Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “It’s artillery that costs,” he commented sulkily.

  “Shut up and listen to me. I wanted to kill you. Then a good woman reminded me that love matters more than duty. Though as far as I know, she has done her duty all her life so I don’t know where this wisdom came from. So I have brought you your son. He is your only son, and we must think about him now. There will be time enough to mourn our fathers later.” My heart had set up such a tattoo in my chest I was afraid I would faint. My sight blurred and my head felt like a bladder full of air; I half expected it to lift from my shoulders and float out of the open window.

  “What do you think it would be best to do for him?” he asked. He spoke with tenderness, almost humility, but he could not disarm me that easily.

  “You’re asking me? You are the great Valentino, the victor of Senigallia, the…”

  “Spare me your sarcasm, woman. It does rather take the shine off your last pretty speech. I could hand him a fistful of titles but frankly, keeping him alive, keeping all this…” He waved his arm at the window, the room, the castle. His sleeve caught the pile of parchments and scattered them over the floor, “…circus going is my top priority at the moment. How many people do you suppose are here? What are they all to eat come winter? I have nothing but what Michelotto managed to seize before the buzzards started flocking round the Vatican, and that little I must use to keep Della Rovere’s arse off Saint Peter’s throne or I am finished. I can scarcely get out of this chair, let alone ride at the head of an army. You know, I had thought of everything. Everything, Violante, except that when my father died I would also be laid low with the fever.

  “And now I am so tired. Sometimes I feel as though I have a dark daemon clinging to my shoulders like the Princess Sherezade’s old man of the sea, and he wraps his legs and arms around me so tight I can scarcely breathe, let alone move, or think, or do anything.”

  I am sick, he had written. Sickness smoulders in me like fire at the heart of a damp haystack; it ticks in the night like a death clock in the rafters. Now I understood.

  “You should make your peace with your God, Cesare.”

  “Why? Have you changed your mind about me, my lady physician? Am I dying after all?”

  “If there is a disjunction between man and his Maker, that is where the melancholy enters in.”

  “Torella tells me it is an imbalance of black bile and makes me eat white food to counteract it. I dare say we Christians must take a more circuitous route to God, not being His chosen people.”

  “I am trying to help, and you must be flippant!”

  Suddenly he raised his hands, backs facing me. A gesture of surrender? The wide sleeves of his gown slipped up his arms, exposing their thinness and the raw and blistered skin. But that was not what he wished to show me.

  “See the scars?” he asked, twisting his hands this way and that. There were, perhaps, six scars on the back of each hand, fine bridges of raised skin across his veins, left by the physicians’ bleeding fleams. “They set me thinking about my sister’s nun. I have realised that her prophecy was right.”

  “How right?” I filled my voice with brisk common sense, but I remembered, and I could see he did, the shocked whiteness of his face, the way he had stumbled, almost as though Sister Osanna’s words had physically struck him.

  “She gave me the number twenty. I believed then she referred to my age. As I had already passed my twenty-sixth birthday, I dismissed her as a charlatan who wished merely to flatter me. If Lucrezia wanted to give her to Ercole d’Este, all well and good, I thought. But recently I realised, if you count the months from the date of her prophecy to my father’s death, it is twenty. And so, every time I see a possible way out of this mess, I look at the backs of my hands and am reminded there is no point, no plan I can contrive, no action worth taking.”

  “Oh Cesare.” I rose and crossed the short space between us, impelled by some vague idea of comforting him, and tried to put my arms around him, but he flinched and hissed with pain as my hands came into contact with his shoulders. I backed off, apologising. He gave a grim laugh.

  “Stay away from me, Violante, for I am the emperor of the kingdom of pain, encased in ice.”

  “Cesare, you’re not raving again, are you?”

  He shook his head. “Merely misquoting Dante. At the height of my fever the physicians had me plunged in a barrel full of ice to stop my blood from boiling. The ice ripped most of the skin from my body. I did not die, nor yet remain alive.”

  “But you did remain alive. Dante didn’t give up and neither must you.”

  “Dante had faith. Dante had Beatrice.”

