Blood & Beauty: A Novel of the Borgias

by Sarah Dunant

  ‘This obsession with bathing is something that the Romans share with the Arab infidel, but the truth is, brother, if you want to get on in this city…’

  And then he flicks open a small pillbox and offers a perfumed lozenge to help sweeten the delivery of the language they must now talk, filled with blowsy open vowels. After so much practice his manners are more Italian than Spanish these days, yet there are those who still call him a Marrano, a Dago Jew behind his back. Except from now on, before they do so, they will have to make sure the doors and windows are bolted and that the company around them is either blood or bought.

  And finally the papal cap. It fits awkwardly over the broad baldness of his tonsure. He squints into the shine of the brass vase: his white hair sitting like a ruffle of piped cream around a cake, the great eagle nose jutting out beneath. So, the biggest hat is too small. Well, it will do until there is another made. He stands back, lifting his right arm and bringing it down in a solemn gesture of blessing, the wonder of it all flooding through him, and it is all he can do not to cry out in triumph again.

  He notes a flicker in the surface of the brass and turns to see the Master of Ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, standing in the doorway, come, as tradition demands, to help him dress should he require it and to measure the new pope’s finger so that the goldsmith can start work straight away on the papal ring. He has known a couple of cardinals who walk into conclave with their own ready-made fisherman’s ring in their pocket, just in case. But over the years Rodrigo Borgia has grown to have too much respect for God – or perhaps it is that other deity, Fortuna – to take such chances.

  If the bony-faced German is pleased or displeased at the Spaniard’s elevation, he doesn’t show it. His job is also his natural talent: to note everything and express nothing. They have things in common these two men: they are both foreigners at the court of Rome, and both skilled at negotiating the right price for the right job. (Ten years ago, four hundred ducats had been an excellent bid for the post of master of ceremonies – it would cost him triple that now.) Yet in the fifteen years that they have known each other they have exchanged no more words than their roles demanded. Now they will be joined together for as long as they live. Before the new pope can speak, the German falls to his knees and prostrates himself on the ground, judging perfectly the distance in order to kiss the other man’s naked, and mercifully clean, feet. The Master of Ceremonies at work.

  The Cardinal of Valencia – and it is the last time anyone will think of him thus – feels a deep glow of pleasure rising up inside him. He picks up his skirts and walks out towards the public balcony.

  Sixty-one years old. How many years does he have in front of him? By his age four of the five popes he had served were already rotting in their tombs. But the Borgias have more staying power. His uncle, Calixtus III, had survived to almost eighty. Sixty-one. Three sons, a ripening daughter and a sublime young mistress, young enough to drop more fruit. Borgia blood. Thick with ambition and determination. How long does he need? Give him another… ten – no, fifteen – summers and he will have the bull crest emblazoned over half of Italy.

  He strides out on to the balcony into the light of a new day. The crowd roars its greeting. But as Pope Alexander VI lifts his hands to offer the traditional blessing, silence falls. The clothes have become the man.

  Bought from Mantua, where those who know say the Gonzaga dukes breed better Turkish stallions than the Turks themselves, the Borgia horse and its messenger are making excellent progress.

  The journey from Rome to Siena is harder than its distance warrants. Once outside the great walls of the city the route becomes as treacherous for humans as for animals. Before the coming of Our Lord, when men knew no better than to worship an army of badly behaved gods, the countryside around Rome was legendary for its fertility, with well-kept roads filled with carts and produce pouring into the city’s markets. But over centuries of the true faith, it has degenerated into wilderness and brigandry, divvied up between the families of the great Roman barons; men hidden inside castles and fortresses who would prefer to carry on slaughtering each other than create stability together.

