Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “Your hosts behaved exactly as they should when a guest enters their house on a festival, but they didn’t warm to me. They were curious about me, that’s all. A conversa at court. They would probably have stuck pins in me if they dared, to see if my blood runs the same colour as theirs.”

  “No, there is a prohibition against it in the Torah.” He spoke so earnestly I did not immediately understand he was joking, so he pinched my arm to make me laugh. But my laughter was false and I longed to be back in my own room.

  “I don’t belong here, that’s all. I am no longer a Jew.” I had no place but that room, where Angela’s old gowns gathered dust and Leonardo’s drawing had begun to fade, and Cesare’s letter had cracked along its folds in the bottom of my travelling chest. No family but Girolamo, and Girolamo was a Borgia. “I am Violante; I break promises.”

  “You are always a Jew. Even my sister is still a Jew. We didn’t ask to be Jews, we were chosen. We promised Him nothing; the promising is all on His side.”

  We had passed through the gate and were almost across the cathedral square. The sight of the great old fortress looming out of its moat made me feel homesick, as though I had been away for a long time. I wanted to be back inside its walls, cocooned in its intrigues like a fly wrapped in spider silk. “You may leave me here,” I told Gideon.

  “If you’re sure. Well…” He offered me his torch. “I’m sure I shall see you when I come to court to show the duchess my designs.”

  I closed my hand around the stem of the torch, but he did not immediately let it go, and we stood there, hands touching, locked in a wordless, decorous battle for the light. “Do not seek me out,” I warned him. “You know nothing about me. Nothing.”

  “All the more reason to look for your company. I am a curious man, Monna Violante.” He bowed and left me, loping back across the square with his hands in his pockets. The brim of his felt hat was frilled like a lettuce by the damp in the air.

  When I reached my room and made myself ready for bed, I could not sleep. The fire had gone out, and the bed-clothes felt damp, and the Hanukkah meal lay heavy on my stomach. Perhaps that was why my mother’s recipe book came to mind. It lay now in the bottom of my travelling case, along with the rest of my meagre history. I had put it there on my return to Ferrara and had not looked at it since. I lit the candle on my nightstand, removed the book from the case, then climbed back into bed and, with my bent knees for a lectern, opened it at the first page.

  Leah Sarfati, she had written, with more confidence in her hand when she wrote her given name than when adding my father’s. The date beneath I took to be the date of their wedding, since it fell about a year before Eli was born. In this book I will keep a record of everything I have learned and will learn about keeping a good Jewish home and raising children in the sight of Our Father. By His Grace I may one day have a daughter to hand it to on her wedding day, but I pray first for sons. Below this, in my father’s hand, were written some words in Hebrew which I took to be prayers and blessings for the home and family.

  The pages that followed contained recipes for festival dishes and daily meals, remedies for cuts and bruises and common agues, charms against plague and small pox, compounds for cleaning silver and bronze and mending broken pots. She had recorded her timetable for Shabbat preparations, in what order the cooking and cleaning should be done, how the boys’ clothes should be laid out and my hair braided last thing before sundown on Friday to give me the best chance of looking tidy until the Shabbat ended. Her cooking utensils were meticulously listed so there could be no mistaking which were for meat and which for milk.

  Her entries began in the same neat, self-conscious hand that had written her newly-married name but as the years passed and her family grew, and Spain became an ever more frightening place for Jews to live, they became more hurried and untidy, the ink smudged and blotted, the writing leaning further and further forward as though straining towards its end. How happy she must have been, I thought, with a fierce pang of loss, when she did eventually have a daughter to whom she could hand on all this accumulated wisdom. There was a clutch of childbirth charms and remedies for pain in labour, sore nipples and stretch marks on the belly around the time of Eli’s birth. These were followed by potions to make babies sleep, unguents to ease their gums during teething, tips for keeping children’s limbs straight and making their hair curl. Each of our histories was there to be read between the lines of recipes for weaning foods, remedies for colic, unguents for the chicken pox, and poultices for grazed knees; yet none of us was mentioned by name, as if her love for us was a dangerous force which had to be bound by the careful listing of ingredients and proportions, methods and doses, the way spirits can be bound by charms.

