Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  Donna Lucrezia had chosen the comatre wisely. She had attended a great many women who, for one reason or another, desired to return to a man’s bed as soon as possible after childbirth. Make a game of it, she suggested with a laugh not altogether respectful. Mix a little rosewater in with olive oil and let him massage you. Well, Angela and I had not a lover or a husband between us, but we had each other, and we whiled away our time in the country with games the comatre had probably never dreamed of.

  But now, with her wedding scarcely an hour away, she was still not happy with her appearance. “God!” she exclaimed, twisting this way and that as tongues of candlelight flickered across her skin, “I look an utter hag. My belly sags like a sow’s and my tits are flat as pancakes. He will run screaming back to his mother and she will feel perfectly vindicated.” The bridegroom’s mother was less than happy with the match, which was why Angela had not travelled to Sassuolo for her wedding but was to be married secretly in Donna Lucrezia’s chapel and would stay on at court afterwards. Angela had greeted this plan with relief; she had no wish to be buried in the country with only her dairy and her fruit orchards to occupy her.

  “He will love you just as we all do,” I said.

  “Really?” She turned towards me. Unsoftened by the polished silver of the mirror, her face looked tired, the skin below her eyes fragile and puffy and a deepening of the lines at the corners of her mouth once caused by laughter. Whatever the artists may say, it is the flaws which make human beauty. Perhaps that is why the Creator did not abandon Adam when he ate of the fruit.

  “Really.”

  I was right. Don Alessandro, attended by a cousin from Carpi, could not take his eyes off his bride throughout either the brief service or the longer supper which followed. I thought he would burst with glee when madonna finally took mercy on him and, rising from the table, ordered Perro and Gatto to escort the happy couple to the bridal bower. In the lull that followed, while we waited for a space to be cleared for the actors and musicians who were to entertain us while Don Alessandro and Angela made good their promises to one another in the neighbouring room, it seemed to me there were more absences in the room than just theirs. I thought of Giulio, still staying in the Corte Vecchio, of his baby daughter in Medelana, of his closed house and the silent fountains in his garden. I wondered about Girolamo, on the road from Naples, as I did a thousand times a day, pleading in silent desperation for his safety to whatever deity might hear me. I tried to imagine what he looked like now, but all my mind ever showed me was his father’s face, and that was the greatest absence of all.

  “Do you miss him?” Angela had asked me one evening at Medelana, when we lay together in front of the fire drinking wine mulled with honey and cloves.

  “Who? Here, eat.” I threw a handful of raisins at her.

  She threw them back. “I’m dieting. You know that and you know who.”

  Perhaps because I had drunk more wine than was good for me, I found myself striving to give an honest reply. “In here,” I said, tapping my fingers against my temple, “I can never forgive him for the way he tricked me. But the rest of me…yes, I miss him.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Would he care?”

  She shrugged, causing her shift to slip off one golden shoulder. “Write to him and see if he writes back. Some of his letters seem to get through.”

  “No.” I sat up, suddenly uncomfortable with my body, aware of the cold breath of the empty summer palace on my back. I shivered, hugged my knees. “There is nothing in my heart which makes me feel inclined to do him any kindness. He doesn’t deserve it and he wouldn’t thank me for treating him as a charitable case.”

  Angela broke into slow applause. “Oh what a pretty speech.” She knelt behind me and wrapped my gown about my shoulders like a cloak. “What you really mean is, you’re afraid he wouldn’t write back. You’re still running from the truth about my cousin, aren’t you, Violante? Just because he is free with his favours doesn’t mean he can be cheaply bought.”

  “I know that. I’m just not sure any more that he’s worth the price.”

  Her hands froze on my shoulders then, and I knew I had touched on more of a truth than I had intended. I had given voice to what was in her own heart concerning Giulio.