  “And you have only me. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve told you what I’m thinking. I have been honest with you. Can you not take that as the compliment it is intended to be?”

  “It is a burden, a responsibility. Do you expect me to do nothing with the knowledge you have given me? I might as well take a knife and stick it between your ribs.”

  He took my hands. I stared at my skin, rough and reddened by laundry soap and the pox, and at his, swollen and scarred. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “If I were inclined to give up, I would have died when my mother died, and never met you, and you would not have a son. And before you start up again about how you can’t be of any use to him, consider what you said to me about Juan and your father. Even if you have no cities or guns or diamond rings, you can give him your love and that will mean more to him than anything.”

  “Bring him to me, and we shall see. Tomorrow. I am tired now. I think I shall sleep for a while.”

  “Let me help you to your bed.”

  “I can walk that far unaided, for Christ’s sake. Leave me.”

  As I turned to go, the heel of my shoe, which had come loose as a result of Cesare’s delirious attack, caught in a gap between two floorboards and I stumbled.

  “Here,” he said, “catch.” But I turned too slowly and the key clattered to the ground. As I stooped to pick it up, he went on, “There’s a room on the floor below here where my sister left some clothes and things. I suppose you are her size. Help yourself.” It was impossible to know whether he remembered what he had done. Or that he had kissed me.

  I had no intention of taking him up on his offer. It seemed to me somehow improper to pick over madonna’s clothes in her absence, like going through her private letters or eavesdropping on her conversations. But once the idea of a new dress which would fit me properly, of clean linen and darn-free stockings and waterproof shoes had taken hold, I could not let it go. I found myself drifting towards the Governor’s Tower, the key pressed to my palm, pictures of gowns both remembered and imagined flicking through my mind as though it were nothing more than a dressmaker’s design book. I knew I was watched, by Michelotto and Monna Vannozza, by Don Jofre as he crossed the courtyard in consultation with his secretary. A messenger from Don Prospero Colonna had recently brought Don Jofre word that his wife intended to accompany Don Prospero to Naples, to console him for Cesare’s deception, and Don Jofre was working hard on his reply. I felt I must at least unlock the room, if only to show them all I was not merely mooning after Cesare, to wipe the various, complicated smiles off their faces.

  Two rooms shared the floor below Cesare’s apartments, the one to which I had the key and the strongroom, guarded by four of Cesare’s Swiss infantry with their tall pikes and gaudy uniforms. I held the key out in front of me like a safe conduct as I advanced on the door and the cold eyes of the montagnards watched me.

  The door was stiff. No, it was obstructed. I had to put my shoulder to it to open it, and even then sidle, crabwise, through the narrow gap. I will take nothing, I told myself, just look. There might be things madonna would like back, things I could pack up and send with the next messenger who came from Ferrara. It was the lightning that changed my mind. I had not noticed the weather closing in while I had been talking to Cesare, then rushing to feed
Girolamo, singing him distractedly to sleep while thoughts of skirts and bodices and embroidered chemises whirled about my mind. But the sudden explosion of light drew my attention to the window slit, to the slap of rain on the stone sill, a brown, twisted leaf dancing across the narrow bar of steel-coloured sky. Winter was coming. I had to have stout shoes and a decent cloak. I owed it to my son not to risk my health.

  Thunder growled as I closed the door behind me. At first the room was full of shadows, strange, cloudy shapes that only gradually resolved themselves into bound chests, and piles of clothing. But these were not madonna’s clothes, I realised as I clambered among them. Doublets decorated with rosettes and ribbons like the costumes of a mountebank, sleeves and breeches slashed with coloured silks and cloth of gold, caps set with stones and pearls the size of birds’ eggs, fur-lined cloaks with clasps of filigree, soft boots and gold spurs were scattered about like dismembered bodies on a battlefield, everything thrown together in utter abandon. With the next lightning strike I was nearly blinded by the brightness of the gems.

