Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  How much longer? I crossed to the window and pushed the shutters ajar, but there was nothing to see, nothing to hear except the restless conversation of leaves in a rising wind and beyond them the river slapping against its banks. These rooms overlooked the palace garden, but the entertainment was all indoors this evening due to the lateness of the season. A sudden animal scream pierced the darkness, just a rabbit perhaps, or a water rat, and I thought of the leopards, their lithe, silent bodies, the secret glint of their eyes, the bloody strings of flesh in their teeth. No rest, not in this house. Closing the shutters, replacing my candle in the stand on the table, I sat back down to wait.

  ***

  A taste overshadowed the place between sleeping and waking, something dry and dark and bitter on the tip of my tongue, the inside of my lower lip. I opened my eyes to find the darkness sculpted by candlelight into the shape of a face, Cesare’s face, so close to mine it was little more than an abstraction of light and shade. But my body recognised him, drawing itself around him like a closing fist.

  “The powder of the cocoa beans,” he whispered, “a peace offering.”

  I licked my lip, discovering with my tongue the tip of the finger which had opened my mouth, tasting salt now, mingled with the strangeness of the cocoa grains. “What hour is it?” I mumbled, still half asleep.

  “No idea. The fifth or sixth maybe? It’s the middle of the night in any case. I could not get away sooner. The Florentine ambassador arrived very late with some story about an amorous adventure that had gone wrong, and there is much fence mending to be done between me and Florence. Besides,” he added, straightening up from where he had been squatting in front of me, stretching and yawning, “I like Messer Niccolo. He has a quick wit.”

  I sat up, smoothing my hair and skirt, dabbing the remains of the cocoa from my lips with a fingertip.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Strange. Bitter. It tastes like…tree bark. What do you do with it?”

  “Apparently there was some in the wine sauce for the hare, but I could not taste it. That is why I had this ground separately.” He tapped the lid of a small spice box lying on the table next to the salt.

  “You know what they will say? That you have brought it up here to mix with poisons. The career of the cocoa bean will be over before it has begun.” We laughed and he sat down beside me, his long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles.

  “The cocoa bean as metaphor. Are you hungry?” I shook my head. He poured two cups of wine. “Drink then. You were sleeping with your mouth open. It must be dry.” I felt myself beginning to blush, and he caressed my burning cheek with one finger, tracing a line like a duelling scar from my temple to the corner of my mouth. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you looked gorgeous. I almost didn’t want to wake you, but I did really. Music?” His mouth was so close to mine I could feel his breath on my lips, smell wine and cardamom and jasmine. I could see nothing but his eyes, huge and black with a mote of quicksilver somewhere at their heart, but there must have been a musician in the room with us because a lute began to play, a fountain of notes pouring into the hot spring of desire which was dissolving me.

  We kissed, first with artifice and then with greed. Something fell off the table and crashed to the floor, then there was more knocking, shouting, scuffling, a thud like the sound of a body hitting the door. The lutenist stopped playing. Cesare was on his feet, dagger drawn. “Back me up,” he ordered the lutenist, waiting with his free hand on the door catch until the man had put down his lute, drawn a short sword, and stepped up beside his master. Then Cesare hauled open the door and sprang through it just as Don Jofre fell across the threshold into the room. A kind of lunatic mirth rose up inside me and I began to laugh uncontrollably, though neither of the brothers could see the joke. Cesare looked murderous. He kicked Jofre over on to his back and pinned him there with one foot planted on his breastbone while the lutenist held the point of his sword to Jofre’s throat and several men at arms with pikes at the ready blocked off the head of the stairs.

  “What is this, brother?” Cesare spat the word brother as though it were the worst insult he could contrive. But what most condemned Jofre was that Cesare spoke to him in Italian rather than the Valencian patois the family reserved to themselves.

  “Let me up, Cesare. I mean no harm. It’s the pope.”

