by Sarah Bower
We seemed to reach the Porta del Popolo quickly, considering the crowds lining the narrow streets and the size of our party with its horse soldiers and foot soldiers, its baggage carts and mule trains and, no doubt, the special wheeled cages in which Cesare would have his leopards transported to hunts. There we stopped, presumably to meet Don Prospero who, Monna Vannozza explained, had been forbidden to enter the city because he was at the head of a troop of Spanish infantry. Don Prospero had placed his villa at Tivoli at Cesare’s disposal to aid his recovery and that, Monna Vannozza told me, was where we were now headed.
As she was explaining this to me, the carriage door was wrenched open and Don Jofre’s face appeared, the diamond in his cap winking fiercely in the mid-morning sun.
“You’re to come with me,” he said, jerking his chin in Dorotea’s direction. A puzzled frown briefly drew her fine brows together, but she turned without question to take her daughter from Monna Vannozza. After two years with Cesare, I supposed she must have become used to mysterious commands and sudden changes of plan; though everything he did made perfect sense to Cesare, he tried to ensure it made no sense at all to anyone else.
“Not the child,” said Don Jofre. His voice was harsher than his brother’s, not so carefully tutored. Don Jofre, I decided, was a lazy man.
“But..?” Dorotea’s pale, tapered fingers tensed around her child. Monna Vannozza’s jewelled hands did likewise. In this Judgement of Solomon, there was no doubting which mother would win; the backing of superior force can transform any travesty into a just cause.
“The child will be well cared for by my illustrious mother and her wet nurse. Your husband wants you, woman, doting old fool that he is. But he most certainly does not want any reminders of your sojourn with the duke. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll get plenty more babies on you, if he still has ink in his quill.” Don Jofre and his mother exchanged identical, spiteful smiles. Tears welled up in Dorotea’s disbelieving eyes; she blinked, and they spilled over, running unchecked into the corners of her beautiful mouth. I clung so hard to Girolamo he began to squirm and whimper, and thanked my Creator for making me stubborn and manipulative and for giving Donna Lucrezia a good conscience. They could not do this to me. Girolamo had no wet nurse.
“Oh do get a move on, Dotti,” snapped Don Jofre. “There are some men from Venice waiting for you, and they look none too comfortable around my brother.” He gave a bark of laughter. “I’m afraid they believe he has risen from the dead.”
“Jofre!” Monna Vannozza raised one hand from baby Camilla to cross herself. When Cesare was a baby, it was said, she had posed with him for a Madonna and Child, but had later forbidden the statue to be displayed because she felt it to be sacrilegious. Remembering this, I felt a stab of pity for her, trying to appease whatever malign fortune had put her child in the shadow of death.
Dorotea hesitated. Her hands fluttered, her gaze wandered as though she could not bear to look at her daughter. The baby, perhaps catching the mood from her mother or my fractious son, began to cry. With an animal howl, Dorotea threw herself out of the carriage door and against Don Jofre as though she planned to wrestle him to the ground but, though tall, she was not a strong woman. Don Jofre, caught off guard, staggered a little but quickly recovered himself and seized Dorotea by her wrists. She struggled against him until I thought her wrists would break then suddenly all the fight seemed to go out of her and she slumped, head hanging, knees buckled, held upright only by Don Jofre’s grip on her.
“Good girl,” he said, “that’s better. Off we go.” He turned her towards the head of our train and marched her away, the flat of one hand against the small of her back, her narrow feet dragging and stumbling in the dust.
I bent to kiss my son’s head. Never, my heart told him, never will anybody do that to us.
***
“I will speak to you in Latin,” said Monna Vannozza. Giovanni, bored and whiny, had been despatched up top to sit with the coachman and Camilla’s nurse had taken his place in the carriage. I wondered what Monna Vannozza had to say that must not be understood by the nurse and if, indeed, I would understand it for I had had little practice at spoken Latin.
“Let us understand one another. As you are the mother of my grandson, I will tolerate you. The child cannot be blamed for whatever duplicity you and my daughter concocted between you to get him, so you may stay and care for him until better arrangements can be made.” She paused, her mouth a puckered line of distaste, her hands folded in her lap. Her jewellery flashed from time to time as chinks of sunlight found their way around the window blinds. I thought I must have misunderstood her, for I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Yes, domina.”