  I waded through this fabulous sea, picking up articles at random as if I were a beachcomber on the shores of some fairy-tale kingdom. Here a cap of violet-coloured velvet, so encrusted with precious stones it weighed as heavy as a crown, there a spur pointed with diamonds. There were shirts so fine they slipped through my fingers like air, a dancing slipper with a gilded leather sole which looked as though it had never been worn paired with a green kid boot whose chased shin was caked with mud. I held the boot up to my nose, as though the smell of the earth might tell me what journey it had been on, but the earth was old and dry and crumbled away under my touch, and smelled of nothing. A peacock feather shivered in the storm’s draught, a fountain of dark sea blue sprang from a turban of gold satin pinned with a chunk of polished coral. I imagined the ghost of Prince Djem, chuckling like an indulgent uncle over the follies of young men, and wondered if Cesare had ever worn it, or if it was just some memento mori. Here were all the skins he had sloughed off, and now the last decorative sheath had gone, the beard, the river of red hair, the upholstery of muscle, even the skin he had been born in, so all that remained was blood and bone, the fire in his heart and the stone in his will.

  I put down the boot, trailed my fingers over the fringe of the peacock feather, stepped over dressing cases and jewellery boxes to reach the far side of the room where a row of skirts and bodices swung austerely from a rail. Mourning clothes, I realised as the next bolt of lightning picked out the rich, dull gleam of black satin, a thin froth of lace at a neck or cuff or the edging of a skirt. That was why madonna had left them behind.

  I chose a dark violet skirt and a bodice striped in black and white which I thought must have been designed for the period of half mourning. They were a little old-fashioned, and far too grand for me, but well made, and with enough stuff in the skirt for me to cut it down and make a second dress if I needed to. A chest with a broken padlock yielded undergarments made of Egyptian cotton and beautifully embroidered in black silk with trails of ivy and tiny figures of Orpheus looking over his shoulder. I unpacked violet and mulberry silk stockings with black garter ribbons, neatly folded, cedar perfumed. I changed quickly, with a sense of trespass, almost as though Donna Lucrezia were watching me step into her skirts, tie her stockings, fasten her bodice across my own full breasts just as she must have done, alone behind these thick walls with her own infant son.

  Shoes, I thought, or did she put the word in my mind, a practical nugget of a word trailing wisps of soft laughter and dance tunes playing in neighbouring rooms? As many as a dozen pairs were lined up beneath the rail of gowns, velvet slippers, kidskin boots with gilded heels and pearl buttons, tall Venetian pattens for rain. One after another I picked them up, looking for the stoutest, examining the soles for signs of wear. I found a suitable pair quite quickly, morocco riding boots which looked as though they had never been worn and scarcely pinched my feet at all. But as I sat down on the lid of a chest to put them on, another pair caught my eye.

  These were not black, but made of rose-coloured satin and scattered with tiny pearls and emeralds. I picked them up, just to examine the workmanship, I told myself, just out of idle curiosity. They were worn, these shoes, the heels scuffed, the toes crumpled and one darkened at its point with what looked like an old bloodstain. I felt a tug at my heart as I remembered how often we had all danced till our feet bled, then spent the daylight hours gossiping with our toes poulticed and ankles raised, ready to do it all again the next night. As though the cycle would go on forever, as though it had the certainty of sunrise and sunset. Lightning caught the tears in my eyes and blinded me. Clutching the shoes, I counted the space between lightning and thunder and waited for my sight to return, traced the pattern of embroidery on the shoes, the sharpness of their toes, the curve of the heels. Something else. The soles of these shoes were cracked, no, cut, scored crosswise.

  I flung them away from me as if they had burned my hands. In the sudden silence left by the thunder I heard myself gasp, mutter some denial. I fancy I even heard the small grind of the bones in my neck as I shook my head. Gathering up my old clothes, I fled. I did not even pause to lock the door, was only half aware of the wolf whistles of the Swiss guards cutting through the drumming of my blood, the thud of the heels of madonna’s boots on the stone flagged floor.

  ***

  “Who is she?” There were no guards on his door, nothing and no one to stop me crashing into the room with this question swelling inside me until it felt as though it would burst out of my chest. “Who is Lucia?”

