by Lisa Hilton
My plan did not work. My lady had the walls of the park pulled down, the orchards beheaded and the beautiful, delicate green pavilion dismantled. The Florentines temporised, the carts rolled through the streets of Forli towards the Rocca, the overseers went out to the farms for supplies. Florence declared neutrality, my lady inventoried her goods and looked over the armoury, her captains drilled the garrison and the weeks went by with no news, or too much. Valentino was moving on the Romagna with his Swiss mercenaries and Gascon gunners, Ottaviano left for Imola and the leaves fell. In Rome the Pope lived. I was certain that when his greedy Borgia hands unwrapped the letters of submission wrapped in those poisoned cloths the boils would appear on his body as black as his heart, but the Forlivese were always a stupid and a cowardly people, and my lady’s messenger to the Vatican, Tommasino, confided my scheme to another servant. His secret was barely whispered before the pair found themselves in Sant’Angelo, and His Holiness’s Spanish torturers had it out of them before the canister was even unsealed.
I had feared Caterina would be angry at my failure, but when the courier came with the news that the Countess of Forli’s attempt to assassinate the Pope was the talk of Rome, she merely smiled a little grimly and said that there would be no quarter for her, then. Abandoned by Florence, knowing that the Rocca could never hold out against the force of those legendary French guns, Caterina was nonetheless happy. Her Sforza blood was up, and she appeared as lithe and straight as a goddess as she strode the boundaries of the cittadella, with a breastplate strapped over her fine gowns and a hawk on her gloved wrist.
‘If I must perish,’ she said, ‘then let me die like a man.’
Despite her fighting words and the rigour with which she oversaw the preparations, there was a sense of girlish anticipation to her, as though she longed for Valentino’s coming. I noticed that while she worked all day, even hauling supplies down from the carts in her own arms as an example to the men, she nevertheless washed her hair in lemon juice and combed it out each night, and that beneath her gauntlets, her hands were moist and fragrant with the rosewater lotion I prepared for them.
Imola fell to Valentino at the end of November. The French guns breached the walls of the citadel, and though the castellano held out for a week (as well he might, since my lady had his wife and children safely hostages at Forli) his resistance was, as she said contemptuously, more a matter of mere good manners than of honour. From the walls of the Rocca, we watched what seemed the whole of the Romagna in flight, the road crowded with carts and weary figures carrying bundles or children, trudging pathetically south. I pitied them in my heart, these poor people who paused to pray in roadside shrines as though the Church herself was not the author of their misery, but my lady felt only disgust for those who fled. Nevertheless, she set me to packing the goods from the inventory that she wished to send to Florence for safety, her silver basins and ivory boxes, great chests of linens and fabrics, her walnut bed and her gold and pearl crucifixes. She seemed to find satisfaction in the idea that though Valentino might kill her, he would not have those Borgia hands on her precious mirrors, her tapestries or even her gilded sewing scissors. Sadly, I bundled up my own books and instruments and added them to the cart.
What hurt her most was sending her youngest boy away. Since his father’s death he had been known as Giovanni, for the Countess’s secret, lost husband. At a year old, he disdained to crawl and clutched his way determinedly round his nursery, toppling the chairs and bawling furiously if the nurse tried to keep him still. I cried as I packed his little clothes into a trunk, with another case of medicines from the dispensary. He seemed so tiny, so fragile in his innocent cheerfulness that I could hardly bear to think of him sobbing for his mother who might never come to him again. He was to go to his uncle’s house at Florence, where he would be safe, and I drilled the girl into remembering what must be done if he should fall ill. I stitched a charm into the breast of his gown, his name inside a pentagram. As I worked the cambric with my tiniest stitches I thought of that other charm, gathering dust beneath my bed, and I knew as sure as the future is contained like an insect in amber, that it too was useless.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
UNTIL IMOLA, THE COUNTESS HAD BELIEVED herself beloved by her people. Had she not fought for them, fed them, sheltered them from disease? She chose to forget that she had also slaughtered them, made beasts of them, that she had never been one of their own, and that her pride – her cursed Sforza pride – had refused the Pope’s alliance when it was offered and brought Valentino down upon them. When Imola surrendered, she saw they were no longer to be trusted.
In early December, she met with the councillors of the city, who advised her to flee. Why could she not do as the King of Naples had done, as her own uncle of Milan had once done, and leave the city, sparing the citizens the horrors of war, and wait until Valentino had passed through the Romagna before coming to an agreement? She could save herself, they argued, and she could save them. The Borgia Pope was old, and the effects of his dissipations would soon tell on him. It could not be long before he died. Of natural causes, they delicately implied. But Caterina would have none of this. If she had to sacrifice herself, she declared, she would do so. She was prepared to fight until the end.
The Forlivese had no stomach for such talk. The Council gathered them in the piazza and reassured them that they had private word from Valentino that if the city should only submit as peacefully as Imola had done, there would be no violence. They sent their leader, Niccolo Tornielli, to inform her of their decision. He came to the gatehouse, bareheaded, scrunching his cap into a miserable rag, and told my lady that despite all her care and protection of them, the people of Forli would not rise for her. They were not prepared to close the gates against Valentino; they wished to be absolved from their oath of allegiance to their Countess. He could not look my lady in the eye, but waited there, like an admonished child, stumbling over his words. My lady showed no anger, there was no time for anger. She came close to him, so close that I knew he could feel the hiss of her breath cooling his skin.
