Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “The Duke of Romagna,” she corrected, but almost under her breath. Fra Raffaello showed no sign of having heard her.

  “God granted him a brave end in a just cause,” he continued.

  Donna Lucrezia nodded as if in appreciation of a poem or a piece of music. “The messenger,” she asked, “who is he?”

  “A man called Juan Grasica, madonna. I believe he is...”

  “I know who he is, brother. I will thank you to leave us now, and ask Juan Grasica to attend us.”

  “Will you not pray, madonna?”

  “Of course I shall pray, but not here and now. I find myself a little at odds with God just now. The more I try to please him, it seems, the more He tries me.”

  The friar bowed and retreated.

  “Fidelma,” said madonna, “go and tell your little friar I will receive Juan Grasica in my own chamber. The rest of you, leave me. Not you, Violante,” she added as we all laid aside our work and prepared to absent ourselves, “you will come with me.” She rose from her chair and, on an impulse, I stepped forward and put my arms around her. After a brief hesitation, she returned my embrace. No matter how often I replay the scene in my memory, I cannot be certain what was in my mind. I do not know whether I sought to comfort her or myself, or whether I was trying to make contact through her with some emotion I could not feel.

  Juanito was not admitted to her private chamber until I had dressed her in the mourning clothes so recently put aside after the deaths of her father-in-law and her baby son. She chose the deepest mourning, a skirt and bodice of plain black, a chemise without any lace or embroidery, black hose and shoes. I washed the makeup from her face, brushed her hair loose and adorned her with no jewellery but her wedding band and the cameo poison ring I had brought from Rome. Then she stooped to dip her finger in the ash of last night’s fire, and made a cross with it on her forehead.

  “Should have let the priest do it,” she muttered, “but Cesar would like it this way. I am ready now, Violante. Please call Juanito to me. I will lie on my bed. I don’t think I have the strength to sit.”

  “Perhaps you should delay seeing Juanito, madonna.”

  “No. I shall see him now.”

  “Yes, madonna.”

  Poor Juanito. He was not a young man; like Michelotto, he had joined Cesare’s household when Cesare went away to school in Perugia and had kept company with every twist and turn of his fortunes. He looked grey when he entered the room, grey with exhaustion and misery and the dust of his wretched journey which rose around him in a cloud as he pulled off his cap and knelt to his lord’s sister. His limbs were so stiffened by his long ride I had to help him up.

  “Please sit, Juanito,” madonna urged him but he refused. He stood to attention beside her bed, one hand clutching his cap over his breast, the other spread protectively over a bulging satchel which hung at his side.

  “Very well, but I warn you, this will be a long interview. I require you to tell me everything.”

  “I expected you would, madonna.”

  “Begin please.” Signalling me to sit beside her on the bed, she took my hand. By the time Juanito had finished his story my fingers were numb and my knuckles bruised from the pressure of her grip.

  “My lord, as you know, was to escort his excellency Don Carlos from Flanders to Spain.” We both nodded. Cesare’s conviction that he had a part to play in upholding the infant Don Carlos’s claim to the throne of Castile had not been shaken by the sudden death from influenza of the boy’s father, Philip of Flanders. On the contrary, it was this which had made him decide on escape. As he had written to madonna on his arrival at his brother-in-law’s court in Pamplona, he had no intention of sitting about like a hen in a coop waiting for that old fox Ferdinand of Aragon to get him.

  “As part of his preparation, he and King Jean wished to strengthen Navarre’s defences and they asked the Count de Beaumonte to hand back the fortress at Viana. He refused, saying he was a vassal of King Ferdinand and not of King Jean, so his grace the king put my lord at the head of an army and required him to take Viana by force. Madonna, you should have seen him the day we rode out of Pamplona. It was like the old days, men cheering and women weeping by the roadside, small boys hanging on to his stirrups and himself so big and handsome, soro, like a young falcon.

  “We went to Larriaga first and besieged it.”

