her climbing in beside me, the dip of the mattress beneath her weight. My sleep was profound and dreamless, and when Mariam woke me just before dawn, nothing was any clearer than it had been. I seemed to be caught in some kind of endless relay race, in which parents handed heartbreak on to their children.

  While I fed Girolamo, Mariam packed a small satchel for me with the remains of last night’s bread, a pot of the salve she had given me for my breasts and, most particularly, Donna Lucrezia’s gold, counting out the coins with great deliberation. Then she went to the shelf where she kept her simples and some bunches of dried herbs and took down what looked like a book. A book? Mariam?

  “I kept this for you too,” she said. The leather binding was salt stained and battered, what might once have been red morocco turned rusty brown with age and neglect.

  “What is it?”

  “Your mother’s recipe book. It was among your things when you came here. I don’t expect you remember. There never seemed to be a good time to hand it over, but now you’re a grown woman with a family of your own, you should have it.”

  The book felt both strange and familiar in my hands, the leather as warm to the touch as my lover’s skin. When I unwound the thong from the toggle which held it closed, a few loose leaves drifted to the floor, carrying with them old smells of our kitchen in Toledo, of fried almonds and orange oil, cinnamon and roast lamb, precious vanilla, like a silk lining for the nostrils, scents as frail and desiccated as pressed flowers. Uncertain what Mariam expected of me, I bent to pick up the loose pages, to hide my face. Lokum, I read, a sweet made from rosewater by the Moors of Al-Andalus. I do not think there is a Spanish name for it. Lokum. In exile, Cesare would teach me to make lokum, and we would be happy. Mariam had said, follow love, and now love had shown me a signpost.

  “Thank you, Mariam. You should know men may come for me from Don Jofre Borgia. If they do, be sure and tell them I am going to the Vatican and will return the mule to San Clemente.” The mule. I had forgotten it until now. If it had been stabled, or left in the courtyard, Eli must know I was still here. Perhaps Don Jofre’s men had already come for me and Eli had sent them away. No, of course not; it was barely light, no hint of day yet but a faint paling of Mariam’s square of wax-papered window.

  “I think you had better forget the mule, Esther. I’ll let you out by the back gate. If anyone asks, just say you are going to the market in Campo de’ Fiori. You have to go early to get the best vegetables.” I hardly heard her, so loudly did my impatience to be gone rage in my head. My father was dead and my brothers cared nothing for me. Now, at last, I was truly Violante, the conversa, the girl with no family name but the one my son gave me. Borgia.

  ***

  A silvery mist clung to the river, from which the figures of other early risers, bargees, and beggars, bowed women with great covered baskets, emerged with the silence of wraiths. The mist seemed to dampen sound as well as sight. I had to step smartly down the river embankment to make way for a raucous hunting party, young men and women in bright velvets and plumed hats riding skittish horses, with falcons balanced on their wrists. I thought I recognised one of the young men, an Orsini cousin who had accompanied Donna Lucrezia to Ferrara, but he showed no sign of having noticed me. Below the embankment was a different world, where the paupers who slept under the bridges lay caught in the mud like Adam awaiting the Creator’s hand. A row of men in manacles and leg irons, chained together at the neck so their heads looked like beads strung together on an ogre’s necklace, clanked aboard a sailing barge, bound for Ostia and the galleys.

  Yet, as I climbed the steps in the westernmost pier of the Sant’Angelo bridge, a ragged rim of sunlight began to show above the roofs and towers to the east. Gulls mewed as they curved across the sky above the mist and the undersides of their wings caught the gold of the sun. I smiled at them, my heart caught in a sudden bliss of pale aquamarine, oyster pink, primrose yellow. I thought of the gulls wheeling past the high windows of Cesare’s apartments in the Vatican, of his valet opening the shutters to get the best light to shave him by, and the new sun catching the red lights in his beard. You follow love. Love is the most constant of constant things.

  A crowd had gathered in Saint Peter’s Square. This would not have been unusual except for the early hour. The parties of pilgrims and other foreign visitors who came to look at the palace of the ruler of Christendom would appear later, after Mass and breakfast and the customary haggling with the city guides. All heads were turned towards the north side of the square, in the direction of the Porta del Popolo. As I joined the throng I was jostled and carried forward in a sudden lurch.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, not being tall enough to see over the heads of several men in front of me.

  “The duke’s leaving,” said one over his shoulder. Leaving? How could he be? Don Jofre had promised I would see him this morning. Something must have happened, but what? Tying Girolamo more securely into my shawl so I had both arms free, I fought my way to the front of the crowd, ignoring those who jostled and swore at me as I trod on toes and elbowed ribs. As I dodged a big pikeman in Cesare’s livery who was struggling to keep a passage clear for his lord’s cortege, the mass of people behind me fell suddenly still and silent. For a second it was as though the whole world had stopped; I half expected the birds to drop out of the sky, a thousand tiny Icaruses falling for the one who had truly flown too close to the sun.

