by Lisa Hilton
*
The dream had come to me so quickly that I staggered a little, dizzied with it.
‘I think it means nothing, Madonna. These things are much more common than we suppose. Maestro Ficino would say—’
‘It is an ill omen.’
I closed my eyes, trying to blink away the image of the man in black following the Countess from the wreck of the Rocca.
‘If you’ll forgive me, my lady, I think not. Iron has many properties. It can bind spirits, drive away curses. Perhaps if the fragments were to be gathered together, blessed, this might bring good fortune,’ but I was babbling, and we both knew it.
‘It is an ill omen.’
‘Yes.’
The Countess ordered that all the pieces be collected together, and declared that she would have a monument made to them in marble at the church of San Mercuriale. But that winter the rains fell and the floods came, and though bread was sent out from the Rocca, there were many who starved in Forli, and many more who blamed not the comet but the Countess for defying its warning.
My dreams returned, haunting me as I worked in the farmacia or combed out the Countess’s hair or tried to lose myself in my studies. I thought again of my mother and the charm she had worked into my old red dress – she’d had the sight, and knew what it meant. And sometimes I saw myself, standing in the window above the Zocodover, the light streaming out behind me and my hands gleaming red, and I thought of what I was, and how I was cursed. I thought perhaps I should run away, that it was me who would bring bad luck to the Countess, but I pushed it from my mind. I was happy here, and besides, I knew now that however far I ran, the shadow of the man in black would find me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I HAD PROMISED MY LADY TO CAST A CHART FOR HER wedding, and I dearly hoped that she would take Ser Giovanni as her third husband. He was a Medici gentleman born, and surely the people of Forli would love him for his handsomeness and his fine manners and his Florentine gold as much as they had hated the others, men who they had taken from her with murder. When she had me take the maids to the gardens to gather white and yellow jasmine and heavy-scented tuberoses to garland the pavilion, I was glad, for I thought that they would be betrothed and that her city would celebrate with her. I thought that with a strong young husband at her side, her lands and her family would be safe. Yet there was no proclamation of the wedding, no exchange of letters and gifts and no great people arriving to feast at the Rocca. There was only the Countess in her nightgown before dawn on a late summer’s morning, bidding me rise and help her to dress; a walk across the silvered parkland, our feet making deep prints in the dew; Ser Giovanni waiting in the summerhouse with a monk fetched from the convent; and a ring that passed from his hand to hers and then to mine, for I was her witness and I was to keep her secret safe.
There was talk, of course, that the Countess was secretly married, but I kept my countenance and held my tongue, letting out her bodices and lacing her less tightly, but it would not be long before her belly showed the world what she still denied. Her uncle, the Duke of Milan, would be sorely angered, she told me, if he learned that she had married without his permission. Forli was too isolated, too weak without the protection of the Sforza. When Il Moro sent an envoy from Bologna to sniff out the rumour of the marriage, my lady put on her widow’s weeds, draping herself in heavy black, and Ser Giovanni kept his own room. The rumours of love between them were lies, said my lady sweetly; her Medici guest had prolonged his visit to see about the harvest for which Florence hungered, and to avoid the trouble which had befallen his family there. There would be no new marriage, she claimed, that her uncle did not choose for her. The sala at the Rocca glittered with all her treasure of plate and she murmured as she served the envoy’s wine with her own hands in a gem-encrusted cup that she was a poor widow, who counted on the goodness of the Duke to protect her. Ser Giovanni made it plain that he was no lover of the French, and sent his loyal respects to Milan. My lady, meanwhile, wrote a pious letter to Savonarola in Florence, expressing her wish that he would assist her to come closer to God. The Florentines bought another huge consignment of grain and ten lions were ordered for the hunting park of the Paradiso; the envoy departed no wiser and I thought the Countess must be very clever, to get what she would have from all, and commit herself to nothing.