  My mother’s domestic life seemed to end abruptly with a recipe for beeswax furniture polish given her, she noted, by Yasmin Abravanel during the month of Elul in the year 5251. A whole year before we left Toledo.

  Slowly, I flicked through the empty pages, until I chanced on another one, near the back of the book, on which she had begun to write again. Charms to Rekindle Passion, she had inscribed at the head of the page. You must take a good wax candle and anoint it with oil of cinnamon. Burn in its flame a bay leaf on which you have written the name of your beloved. Put a pillow stuffed with cloves and vanilla flowers upon his side of the bed. Keep one seed from a lemon you have consumed and plant it, and give the plant to your beloved to keep your love fresh and true. You must make a poppet with hair or nail clippings of your rival within and surround it with angelica leaves and that way you will ban her from your house.

  I got these from Señora da Souza, the Portuguese laundress on Cal’ Ebraico, she had added beneath the charms. I expect they are nonsense but what can I do against a woman so strong in magic she can draw him all the way to Rome? He has left again this morning, saying it is unavoidable business, but he has clerks in Rome. Why must he go there himself barely six months from his last visit? Last night he said her name in his sleep, so today I went to Señora da Souza, who has a reputation for discretion, or so I have been told. The woman’s name is Mariam.

  I closed the book abruptly, as though by not seeing what my mother had written I could erase it. So that was why he had left us behind. It had nothing to do with my fair hair and blue eyes, though, of course, he had made good use of them since. Like any successful man of business, he exploited what he had and did not regret what he lost. I was smitten with a dizzying sense of dislocation, a sudden notion that the person I had believed myself to be, and the place I had believed I occupied in the world, had never existed and I was someone else entirely. It was not until I realised I was not to blame for my mother’s ill-conceived, panic-stricken departure from Toledo, and her wretched death, that I understood how weighed down I had been by my guilt. I could simply off-load it now, as I had so many things, from housework to loving my family, on to Mariam.

  You follow love, she had said. But where had love led her, or my father? They had not married, even when he knew he was free to do so. I searched my memory but could not bring to mind a single instance when I had seen them demonstrate affection toward one another. Had my mother been following love when she took me from Toledo, even though we might safely have stayed and passed as Christian, or was she driven by something else entirely? And where had love led Angela, or poor, scarred Giulio? Or me. By the time I finished pondering these questions it was dawn and I was no nearer finding any answers. I had just closed my eyes, thinking I would attempt to sleep for an hour, when the cathedral bell began to toll and I remembered it was Christmas Eve and I would be obliged to accompany Donna Lucrezia to morning Mass.

  My head pounded with a dull ache all through the service, which seemed interminable, and my knees protested at the cold striking through the marble floor of madonna’s chapel. I hoped I had taken a chill, but thought it more likely it was my other ailment flaring up again, and made a mental note to have words with the incompetent apothecary. Fra Raffaello did not preach
, the Lord be praised, his style being better suited to the less joyful dates in the Church calendar. Madonna’s own head chaplain, a man as sleek and plump as a seal, did not detain us long with his reflections on the impending birth of Christ. At the end of the service I asked madonna if I might be excused to lie down for a while, but she forbade it.

  She made me go with her to her room, to put aside her prayer book and rosary, she said, but I was afraid she wanted to talk to me about Cesare. Her majordomo, Sancho, had returned from Spain some days earlier. He had seen Cesare at Medina del Campo and had brought letters from him. Could there be one for me? I wondered, then dismissed the thought; even if he had written to me I did not want to know what he had to say, to set eyes on that familiar hand with its loops and sweeps, to read his beautiful lies.

  So I will tell you I was relieved when she said, “I wish you to accompany me to the duke’s rooms, Violante. He has arranged to bring the cardinal and Don Giulio together. He wishes to make peace between them before the festivities begin tomorrow. Then we shall go to Angela. I have a proposition for her also.”