  ***

  After the wedding, Don Alessandro returned home alone to his mother, while Angela hurled herself into Carnival like a parched man jumping into a river. She danced all night, frequently with Don Alessandro’s cousin from Carpi, and accompanied Donna Lucrezia every day on masked rides around the town in the company of certain of the duke’s favourites. In the front row at every spectacle, she attracted several champions for the Battle of the Eggs and blew a kiss to a man who succeeded in sticking a pig while blindfolded. Hers were the most extravagant gasps of admiration for il Cingano, the duke’s gipsy, when he walked a tightrope strung across the piazza with iron bars chained to his ankles.

  The court held its breath when Ippolito, extravagantly masked in a confection of pearls and peacock feathers, but Ippolito nonetheless, asked her to partner him in a chaconne. We sighed when she accepted, and danced with matchless grace behind her own mask of white satin trimmed with tulle ribbons that floated around her head like angels’ breath. Duke Alfonso and Donna Lucrezia were as energetic and splendid as it was possible to be, their very presence at the heart of the festivities a mask to cover the grieving stones of our castle of ghosts.

  On Shrove Tuesday I went to visit Giulio. I took him pancakes and a dish of pane perso from madonna’s own kitchen; I did not like to think of him embarking on the long privation of Lent without a little of the holiday fare to cheer him. When I arrived, however, he already had company. Ferrante and Don Alessandro’s cousin, Don Alberto Pio da Carpi, were with him. An empty wine jug stood on a low table between them, and they were well on their way to finishing a second. Don Alberto’s presence surprised me. Ashamed of his scarred face and the clumsiness brought on by his damaged sight, Giulio had stayed away from Carnival altogether, and received scarcely any visitors. Ferrante called on him daily. He would, he said, have gladly admitted his brothers the duke and the cardinal but neither had seen fit to interrupt his revels to while away dull hours with an invalid. Of Angela, and his daughter, he said nothing, though his readiness to spend time in my company, to listen to me read, or even sit in silence, was eloquent enough. The odour of Donna Lucrezia’s court clung to me. I was Angela’s friend and had been with her at the birth of her baby. For him, perhaps, I embodied hope, possibility.

  So although I set down the food and begged to be excused, Giulio insisted I stay and his companions, mellowed by the wine, put forward their own enthusiastic, if somewhat muddled, arguments in my favour. I sat, and answered their enquiries about my health, how I had enjoyed Carnival, what had been my favourite masques and spectacles, but all the time I had the feeling I had interrupted something. Our polite conversation skimmed the surface of a deeper, darker exchange, and I was uneasy. When madonna’s Dalmation slave appeared in the doorway to Giulio’s gloomy sitting room and told me, in her still scarcely comprehensible Italian, that madonna required me to come to the Camera di Paravento, I could have hugged her.

  The Camera di Paravento was a new addition to her apartments, a room divided by a trellised screen behind which madonna would sit with her ladies while gentlemen danced on the other side. It was a device she used to allow the unmarried girls in her care to observe the young men she had in mind for them without compromising their modesty. I was sure either the slave had misunderstood her orders, or I had misunderstood her. There had been no talk of finding me a husband since my return from Rome; at my age, and with my history, I was pretty well unmarriageable. Nor had I much modesty left to compromise. But the Dalmatian made her way decisively enough along the adjoining walk between the Corte Vecchio and the Torre Marchesana, so I followed without question, picking my way through the thicket of scaffolding poles like a fairy-tale child lost in a forest. After the h
oliday, work was to begin on raising a roof over the walk, and not before time, I thought, as I stepped through a crust of ice into a puddle.

  Madonna was attended only by Fidelma, which was also strange, as admiring the turn of a young man’s calf or giggling at the sinuousness of his hips when performing the moresca was not her favourite pastime. Fidelma’s heart was devoted to Fra Raffaello with his saintly pallor and the silvery glow of sanctity in his black eyes, though she believed she had given herself to the god of the Christians and petitioned madonna to allow her to enter a convent at every end and turn. She had fulfilled her promise to her father; her brother had his commission from the duchess; surely now her life might be her own. I found her naivete touching when I did not find it irritating.