It pleased her, as her time drew near next spring, to walk the walls of the Rocca, looking down over the cittadella and the town. After the child was born, she would build a new house outside the city, where the air would be fresher in the summer, and where she could retire when the time came for her eldest son to govern.
‘Or perhaps we shall go to Florence, Mora. It is so long since I visited. Should you like that, to see Florence once more?’
I did not care much for the idea of Florence, but so long as she said ‘we’ like that and turned her eyes upon me so gently, I think I should have followed her anywhere. Or she would speak of the child, a boy, we were both certain. He would be her seventh, and sure to be a great man.
‘He shall be a soldier, certain,’ she said, ‘a true Sforza warrior.’
She told me of the first Sforza duke, the greatest condottiero of Italy, and how his mother had trained all her children, even the girls, to fight like Roman gladiators. The Sforza were Tuscans, like the Medici; the finest soldiers in Italy were Tuscans.
‘He shall have warrior blood on both sides, Mora. The Medici claim one of Charlemagne’s knights as the founder of their line.’
‘Truly?’
She laughed. ‘No, not truly. But a better story than money grubbing in the Mugello marshes, no?’
The baby came in April, on a night so filled with stars that the sky looked like black sequins in a cloth of silver. It was an easy birth; the child slipped out like a fish, and bellowed and grasped his mother’s hair so that even in her pains she laughed and kissed him. When he was washed and had been put to her breast, she told me to carry him to the window, to bathe him in the starlight. Our shadows fell on her pillows. ‘I’ll call him Lodovico,’ she said softly, ‘for my uncle of Milan.’
Men like my old master were so dedicated to detecting the auguries of fate that they overlooked its most obvious manifestations. While Piero de Medici was playing the prince in Florence, the statue he commissioned in snow from Michelangelo was thawing quietly to nothing in his own courtyard. The struggling figures of the angel and the serpent collapsed gently into an embrace, drop by gelid drop his power was melting and he never troubled to notice. So my lady chose to celebrate her last son’s birth that spring and rejoice in the bright stars that heralded his coming, allowing them to eclipse the memory of the comet. I went to my books and tried to work diligently with my compass and my astrolabe, but she barely gave a thought to my researches, lost in milk and the sweet-hay scent of her baby boy, a true Madonna. Each day, her messengers brought news, and I began to see that the new baby’s fate would not be determined by the planets but, like all the people of Italy, by Rome.
I dreamed of wolves again. Huge black wolves, streaming down a mountainside, slavering, savage. I dreamed too of a great bull, rampaging through the farmlands of the Romagna under a flaming sunlit sky. The devices of the Borgia, the bull and the flaming double crown of Aragon. I dreamed I saw a palace where the bull walked docile between the streaming rays on the walls, ridden by Cupid. I tried to warn her. I explained, as though to a child, that the Borgia bull must be tamed or it would ravage and put the countryside to fire, and she listened to my child’s stories with her head on one side and her amber eyes the colour of the Aragon sun and told me that my dreams were very pretty and that she ought to have me whipped for lying, for what could a slave know of the great game of politics?
I was ashamed then, and dared not tell her of my other dream, of the Rocca all aflame and she led out captive, like a pagan queen, through her ruined city. She believed herself indomitable, Caterina. She had her sons and her young Medici husband. She was beautiful and beloved in her ci
ties of Forli and Imola, and her uncle was the lord of Milan. Had she not held the Castel Sant’Angelo against her enemies? Had she not defied those who rebelled against her and scorned their threats to murder her children and triumphantly revenged herself? Had she not lived as it pleased her, for all that she was a woman? She was a Sforza. What need did Caterina, Countess of Forli have of the counsels of her maid, cobbled together from eavesdropped dispatches? So I held my tongue and dandled her baby and kept my place. But I wish I had not.