  Still, to be robbed and murdered, the victim has to be caught first. And this rider, a young man born in the saddle with a passion to make his mark on the ground, stops for no one and nothing. The heat rises with the sun, but as long as he keeps moving the sweat on his clothes stays cool in the wind he creates. The more he sweats, the further he can ride without needing to empty his bladder. It is past ten o’clock when he reaches Viterbo, inside the borders of the northern papal state. The staging-post is one that the Vice-Chancellor’s postal system has used for years, and it has been on standby since the conclave convened. The stable master himself does the handover of horses. No point in trying to read the boy’s face: there is nothing there but grime and exhaustion; when the sealed letter had been given, Pedro Calderón did not know and neither did he ask. It would not do for the cardinal’s eldest son to remain in ignorance while others celebrated or commiserated on his behalf, and those who work for the Borgias learn fast what is to be gained from doing what you are told.

  Back on the road, the new mount is skittish at first, but they come to understand each other’s rhythm fast enough. He rides through the furnace of the day and by mid-afternoon he is soaked with sweat as he climbs the curling road up towards the city gates of Siena. From woodlands and scattered hamlets he is suddenly enveloped into a maze of dirt alleys, alive with other horses, some ridden, some being led. In August, Siena is a giant stable filled with snorting pure-breds on their way to the exercise tracks. Carts and merchants, even the best-dressed of men, make way for them. The city is high on the perfume of horse sweat and excrement, the alleys ankle-thick in leftover dung. In less than a week, the best race horses in Tuscany will be stampeding round the great piazza in a storm of dust and straw; a chariot race without the chariots, mowing down anyone or anybody who gets in their way. On street corners money changes hands under long sleeves. The frenzy of the Palio is everywhere. Cesare Borgia, who should by rights be finishing his studies in Pisa, is as mad for hunting and sport as the next rich young man, and has two horses with a good chance of taking the prize.

  They are resting in the stables now, enjoying better treatment than most of the human population of Siena. They train each morning at dawn, which fits in perfectly with their owner’s lifestyle, for recently the newly appointed young Bishop of Palomar has taken to entering the day when it is almost over, then working – and playing – through the night while others sleep. And since what is good for the master is also good for his men, the house is snoring when the rider arrives, the only people up and about a few servants and the old stable guard who acts as watchman.

  ‘You’ll have to come back. We don’t take visitors till after six p.m.’

  In answer the great horse snorts in the man’s face, steam rising off its flanks.

  ‘I am ridden from Rome on urgent business.’

  Begrudgingly, the old man hauls open the doors on to a silent inner courtyard.

  ‘Where is your master?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘Then wake him.’

  ‘Hoa! I am sixty-five years old and want to reach sixty-six. You wake him. No. On second thoughts, even that would have me gutted and fried.’

  From the corner a door opens on a short, half-dressed figure, thick-chested and with a latticework of healed wounds on his upper torso and a face so scarred that it looks as if it has been sliced into bits and rearranged carelessly.

  ‘Miguel da Corella?’ The boy’s voice is hoarse with dust, or it might be trepidation for the man has a reputation more colourful than his scars. ‘I am ridden from Rome,’ he adds hurriedly in Catalán.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just before dawn.’ He slides from the horse, a cloud of dirt rising around him. He thrusts out a gloved hand and they clasp each other by the wrist, once, twice. ‘With no one behind me.’

  ‘You can rid
e, boy. You’re Pedro Calderón, yes? Romano’s son.’

  Their language is rough and ready, a long way from home with the touch of gang talk. The boy nods, pleased beyond measure that he is known.

  ‘Where is it, then?’

  From inside his jerkin, the young man pulls out a leather pouch, dark with sweat.

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  The rider shakes his head. ‘I… my instructions are to put it into his hands only, Michelotto.’ He risks the popular name, used by those who love him. And hate him.

  ‘You already have.’ The man holds out his palms. ‘These belong to him, boy.’

  Still the rider doesn’t move.

  ‘Dawn, eh? All right.’ He gestures to a door on the first floor. ‘But you shout before you go in and keep your eyes down. He’s not alone.’

  Halfway up the stairs the rider finds his legs buckling. He hauls himself up by the banister, biting back the cramp. Two years in the service of Vice-Chancellor Borgia, two years of cross-country deliveries and the odd piece of thuggery to get to this. Of course he has seen Cesare Borgia, but in company, never to meet directly. He knows something of the others, one Spanish family to another, but this inner circle is something else.

