Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “He wrote and told old Piccolomini he was dying, you know,” Jofre told me. “Begged to be allowed to go home and die in peace. And the daft old sod believed him. Apparently he told the Ferrarese ambassador that he had never thought to feel any pity for the duke, but that he now found himself pitying him most deeply.” Jofre gave his irritating snigger.

  “Hold your tongue, Jofre. You’re blathering nonsense like a girl.”

  “His Holiness will be very surprised when he sees you, my lord,” I said. “Pleasantly surprised, I am sure.”

  “Ah, but there are many ways to die, Violante.”

  CHAPTER 5

  ROME, OCTOBER 1503

  I have been remembering the place we used to hide among the fruit canes, where I crushed the ladybird because I was sure I would never need its tiny store of luck.

  And for every way of dying, there is a way to protect yourself from death.

  Rome was full of Cesare’s enemies, vultures, he said, come to pick over his carcass and more dangerous than ever now they were condemned to go hungry. Once we had returned to the palace of San Clemente, Cesare rarely left it, and never after dark. The main gates remained locked and barricaded and despite objections from the Vatican, and all the major Roman families, a row of small cannon were ranged across the square outside, causing carters to have to take alternative routes through the cacophonous maze of the Borgo. Cesare had makeshift wooden firesteps slung up around his garden walls, which his guards accessed by means of rope ladders so the walls took on the aspect of the high sides of a ship ready for boarding. The towpath which ran between the palace grounds and the Tiber was patrolled by men with dogs, and several complaints were received from bargemen whose horses had been savaged. In the garden itself, he allowed his pet leopards free rein, and they were irritable after the journey from Nepi, bouncing over pitted roads on the back of a cart.

  Cesare himself went armed at all times, even, said those who might or might not know, sleeping with his sword on his pillow. He began to wear a ring I had never seen before whose cameo setting formed the hinged lid to a tiny compartment which, it was rumoured, contained the legendary poison called cantarella. We used to laugh about cantarella, which was supposed to have been devised by Donna Lucrezia for disposing of her first husband, Giovanni Sforza.

  “Well,” Cesare would say, punning on the poison’s name, “a milksop like Sforza might well be killed by a blow from a mushroom.” But now, thinking back, I could not recall he had ever actually denied its existence.

  And looking at him, I wondered whether he kept it about him to use on his enemies or himself. The fine skin beneath his eyes had begun to resemble ink-stained parchment and his eyelids were pleated with weariness like those of a much older man. Lines like deep scars ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth. I doubt he slept, even when he did finally retire to bed as dawn was beginning to overpower the magic of candlelight and the city’s bells struck up the call to Prime. His imagination was too agile; even an unsheathed sword on his pillow and armed guards at his doors and windows could not ward off all the terrible possibilities that must have been whirling around his mind, the spectres of failure lurking in unlit corners, the loneliness, the temptation of death. I suppose there were women for the loneliness, but now I can see they would only have made it worse.

  Yet to the outside world he kept up the smiling mask of optimism. The builders who had erected the firesteps and checked for weak spots in the palace walls were kept on to resume the work of modernisation which had been abandoned on the death of his father. Wherever Cesare went, he was shadowed by his clerk of works cradling a stack of thumbed and dog-eared plans, trailing a flow of questions and observations about stable buildings with hypocausts, flushing systems for privies, windows for the library and whether or not a revolving studiolo could be constructed with mechanics to keep pace with the daily transit of the sun. The palace itself seemed to be infected with the same sense of shifting impermanence as the household it sheltered. You might walk into a room one day, only to find yourself teetering on the edge of a cliff of brick rubble the next. Walls appeared and disappeared and reappeared in new formations as though performing a strange, slow, dusty dance. Candelabra of Venetian glass hung from the ceilings in linen shrouds, like the chrysalises of giant moths. Figures in half-painted frescoes seemed in one light to have the energy of Adam struggling out of the mud, yet in another were ghosts fading back into the pale plaster. The house breathed fumes of quicklime, catching in our throats and making our eyes stream.