  “The pope?” Cesare removed his foot from Jofre’s chest and the lutenist lifted his sword point, though he remained on guard and made it clear Don Jofre would be unwise to make any sudden moves. Jofre got cautiously to his feet, rubbing his bruised bones.

  “He has been seized with vomiting and a high fever. They say he is dying, Cesare.”

  Cesare rammed his dagger back into its sheath. “Oh Christ’s blood and bones,” he bellowed and picked up one of the ebony chairs and hurled it out of the door. The pikemen at the head of the stairs scattered as the chair bounced and whirled down the steps sending out showers of splinters as it went. “Could he not have waited a week?” A second chair followed the first.

  “Calm down,” said Jofre.

  “Calm down?” Cesare seized his brother’s beard and twisted it until Jofre was forced to cock his head so sharply he looked almost as though his neck had been broken. “Calm down?” Cesare repeated. “I am mocked and thwarted at every turn and all you can say is calm down. What in God’s name have I done to deserve such ill fortune?”

  “Where would you like me to begin?” his brother replied with, I thought, scant regard for his own safety. But Cesare’s anger had passed, or perhaps he realised he was in danger of making himself hostage to his own rhetoric.

  “Send Sassatelli to me, and find me a messenger who can ride fast.”

  “Last time I saw Sassatelli he was unconscious in the dining hall.”

  “Then throw a bucket of well water over him and tell him the pope is dying. That should cure his hangover.” Turning his back on Jofre his gaze came to rest on me. He looked bewildered, surprised, as though he had entirely forgotten me. “Ah, Violante,” he said, passing a hand across his eyes as if trying to wipe me out of his vision.

  “You’re tired,” I said, astonished by my own boldness. “Nothing’s going to happen tonight. You can’t send out messengers in the dark. Leave it till morning.”

  To my further amazement, he seemed to listen. Taking both my hands he pulled me to my feet and stared at me hard. “What do you want?” he demanded. “Do you want a quick fuck from a man with more pressing matters on his mind? To be treated like some slave girl or back street whore? Or would you like to leave this until better times, when I can give you my full attention? I made you a promise, I seem to remember, in my sister’s orange garden. The least you can do is allow me to keep it. Now go, look to my son. I rely on you to keep him out of danger.”

  ***

  I was chasing a beast, something leonine with a dark red mane and flanks dappled with the strange underwater light of a deep forest. I was afraid, but wanted the beast to know I was there so I called out to it. For a time it made no response; I heard nothing but the rasp of my own breath and the rhythmic thud of the beast’s paws on the earth floor of the forest. Then suddenly it turned to reveal the face of a golden skull. I walked into one cavernous eye-socket, following a pinpoint of firelight that glimmered at its heart, but it was not a fire; it was the beast’s face, grinning a pearly grin. I knew I should run but I was held fast by creeping vines with leaves like sweating palms and tiny suckers which prickled my skin. The beast clenched its jaws around my shoulder and began to shake me.

  “You’re a mask,” I told it.

  “I am blind Tiresias,” it replied.

  “Violante, wake up.”

  I opened my eyes. A tall figure without a face held my son to its chest, his head cupped in its hand, his orange curls licking its clawed fingers like newly ignited flames.

  “It’s a dream,” I said, though my heart tolled like a warning bell.

  “Wake up,
girl.”

  I wanted to stay in my dream and follow the will of the beast, but I could not leave Girolamo in the clutches of something with burning hands and no face. “Give me my son,” I screamed. “Give me my son!”

  “Here you are.” Monna Vannozza held the child out to me, leaning forward so the afternoon light caught her face, all patches of gaunt shadow within the recesses of her stiff hood.

  I sat up, pushing my hair out of my eyes, smoothing my tangled skirts.

  “We are to go to my house,” said Monna Vannozza.

  “We? Your house? ” I repeated, my mind still torpid with sleep. “Is that the afternoon Angelus? What hour is it?”

