Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  He sniggered. “I tell you, Violante, you and I would make an altogether more upright duke and duchess than Alfonso and his lady, one all day in the whorehouse and the other being titillated by stories from the baths at Porretta.”

  “Never speak of it again, Ferrante. Go away, and tell Giulio to go too.” I turned and walked away from him.

  “What will you do?” I heard him call after me, but pretended I had not.

  ***

  Donna Lucrezia was silent for a long time while she read the letter, then turned back the page and read it again. Though she was pale, I did not fear for her health because at the same time her features settled into an expression of shrewd and determined calculation, one of those expressions that thinned and honed her face until it reminded me of her brother’s.

  “Leave us,” she commanded her ladies. Angela hesitated. “You too,” said madonna, and Angela slammed down her hand of cards on the table. She cast me a venomous glance over her shoulder as she left.

  “Look out of the window,” madonna ordered me. “Look for open shutters anywhere in hearing distance and make sure no one is on the moat. They were dredging earlier.” The moat was dredged every spring to keep its depth constant and the water clean so it did not smell too much in the hot weather; every spring my heart remembered the shuttered, blank-eyed mask Cesare had turned on me as he stepped on to the ravelin and emptied Ser Torella’s basin, and I feared the discovery of the dead child’s tiny bones. An irrational conceit; how many bones had sunk into the silt of the moat over the years, what was there to distinguish hers from those of a dead pet or the remains of a meal cast out from the kitchens?

  “You must tell me everything you know about this,” said madonna as I drew the shutters close behind me as a precaution, though I had not spotted any evidence of spies. But spies are everywhere in courts; they are the essence of courts as wood is the essence of a tree and without them courts would be something different.

  I told her how I had discovered the letter, and about the time I had visited Giulio and found Alberto Pio in his company, and as much else as I could think of, although I did not mention my visit to Gideon d’Arzenta. And I did not mention my conversation with Ferrante.

  “Well Pio is easy to deal with,” she said as I completed my account. “Find a slave and have him sent for.” Although Girolamo had been dispatched to Carpi with his nurse, a valet and a gaggle of tutors, Don Alberto had remained in Ferrara; his reasons were now obvious. “Then go and fetch my brother’s letters. You know where I keep them.” She unfastened the key to her bureau from her girdle and handed it to me. I think she had always believed it would comfort me to know where the letters were; sometimes I wondered if she intended me to read them, though I never did.

  By the time I had returned with the leather case, so slim you would never notice it beneath the bureau’s false bottom unless you knew it was there, Don Alberto was standing before madonna looking a little like a rabbit caught in a bright light. Don Francesco’s letter lay on her card table, tossed casually among the discarded hands of cacho and heaps of small coins. Every time she glanced at it, she pulled Don Alberto’s gaze in the same direction, towards his own name inscribed there as if on a warrant.

  “Ah, Violante, thank you,” she said as I handed her the folder and she made a great play of opening it. “I thought you would wish to know, Don Alberto, that I have excellent news of my brother.” She withdrew a parchment and waved it in his direction. Cesare’s monogram, his personal signature, was in plain view. The letter’s date was not. Don Alberto nodded, swallowed hard, turned, I fancied, a shade of green. His experiment with a smile failed.

  “Yes,” madonna continued. “He writes that he believes the charges against him will be dropped, for there is no evidence, you know, and that King Ferdinand will release him. He says,” she added, perhaps believing that by saying it she could make it true, “that he hopes to spend Christmas with his family in Ferrara. He attaches great importance to his family, Don Alberto, and to those who do us loyal service.”

  “I am honoured to be of service to your noble brother, duchesa.”

  “Are you, though, Don Alberto? Are you, do you think, setting Don Girolamo the best example? Will my brother approve your care of him when he next sees his son?”

  Don Girolamo, I thought, my baby, made out of two very different sets of dreams.

  “You yourself chose his tutors, madonna.” Clearly Don Alberto thought he could take refuge behind a screen of righteous indignation.