  Then the bells of the basilica began to toll the morning Angelus, the pikeman drew himself to attention, and a group of mounted soldiers rode out of the palace gates, their pace slow, their mien solemn. They were followed by eight men bearing a litter closed with curtains of crimson damask, and behind it a riderless, high-stepping war horse decked out in black velvet and bearing Cesare’s ducal coronet and other insignia on a cushion strapped to its back. I saw people cross themselves and heard a woman burst into tears somewhere behind me.

  I had to know. Not knowing is the worst thing. What you know, you can deal with. Eventually. I ran across the empty space between the crowd and the litter. The distance seemed interminable; as I reached out my hand towards the gold-fringed curtains the blood hissed and pounded in my ears as though I had run all the way from Ferrara. So I did not hear the shouting, the th
ud of galloping hooves, the rasp of a sword drawn from its scabbard. Then suddenly my feet were running on air, an unimaginable jumble of ridges and points was digging into my left side, and my nostrils were filled with the smells of horse and leather.

  “Back off, Don Jofre!” shouted a familiar voice.

  “Michelotto?” He could not have heard me; I could scarcely catch my breath for speech.

  The men carrying the litter halted in consternation, though they did not set it down. Michelotto lowered me gently to the ground as the crowd oohed and aahed as if they were watching a display of acrobatics.

  “What the devil…? She was…she might have…” Don Jofre, breathless, red in the face, his sword still raised, reined his horse in nose to nose with Michelotto’s and glared at him. He was a head taller than his brother’s henchman, and of higher rank, yet there was no doubting who was in command of the situation.

  “She meant no harm,” said Michelotto and Don Jofre’s gaze slid away. He sheathed his sword, fiddled with his reins, then turned his horse and rode back down the column to wherever he had come from. Michelotto smiled at me, displaying a jagged array of worn, brown teeth. “Is the child unharmed?”

  Girolamo was bawling lustily enough to reassure me he had come to no harm. I nodded. “Thank you. Cesare…?” I jiggled Girolamo in my arms to soothe him, to be able to hear Michelotto’s response.

  Michelotto’s pomegranate face looked grave. “You helped Donna Lucrezia. You will help him.”

  “Michelotto, I’m not…she would have got well anyway, I suppose.”

  “That is not what he believes. Let him see you.” Michelotto leaned from his saddle and lifted one of the curtains. His actions seemed interminable, his movements as slow as the sun crossing the sky, so the moment when I could peer into the dark interior of the litter came as suddenly as the sun’s disappearance below the horizon.

  The smell hit me first, a sickening stew of vomit and faeces and stale sweat. And old dog. He had his blind hound with him as always. It was hard to believe anything human or animal could breathe in such an atmosphere. A hand reached out of the gloom and grabbed my shawl, so emaciated the skin had taken on the colour of the bones beneath and I thought it must be the hand of an unquiet ghost. Pulling me close, into that closed, blood dark space, that abject stench, he whispered, “Lucia. You have come to save me. Like you did before. All will be well now.” Then he was overcome by a violent bout of retching and spitting.

  I caught a glimmer of his face as he sank back against his pillows, and he was smiling. His smile terrified me. I could not bear the burden of his trust. Then I realised that burden was not mine to bear. “Who is Lucia?” I asked Michelotto as he escorted me to the back of the procession where, he said, he would find me a place in a carriage.

  “Oh, just a name. He gets confused. Torella has bled him so much I doubt there’s enough blood left in him to keep his mind sharp. You know Cesare and…women.” He looked sheepish, which made me uncomfortable.

  “Michelotto, why are you being so good to me all of a sudden?”

  He nodded at Girolamo, now thoroughly absorbed by sunlight flashing off harness and weaponry. “His son, my son,” he said, and I could have hugged him; if Michelotto did not doubt Girolamo’s parentage, then surely neither did Cesare. “Here,” he went on, drawing rein beside a closed carriage drawn by a matched six of very fine greys, “you climb up here.”

  As I opened the door a woman’s voice asked, “What’s happening? Why have we stopped?” It was a strong voice, almost as deep as a man’s, and accustomed to answers.

  “Don Cesar wishes this lady to join you, Monna Vannozza, if you please.”

  “Whether I please or not is clearly immaterial to my son as the lady is already getting into my carriage. Has his brush with death taught him no humility?”

  “I must get us moving again, madama. Don Prospero Colonna will not wait for us forever. My respects, Monna Violante.” He bowed and rode away, shouting commands as he went.

  So I was to travel with my lover’s mother, the redoubtable Vannozza dei Cattanei, the spirit of whose absence from the life of Santa Maria in Portico had always seemed to me stronger than her presence in it would have been. What mother simply hands over the care of her only daughter to another woman and takes no part in her upbringing? She was a frequent visitor to her sons’ homes, and they to hers, but she had never set foot in Santa Maria while I lived there. Thinking these thoughts, it was not difficult for me to keep my eyes down and my expression suitably grave as I seated myself opposite Monna Vannozza.