‘You recall, do you not, Signor Tornielli, what happened here in Forli after my husband the Count was murdered?’
He nodded, still avoiding her gaze.
‘Then you may tell the people that I absolve them from their oath. They may ring the bells of San Mercuriale for Valentino, if they choose.’
For a second, relief spread across Tornielli’s countenance. ‘Thank you, Madonna’.
She leaned closer and her voice was cold as steel. ‘But tell them this also, that they had better go on their knees to Valentino now for mercy, for when I prevail, they shall see none from me.’
Caterina had the cannon of the Rocca fired over the very heads of her treacherous citizens. They too were her enemies now. The Rocca was provisioned and ready, there was nothing left to do but close the gates for good, shutting out those they had been built to protect. The people of Forli might do what they would, but for the Countess’s small court and her five hundred soldiers there could be no resolution. She had bound us to go to the death.
The storms came on the day Il Valentino left Imola for Forli. The air until then had held some of the heat of that raging summer, sharp and bright, as warm as harvest time by noon; but that day, the middle of the month, it thickened and grew sluggish, the sky obscured by a dingy veil of heavy cloud. My lady had been prepared for some time now, and this new stillness in the air, which gave resonance to even the merest twitch of a leaf on the poor remaining trees in the barren parkland, tightened our anticipation to an unbearable degree. I recalled Florence in the months before Piero fell, that sense of time constricting like a noose. Nothing moved, and yet the space around us was tense, pregnant.
The Countess paced the walls of the Rocca, her head bowed. The garrison sprawled amongst their idle weapons, playing round after round of listless dice, the brief clatter of bones on the parapet like rats’ claws, scrabbling their way into our dulled and aching heads.
Dinner was served in the sala, stripped of its fine cushions, not even a carpet on the table, but none of us could eat. Our hands moved like separate creatures amongst the dishes whilst our senses were cast towards the windows, alert to nothing but the approach of a horse. I asked my lady’s permission to leave the room, but she barely acknowledged me, waving her fingers to accede to my dismissal. I gathered my cloak about me and climbed to the top of the tower. The two waiting guards scrambled swiftly to their feet when they saw me, their faces avid for news, but I shook my head and moved away from them, looking out behind the city to the hills.
I closed my eyes and listened, but though I watched there a long time, there was nothing. When I came to Forli, the wolves had sung me there through the nights. Beyond the frill of grey rock which marked the heights, the country was empty. It had been too warm, I thought, they were not yet hungry enough to come near the plain. I told myself this, but part of me believed that they were spreading, circling out to the high slopes, knowing what I could not. I propped my back against the wall, feeling the cold stone through my cloak against my spine and hunched my head on my knees. No sound, silence enough to hear the passage of the clouds.
*
I am in the cathedral of Florence, huddled amidst a mass of bodies in the dim candlelight. My sight is blocked by the crow. Only by straining my head back can I sense the vastness of the church under the dome. The faces of the men and poor old women who wait for Mass are sharp boned with fasting, for the friar has prescribed bread and water five days a week, that God might divert the French beast to plumper pickings. As we move forward into the plain of the nave a skinny youth sways and staggers like a drunkard, clutching for an arm to break his fall, but those around him turn away, as though to help him would taint them with his weakness. I think again that this is a mean city, crabbed and grasping, and that for all its magnificence there is no charity in this church. I push forward and find a place close beneath the lectern. As he comes from the sacristy, a silence falls, so that in this huge place there is only the sound of the slap of his sandaled feet on marble. His face is almost hidden beneath the black hood of his robe, but as he passes me I turn my eyes sideways to catch his beaky profile, his full lips incongruous in the stern face.
‘Behold!’ cries Savonarola, and his voice, for all that it is thin and peevish, is full of a compelling certainty.
‘The Sword has descended; the scourge is fallen, the prophecies are being fulfilled. Behold, it is the Lord God who is leading on these armies. It has come!’
As he speaks, the crowd begins to murmur and sway, mechanically crossing themselves, clacking at rosaries like a gaggle of chickens. And then, hovering in the space above the pulpit, I see it: a huge sword chased in silver, with the sun’s rays streaming down its blade and a bull being put to death, the flowing blood curving back into the pattern of the sword to form a motto. I squint my eyes, but I cannot make out the words. The crowd behind me melts away, I am alone with my vision now, and the sword twists on its vicious point, dancing for me. Then I see the name ‘Divius Caesar’ engraved into the hilt. Caesar. Cesare. The monk is right and he was wrong. The wolf that will come over the Alps, the sword of God, is not hunchbacked, simple Charles, or his strutting, arrogant cousin Louis, but the Pope’s own warrior. Cesare.