  “Yes,” said Donna Lucrezia, in that voice which made you believe it could etch a pattern on a sword blade, “and I chose you. And just because I favoured you, and your cousin is now married to mine, do not think that gives you license to meddle in my affairs.”

  “Madonna, I…”

  “Do not interrupt me, Don Alberto. And if you value that not unpleasant head of yours, use the brains God put in it to work out which side your bread is buttered. Do I make myself plain enough for you?”

  He made a gesture that was a combination of a nod and a bow.

  “Good. Then I suggest you return to Carpi posthaste and attend to my nephew, or I will have to discuss his future further with my brother. And my husband of course.”

  Don Alberto bowed again and backed unsteadily out of the room.

  “Wine,” madonna said to me, “and have a cup yourself. I do not suppose that was easy for you. Still,” she went on before I could respond, “perhaps we have killed two birds with one stone and he will go to Giulio and Ferrante and warn them they are discovered. I would rather not have to drag Alfonso into it.” I thought I would rather she did not either, and prayed Giulio and Ferrante would listen to Don Alberto if not to me. We drank our wine in silence for a few moments, then she heaved a deep sigh.

  “Oh God I miss him.”

  “He will be back soon, surely, madonna. He has only gone to Venice.” And you have Don Francesco, I added silently.

  “Cesar, Violante. Would to God he were only in Venice. Would to God what I told Don Alberto was true. You know, if I did not have you to talk to, I think I would go mad with the worry.”

  “You honour me, madonna.”

  “No I do not. It is merely that we…share a concern.”

  I thought of Gideon and his invitation, and of Cesare and invitations, of my brother’s broken eye glasses glinting in the mud and a chair shattering against stone stairs. My heart banged about in my chest like some creature maddened by captivity and would not let me speak, but madonna seemed content with my silence.

  “When we were children, of course we did not live together. I was with Aunt Adriana as you know, and the boys had their own household under Cardinal Vera. But we used to spend the hottest weeks of summer all together at my mother’s farm at Caprarola. One year, a calf was born that had two heads and six legs. Amazingly, neither it nor the mother died straight way, so the man who managed the farm just left it.”

  Reason prompted me to wonder why she had begun to tell me this, but instinct told me to keep quiet and listen.

  “It was in a field near the house to begin with, but Juan used to throw stones at it, so the cowherd moved it into a byre some way away from the village. It was just as well because it made people nervous, six being the number of the devil. They blamed it for a series of bad storms we had that summer, and when the Jewish tinker came as he did every year, the villagers stoned him down the main street and refused to buy from him.”

  I thought perhaps she had forgotten me, but with a sudden, mischievous smile, she said, “Cesar tried to stop them. He said he didn’t think the devil would choose a Jewish tinker to represent him, as it was too close to God choosing a Jewish carpenter. He thought the devil would be more original. Of course no one understood the joke and for a while it looked as though they’d start stoning him too. His career as the devil’s right hand man began early, you see.”

  “How old were you then?” I ventured.

  “Let me think…he would hav
e been twelve, because it was the second to last summer before he went to Perugia. So I must have been seven.”

  “And what happened to the calf?”

  “Eventually it died. The cowherd became more and more convinced it was growing into two calves. So one day he decided he would cut it in half. We went to watch. That is, Cesar and Juan were permitted to go. Jofre and I were not, but I got Cesar to smuggle me out of the house during siesta, while Mama and my nurse were asleep. We did it all the time, out of a window and down the back stairs from the loggia.”

  Where was she now, I wondered, the barefoot hoyden who scrambled out of windows to go adventuring with her brothers, skirts kilted up to her skinny knees and grass seeds in her hair? If I stripped away the layers of pomp and fine costumes, the white lead and carmine, the scars on the heart and the lines on her face that made her look older than her twenty-five years, would that girl still be there?