  ‘My Lord Cesare!’

  He lifts his hands to smash on the door, but it is already open in his face, the sword coming so close to his ear that he wonders if he’ll ever hear again.

  ‘Rome, my lord,’ he squeaks, flinging up his arms in surrender. ‘I bring news from Rome.’

  ‘God’s wounds. You climb stairs like a bullock, man.’ The other arm grabs him and pulls him inside as Michelotto’s laughter rises up from below.

  Cesare takes the offered pouch and turns his back, the door left open for the light, the boy already forgotten. He breaks the seal and unfolds the paper. The room smells of sex, sweet and sour. Pedro stands transfixed. He cannot take his eyes off him: this man who can cleave through a bull’s neck with a single blow and jump between galloping horses. Or so they say. They say he makes Michelotto ram his fist into his abdomen every morning to test the metal in the muscles. They say… But then they say so many things.

  In the golden light of the afternoon the body looks as tender as it is strong: the sheen of sweat along the muscles of the upper torso, the scattering of hair around the nipples, the taut stomach and the vulnerable hollow inside the hip as it dips towards the groin and the tucked sheet. With his head bent over the words it is possible to make out the shape of a small, ill-kept tonsure amid the mane of hair. Everyone knows, yet it still comes as a shock. When the angels look down on him, are they equally perplexed to think of Cesare Borgia as a man of the Church? While youth is blithely immune to the threat of age, the thickening flesh, the dulling of the glow, young men judge each other’s bodies with clear enough eyes and they know when they are outclassed. It is not only the athletic beauty; it is the very way he holds himself, aware and unaware at the same time, as if the world exists only to wait on him when he is ready. Power bought or power born? Pedro feels a shiver of excitement even at the question.

  Cesare’s face is impassive as he reads. Not a twitch or a breath, even the eyelids lizard-still. From somewhere in the gloom comes a cooing noise; something willing and lovely is turning over, beginning to wake. Too late Pedro remembers the order to keep his eyes down. He snaps his head to the floor. The cooing subsides. He waits. And waits.

  Then, without his hearing any footsteps, Cesare is in front of him again.

  ‘You will never deliver a sweeter letter in your life,’ he says, his voice now loud enough to be heard far outside the room.

  From the courtyard below Michelotto lets out a howling whoop.

  ‘Oh, my lord. I knew… I mean… I hoped.’ Pedro falls to his knees. It is a less painful position than staying on his feet.

  ‘Oh no, soldier,’ Cesare laughs. ‘Not me. Not yet. Keep your devotion for your new holy father.’

  Pedro pulls himself up, covering his own embarrassment. ‘You have a reply to go back?’

  Cesare studies him through half-closed eyes. ‘When could you be ready?’

  ‘Now, sire. I am ready now.’

  ‘You, perhaps, but your horse will die under you.’

  ‘I… I can take another.’

  ‘Ha. You are keen to serve.’

  ‘With my life,’ he says, slapping his arm over his chest, the drama of the gesture undermined by the explosion of dust that it raises. ‘With my life.’

  ‘That will not be needed quite yet, I think.’ And there is amusement, though no smile.

  The sweet pigeon coo comes again. In the corner of the room the gloom has lifted to show a bed, a tumble of covers and a glimpse of rising flesh. ‘My lord?’ followed by a silvery laugh, like a small wave breaking on to a sandy beach.

  Cesare glances behind him, then puts his arm on the young man’s shoulder and walks both of them out of the room, closing the door behind them.

  ‘Michelotto?’

  In the courtyard below Michelotto is grinning ear to ear, his face made even uglier by joy. Other doors off the courtyard are opening, half-clothed men emerging, rubbing their eyes, half awake when they should be asleep.

  ‘Tell Carlo he rides to Rome within the hour.’

  The servants, a few older men and younger women, hover in the shadows. The Spanish dialect is not so far from their Tuscan tongue that they cannot decipher insults from praise, but they have made it their business to understand neither until they are told directly. The management of Cesare Borgia’s household is a subtle art.