  As the builders and painters and carpenters remodelled his palace, Cesare worked to rebuild his wasted body. He wrestled daily with the African giant he kept for the purpose and spent hours at target practice with bow and arquebus or fencing with his master-at-arms. He organised calcio matches among his guards and the men of the household, with himself as one team captain and Don Jofre, wheezing and grumbling and stopping frequently to drink from a flask of grappa, at the head of the other. Then he decided the players should toughen their feet by playing without shoes, because as soon as the new pope’s coronation had taken place they would be marching back to the Romagna under the banner of the papal gonfalonier. He had already dispatched Michelotto with an advance guard to Rocca Soriana.

  What salves we had for cuts and blisters were quickly used up and every spare chemise or worn-out shirt had been torn into strips for bandages, and the master of horse was doubtful he could acquire enough mules or ox-carts to transport the lame north when the time came. Besides, what sort of army journeyed on carts with feet bound like the courtesans of Cathay? The men’s health also suffered from the amount of betting that went on, resulting in accusations of match fixing and fights which led to an array of cracked ribs and broken noses, and one man who almost died of a stab wound to the lung.

  Eventually his serjeant-at-arms, with much muttering and head shaking about the duke’s state of mind, asked me if I could persuade Cesare to put a stop to the games as he, it seemed, could not. The one constant in the makeshift world enclosed by the high, blind walls of San Clemente was my strange non-relationship with Cesare, the circle of questions unasked and unanswered which to those outside it looked like a love affair.

  “You speak to him; he’ll listen to you,” people said, and I wanted to believe them.

  ***

  He was in his garden. I could not see him as I peered through the sunlit crack in one of the three doors opening from the ground floor salon on to the garden, but I knew he was there because of the number of men at arms standing watchfully among the statues and the topiary. He had many shadows, as though he needed them to prove his substance. I pushed the door cautiously a little wider, telling myself not to be stupid. If Cesare’s guards were unconcerned, the leopards must be safely chained for once. One of the men turned sharply as I stepped out under the cloisters, his hand shifting to the pommel of his sword. The hand was bandaged, I noticed, with dark stripes of blood soaking through.

  “It’s Violante,” I said, hoping I spoke loud enough, for my throat was still dry at the prospect of the leopards.

  “He’s in the rose garden,” the man replied, and looked as though he was going to say more but then thought better of it and turned away from me to watch in the direction of the kitchen garden with its wall of espaliered peach trees whose fruit lay for the most part rotten and crawling with wasps. Stepping cautiously to avoid the dung from the leopards, whose stink was sharp and persistent, I made my way to the rose garden.

  Cesare was sitting on the ground, his back propped against the plinth of a marble bust of Cicero. A late mosquito perched on the orator’s noble forehead, and his blind eyes stared out over Cesare’s head, lips pressed together in stoic disapproval. As he might well have looked on the Caesar of his own day. Drawing closer, I saw the long, thin blade of a Biscayan knife hanging from Cesare’s fingers. It was dark with blood. His hands and his Flemish lace cuffs were caked with a rust of the stuff. I felt the breath leave my body as though I
had been hit in the chest. I may even have staggered a little. I thought he was dead, that his daemon had returned and taken the Visayan knife and plunged it into his belly.

  I could not move. Should I call the guards? Would they think I had murdered him? Had one of them done it? They were not all men who had been with us in Nepi. Those who had stayed behind might easily have been bought by their master’s enemies while his back was turned and his death from the fever expected daily. Footprints. I must hunt for footprints in the soil scattered with dead rose petals.

  As I stood transfixed by my indecision, Cesare turned his head and looked at me.

  “Violante.” His tone was dull and disinterested, as though I were inevitable. I shook with relief. Unaware of how I came to be there, I found myself on my knees at his side, plucking at his sleeve with futile, shaky fingers.

