Blood & Beauty: A Novel of the Borgias

by Sarah Dunant

  ‘Everything marks it as a revenge killing: the precision of the trap, the cruelty of the wounds, the insult of the disposing of the body. I would say the Orsini.’

  ‘The death of Juan for the death of Virginio Orsini? Ah! The man was a snivelling traitor. That they should dare! You are sure?’

  ‘The Sforzas perhaps have as much motive, but I think less courage.’ He pauses. ‘But there are others.’

  ‘Is this how you buried your grief, my son? With thoughts of revenge? Did that help you with the horror?’

  Cesare gives a slight shrug. ‘It has been three days. And you have been crying for all of us.’

  ‘Still, I hope you found time to pray. Whatever power a man has in this world, there is no comfort without God, and a cardinal cannot live within our Holy Mother Church without prayer. That is an offence in itself.’

  ‘I am what I am, Father,’ he says quietly. ‘The Church was never my chosen profession.’

  The Pope grunts as if this is not something he wants to hear. ‘So? Who are these others?’

  ‘Perhaps this is not the time—’

  ‘Agh, it will never be the time. Nothing we do will bring him back. And I have promised God that my eyes will be directed to penance, not revenge.’ He stops. ‘However…’

  Cesare takes the paper from inside his sleeve and puts it into his father’s hand. ‘The names written there denote motive, not guilt. You should know that before you read it.’

  He looks at it and his face grows pale. ‘I don’t understand. What does this mean, these names at the bottom?’

  ‘It means that a deed this foul will breed gossip as fast as corpses breed worms. And everyone who has been in this palace has witnessed things they will talk about. Not least of which is Jofré’s jealousy on behalf of his wife.’

  ‘Jofré? Jofré! I do not believe it for an instant.’

  ‘Neither do I, Father. But he has grown a temper along with his manhood, and when tongues start wagging it is best we are prepared.’

  ‘And you? You, Cesare. Your name is on this list. God in heaven, why do you put yourself here?’

  ‘Because if I don’t, others will. Juan and I quarrelled over many things, Father. You have seen it yourself. Our antagonism is well known. I have in my time envied him the place he held in the world.’ He pauses. ‘And the place he held in your heart.’

  Alexander sits staring at him. Cesare waits. If it is a risk, then it is one that needs to be taken.

  ‘But you are so precious to me. You know that, surely,’ he says at last.

  ‘I do, yes. Which is why we must speak of this now. There must be no doubt between us, Father. So. Ask me. Ask me now and I will tell you the truth.’

  ‘Oh sweet Jesus.’ Alexander shakes his head and his eyes fill up with tears. ‘Very well,’ he says at last. ‘Did you kill your brother?’

  ‘No. No, I did not. I swear to you on my mother’s life. Though there have been times I have come close to wanting to.’

  There is a quiet knock on the door. ‘Your Holiness. The time is come.’ His manservant’s voice is gentle, unsure. ‘The cardinals will be gathering for the Consistory soon. May I enter and help you dress?’

  ‘In a moment… in a moment.’

  Alexander gets up and embraces his son heavily again. Is it possible that Cesare’s answer has staunched the bleeding from a wound that he himself had not yet been aware of? ‘I shall speak to Jofré and send him and his wife from Rome. They may find a stronger connection away from the temptations of the court. And I will write to Lucrezia. Ah, I fear I am being punished for my over-fondness of my children.’

  ‘What about the divorce?’

  ‘The divorce?’ He gives a small sigh, for a second resistant to the call back to family business. ‘I will talk again with the Vice-Chancellor.’

  ‘You’ll have to coax him out of hiding first. He is so sure we think him guilty that he has disappeared.’

  ‘All the better. It may make him more malleable to our will.’

  ‘And the Orsini?’

  ‘Ha! The Orsini. Damn their souls.’ His voice breaks apart with fury. He shakes his head to collect himself. ‘If we revenge ourselves now it will start a greater war in the streets, which would only play into their hands.’