  I could see madonna was becoming impatient, but she let Juanito continue out of charity. By dwelling on the details of the campaign, he kept his beloved lord alive to his heart, and this gave him the courage to go on. After a great deal of arcane talk of bombasts and breastworks, culverins and ballistas and the calculation of firing trajectories and the digging of trenches, it transpired Cesare had lost patience with Larriaga, which refused to fall to him, and had raised the siege and gone to Viana.

  “King Jean held the town,” Juanito explained, “but Beaumonte’s son was holed up in the castle. He was running out of food, though, and no supplies or reinforcements could get through without the King and Don Cesar hearing of it. So it looked like an easy job, a quick finish and off to Flanders. The weather up there was terrible. Flat, brown hills with nothing to stop the wind or keep off the rain. Nothing but sheep and ravines for them to fall into. My lord decided not to post sentinels at night as he said the storms were our best defence. We had a decent house, good stone walls, but even inside there it was freezing. King Jean had given Don Cesar a fine wolfskin cloak and I don’t think he once took it off, not even to sleep unless, saving your presence, ladies, he found other means of keeping warm.

  “Come dawn on March 12, a Tuesday it was, we were awakened by a great commotion, shouting, bells ringing, the guards on the city walls running about like scalded cats saying we were under attack. We found out later Beaumonte had managed to get supplies into the castle under cover of the storm, so the weather turned out to be his friend, not ours, and what the guards had seen was just his escort returning. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “I heard Don Cesar shouting for his armour, but he was in one of his rages, stalking up and down like a leopard in a cage, cursing so even the trollop in his bed looked embarrassed, so I couldn’t manage to get him into any more than his light armour and a corselet and I had to throw his helmet down the stairs after him because he forgot it.”

  Donna Lucrezia smiled while I thought about the “trollop” in Cesare’s bed, unwrapping his body from the wolfskin cloak like a gift, and wondered if she had tried to stop him going.

  “By the time I got to my own horse he was gone. Hadn’t even stopped to check his girth the groom said, which was not like him as you know and was a measure of how impatient he was with the whole business of these little Navarrese and their domestic squabbles. He was so angry he rode like a madman even by his standards and of course none of the rest of us could keep up so…”

  “Go on, Juanito. I wish to hear everything. I have said so.”

  “When he rode into Beaumonte’s ambush he was completely alone. I didn’t realise what had happened till I saw his horse galloping back towards us. Even then I thought…well, he was a great fighter and nearly twice the height of the little Navarrese.” Juanito cleared his throat. He fiddled with the fastening of his satchel and cast a pleading glance at madonna but she gave him no quarter.

  “By the time I got there they had made off. They’d taken everything, his armour, his weapons, even his clothes. One of them had had the decency to put a stone over his genitals, that was all.” Tears spilled out of the squire’s eyes and made tracks in the dust on his cheeks. Only the pressure of madonna’s hand crushing mine kept my own tears back by giving me a simpler and more immediate pain on which to concentrate.

  “It was still pouring with rain so his body looked quite clean, just the earth around it was red. The king came up then, and covered him with his cloak. He said a prayer, then had him carried back into the town. I did the laying out myself, madonna. I wasn’t having strangers take care of him. I’d been his bo
dy servant since he was fourteen years old so it was only right.”

  “Thank you, Juanito. It was proper and considerate of you.”

  “He looked like a bridegroom when King Jean’s six best knights carried him into the church of Santa Maria. I’d brushed his hair and trimmed his beard the way he liked it, and dressed him in his best armour, the black with the gold chasing on the breastplate. He always used to say it felt like a second skin, that armour. He had his wedding ring and his Order of Saint Michael that King Louis gave him, and King Jean gave a coronet in place of his ducal insignia which had got lost somehow in all that fuss in Naples.”

  “Tell me how his face looked.”

  “As I say, madonna, he looked most handsome and serene. The church was full of weeping women. They tell me there were twenty-five wounds on his poor body, though his face was unmarked. All I know is it was too many for me to count and he must have put up the very devil of a fight.”

  “Twenty-five. Good. That is five times the five wounds of Our Lord on the Cross. Were his eyes open or closed?”