  “Hey, Violante!” A boy’s treble, slightly wheezy.

  “Giovanni!” Although I had never especially liked the child, I turned and embraced the Infant of Rome with such passion I almost knocked the breath out of him.

  “I say,” he said, pulling away from me and stroking the feather in his cap, “have you broken my feather? Where’s Lucrezia?”

  “Holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Monna Vannozza, “you are the Jewess. It’s true what they say.”

  “I was born Jewish, but I have converted, madonna,” I said. Her tone was not friendly, and I wondered if she was one of those who mistrusted conversi. She was said to be a pious woman.

  “Lucrezia is her godmother, Nonna,” explained Giovanni.

  “Yes, dear,” said Monna Vannozza, but continued to stare at me as if she dared not look away. The carriage lurched into motion, stopped again, then settled into a slow walk. The rumble of its wheels vibrated through the floor; the murmurs of the crowd came muffled through the dustblinds, which admitted a blurry, underwater light. “Look, Dorotea, look. Is she not the very spit of my illustrious daughter?”

  “I have never had the honour of seeing the Duchess of Ferrara, madonna.” It was a gentle voice, meek, with an uncertain, wavering quality as though speech were something its owner rarely experimented with. Dorotea? Was this, then, the mysterious Dorotea Caracciolo, the woman Cesare was supposed to have kidnapped? I stole a look, and saw she was doing likewise, though not so much at me as at Girolamo, on whom her sad, dark eyes rested with a kind of saintly resignation. She shifted the weight of a bundle she carried in her lap from her left knee to her right. The bundle gave a small cry. A baby. She had a baby.

  “Well, she is, you may take my word for it. It is uncanny.”

  I thought Monna Vannozza was labouring the point, but perhaps she could not really remember what her daughter looked like. Dorotea’s child began to grizzle.

  “Is she hungry?” demanded Monna Vannozza.

  “I hope she’s not going to start crying again,” said Giovanni, puffing air down his nose and folding his arms in a parody of a vexed adult.

  “She shouldn’t be. She was fed just before we left.”

  “Here, give her to me.” Monna Vannozza held out her gloved and heavily jewelled hands. Rings glistened on every finger, even her thumbs, and three or four bracelets hung from each wrist. She must have been wearing most of her portable wealth. Dorotea handed over the baby. She looked to be close in age to Girolamo.

  “How old is she?” I asked, wishing I had not felt compelled to do so, hoping my enquiry sounded merely friendly.

  Dorotea smiled. She had a beautiful mouth, the lips full and shapely and the same dark rose colour as a November olive. “She was born just after Easter.” Not more than six weeks before Girolamo. I felt jealousy settle behind my ribs like an incubus and hoped it would not sour my milk.

  “And your child?” enquired Monna Vannozza.

  “In May, madonna.” Monna Vannozza looked proud; Dorotea shifted her gaze from me to the top of her baby’s head and I fancied I saw a slight blush tinge the saint-like pallor of her cheeks. I found myself wondering if he had kept her indoors these two years, like a toy in a cupboard, to be fetched out on his whim. Her skin looked too thin for wind and sunlight. At least that had not been my fate. I felt better. Then I felt like a peasant, and hid my hands among Girolamo’s wrappings, and was glad my hair was
loose so I could shake it close around my chapped cheeks.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “A boy, madama.”

  “Splendid.”

  “Good,” said Giovanni, “he can be my friend. There’s only Camilla and she’s a girl. Where’s your husband, Violante? Did he die of the fever too, like my papa?”

  I felt the two women’s eyes on me, felt them waiting to hear what I would say. So, if Dorotea did not know who Girolamo’s father was, she had guessed. “He has been very sick, sweetheart, but he is getting well now.”

  “Good. You’re nice. Cesare always said you were the most fun of Lucrezia’s ladies. He said you could make jokes in Greek.”

  “Only one, and it wasn’t mine; it was something I had to memorise from Aristophanes when I was a little girl. I expect Don Cesare saw through it very quickly.” All the same, I stole a glance at Dorotea to see how she would take Giovanni’s remark. She busied herself arranging her child in Monna Vannozza’s lap and appeared not to have heard him. My gaze met not hers but Monna Vannozza’s and, for a second, Cesare’s eyes looked back at me, hooded and dark, full of watchful intelligence.

  “Girls don’t usually learn Greek, though, do they?” said Giovanni.

  “Well, I just used to sit in with my brothers, really.” I thought of the little tutor with the burning eyes and the tubercular bloom in his cheeks, and how it would have broken his heart to know all he had taught me came down to being able to flirt in a dead language.

  “I bet Dorotea can’t speak Greek.” Giovanni made her lack sound unforgivable. I took his hand and squeezed it.

  “Oh really,” said Monna Vannozza. “You are too precocious, child, be silent.”

  “Sorry, Nonna.” He looked contrite, but when he thought Monna Vannozza wasn’t looking, he winked at me. I wondered how old he was now. Six, perhaps? Seven?