  ‘You are wise even in grief, Father.’ Cesare, who has been eager for a sign that this new piety will not last for ever, smiles. ‘I will go to Naples and squeeze what concessions I can from the new king to make up for… for some of what we have lost.’

  ‘Our loss, yes.’ The thought catches again in his soul. ‘Ah. The Duke of Gandia is a two-year-old boy hidden in his mother’s Spanish skirts. Where is the Borgia future now?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Father. We will survive this. One enemy at a time. Just as you always said.’ He takes his hand and kisses the ring.

  ‘Ah, my son,’ Alexander murmurs. ‘My beloved son.’

  It is hard to know which one he is referring to.

  CHAPTER 31

  It might have been easier if Cesare had killed his brother. Then he would have had some plan ready in the wake of the chaos that now surrounds them. As it is, he must make it up as he goes along.

  Fate. For him it has always been a more compelling deity than God. When did his allegiance to one overtake the other? If asked, he would probably not be able to remember. Even as a child the passivity of prayer – the humility of the asking and accepting – had felt not so much unhelpful as unnatural, and with adulthood, privately it had fallen easily into disuse. While others gained comfort and guidance by appealing to a force outside themselves, Cesare found everything he needed inside himself, and the shift from thinking to action came so naturally that it fast became who he was: in argument he would use his wits, with women his charm, and in the hunt or the bullring physical agility and strength. What the world sees as confidence, bravery, even arrogance, is, for him, simply being Cesare. God has nothing to do with it.

  Given the whirlwind of gossip, it is inevitable that some will ask the same question that he has just put before his father. Did he kill his brother because he stood in his way? Except Cesare knows it is the wrong question. The more accurate one would be, why did he not do anything to stop it?

  Over the eleven months since Juan had set foot in back in Rome it had become clear that he would almost certainly kill himself. His dalliances, his violence, his military incompetence were all bound to incite revenge, while his vanity and Alexander’s fawning love had made them both blind to the increasing danger he was in. Why else would Juan have allowed himself to become the willing servant of a masked man? To go with him after dark into Rome’s murky streets with only a single groom for protection? That night by the bridge, as the dinner-party guests had parted company, Cesare had come the closest he could to protecting him when he had offered Michelotto as a bodyguard. But Juan, eager to be seen as wilder and braver than his brother, of course had refused.

  To be given so much, only to throw it away. No wonder Fate had turned against him. When the news came through of his horse found with one slashed stirrup it had been anger not grief that Cesare had felt: anger at the stupidity of such a degrading end. As Alexander lay battered by the winds of grief, leaving Cesare to police the city and try to fashion some tactics to go with this new reality, his fury had grown. How dare his brother have so unmanned his father, have brought such humiliation on the family?

  By the time Cesare walked into the Pope’s bedroom that morning he had forged a strategy of sorts. He must somehow coax his father back from the quicksands of grief, for nothing can be done without his energy and consent. In time the crime will be avenged, but the first priority must be to address the damage.

  With Juan’s death, so die the family’s dynastic and territorial ambitions in Spain. If they are to survive, they must now find a similar foothold in mainland Italy. If Cesare had an army at his back, the papal states would be where he would go. He has studied each and every one of them and most are ripe for the pic
king, cities ruled by petty tyrants with no allies of any size to protect them. If Juan had been a better commander or been more careful with his wooing. If… well, there is no use in ifs now. They must work with what they have. And what they have is a stake in Naples: a state reeling from invasion and once again dependent on papal support to crown its new king, Federico. Jofré’s marriage has already bought titles and lands there. The faster Lucrezia’s ties with the Sforzas are severed the faster she too can be woven into the dynastic web. In a perfect world he would go one step further. Federico has a daughter, Carlotta, of marriageable age. If she were to become Cesare’s wife, Naples would be closer for the taking. Except, of course, cardinals cannot marry.