  ***

  It was a horrible interview. Giulio, wearing a patch over his right eye and with the left still very swollen and discoloured despite the treatment with pigeon’s blood, stood in a shadowy corner of the duke’s private salon, outside the light cast by the lamps. Ippolito, who had been ordered back from Mantua by the duke, looked like a sulky bulldog. He stood as far from Giulio as possible in the intimate room, and refused to accept the challenge of his brother’s ruined beauty. Apart from the three Este brothers and madonna and myself, only the duke’s aide, the poet Niccolo da Corregio was present. I wondered if he was intended to compose a eulogy on the event.

  The duke looked to Ippolito to open proceedings, but he refused to speak, so the duke told Giulio how sorry Ippolito was for the wrong he had done him. Then Giulio, shaking off the servant who had him by the elbow to guide him, stepped into the light. I sensed Donna Lucrezia, at my side, wince and look away. I kept my own eyes down because my position required me to do so, and saw Ippolito’s scarlet-shod feet shuffle a little beneath his soutane.

  “My lord,” said Giulio, addressing himself to the duke as though they were alone together, “you see how I am. Yet,” turning to Ippolito, “I must thank God and Our Blessed Lady who have granted me my sight. And although my case has been most cruel and inhuman and done to me with no fault of mine, nonetheless I pardon your lordship and will not cease to be to you the same good brother I have always been.”

  Duke Alfonso, who appeared unaware of the irony in Giulio’s tone, which, perhaps, I had picked up because I had only my ears to rely on, mumbled something then gave up and burst into tears, whereupon Correggio prayed the brothers to love one another and enjoy their state or the duke would be forced to act against his natural inclination to forgiveness.

  “You will exchange a kiss of peace,” said Duke Alfonso, recovering himself. No one moved. I held my breath and I am certain Donna Lucrezia did likewise. Finally, Giulio took a step towards Ippolito.

  “Your grace?” prompted the duke, and Ippolito also stepped forward. I fancied I heard no kiss, merely the rasp of beard on beard.

  ***

  “I have laid my plans in the nick of time,” said Donna Lucrezia as soon as Giulio’s house slave had closed the door behind us and we were alone with Angela in the small day room overlooking the garden where she now passed most of her days. Though she had no idea when her baby was due, it was clearly a matter of weeks rather than months. She lay, huge and inert, on a daybed beside the room’s single, tall window. Her thin wrap revealed not merely the swell of her belly and breasts, but the fat which mounded her thighs and shoulders and upper arms. On a table at her side stood a dish of sweetmeats and candied fruits, and a jug of sweet, yellow wine. She neither looked at us nor offered us refreshment but continued to stare out of the open window over the wet, brown garden while her hand moved mechanically between her mouth and the dish of sweets. There was no fire lit and the room was freezing. In the silence which followed Donna Lucrezia’s remark I heard nothing but the thin chirping of a winter robin, and realised even the fountains in the garden had stopped working.

  Donna Lucrezia gave a sigh of exasperation. Signalling me to pull a chair up beside Angela’s daybed, she sat, leaning forward, her forearms resting along her thighs. It was a masculine pose; it reminded me of her brother. “Well if you won’t speak to me, at least you can listen. This morning my husband effected a reconciliation between his brothers. If you will care for him, Giulio is free to leave the Corte and come home.”

  Another silence. It was to be a day of eloquent silences, it seemed.

  “In that case,” madonna continued, “ he must stay where he is until he…grows accustomed to his condition. You must marry, clearly. I have spoken to the lord of Sassuolo, Alessandro Pio, to this end and he will gladly have you. He is most generous, for I fear your dowry cannot be much. What I have I must spend for Cesare’s release. I wrote to your brother. Suffice it to say if he were as rich in ducats as he is in excuses, there would be no problem. Still, we shall manage. Don Alessandro complimented your beauty,” she cast her cousin a sceptical, unheeded look, “and your accomplishments and told me he counted himself most fortunate. Make sure you do not disappoint him.