I heard him called a sorcerer, the Borgia Pope. He had cozened his power from the devil himself. I did not believe greatly in the devil, he was not someone for whom my master Ficino had much time, but then nor did I believe in the powers of sapphires and unicorns. People fear what they do not understand, true; yet my lady thought she understood the Spanish Pope too well. He had long been her ally, and she saw no reason that he should not remain so. In the days of her first marriage when she had queened it in the Holy City and Alexander VI was Rodrigo Borgia, the Catalan cardinal, they had been friends, such friends indeed that Borgia had stood godfather to Caterina’s first son, Ottaviano. And had he not restored the Riario palazzo in Rome to Caterina once the papal tiara was on his head, receiving her ambassadors with honour and giving a cardinal’s hat to her uncle Ascanio Sforza? And now, had he not just offered his own daughter, Lucrezia, as a bride for his godson? And Caterina practically laughed in his holy face.
They quarrelled about it, the Countess and Ser Giovanni. I was as eager to listen to their talk as I had been to avoid the sighs of their lovemaking, though it grieved me to hear them at odds.
‘It would be unwise to offend him, my love.’ Ser Giovanni’s voice was soft and reasonable. I heard my lady pacing their chamber in the darkness.
‘He is a Sforza! Would you give our son to a Spanish bastard?’
‘Ottaviano is Riario’s son, too. We may have need of Rome, in time. And the younger boy is married to a princess of Naples.’
‘Sancia of Aragon?’ my lady hissed scornfully. ‘A bastard married to a bastard. And she is Cesare’s whore.’
I knew that name. Cesare Borgia was cardinal of Valencia, the lover of his own sister-in-law and, it was whispered, of his own sister too.
‘Would you have my son polluted with incest as well as bastardy?’
She spoke of the scandals of the Pope’s children, the same as I had heard whispered in the stables and the kitchens and the marketplace. Of Juan, Duke of Gandia, the second of those beautiful, dissolute siblings whose body had been fished out of the Tiber, a sponge of stab wounds. And everyone knew, but no one said, that it was Cesare who had put him there.
‘He will have Cesare renounce the cardinal’s hat. He has sought Carlotta of Naples for a bride, and Federigo of Aragon gives out that a Borgia will do for his bastard but not his own true born child. Is a Sforza to stoop where a Spanish interloper will not bend?’
‘They say that she is beautiful, the girl.’
‘She is a whore! I had it from Mantua that she had a bastard to her own father, hidden away in a convent. Has she not shamed my family enough?’
Caterina might say that a Borgia bastard was no wife for a son of Sforza blood, but this Lucrezia had been married to a cousin of the Countess, Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro. Lucrezia’s father and brother insisted on a divorce, forcing Giovanni to claim that he was not enough of a man to make the marriage true. I thought the Countess might pity her a little; for all she was the Pope’s daughter she remained the pawn of her father and brother, to be pushed passively across the chessboard of Italy where they willed it, just as Caterina herself had been.
‘They are calling her a virgin still. She’s the laughing stock of Rome.’
‘We must think. Why did His Holiness take his child from Pesaro and offer her to you?’
‘So that her children will rule Forli and Imola. I will not have it. I want no more papal meddling in the Romagna. Ottaviano will marry where I choose, and I do not choose a Catalan whore for my son.’
All the gentleness was gone from her voice. I heard the woman I had been told of, before I came to Forli – defiant, fearless, bowing to no man’s will. Ser Giovanni was no match for her. So the Countess of Forli wrote to the Pope most politely that she did not think that her conscience could accept a divorced woman for her son, even one whose chastity had been so vigorously proclaimed as Donna Lucrezia’s, and she wrote to her uncle of Milan that she cared too much for Ottaviano to entrust him to a whore and a poisoner.