  One enemy at a time. As for the rest – he will wait for Fortune, which has taken such cruel revenge, to turn her smiling face towards them again. And when she does, he will be ready.

  Naples: closer to Rome than many of the great cities of northern Italy, yet more foreign than any of them. Wars of invasion and centuries of sea and sun have turned its dark-skinned population even darker, so that when courtiers take to the streets with their artificially whitened faces, they look bloodless against those they rule over. Inland from the glistening bay, the city is cramped and labyrinthine: teeming alleys populated like anthills, longer streets with running loggias and deep cornices offering shade from the relentless sun. It is not enough. When summer bites, the heat grows so humid that it feels as if flesh is melting. Inside this cauldron, the city is pulled between piety and sin. As many convents as there are brothels, that is what they say about Naples. The balance may tip in favour of God, but with poverty rising like its own stench from the gutters, it is the discordant music of orgasm rather than the mellifluous singing of nuns that most travellers remember. No wonder the French could not resist it.

  For the first few weeks, Cesare plays his part as a man of the cloth. The youngest ever papal legate to crown a king, he is regal in his ceremonial robes and cultivates a gravitas alongside his charm, so that even those who would prefer to mock him take him seriously. In the celebrations that precede and follow the coronation, he and the new King Federico, a man of sturdier backbone than his predecessor, spend long hours in conference, bemoaning the parlous state of Italy and laying plans to bind Naples and the papacy closer together, to withstand the appetites of Milan and Venice.

  Outside the council chamber, a network of spies help him to build up a picture of a land as troubled as it is corrupt: large swathes of territory run by squabbling baronial families and beset by brigandry, making it so wild that civic government is well nigh impossible. In short, a state ripe for the taking, if one could find a way into the centre of power. By the end of the first week Cesare has secured a marriage proposal for his almost-divorced sister and prepared the ground for an even more audacious suggestion: that should a certain cardinal be able to revoke his clerical vows (with the support of the Pope nothing is impossible) he would be most interested in the hand of the King’s own lovely daughter, at present at the French court being groomed for whatever future her father’s diplomacy might bring her. The King listens and does not disagree. It would be politically impolite to do anything else.

  With the diplomacy successfully concluded, Cesare slips off his cardinal’s robes and allows himself some pleasure. His prospective brother-in-law, Alfonso, a natural charmer, proves the most accommodating of guides. The pull of beauty amid languid heat does the rest. He moves between the attractions of the palace and the city. He falls in courtly love with a coquettish young duchess, showering her with attention and presents, until her virginity can barely stand the strain, then leavens the drawn-out challenges of courtship with the thrills of open lust.

  The only difficult moment comes a few weeks before his departure, when he wakes to excruciating shooting pains in his legs and shoulders, so that he can hardly breathe or walk, and then his flawless skin breaks out in pustules. For a moment he feels panic. This is not the time for him to succumb to a plague, even one brought on by pleasure. Luckily, he has his own Spanish doctor in his entourage. Gaspare Torella is a medical scholar as well as a priest. He is also a man who makes it his business to study all new ailments, and there is none so new and challenging as the French disease.

  ‘You are not to worry, Your Lord Cardinal. There are things we can do to address it.’ He diligently notes down the symptoms (which now include a small canker on His Most Reverend Lord Cardinal’s penis) and recommends special unguents and a course of steam baths to open up the pores and led the morbid humours out.

  In a few weeks the sores have started to close and a handsome young courtier returns, barely a trace of scarring to mark the adventure. As Cesare mounts his horse and leaves Naples, it feels as if Fate is once again with him. The doctor, riding behind, keeps his thoughts to himself.

  Back in Rome, Alexander makes sure that the public welcome he offers his son is one of cool protocol, as befits a pious pope to an appointed papal legate. He even shows his distance by keeping him waiting for an hour.

  It is a more pragmatic Alexander, however, who arranged the private meeting the night before, where, if he is to be honest, he found the fruits of Cesare’s diplomacy almost as rewarding as prayer.