*
When I woke, there was a rider below the walls of the town. In the moment that I saw him, the bells of the Rocca began to toll the warning of invasion, echoed in moments by the churches of the town. A rush of footsteps on the staircase and the Countess appeared, two of her captains panting behind her. She leaned over the parapet and watched the horseman pass the Schiavonia gate. The city was so still that we could hear the hoofbeats as clear as if they walked beneath us. It stretched so long, that moment, the last seconds before the Countess of Forli embraced her fate. Time held, stretched, a few more instants before a clap of thunder, fit to split the Rocca in two, burst above us, and the sky turned in an instant from turgid grey to black, with the hiss of the rains sounding on the tiles in the time it took for our pupils to open to the dark.
‘How apt, Mora,’ my lady smiled, a real smile, the first I had seen for weeks. ‘Like a country masque, here the thunder, and now the devil himself.’
For the next hours I trotted behind her as clumsy as a convent serbanza let out for her first court ball. The garrison moved behind her skirts like dancers, heaving the guns into position, lining up the powder kegs under the protection of the loggias, weaving the measures of my lady’s defiance along the walls of the citadel. The roar of the storm and the continuous tolling of the bells were deafening. Then Caterina gave orders to begin the bombardment of the town, every report from the guns reverberating in our thudding hearts. The thunder and the cannon kept pace with one another for that night, and the next. Neither the rain nor the barrage from the Rocca gave any quarter. I had thrown off my torpor – the torpor that had held the whole garrison suspended for the time of waiting. Now I could be busy again. In the farmacia I had brewed a cauldron of mallow root, mixed with rosehip syrup to help it down. The potion causes the heart to beat more strongly; it would keep the men alert. Every few hours, as the soldiers changed their positions, I went among them, dispensing spoonfuls like a nurse to the newcomers to keep their senses sharp. My lady had ordered that no wine be given out just yet, the time for that would come.
On the third day, Valentino rode beneath the San Pietro gate and into Forli. The Council sent out twenty-five horsemen to greet him, assuring him that the city would submit to occupation without a single blow of the sword. In response, Caterina trained her guns on the tower of the campanile. The rain and the smoke from the guns obscured the view from the walls, but beyond, in the countryside, we could make out the massed ranks of the soldiers who accompanied him, a black swarm on the sodden hills. Ten thousand, came the reports, twelve thousand, fourteen. Like a mist, the swarm formed into a column and trailed towards the walls. The piazza was so dark that the torches were set alight in their brackets, and they illuminated the figure on a white warhorse, surrounded by his French courtiers in crimson and cloth of gold.
Always, it seemed to me, Valentino moved within his own prism of light. The rain was as hard as ever yet as his bearer carried the Borgia standard into the piazza, the streaming comet’s tail of the pennant stretched itself into the sky and made a tunnel through the cloud, so that the tall, erect figure on his white horse seemed captured in a luminescent spiral, a valedictory light, as when the last ray of a sunset recalls within it the fact of night. The guns were silent. Our ears had become so accustomed to their punishing boom, that it made the quiet seem enormous. The garrison stood silent too, along the walls of the Rocca, surrounding my lady.
The approaching figures came up into the square, the suck of the sodden ground muffling their steps.
‘Look at him,’ sneered my lady, ‘the Catalan bastard come courting.’
Valentino too was dressed in crimson, wetted to the colour of dried blood, the cloth of gold lining to his sleeves drawing the lemon-coloured sunlight towards him. His face was obscured by a soft cap of the same tissue, a white feather curling coyly over his cheek. He was too distant to make out anything other than the soft set of his broad mouth. I watched my lady’s face, I watched her take in the ease with which he sat his horse, the movement of his hips languid in time with the push of its shoulders, the taper of his waist and the spread of his back under the tight cloth. Despite their treacherous submission, the people of Forli had not turned out to greet their new ruler, so it was a solitary figure which circled the square three times, slowly, his lance resting at his hip in the conqueror’s gesture, reclaiming the fief for St Peter. It was so quiet. I knew I ought not, but I thought he was beautiful.
*
In Florence I had seen two paintings: the soul in purgatory and the soul damned, both framed in ribbons of gold. In the first, a resigned figure cast up suffering eyes to the rays of what I supposed was Heaven, in the second the same figure wa
s a howling gargoyle, mouth agape, eyes swollen in frenzy, flanked by two horned demons with lolling tongues. Maestro Ficino said such stuff was nonsense, that it played only upon the fears of the ignorant, who had not been taught that the soul’s essence communed with celestial entities, that spirit was too subtle to be confined by demons and pitchforks. So I thought that I did not believe in Hell. I think, though, that if my master had stood there that day on the walls of the Rocca, and seen it all as I did, he would have changed his mind.
The Forlivese had believed Valentino would be merciful, but he had made no such promises for his French troops. The cross in the piazza was their first victim. The revered statue of San Mercuriale – venerated by the people for generations – was torn down and dragged ignominiously around the square. Within hours of their arrival the roofs of the city were smouldering under the ceaseless rain. The streets were black with French locusts, one after another workshops and warehouses were looted, so that we heard glass smashing and the thud as beams fell to the fire.
‘They’ll be at the wine shops next,’ remarked one of the Countess’s men.