“But you cannot expect to win my good opinion.”
“No, domina.”
“Yes, domina, no, domina. Pretending the innocent won’t wash with me, young lady.”
This unjustified onslaught was making me angry. “Domina, forgive me, but I have no idea what you are talking about. I hope I have served your illustrious daughter loyally and well, and I am…I love the duke very much and long for his recovery. I am here only because he asked for me, as Michelotto will bear witness.” The mention of Michelotto seemed to give her pause; whatever his shortcomings, Michelotto’s devotion to his master was not in doubt; if I had his support, I could not be all bad.
“Perhaps you do love him. Perhaps, after all, Lucrezia has deceived you too, but it is complicated and I’m afraid my Latin doesn’t run to it.” She turned to the nurse. “You, girl, shut your ears. If you repeat a word I say to Monna Violante here, be sure I will know of it and I will tell the Duke and he will have your tongue ripped from your head. Do I make myself clear?”
The girl nodded. I wondered if she too remembered the fate of the man who had spread word of the Savelli letter.
“Good.” Monna Vannozza settled herself as if she were about to tell me a bedtime story. The tale she told me was a strange one, and like all good tales, it began with a castle. “All my children, that is, the children I bore Rodrigo, were born at his castle of Subiaco, up in the hills. His ambition made him discreet then, you see. The children would all be born in the country and only brought to Rome when he could pass them off as his nephews, or protégés. The house has been refurbished since, but then it was a proper castle with tall towers and crenellations. None of these ugly squat walls you see nowadays for resisting cannon fire.
“The afternoon I went into labour with Cesare was lovely, just what you expect of mid-September, the sun golden, the grapes ripening, the second cut of hay just finished. But in the night, the devil breathed on Subiaco. By morning there was frost on the ground. Even through my travail I could feel the cold, chilling my sweat and the midwife’s hands when she examined me to see how I was progressing. When Cesare came, she cut the cord and blew in his face to make him cry and I knew, I just knew, the way a mother does, that with that cry he had breathed in the devil’s frost. I could see it lying in his lungs, shrivelling them as it shrivelled the grapes on the vines. I fancied when he breathed I could hear the rattle of icicles in a wind. He fed poorly, his lips and fingernails were blue, his skin as clammy as the grave. The midwife herself baptised him because we did not think he would live. That is why he is called Cesare, you know, and not one of those Borgia names, Juan or Pedro Luis or Rodrigo. It was the midwife’s brother’s name.
“But we had underestimated his stubbornness. He lived. Juan was born and quickly outgrew his brother. Rodrigo treated them both the same, gave them swords and ponies and little suits of armour, but Cesare hadn’t the strength for riding and learning the knightly skills, though you could see how he envied Juan with every bone in his body when Juan showed off on his pony or with his sword. But he had the kind of mind that couldn’t help learning. He learned to read very young, and he watched and listened. He once told me that what he remembers most clearly from that time is lying on his daybed in the garden of my husband’s house and being able
to hear a cockroach crossing the terrace and the cat stalking it. He was a remarkable child.
“When Lucrezia was born, he was five. Rodrigo was so thrilled to have a daughter, he insisted on bringing both boys up to Subiaco to see her. I didn’t want Cesare to come. I had a bad feeling about it. I was sure the journey would kill him. There I lay in bed, with the new baby in her crib beside me. Juan came bounding into the room and leapt on me, covering my face with kisses, prattling on and on about how he had learned to jump his pony now and Papa had promised him a kestrel for his birthday. So I scarcely noticed Rodrigo, who was carrying Cesare, put the boy down beside the crib and say, look, here is your new sister. But I remember what happened next with every breath I draw.
“Cesare peered down into the crib, and she looked straight back at him. She didn’t blink, she just stared, and her eyes looked as old as eternity, and Cesare said, clear as a bell, not a wheeze or a cough to be heard, that changes everything. That changes everything. What sort of thing is that for a five-year-old child to say, even one like Cesare? It made my flesh crawl. Juan stopped his chatter and even Rodrigo looked slightly doubtful. That was when I knew. They had taken my baby away and put a changeling in her place.