  “Closed with pennies, madonna, of course.”

  “When you found him.”

  I wished she would stop. I was not sure Juanito had the strength to continue, yet she did, so he and I must also.

  “Open, madonna. Sort of…surprised looking.”

  “And could you see anything in them? They say the image of a man’s killer will imprint itself upon the eye for a little while after death.”

  “Do they, madonna? Well perhaps I got there too late. I could see nothing in his eyes but the rain.”

  “The gods must weep for the death of such a one. Thank you, Juanito, you have spoken well and bravely. You know Sancho, my majordomo?”

  “I met him in Medina del Campo, madonna.”

  “Go to him. He will give you money and find you lodgings. As soon as I am able, I will make more permanent arrangements for you. I would like you to stay in Ferrara, Juanito, so we can talk sometimes about the old days.”

  The squire bowed. “I have nowhere else to go, madonna.”

  As I saw Juanito out and told him where he might find Sancho, I also asked him to tell Sancho to send a messenger to Donna Angela in Sassuolo.

  ***

  Angela arrived the following evening, on horseback and accompanied only by a groom. One of her ladies-in-waiting was to follow on with her luggage, she explained, to fill the awkward space between us. The last time I had seen her had been the previous winter when, madonna having pawned some of her jewellery and sold a small parcel of land she had forgotten she still owned in Calabria, had managed to raise a dowry for her cousin sufficient to mollify Don Alessandro’s mother. The whole Pio clan had come to Ferrara for a second, public wedding in the duke’s newly decorated rooms in the Corte. We had feasted on platters of oysters with oranges and pears, on pike dressed with crystallised borage flowers and anchovy salads, and you would hardly have known it was Advent. For dessert there were nudes fashioned from liquorice biscuit, the eating of which occasioned a great many jokes suitable for a wedding, though Don Alessandro’s mother did not seem to be amused. After dinner we had formed a noisy procession, headed by musicians and acrobats, and a fire eater produced from somewhere by La Fertella, to escort the bride and groom to their lodgings in the town. Our cheeks glowed with cold and wine; torchlight sparkled on jewels and danced along the snowy streets, threw wild shadows up the walls of buildings, picked out the gleam in the eyes of watchers behind their window shutters.

  Only fleetingly had I felt the dark pull of the Torre Leone as we passed, glancing up as I always did to see if the food baskets were still hanging from the pulleys on the roof, for their daily journey up and down the sheer face of the tower was the only evidence we had that Ferrante and Giulio were still alive. From where I was in the procession I had been unable to tell whether Angela looked in that direction or not, and my thoughts had shifted quickly back to my own joy.

  Don Alberto Pio had brought Girolamo with him to Ferrara for the wedding. Giovanni’s attachment to me, which had begun with Cesare’s commendation of my Greek joke, had deepened during our time at Nepi and in Rome. We were, I suppose, like soldiers who have campaigned together, bound by a common experience not shared by anyone around us. So, when he played with Girolamo, he often wanted to include me in their games. Elated and heartbroken, I had watched them race hoops through the Sala Grande or play at jousting with their hobbyhorses and broom handles. I had referreed their fights when Giovanni tried to dominate his nephew and Girolamo, small and wiry, tenacious and bold, had fought back. Though not as plump as he had been, Giovanni was still indolent and somewhat slow of wit. Girolamo, though, was much as I imagined his father would have been if he had not been so poorly at that age, as he had become after Donna Lucrezia was born and he decided to live.

  We had also just heard that Cesare was free. He had broken his collar bone, some ribs, and an ankle jumping from the end of the rope he had hung from his window, having miscalculated the drop, and his journey to Pamplona had been a torture. But now he looked forward to celebrating Christmas there with his brother-in-law, and to the year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and seven which he knew would see a rise in his fortunes.

  And now he was dead.

  As Angela and I greeted one another in the castle courtyard, in the cool spring dusk, the contrast of present sorrow with past happiness seemed to reinforce the gulf that had opened up between us now she was a married woman with a good name and a substantial household.