  “I thought you were dead. I came out to talk to you about the calcio and…Where did all the blood come from? Are you hurt? What happened?” Questions tumbling out of my mouth as inane as the braying of an ass.

  “Tiresias.” He gestured with his chin towards a point in front of his feet. A heap of white fur and bloody flesh lay there, the soil around it stained crimson.

  “Tiresias?” I repeated.

  “He must have wandered out here, poor old boy. The leopards got him. There was nothing else for it by the time I found him. I had to…” He slid the knife across his throat, the blade almost grazing his beard. I looked at the dead dog, saw the cut, clean and beautiful, among the tatters of flesh and fur left by the leopards’ claws.

  “You didn’t let him suffer. And he was very old.”

  “Born the same month my father was made pope.” There was a catch in his voice, as though he was trying not to cry. His eyes, I noticed now, were bloodshot, but then, everybody’s were on account of the builders’ limekiln. “I should have had him drowned, but I thought a blind dog might make a good truffle hound. More acute sense of smell, you know? So I kept him. And he did.”

  “You gave him a good life. The old pass. We live on. It’s the way of things.”

  “Yes.” He sighed, and the new air in his lungs seemed to bring him to his senses. He wiped his knifeblade on his sleeve and leaned forward to return it to the sheath attached to the back of his belt, then examined his blood-caked hands and stained cuffs with an air of mild vexation. “I am going to Vespers with my mother this afternoon,” he said. “I had better change. I shall ask Bernardino to design him a tomb,” he added as he got to his feet and pulled me up after him, leaving tiny flakes of the old dog’s blood on my sleeve. “He’s in one of Bernardino’s paintings, you know, in the big fresco he did over the door in the Sala dei Santi, the one with me as the emperor and Lucrezia as Saint Catherine. Tiresias is at the feet of Juan’s horse, looking up at Juan adoringly, which only a blind dog would do.” He laughed. I responded with a cautious smile, never sure what Cesare’s feelings were towards his murdered brother.

  He had taken to attending Mass regularly, most often in the company of his mother, in her family chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo, where Juan was buried. The avvisi opined that his own brush with death had sharpened his conscience; Cesare’s men tore them down from the Pasquino and set them alight in front of the crowds who gathered around the statue each day to discuss the latest gossip. It was impossible to know whether this was done at Cesare’s command, or without his knowledge.

  One morning, as I was sitting in the garden with Girolamo, watching his efforts to roll himself over on to his front, I overheard raised voices coming from the house.

  “But if I leave the gesso now it will dry and the whole wall will have to be re-plastered before I can start again.” I recognised the Mantuan accent of the little painter, Bernardino, summoned back to Rome by Monna Vannozza to decorate the walls of Cesare’s chapel.

  “God’s work must come first.”

  “Painting is God’s work. How else are your congregations to understand what you prattle on about in Latin if they have no pictures to look at?”

  “Wonderful though your frescoes are, Ser Bernardino, you must admit that the duke’s desire to make confession is little short of miraculous.”

  “I’d be careful what you say, priest.”

  “And you want to be careful what you hear, painter, for you are not protected by the confessional and I dare say there are some in Rome who would go to very…creative lengths to find out what the duke might have to confess. A wall of spoiled gesso would be of less consequence to you than a set of smashed fingers.”

  Then, with a string of triumphant gurgles, Girolamo finally flopped over on to his belly and lay beaming up at me, one cheek squashed against the blanket on which he lay, and by the time I returned my attention to the argument, the speakers had moved out of my hearing. But their words stayed with me, and the silences between them, and I could not help wondering how Cesare would break the silence, what he would choose to confess.

  Certainly, in the coming days, he behaved like a man from whom a burden had been lifted, though privately I believed it was the resumption of a responsibility which had cheered him rather than being relieved of one. The new pope was crowned, and, as he had promised, he returned to Cesare the white lance of gonfalonier and captain general of his army. Though the Orsini and their partisans still prowled outside the Borgo like wolves around the edges of a fire, Cesare announced that he would give a party to celebrate, and to thank those who had supported him through his difficulties. The builders and decorators now worked around the clock, hammers pounding like massive heartbeats, new-laid marble floors flushed and shimmering with torchlight, dust everywhere, dulling the stars and choking the moon.