“I tried to tell Rodrigo, but he just patted my hand and gave me a diamond ring. New mothers were prone to strange fancies, he said, and told the midwife to give me something to help shrink my womb and dry up my milk. Let’s get you back to normal, he said, with an unmistakable glint in his eye. Time passed, and I learned to keep my suspicions to myself. Cesare grew stronger. By the time Lucrezia’s first birthday came around he was taller than Juan and could outdo him at most sports, though Juan competed with him fiercely, not least over Lucrezia. Even then she could charm the birds out of the trees and her father and brothers spoiled her rotten. Rodrigo said her effect on Cesare had been a miracle, but I didn’t trust her then, and I don’t trust her now. She’s a witch, and whatever purpose she had in saving Cesare’s life is evil, I’m sure of it.
“I’m afraid of you, Violante. You have been sent here by witchcraft, and I will do everything I can to keep you away from my son.”
I wondered if she truly believed what she had said. If she did not, she insulted my intelligence by thinking she could make me think it was true. I glanced at the nurse, but she remained absorbed in feeding Camilla, her head bowed over the baby whose tiny sucking sounds fell like small pebbles into the chasm of silence which had opened up between Monna Vannozza and myself as I thought about her tale.
True, Cesare and his sister were close, far closer, I thought, with a twist of regret in my gut, than my brothers and I. But if the relationship was not equal, it was Cesare who had the upper hand, not Donna Lucrezia. She had been the one reduced to impotent rage by his action at Urbino, who had waited in a terror of ignorance for the outcome of Senigallia, not the other way around. Did Monna Vannozza know her son so little? If there was magic involved in his survival, it was his own, not Donna Lucrezia’s. She was no more a changeling than I was.
And then I remembered something else, a scene from far back in my childhood. Rachel Abravanel pulling my hair, dancing around me with a hank of my hair in her hand, my neck twisting and twisting till I was forced to turn myself, and Rachel chanting, “Esther’s a dybbuk, Esther’s a dybbuk.” Round and round. Over and over. What exactly had Donna Lucrezia seen in me that pleased her? I closed my eyes and hoped Monna Vannozza would think I had fallen asleep. Perhaps I did sleep. Perhaps the images of Cesare and his sister which converged and floated apart and converged again inside my eyelids were the manifestations of a dream.
CHAPTER 4
NEPI, SEPTEMBER 1503
You always held it against me that I left Nepi without saying goodbye. Didn’t you realise goodbye had already been said?
I knew immediately we were not at Tivoli. I had been there often with Donna Lucrezia, who loved the town and used to say she would emulate the Emperor Hadrian and build herself a villa there one day. We climbed out of the carriage and stretched our stiff limbs in the courtyard of a fortress, not a house built for pleasure. We were surrounded by the same kind of squat, anti-artillery walls Monna Vannozza had complained of when describing Subiaco, and the living quarters appeared to be a series of round towers with only arrow slits for windows. The curtain walls might have been the latest thing in military science, but the buildings inside them must have been hundreds of years old, with moss sprouting from the mortar and old water stains streaking them like tears.
“Nepi,” said Monna Vannozza, reaching her arms towards the deep, afternoon blue of the sky, her gems winking in the mellow sunlight. “That boy never does anything he says he’s going to do. I doubt I will have any warm enough gowns.”
Nepi. My heart seemed to somersault behind my ribs as I saw madonna once again at Belfiore, her bare, bloody feet crunching over shards of glass and pottery, shrieking as though Cesare would hear her all the way from Urbino, “You promised. At Nepi. You swore you wouldn’t interfere.” I looked around, at the blind towers casting their deep shadows over the melee of men and animals, carts and carriages in the courtyard. What were they hiding? I wondered, as my gaze came to rest on Cesare’s litter, lying enigmatically at the centre of all this activity, surrounded by his guards, its curtains still drawn. What words were trapped in their stones, what actions had been done in the thin bands of light falling through the arrow slits and the shadows beyond their reach?
Monna Vannozza, perhaps noting the direction of my gaze, swept past me, so close I felt the swish of her skirts against my bare ankles, calling instructions to the guards, who shifted about uncomfortably but made no move to obey her. Michelotto came to the rescue, detaching himself from a group of men who were rolling a small gun into position in front of the tallest of the castle’s four towers. He pulled back the curtains on the litter.