  “We will have the wedding at Carnival. In the meantime, you will go to Medelana for the birth. It is far enough away to be discreet. The duke has most generously offered his bucentaur for your journey. Violante will help you pack.” At this, Angela turned her head in our direction and fixed her cousin with a bovine stare. Her eyes were dull, her complexion pasty, and she had spots on her forehead. Her hair was untidily bound, and tendrils like tarnished copper wires clung to her temples. I wanted to weep. I wanted to gather her in my arms and tell her nothing had changed; it was still we two together with our jokes and schemes, and the men could all go fry in Gehenna.

  “I cannot go today. I need to rest,” she said. When she opened her mouth to speak I noticed her diet of sweets was beginning to discolour her teeth.

  “You will be on board the barge before dark,” said Donna Lucrezia. “Violante will go with you. I have retained a midwife and comatre who will also travel with you. You have nothing to fear. The country air will do you good. Now, up off that bed and let us see to your packing.”

  As madonna and I each took one of Angela’s arms and heaved her up off the daybed, my first thought was that I was glad to be going with her. My second was of the ugly, charming face of Gideon d’Arzenta.

  ***

  By the time Angela and I boarded the duke’s bucentaur, the light had drained from the low clouds and the river slapped against the jetty as thick and black as molasses. Looking back towards the city I could see the Corte and the castle ablaze with lights for the Christmas Eve festivities, and searched my heart for some sense of envy or exclusion. Yet I was content, happy to be alone with my friend even in these circumstances, about to set out on the river in the winter dark, into what was, however temporary, a kind of exile. The ducal barge was as luxurious as a small palace, with the walls of its staterooms velvet padded and hung with tapestries to keep out the cold and the thud of the oars. As well as the midwife and comatre, we had slaves to attend us and a cook, and madonna had lent us La Fertella to keep us entertained. Perhaps neither she nor Angela remembered the clown had been given to her by Ippolito.

  But though all these things contributed to my contentment, if they had been taken away, they could not have lessened it. As we had waited for madonna’s litter to be brought round to Giulio’s palace to carry us to the dock, she had taken me aside.

  “I have some news which will please you,” she announced. “You know Sancho came back via Naples? He stayed one night with my brother Don Jofre.”

  “And is my son well?” I should not have interrupted her but I could not help myself, and she seemed content to let the matter go.

  “Very well,” she said, her
expression alight with a very charitable joy, “as you will soon see for yourself. He will travel to Ferrara with his sister Camilla and the Duke of Camerino in the new year.” Perhaps I asked her how this had come about, perhaps she simply chose to honour me with an explanation, I cannot remember. At the time, I hardly took it in, it seemed to matter so little why he was coming in comparison with the wonderful fact that he was coming, that in a few, brief weeks we would be reunited and I would be whole again. The reason, it seemed, was that Don Jofre, who had been widowed the year Cesare was sent to Spain by the sudden death of Princess Sancia, wished to marry again and his new bride was reluctant to take on the care of the three little Borgia bastards. Under certain conditions, Duke Alfonso had agreed to their coming to Ferrara. I did not ask what those conditions were, and madonna did not tell me. Not then.

  CHAPTER 3

  FERRARA, CARNIVAL, 1506

  I was so young then, and confused lust with love as the young do.

  Looking over Angela’s naked shoulder, at her candle-lit reflection in the long mirror, I thought how our lives move forward in tiny increments. Like a spring tide, we take great sweeps back and forth, yet each high water creeps only a little higher than the last.

  On Christmas Day, as we sailed to Medelana, she had given birth to a baby girl aboard the bucentaur. The child was small, brought on early perhaps by the upheaval of travel, but she was strong. Angela was decisive in choosing the name Giulia for her daughter, but then handed her straight to the wet nurse and seemed to take no further interest in her. All the time we stayed in Medelana she bewailed the ravages of pregnancy on her body and set about trying to restore it to its former glory. She bound her breasts with bandages soaked in a paste of ground fig kernels to restore their firmness and had me rub her belly with sweet almond oil and lavender to banish stretch marks. Even before she had stopped bleeding she took to walking and riding on the estate, which I feared would bring on a falling of the womb but she was convinced would help to tighten her women’s parts so her new husband would take pleasure in her. At least, she said, in the only reference I heard her make to her daughter, the child had been a girl, and small, so did not stretch the quim like a boy.