  ‘Do I tell him why?’

  Cesare nods. And for the first time a smile breaks his lips.

  Michelotto takes in a lungful of air. ‘Christendom has a new pope!’ he yells in Italian, in a voice to carry halfway through the city. ‘Rodrigo Borgia, Vice-Chancellor and Cardinal of Valencia, is elected. And everyone in this house serves his best-loved son.’

  As Cesare walks down the stairs the men go crazy with joy. Many of them had their money as well as their ambitions on the outcome and they will be drinking the profits for weeks. At the bottom of the stairs, Cesare and Michelotto face each other without moving for a moment, then Cesare opens his arms and they embrace, a bear hug that takes the breath out of both of them. The Borgia is a head and a half taller than his swarthy henchman, his features as regular as the other’s are crooked. Beauty and the beast, some of the men have been known to call them, though never to their faces.

  ‘So?’

  ‘We go to Spoleto.’

  There is a second of hesitation. ‘Not Rome?’

  Cesare flicks his eyes to the ground. Whatever it is, this is not the time for it.

  ‘And the Palio?’

  ‘There will be others.’

  ‘What about the girl?’

  ‘Send her back to Pisa with a full purse. Make it big enough so that the next time that sap Giovanni de’ Medici comes knocking she will say she is spoken for. Come, I need food and pen and paper. See to the mount and the messenger. What’s his name?’

  ‘Pedro Calderón.’

  ‘Right,’ he says, calling more loudly as he moves across the courtyard. ‘And make sure you treat the rider as well as his horse.’

  Michelotto turns, expecting to find the boy somewhere on the stairs, drinking in the praise. No sign. He glances up to the second floor. Propped up against the wall next to Cesare’s closed door, the young Pedro Calderón is asleep on his feet.

  PART II

  Love and Marriage

  He is a carnal man and very loving of his flesh and blood.

  CARDINAL SFORZA, 1492

  CHAPTER 4

  Rome: a city born from the milk of a suckling wolf. Rome: the centre of the strongest empire the world has ever known. Rome: birthplace of the Holy Mother Church. Rome: the very word paints pictures of splendour and wonders.

  The reality, as any number of visiting pilgrims will testify, is a miserable disappointment: not so much a great city as small
islands of wealth poking their heads up amid a sea of festering slums and wilderness. It is history that is to blame. History, which had made the city imperial, had gone on to rip out its innards and leave the remains for the jackals and the vultures to feed on. Centuries of war and neglect have eaten like deep frost into the very structure of living: with no fresh water, no sewage system and precious little employment except the burying of its dead, much of the population had fled or bled away, with such government as there was undermined by the tribal violence of a few great families.

  When other Italian cities – Florence with her cloth and Venice with her ships – were fusing wealth and scholarship in the great rebirth of classical culture, Rome was still waking from the nightmare of the great papal schism. The return of the papacy from Avignon seventy years ago had brought with it the promise of a better future: cardinals, bishops, papal lawyers, secretaries, copiers, ambassadors, diplomats, all with households to be fed and watered.

  By the time young Rodrigo Borgia arrived here at the age of twenty-five, there were already clear signs of progress: men and horses were moving through the streets with less fear of injury from gangs of thugs or falling masonry, and Church officials with patronage to dispense and appearances to keep up had spawned an industry of cloth merchants, tailors and jewellers. As the young Borgia climbed the rungs of Church power, so came further changes: a new bridge over the Tiber after the old one crushed a multitude of pilgrims, an edict cleaning away centuries of unauthorised building to create new thoroughfares and markets. And, most wonderful of all, the mending of a hundred subterranean water pipes, so that what was once the greatest fresh-water system in the known world could at least offer its citizens an occasional fountain to drink from or, at a cost, siphon water into the new palaces that the papal officials were eagerly building, each bigger, richer and more fashionable than the last. Rodrigo had benefited like all the rest, but he had also been part of it, since as Vice- Chancellor it became his job, through the selling of offices and other imaginative taxation, to keep the money flowing: Church wealth and city growth rising entwined out of the fertile soil of corruption.