To teach us life drawing at the convent, Sister Arcangelo used to use an articulated wooden figure. One day, the boy who kept the ink wells filled loosened all its pins, so that every time Sister Arcangelo attempted to pose it, it flopped uncontrollably. This was what Cesare reminded me of as two of his guards linked their hands in a lift and two others hauled him from the litter. As they hoisted him beneath his armpits, his limbs dangled and his head lolled. His poor, shorn head, the mass of curls patchily replaced by dark, dull stubble.
I heard a cry of pain, then a sudden, shocked silence. Everyone stopped what they were doing. Everyone turned towards me, open-mouthed laundresses clutching bundles to their bosoms, mules with baleful eyes and flicking ears, strapping Swiss infantrymen, and a couple of dwarfs wearing caps with bells on them and brandishing pigs bladders on sticks, just as though they were about to perform for their master. Camilla’s nurse placed a comforting hand on my arm. Was it me, then, who had cried out? I had thought it was him.
“Oh Lord, Violante,” whispered Giovanni, slipping his hand in mine, “what’s going to happen to us? Will I still be Duke of Camerino?”
Though all I did was give the little boy’s hand a reassuring squeeze, I thought, what ever is going to happen is happening now. History isn’t despatches from new worlds or the dry observations of Herodotus or Plutarch or Livy I once studied with my brothers, it’s this small, sad chaos, this directionless muddle of bewildered women and children and dogs, and leopards in cages. “Don’t worry,” I said, because there was no point in worrying.
***
Cesare was installed in the Governor’s Tower, guarded not only by his Swiss lancers but by his mother and her priests. She surrounded herself with them, peering out from between their black-clad or lace-bedecked shoulders like a soldier watching his enemy from behind a barricade. I, meanwhile, bided my time, exploring the ancient castle and its grounds, pacing its squat ramparts and peering into its little stone caves of rooms, looking for clues as to what had happened here, what promise Cesare had made to his sister and then so catastrophically broken by invading Urbino.
Then one morning I encount
ered Michelotto on the well-trodden path to the latrine. Whatever privy arrangements there might have been in the Governor’s Tower, which had been refurbished for Donna Lucrezia when she was appointed governor of Nepi, the rest of us had to make do with the communal latrine just beyond the castle walls, at the head of the ravine; a precarious perch, but hygienic as a steep waterfall rushed and bounced from there into the gorge many feet below. As we bade one another good morning, Monna Vannozza swept past us with a jangle of keys and a swish of the heavy, damascene silk she favoured. Her bevy of priests scurried in her wake, heads down against a sharp breeze, leaving traces of incense and camphor on air that tasted of cold stone and dying leaves.
“Autumn’s coming,” remarked Michelotto, squinting at the sky, which was full of fast-moving cloud.
“How is your lord this morning?”
“He needs rest, but with only Don Jofre to safeguard his affairs, well…” Michelotto shrugged.
“I wish I could see him.”
“I wish you could.” He cast a dark look at Monna Vannozza’s back then suddenly grinned at me, giving a fantastic display of his ruined teeth. “We all have feet of clay, you see.”
“It is proper for a man to respect his mother.”
“If he was well enough he’d be showing his respect with the toe of his boot,” said Michelotto with feeling. “Come today. I’ll be damned if she’s going to get all her own way. And now my bowels are telling me they will not wait, if you will excuse me.”
***
I was not afraid of Monna Vannozza. I told myself she had more cause to be afraid of me if she believed I was a witch. Leaving Girolamo in the care of Camilla’s nurse, with whom I now shared a bed in a room crowded with all kinds of women in the tower which also housed the castle’s kitchens and scullery, I made my way to Cesare’s rooms. Two guards were posted outside his bed chamber as usual, but the door was half open and I could hear low, urgent murmurings coming from inside. A grave-faced physician emerged bearing a covered bowl, followed by a maid carrying a bundle of dirty linen, her cheeks blotched with tears. I felt cold. As the girl hurried past me, wiping her nose on her sleeve, I wanted to ask her what had happened but my heart seemed to block my throat, as though it did not want to know. Suddenly I heard a great shout, almost a scream, tailing off into a querulous whine.