There was no more talk of Rome. Nor did the Countess seem much concerned with the new French king, Louis XII, who had taken his throne the same month that she declined the alliance with the Borgias. Florence was allied with France and Forli with Florence. There was no cause for anxiety. More pressing was the Florentine’s war against Pisa, which Piero de Medici had so carelessly thrown away to another French king, and which Giovanni was determined to help them take back. That spring, the Lion of St Mark flexed his muscles, and news came that the Venetians planned to move into the Romagna in support of Pisa. Forli would remain neutral, but Caterina had obtained a condotta, a paid mercenary post, for her son Ottaviano, and like their Sforza ancestors, he was now obliged to turn out his men. Giovanni, she insisted, must accompany him. The Florentines ignored her increasingly urgent requests that they garrison the mountain passes. Caterina temporised with the Venetians, proclaiming that her neutrality was unaffected by the fact that she was sending her son to fight on the other side as a business arrangement, yet she grew more and more anxious, and had the walls of the Rocca inspected and reinforced.
Giovanni was ill the day I bade him farewell. The gout, that plague of the Medici, was grieving him and I had prepared a medicine of lime paste to ease the pain in his leg. He thanked me and bade me have a care for his son.
‘I’ll be home in the autumn, Mora. And perhaps we will go to Florence again, now that the mad monk is where he should be, eh?’
The priest who had burned the treasures of Florence had perished that year in the flames of his own ardour. The Florentines who had so joyously gathered up their wigs and rouge pots, their perfumes and trinkets, their books and their paintings and cast them all into the fire now crowded to the Signoria to see Savonarola himself consumed by the blaze. His very bones had been reduced to ashes and scattered on the waters of the Arno, and the people cried ‘liberty’ once more. But I could not rejoice with Giovanni at the thought that the Medici might have their own again. It was the Pope in Rome who had brought about Savonarola’s end, always the Pope behind it all, and I saw him as a fat spider, squatting in his palace, spinning a web in which all Italy would flail and stifle.
‘Will we see a Medici in Florence again, Mora?’
His tone was teasing, yet I sensed the need in his question.
‘I make medicines, sir, not predictions, as my lady the Countess reminded me. God speed you safe home.’
I stood on the walls of the Rocca and watched until Giovanni and his column of men were obscured by the dust from their horses’ hooves. He seemed a boy to me, peacocking in the chased silver armour my lady had ordered him from Milan, a boy playing at war and greatness, who had no care or knowledge of the conflagration that awaited him. And how could I warn him, when I had seen it only in my dreams?
Giovanni did return home that autumn – but to Florence, not to Forli. And he did not ride at the head of his men, a Medici champion, but in the plain wooden coffin of the soldier he had never truly been. All summer he had sickened and failed, though he wrote daily to Caterina, reassuring her of the news from the field, even as the Venetians drew closer, anxious to hear when Il Moro would finally send the troops he had promised from Milan. Not until September did his letter reveal his illness and urge the Countess to come to him. Though we rode hard for Bagno, Caterina arrived only in time to hold him in her arms as he left her. We remained in Bagno just long enough for the arrival of Lorenzo, who came to transport his brother’s body for burial in the Medici c
hapel in Florence. The Countess spent her time in prayer until his arrival, but when he was announced she rose from her knees and greeted him with the same regal haughtiness she had displayed on our arrival in Forli two years before. Lorenzo offered her no condolences, and beyond the merest words of convention, nor did she console him for the loss of his brother. The marriage had created no family affection between them. She did not wear mourning, and on the ride home she sent her men before her with her own standard and that of Giovanni. Whatever her grief, she kept it to herself, and I barely heard her speak in all the three days of the journey. There could be no bloody revenge for Giovanni, no public quarterings to assuage the violence of her misery. His death was not to be spoken of. I wondered how it should go with her then, into what conduit her rage should pour, but I did not dare to offer her comfort, for what comfort might I offer, I who had never loved or been loved?
So we returned to the Rocca, and much of that winter was spent by my lady in correspondence, with her uncle of Milan, with the Venetians. She began to send out her jewels and her plate to dealers in Rome who could supply her with money to pay troops. Something had shifted in Caterina, the loss of Giovanni had hardened her. The woman she had been was giving way to something else, something ruthless and warlike that it pained me to see. That soft, contented flesh which had enfolded her began to fall away, showing the planes of her face sharp, and though she looked beautiful still, there was something fierce and wild in her face now.