  “How is she?” asked Angela as we made our way to madonna’s rooms.

  “I can’t describe it. You’ll see for yourself.”

  ***

  Donna Lucrezia’s mourning for her brother was as desperate and visceral as his dying must have been. There was no dignity to it, no restraint or self-consciousness or thought. Once Juanito had finished his tale and left us, she had utterly collapsed. She tore at her clothes, her hair, the skin of her face and arms, and howled as though possessed of a devil, unearthly, guttural moans and growls that made me think of fighting cats and the beggars who do not have the decency to die silently by roadsides. She took handfuls of ash and rubbed it all over her head and face and breast, and when the fire was re-lit she shovelled hot coals out of it and tried to walk on them, so I had to douse it with the first water that came to hand, the contents of a chamber pot. The Dalmatian slave fled in terror, crossing herself repeatedly, her long white fingers fluttering in front of her long white neck.

  I thought Angela’s presence would calm madonna, but she scarcely seemed to notice her cousin’s arrival. When I tried to leave, however, she rose briefly to the surface of the pit she had fallen into and forbade me to go. “You are me,” she said. “There is nowhere for you to go.”

  “Violante just wants to get some food and drink for me, cousin,” said Angela, “and a broom to sweep up the ashes.”

  Donna Lucrezia stared at her as if she had no idea who she was or what she was talking about and shook her head. A hank of hair caught on her lip. She stuck out her tongue and hooked the hair into her mouth and sucked it. That seemed to distract her for a moment, and she allowed herself to be led back to her bed.

  “Do you think we should restrain her?” Angela asked me. “At least until we can get her physician to see her.”

  But before I could reply she was up again, spitting out the hair, heading for her bedroom window, muttering about ropes and drops and how Cesare could have been a good mathematician if he had only had more patience. I ran in front of her, slammed the shutters closed, and used my girdle to make them fast while Angela once again wrestled madonna back on to her bed.

  “I’m going for her doctor,” said Angela. “This is much worse than I’d expected.”

  “What had you expected?” She gave me an odd look then, both calculating and troubled, but did not reply to my question.

  When she returned with the physician, madonna smashed a perfume flask and yelled through the door that
if anyone other than Angela were to come through it she would stab them with the broken glass. It was a floral perfume, with notes of jasmine, and its scent wreathed like a ghost around the bed furnishings and ceiling bosses, the chair legs and the jewelled crucifix on the prie dieu, and clung to our skins.

  Donna Lucrezia had cut her hand, but when I tried to bind it she pulled away from me. “You think that matters?” she asked, her tone full of contempt.

  Fra Raffaello received the same treatment, as did Ippolito and even the duke, who arrived on a lightning visit from Genoa, where he was helping the French king to crush a rebellion. No doubt he was glad to have a rebellion to go back to. For two weeks, madonna would let no one near her but Angela and myself. She raged and wept and called out Cesare’s name, sometimes pleading with him in her rapid, incomprehensible Catalan as though she could persuade him to come back. She would not let us change her ragged clothes, so we tried to cover her with blankets which she would trail around the room after her, knocking over furniture, swiping books and cups, hairbrushes, jewellery, and powder pots off tables until the floor was sticky and treacherous with a porridge of spilt wine and makeup and broken glass. She soiled herself with the random wilfulness of a small child. On the rare occasions we could persuade her to eat and drink, she pushed food into her mouth with her fingers and lapped water from a basin, and a pappy crust formed on her lips and chin which cracked and irritated the skin.

  When she slept, which was rarely and for short periods, Angela and I would sit slumped in half-conscious silence, without the energy to speak, let alone attempt to clean up the sad chaos of our surroundings. I waited, braced for my own sorrow which I was certain must come, but it did not, not then. It was as though madonna’s grief, in all its savage grandeur, shamed mine into hiding itself. No one could mourn as she did; even the women of Troy seemed like faint pretenders compared with her. And I was so tired, too tired to muster the resources needed to properly grieve for my first love, my son’s father, the man whose dark eyes and clever smile had defined the whole world for me.