  “Look,” said madonna as I entered, and the slave busied herself pouring wine and handing a plate of dates wrapped in marzipan. She held up a rough-edged silver disk. “The design for my medal. Ser d’Arzenta presented it yesterday.” He had come to court yesterday and had not sought me out? Well, I had told him not to. “What do you think?” Madonna handed me the disk. On the face was a very true likeness of Donna Lucrezia in profile. I feared she would not think it flattered her enough, for it did not spare her her receding chin or a tendency to plumpness in her cheeks. On the other hand, he had captured the wry, determined set of her mouth as if he had known her all his life.

  “I find the image very pleasing, madonna.”

  “Good. So do I. It is honest, as Fidelma observed.” She would; her feet were as big metaphorically as they were in life. “Honesty is a trait I should admire, as duchess.”

  “Yes, madonna.” What could I say? Perhaps, as the chosen conduit of her love letters, and the woman who, she believed, loved her brother as much as she did, I was the only person in the world with whom she could be honest.

  “And I would not wish to be portrayed as some slip of a girl. That would not inspire confidence in my subjects. It is right I should look a little…matriarchal. Now,” she continued, before any of us had a chance to dwell on the frightening irony of the word matriarchal, “turn it over. Look at the reverse.”

  The reverse was decorated with a blindfold Cupid bound to a laurel tree, and beside the tree a violin with its bow and a music stand, its voluptuous outline brushed by the tips of Cupid’s wing feathers.

  “It is very well executed, madonna.” The composition was perfect, the tree arching over the figure of the god and its curve reflected in the angle of his body as he pulled at his bonds. All was fluid, windblown, captured on the edge of change, so you felt that if you closed your eyes for a second, the next time you looked, the image would be different. I could not equate its grace with Gideon’s huge, bony hands, his flat-tipped fingers and scuffed knuckles.

  “How do you read it?” madonna demanded.

  “I must defer to you in that, madonna. You have the benefit of a superior education.”

  “Absolute nonsense. When we first met you matched me quote for quote from Dante, and your Greek is…quite subtle.”

  I thought of Giovanni, and my one Greek joke, and how he and my son and Camilla would be here any day now. “Well,” I began, “Cupid bound to the laurel cautions us against loving unwisely.”

  Madonna smiled and nodded, though in the winter light which reached us only through the screen it was hard to tell whether or not her smile reached her eyes. “Go on,” she said.

  “The violin, perhaps, represents your illustrious husband as he plays it so well, and the bow his…virility.” I heard Fidelma gasp. “And…the bow points to Cupid, and his wings touch the violin, so he blesses your union, madonna.”

  “Good, but I will go further. I will postulate that Ser d’Arzenta intends us to see the violin as hewn from the wood of the laurel, which symbolises Daphne’s chastity. And Cupid’s blindness enjoins me to concentrate on what my other senses tell me, to rely not upon what I can see, but upon what I hear. My husband tells me he is chaste and all is well with Ferrara. And that is what I must believe.”

  “He gives you the secret of marital harmony, madonna.”

  She laughed. “You see how clever he is. His work has inspired such discussion I had almost forgotten why I sent for you. Fidelma, you may leave us. Seek out your brother and tell him we are pleased, and he can go ahead and cast twelve medals in gold for the twelve months of my husband’s reign, and thirty—no, let us say twenty-nine—in silver. Sancho will arrange payment with him if he will come to his office tomorrow.”

  As Fidelma left, I became aware from a sudden draft and a change in the light that the door to the main part of the room, on the other side of the screen, had opened. Some muttered conversation reached our ears, and a scuffling of feet, as though someone were being pushed or dragged across the threshold. Then a high-pitched cry of, “Shan’t,” followed by rapid thuds on the sprung dance floor. Footsteps, light and rapid. A child’s steps. Pressing myself against the screen I called, “Girolamo!” Then realised the runner was a little girl, then was unsure. After all, Girolamo was still several years away from being breeched or having his hair cut. Red ringlets, a hot temper, and a dislike for authority, it might equally well be Camilla as Girolamo, or any other child born to Cesare.