  “There was quite an audience, but we were recognised and allowed to the front, though I got some disapproving looks I can tell you. I expect they were meant for the boys, for bringing me, but Juan would have disarmed them all with his smile and Cesar could always stop people looking at him somehow, as if he had shields around him. The calf was slung in a harness from the byre roof. It was lowing out of one mouth and one set of eyes was wide and rolling. The other head hadn’t really grown properly. Its eyes were blue and filmy. It was more like a kind of big, complicated carbuncle. The cowherd had a little mallet to stun the calf. Juan tried to object to him using it. I began by agreeing with him, but then Cesar said two things. First he said the mallet showed the cowherd’s thinking. If he believed the animal should be stunned before the separating began, then he knew it was going to suffer and probably die. Then he told me to look in the calf’s eyes, and that if I did that, carefully, I would have seen all I needed to see. Finally, since he was sent to Spain, I have understood what he meant.”

  We are not like the calf at Caprarola. We won’t die.

  “It’s another of the clues he’s been leaving me. All my life.” I was sure, now, she had forgotten I was there and was talking to herself, holding up to the light something which had gone unexamined for a long time. “I feel there were thoughts in my mind when I was born that he had put there, left in the womb for me to find.” A changeling, her mother believed. A dybbuk. Like me.

  ***

  Madonna’s interview with Don Alberto seemed to have succeeded in its purpose. He returned to Carpi the following day. The duke did come back unexpectedly from Venice on the Saturday, but seemed relaxed, and left again on Sunday morning for the annual fair at Lanciano. He enjoyed the fair season, and the excuse it gave him to indulge his enjoyment of whoring, drinking, and brawling in taverns.

  In the uproar of his departure, it was an easy thing for me to slip away to keep my assignation with Gideon, who met me at the Porta Mare, which I had last passed through with Angela on our way to Medelana. A terrific argument was under way between a carter carrying a load of building materials and a man standing before a smashed cheese lying in the middle of the street. It was one of the enormous, salty cheeses they make in Parma which are nearly as hard as marble. Ferrante used to joke a splinter of it would make the perfect murder weapon, for you could get the mice to eat the evidence. Quite a crowd had gathered to support one side or the other or merely scavenge pieces of cheese before the street dogs had them all. As I looked about for Gideon, I noticed one enterprising urchin slip a handful of scaffolding ties off the back of the cart, and wondered how much he would ask to sell them back to the duke’s builders next day.

  Gideon’s height made him easy to spot. He wore a soft, broad brimmed hat which bobbed above the crowd as he fought his way towards me. His hatband was stuck about with a lot of tiny, bright-coloured feathers; it reminded me of pictures I had seen of the natives of New Spain, or is that just what I think now? His rods were slung over his shoulder, but he seemed to keep forgetting they were there, so they were endlessly catching on people’s clothing, or the backs of their legs, and his progress was accompanied by a chorus of indignant shouts. By the time he reached me, I was almost helpless with laughter.

  “What a circus,” he said by way of greeting, using the bulky basket he was carrying to swipe at a tiny child who had been about to cut my purse. He missed, but the child ran off anyway to try his luck elsewhere.

  “It’s always like this down here.”

  “I would have liked to have taken you north of the city. The fishing is better there, but that’s all the duke’s land. I’m afraid we shall have to walk a bit.” He took me by the elbow and steered me around the quarrelling men and the broken cheese, through the gate, and on to the public dock with its clamour of bells and raised voices, the slap of rigging against masts and coin against the table tops of the wholesalers and tax collectors. The air smarted with the smell of fish and tar. Gulls screamed over our heads, and, looking up at them, I suddenly felt the vastness of the sky, how it spread from here, over Carpi and Nepi, over Nettuno and Rome, to Spain and Jerusalem and the New World and the Kingdom of Prester John. Everything I knew was in it, and everything I was yet to know. It seemed to sway, like an awning buffeted by wind, but it must have been me because Gideon tightened his grip on my elbow and asked me if I was quite well.

  “The crowds,” I said, “and it’s rather warm.”

  “Perfect for the fish. No wind, and the warm weather brings out mayflies at this time of year.”

  I laughed. “You might as well be speaking Turkish.”

  “Your ignorance is shocking. Did your father not think to educate you?”

  “I’m a city girl, Gideon. I grew up in Rome.”

  “Rome has a river, doesn’t it?”