  The shutters were closed. The thunder prowled outside, rattling them with the power of its voice. Monna Vannozza sat in a wavering circle of candlelight, her embroidery frame in her lap. The face she turned on me, pale, deepset beneath her voluminous wired hood, the large eyes full of calm enquiry, was like an owl’s.

  “He is asleep,” she said, as though there were no possibility of his having been awakened by the thunder and lightning, or my shouting, or the door banging against the wall. As though he might not be lying behind his closed bed curtains listening to the storm, the fizz and crackle of the guttering candle, the rasp of thread through canvas, his own heartbeat, the daemon chattering in his ear. She professed herself so proud of his skill at listening. She looked me up and down, pushed a contemptuous breath down her long nose. “So you have added thieving to your impertinences now, have you?”

  “His grace said I might. He gave me the key. My shoes…you saw the condition of my dress before. Winter is coming. And Donna Lucrezia will not be wanting these things, not now she is married again.”

  Monna Vannozza chose to ignore my last remark. “You talk of practicalities, but I know your game. You will put those things back where you found them. I forbid you to allow yourself to be seen by my son in the changeling’s clothes. The shock would kill him.”

  I straightened my back, squared my shoulders, clenched my fists at my side to stop my hands shaking. “Your son commands this household, madama, not you. I will change my clothes if he orders it, not otherwise.” I did not wait for her reply. I wanted Cesare to sleep; I wanted him to wake up tomorrow and be himself again, to be strong and funny and in charge of things. I feared the wraith with his hands frail as fallen moths and his bleak talk of daemons far more than I had ever feared the terrible duke who used to wink at me during dreary theatrical pageants and make me laugh. I wanted to be able to ask him about Lucia in the certainty I would be answered with some smooth and entertaining lie.

  ***

  Two days of cold and rain were followed by a last, soft breath of summer. Grape picking began on the terraces below the castle, and in the castle’s own orchard we were all suddenly busy gathering pears and early apples and fat, golden apricots that basked against walls as warm as flesh. After the storms, and an apathy induced by low cloud and grey light and smoking fires, we were imbued with a sense of urgency, a sense we could not stay here forever.

  In Rome
the conclave had begun to elect a successor to Cesare’s father and among those anxiously awaiting its outcome were no doubt many of the men dispossessed by Cesare in his conquest of the Romagna. Yet as we cleaned and bottled the fruit, we women and children laughing and singing and gossiping around the great trestle table in the kitchen, with its knife scars and the smooth dents made by years of kneading, we knew we were also at the centre of something here. A web of information spun out from Nepi and back again, embassies arriving daily, sometimes hourly, from all over Italy and beyond, messengers coming and going, sometimes in Cesare’s livery and bearing sealed letters, sometimes anonymously dressed and carrying nothing.

  I thought he had forgotten Girolamo, and for now I was content to leave it that way because I knew when I saw him again I would have to find out the truth about Lucia and I was not sure I had the courage for it. Despite Monna Vannozza’s hostility, I enjoyed special status among the women in the castle as the mother of the duke’s son. They treated me as if I were, indeed, his mistress, and I was content to prolong the make-believe. Perhaps, if we all pretended hard enough, it would, somehow, become true. So, when I unexpectedly found myself face to face with him in the garden, my heart did something complicated which had as much to do with dread as desire.

  “You see, Violante,” he said, waving an ebony cane in my direction, “I defy the riddle of the Sphinx by walking on three legs at midday.” Clearly his joints were still plaguing him, though he had put on a little flesh and had some colour in his cheeks, and his smile, fringed by the rough regrowth of his beard, had the fierce merriment of a pirate’s. I had come outside to find somewhere peaceful to feed Girolamo, to rest my back against warm stones after hours stooped over the kitchen table. He was accompanied by a whole retinue of people. His secretary, Agapito, recently returned from Rome, and Torella, conferred together as they walked like a pair of black crows. One small page was almost hidden behind a pile of cushions while another staggered beneath a load of books and a guitar. A demure girl with bony wrists balanced a wine jug and goblet on a tray while managing to keep a long-handled fan tucked beneath one arm.