  “Shhh,” commanded madonna. “Do not let them know we are here.”

  All the children had entered the room now, with a bevy of weary-looking nursemaids and a travel-stained man bearing a hobby horse, an armful of dolls, and a hoop and stick. Giovanni, I noticed, had grown taller and thinner, though his resemblance to Donna Lucrezia and their father remained strong. Turning my attention to the other two, I realised, in a whirl of guilt and panic, that I could hardly tell one from the other as they danced about in front of the man with the toys and tugged at his sleeves to release his burden. Both wore woollen gowns, plain but of fine quality, and soft caps pulled well over their heads to ward off the cold, both had long, unruly red hair.

  “Girolamo?” But they were making too much noise to hear me. One of them grabbed a doll, which the other immediately wanted, and a tug of war ensued. Inevitably, the doll’s head was sundered from its body and the child holding the head lost its balance and sat down abruptly. The other gave a crow of triumph, waving the decapitated body in the air, and trotted a lap of honour around the room, showing a glimpse of stout legs in wool stockings. To add to the mayhem, Fonsi, who had had his nose pressed to the trellis throughout, now escaped underneath it and flounced, yapping, in among the children. The child holding the doll’s head glanced towards the trellis and, though he was unaware of it, for a second our eyes met. His were very dark, with an old, cool spirit in their depths I knew very well. Then he turned his attention to the dog, and tossed it the doll’s head. That was Girolamo.

  “Madonna, please may I go to my son?”

  “No, Violante.” She placed a restraining hand on my arm. “Best not to.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, a sense of dread trickling into my veins, not certain I wanted to understand.

  “I wanted to give you this opportunity to see he is well, but I will not be giving him back into your care. He is to go to Carpi under the tutelage of Don Alberto Pio. Don Alberto is of good standing and has some talented men in his household. He can ensure Girolamo grows up with all the accomplishments proper to his station.”

  “But…”

  “There can be no argument. Were you married, it might be different, but you were unlucky there and we must ride our luck, as my brother would no doubt be the first to tell you.”

  “I am willing to marry, madonna. When have I ever said I was not?”

  She gave me a sad smile. “There is a gulf between willingness and ability that I cannot afford to bridge. I would have to pay any man a high price for you, and I simply do not have it. Pope Julius sequestered everything of Cesar’s, you know. You will be able to see your son. I will make sure he is brought to Ferrara sometimes. But you must promise not to make yourself known to him.” After a pause she went on, “This
is Cesar’s will also, Violante.”

  The children are important to me, he had said, and had proved it, had done me the courtesy of an entire night in his bed to prove it. The thought of resistence flashed across my mind and disintegrated, like a shooting star, but I could see very clearly in the ensuing darkness. Resisting their plans would only separate me further from my son; at least, if I abided by madonna’s terms, I would see him sometimes, and have news of him. I would know how he grew, and what he learned, when he passed through his childhood ailments, had his first pony, fell in love for the first time. I would know more about him than my own mother ever had the chance to know about me. You follow love. It is not a straight path, nor, perhaps, a very moral one.

  ***

  I found myself increasingly drawn to Giulio. Although Angela moved back into our shared room and carried on as though nothing had changed since we had come to Ferrara four years ago, I could not confide in her my deepening sense of betrayal over Girolamo. Her daughter, still at Medelana in the care of her nurse, seemed to have made less of a mark on her mother’s heart than she had on her beautifully restored body. She would simply have told me that this was the way of things, that I had had my fun, paid the price, and it was time to move on. The festering air of nostalgia in Giulio’s apartments suited my inclinations better.

  Even as Easter drew closer and the days lengthened, Giulio remained indoors, behind closed shutters, saying the light hurt his eyes. His rooms stayed in the grip of perpetual winter, though spring was advancing everywhere else. Sometimes I read to him and sometimes we would entertain ourselves by reciting from memory or singing together, though my musical accomplishments were very poor compared with his, and it was a relief to me when Ferrante was there, or the singer from Artigianova whom the duke favoured and had lent to his brother to hasten his recovery.