  Whole carcasses of beef and boar, shoals of fish of all kinds, and flocks of fowls were swallowed up in the maw of the kitchens. A papal tiara materialised, made from almond paste set with jewels made from tiny pieces of crystallised fruits, and a giant pyramid of gilded duck eggs containing spice bottifacci, which had to be constructed in the dining hall, despite the presence of carpenters working on the ceiling bosses. I dare say as many woodshavings as leaves of gold found their way into the confection, though in the end, as things turned out, it was probably eaten by the kitchen staff, who would not have complained.

  A chef who suggested oil flavoured with truffles in which to stew hares was summarily dismissed, as Cesare had declared he would never eat truffles again since the death of Tiresias. A new chef was hired who brought with him a small wooden spice box which he never let out of his sight; the spitboy who took his fancy said he even slept with it fastened across his chest by a leather thong, “just like a Jew with his boxes of spells on his head and arms.” A rumour began to spread that it contained the beans of the cocoa plant, much prized by the savages of the New World and used by them in their religious ceremonies. This was followed by a darker rumour that Cesare aimed to conceal a poison in the beans, for as no one would know how they should taste, no one would be able to say they tasted strange.

  Cesare had never looked less like poisoning anybody. He directed the operations of his household with gusto and good humour, mediating with all his old diplomatic skill between bickering chefs and quarrelsome painters. He auditioned musicians and inspected new recruits to the papal army, and spent hours cooped up with Don Jofre and a jug of the strong wine from Avignon that was his particular favourite, devising spectacles to entertain and astonish his guests.

  Suddenly we were all sent for to witness one of these. We assembled in the dining hall, crammed in awkwardly around scaffolding poles, work benches, and paint pots, while Cesare and his brother mounted a platform suspended by pulleys from the ceiling which was then winched up a little way so everyone had a clear view. They had with them a shallow dish set over a brazier and several rabbit carcasses, already gutted and stuffed. Girolamo, caught by the buzz of excitement in the room, squealed and wriggled in my arms like a little piglet; I had by now given up trying to swaddle him for he would simply scream until he was unbound. Mon
na Vannozza, who might easily have returned to her own house now Cesare had been confirmed as gonfalonier but had chosen to stay at San Clemente, frowned in our direction before her own sons’ antics captured her attention.

  Jofre laid one rabbit in the dish. The onlookers fell silent. The rabbit began to sizzle and a smell of frying meat mingled with odours of paint and sawdust and unwashed bodies. A murmur of conversation resumed and grew louder, like a tide coming in. Jofre turned to Cesare, who looked puzzled, then vexed, passing a hand repeatedly across the dense, dark cap of hair which now covered his head. He muttered something to Jofre, who took up a pair of tongs and was about to lift the rabbit from the dish when gasps from the front of the crowd made the rest of us jostle and crane our necks for a better view. Clutching my baby firmly under one arm, I used the other to steady myself as I stepped up on to a low cross pole and looked out over the others’ heads.

  The rabbit flipped in the dish like a landed fish, its belly convulsed with ripples and tremors which increased in vigour until the legs were lifting and falling in a mad parody of running. Jofre let out a great whoop of laughter and did a little jig which set the platform swinging and spilled a few embers into the crowd. Cesare, hanging on to the pulley rope to steady himself, wore a grin like that of a small boy absorbed in pulling the wings off a fly.

  Then there was a loud bang. A woman screamed and Girolamo began to cry. Both men leapt backwards and Cesare’s free hand flew to the pommel of his sword. Jofre lost his footing and fell into the arms of the buxom woman who had charge of the laundry, and then looked happily inclined to stay in her embrace as he watched Cesare regain his footing and peer cautiously into the now empty dish.