  “Not one you’d want to eat the fish from.”

  “Well Mantua is a very small city with a lot of lakes around it.”

  “So did you do all your courting on riverbanks?” I teased.

  “Boats mostly,” he replied, and it was impossible to tell whether or not he was serious.

  As we passed the duke’s private jetty, deserted now he had taken the bucentaur to Venice, all the mooring ropes neatly coiled and the Este standard hanging limp from its pole in the humid air, Gideon said, “Tell me about Giulio d’Este.”

  “Why?”

  “He has sent for me. Says he’s seen the medal I did for the duchess and would like to give me a commission.”

  “So that is why I am here.” I twisted my arm out of his grasp and walked up the bank a little to increase the distance between us. He made no move to close it again, just raised his voice a little so he sounded like a poor actor trying to project to the back of a large room.

  “A moment’s thought before you climb on your high horse, Violante. When I asked you to fish with me, no one had seen the finished medals, not even the duchess. This all happened only yesterday.”

  Of course. What was the matter with me? Had my wits gone to Carpi with my son? Or further afield, with my old lover.

  “Here. Here’s a good spot.” He stopped where the river began to narrow and was overhung with willows newly in leaf, all white bark and spears of silvery green trailing on the water’s surface. He put down his basket and lay his rods beside it on a sliver of grey beach curved like a giant’s nail paring while I hovered on the grassy ridge above wondering whether grass stains or river silt would be harder to clean off my skirt. I was wearing silk, the weather being too warm for a woollen gown, and though it was only my second best, I loved its deep blue colour and the embroidered panels of mille fiori I had done myself. Taking his cue as perfectly as a shepherd in an eclogue, Gideon produced a blanket from his basket and spread it at my feet.

  “Sit,” he said, as he delved in the depths of the basket, taking out first an array of mysterious small boxes, then enough food to feed the entire crew of a fishing smack. Fine white rolls, fresh cheeses, fruits, and salads followed one another on to the rug as though he had emptied a cornucopia. “I didn’t kno
w what you liked to eat,” he said, “so I brought everything.”

  “So I see.” I tried to sound appreciative, but I felt guilty. Such a spread must have cost him far more than he could afford, even with the promise of a commission from Giulio.

  “You must work for your meal, though.” Squatting on his haunches, he opened one of the boxes and took out a ball of lead shot. From another box he withdrew a tiny feathered hook similar to the ones decorating his hat. These he tied to one of the fishing lines then repeated the performance with the other. Then, stepping to the water’s edge, he told me to watch carefully while he demonstrated casting. “First, look behind you. There is nothing more foolish than a fisherman—or woman—with his line caught in a tree. Then you must think of your rod as a spring. You load it with the weight of the line and shoot it out into the water.”

  I tried to watch as he instructed me, paying attention to the angle of the rod on the back cast, the straightness of the line, and a thousand other technical details, but all my wayward senses would take in was him, his gangling silhouette haloed by the river’s sparkle, the unexpected grace of his movements, the concentrated set of his head, his ridiculous, unabashed delight at every catch, however small. So I proved a poor student. I let my line become tangled, my casts fell short, and then, when I thought I had a bite, it turned out to be an old boot.

  “Not much use,” observed Gideon, “unless we can find its mate.”

  By this time I was flushed and hot and far too cross to appreciate his humour. Flinging my rod on the bank, I climbed up to sit on the rug and sulk. My corset chafed and my scalp prickled with sweat under my cap. Looking at the river carving its lazy, sinuous path between its banks, the silver fish jumping after turquoise dragonflies, the low, wide arcs of swallows and swifts, I longed to swim, to be part of heedless nature with its simple necessities. Perhaps I might at least remove my cap, and take off my shoes and hose and cool my feet in the water. Thinking Gideon was absorbed in his fishing, I was careless, lifting my skirts to the knee to make it easier to unlace my hose. A sudden stillness, a sense of breath caught and held, made me look up and realise he was watching me. For all my loosened hair and bare calves, I felt hotter as my body struggled with its constrictions.