  “About the twentieth.” Too early for the Angelus. “He says he will leave Rome for the Romagna in the morning. He wants us to take the children before he goes, while he still has troops here to protect us.”

  A sense of dread dropped on me like a wet mantle. “Has the pope died then?” Rome’s laws require all soldiers to withdraw from the city in sede vacante.

  “Not yet, but it is sure to be soon. He can no longer protect Cesare from his enemies. His best hope is to join with Michelotto and wait out the interregnum in his own power base.”

  I rose, pushed my feet into my shoes, felt a tightness in my breasts that told me Girolamo must be hungry and a pressure on my bladder that made me think I must have been asleep for several hours. I remembered the conversation I had had with him in Nepi, when he had condemned such a move as the coward’s way out and teased me for my lack of understanding. “I want to go with him,” I said. “Surely Girolamo would be safer out of Rome.”

  Girolamo grizzled and butted his head impatiently against my chest until I sat down again on the edge of the bed and put him to my breast.

  “There will be fighting,” she said, looking with a tight, wistful smile at her grandson’s plump cheeks and the vigorous working of his jaw as he suckled. “He tells me he has got wind of a meeting at the Venetian ambassador’s house last night. Annibale Bentivoglio was there, and Giovanni Sforza, and some people of the Manfredis. With his customary irony he says he thinks it unlikely they were there to draft a paeon of support for him.”

  So that was why he had come so late. “I remember Lord Annibale,” I said stupidly, “from our journey to Ferrara.” Hard to imagine that bluff, gallant man plotting an assassination. Yet our brief stay there, where Giulio and Angela first met, and Donna Lucrezia played the guileless inamorata to her new husband, seemed just as unreal.

  “A pity my daughter could not do more to win him over.”

  The bell still tolled, a thin, mournful clang. “What is that?” I asked again.

  “Pay it no mind,” Monna Vannozza commanded. “It is none of our business,” she added, as much to convince herself as me, I felt.

  It quickly became clear there were many others who were not to be so easily deterred. As I gathered together Girolamo’s and my few possessions, the sound of raised voices and running feet swelled on the other side of the door. When we stepped out into the narrow passage, we found ourselves swept along with the rest.

  Everyone rushed towards the main courtyard. We joined a throng of bakers and secretaries, priests and snivelling laundrymaids, all elbowing and jostling one another in the narrow passages and old, low doorways that lurked behind the modern façade. As we drew closer, the clanging of the bell grew louder, until I realised it must be the bell in San Clemente’s own campanile.

  Which meant the palace was under attack.

  We burst out into the cloister bordering the courtyard on the crest of a wave of small boys, choristers and drummers and spit boys. Cesare stood on the parapet of the well, surrounded by a mill of hostile, shouting armed men. A thicket of blades glittered above their heads in the midday sun which shone straight down into the courtyard and re-ignited the fires in Cesare’s close-cropped curls. I felt my stomach tighten with a mixture of terror and longing.

  “You want to kill me?” He did not seem to be shouting, yet his voice was clearly audible above the grumbling discontent of his mutinous troops. “Come on, then. I am alone and unarmed. Now’s your chance.” What he said was not strictly true. As my mind began to sort out what my eyes were seeing, I realised the well was ringed by a cordon of the gigantic Swiss lancers who formed Cesare’s personal bodyguard. But the way he put one hand to his throat and loosened his shirt collar challenged all of us who were watching him with his vulnerability. No one saw the lancers; no one noticed the way they bunched around their leader and lowered the points of their lances. All any of us would remember from that moment was the triangle of fragile skin at the base of his throat.

  I heard Monna Vannozza suck in her breath. She crossed herself, jabbing at her forehead and breast and shoulders with rigid, fervent fingers. “What is he thinking?” she muttered. “They’ll cut him to pieces.”

  The air whistled. As if Monna Vannozza’s words had conjured it, a long knife carved a slender arc across the square of sky bounded by the palace walls. Sunlight poured over it, bounced off it like water from hot iron. I thought it would hang in the air forever, while the eyes of the now silent mutineers were raised towards it in a parody of prayer and Cesare flung his arms out to his sides with a cry that sounded almost exultant. I closed my eyes, smelled sweat and cooking fat, the sharp stink of Monna Vannozza’s fear and the milk souring my bodice. I seemed to fall forwards, hunched over my son, my hand cupping his soft skull, his fingers tangled in my hair, pulling, pulling me down…

  ***

  When I opened my eyes again, I found myself kneeling, Monna Vannozza’s hand gripping my sleeve. “It’s a miracle,” she breathed, “a miracle.”

  The courtyard was empty except for Cesare, now sitting on the well parapet, his elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped at the back of his bowed neck, and two of his Swiss lancers who were engaged in sliding the great iron bars across the main gate. A glint of steel showed me the knife resting on the parapet beside him. The body of a man lay face down, no more than two arms’ lengths from the well, with the blade of an axe half buried in his spine.

  “What happened?”

  “The knife fell short, then the gate was opened somehow and the Swiss chased them all out into the street.”

  As we got to our feet, a man shouldered his way past us and our crowd of little boys struck dumb and stone still as a flock of grubby marble Cupids. Calling out to Cesare, he raced across the courtyard.

  “Now what?” asked Monna Vannozza. Cesare leapt to his feet, as the man gesticulated urgently in the direction of Saint Peter’s Square. Although most of what he said was inaudible to me, I did hear the word Orsini, then Cesare let out a string of oaths that caused Monna Vannozza to hiss with disapproval, and called for armour and a horse. Once again the courtyard filled up with soldiers, more of the Swiss this time, and a contingent led by Don Jofre, wearing no protection but a breastplate and looking nervous on a skittish horse. After some altercation between the brothers, Cesare took the horse and spurred it at the palace gate as the men who had just barred it opened it again. Sword drawn, he rode out into the street at the head of what looked more like a rabble than an army. The gate was already closed again by the time Cesare’s squire, Juanito, who was an elderly man, though loyal and fastidious, arrived in the courtyard with his armour.

  It was the man who had been ringing the tocsin in the campanile, and had seen everything, who eventually explained to us what had happened. The guards who had driven the mutineers out into the Piazza San Clemente had discovered that, at almost the same moment, a hostile contingent of the Orsini and their followers had broken through the gates of the Borgo and were advancing on the palace. Many of the mutineers had been cut down, and some had gone over to the Orsini, but others had swung back to Cesare’s side when he appeared among them, swinging his sword above his head, yelling that he had never intended to die in his bed anyway.

  No, I thought, with the image of his bared throat and the knife spinning across the blue sk
y fresh in my mind, but he would not mind dying out there, in the great square where he had once danced with bulls, under the golden eye of Caesar. I was angry. How could he be so reckless and self-indulgent? Clearly his sentimental feelings towards his children at Nepi had been inspired by nothing more than his weakness and now he was strong again he was content to strike any bargain he liked with his daemon and to hell with the lot of us.

  “He’s a child himself,” I told Girolamo furiously, but Girolamo merely turned his cool, black gaze on me for a few seconds then fell asleep.

  I could not bear to dwell on what might be happening beyond the palace gates, so I went out to the garden and walked down towards the river, as far from the street side of the building as I could go. I found myself in the rose garden, though even there the din of the fighting infiltrated the air to compete with the drowsy fizzing of late bees and the cries of the bargemen for whom it mattered not one whit who was pope as long as Romans still needed wheat and olives, cheese and sausages and cork stoppers for their wine bottles. Somebody had raked over the spot where Tiresias’s blood had soaked into the soil, leaving a patch of earth bare of weeds and fallen petals. After the bullfights they used to scatter sawdust over the square to soak up the blood, then sweep the pale pink clumps into barrows and cart them off to be burned in the refuse dumps outside the walls. I hoped there was somebody who would do as much for Cesare when he fell.