  PART VI

  A Very Papal Divorce

  I have known her an infinity of times, but the Pope has taken her away to have her for himself.

  GIOVANNI SFORZA, DUKE OF PESARO, AUTUMN, 1497

  CHAPTER 32

  It is difficult to know how much jubilation a good Christian should admit to when someone he hates is violently dispatched. But when the news of Juan’s death reaches Giovanni Sforza in his palace in Pesaro, he has no problem celebrating. He might have preferred that it was another brother-in-law butchered and thrown into sewer water, but over the last months he has suffered from the rough tongue of Juan as well as Cesare, and there is no doubt that the death makes his spirits rise.

  Alas, the euphoria does not last long. Halfway through the night he wakes with crippling stomach pains when he realises that even now they must be discussing who might be responsible for such a monstrous act and that his own name cannot be far from anyone’s lips. When tales of the Pope’s wailing through the night reach him he is in a panic lest anyone might hear the word ‘Sforza’ rising up from within his howls. His cardinal cousin, he learns, has already given up the keys to his house to be searched for evidence and has fled in fear of his life.

  There are moments when he wishes that he had done it, had had the courage. What would it have taken? How much money? Which contacts? Which men? The world is full of ways to carve a body into pieces without being the one to wield the knife. But you would have to be sure of the loyalty of your employees: that they were more frightened of you than of the victim’s family. And he has never commanded such a following.

  The news of the Pope’s emotional collapse and public repentance is so extraordinary that Giovanni almost envies his father-in-law his capacity for feeling. He spends so long on his letter of condolence that by the time it is dispatched he is already hearing how many others have been received. The papal choir will soon be rehearsing the most delicately felt motet on the death of David’s son Absalom by the Pope’s own composer, and even His Holiness’s most passionate opponents have been moved to try to comfort him. The mad monk of Florence, Savonarola, who spends his life launching thunderbolts at the Vatican, sends a fulsome sermon on love and God’s infinite compassion, while from France no less an enemy than Cardinal della Rovere writes such a feeling letter that the Pope cries all over again when he receives it. One might even believe that political rapprochement is not impossible after all.

  As the Sforzas are publicly absolved and received back into the Vatican fold, the names of further suspects speed out of Rome amid clouds of summer dust. In Venice the word ‘Orsini’ is everywhere on the Rialto, while in Florence they are even whispering individual names: Paolo, nephew to the poisoned Virginio. Or his brother-in-law, the bellicose Bartolomeo. But e
veryone agrees that whoever is responsible, the Borgias will have to swallow their pain and bide their time. The arrogance of the murder speaks of threat as well as punishment, and there are those who wonder if the family will be able to survive the blow. It seems even the Pope understands that: by August he has officially called off the investigation, claiming that he is leaving the matter to God.

  The gossip gives Giovanni hope that his own fortunes too may change and that in all this new-found holiness his marriage might be given a second chance. At times he is not sure what would be worse, to be tied for ever to this vicious, violent family or shamefully shrugged off. But as long as Alexander is Pope the answer is clear: as the ruler of a city that is also a papal state it is better to be inside his family than out. To help things along he even prays: for the soul of Juan (safe enough – it will take more than his prayers to keep him from the fires of hell), and for his own future.

  He gets his answer soon enough. While his Vice-Chancellor Ascanio Sforza is received with open arms and given the honour of private consultations by both the Pope and the Cardinal of Valencia, the warm welcome soon gives way to cold reality. The marriage is over and the Pope now wants it done with. The longer it takes, the less chance there is of him keeping the dowry.

  The matter is deposited firmly into Giovanni’s lap. Or rather a little higher in his anatomy. Ascanio’s letter spells out the depths of humiliation that await him, paraphrasing as it does the wording of Lucrezia’s declaration of non-consummation.

  He reads the first lines and then explodes with fury and outrage. How could they do this? They, who are already reeling from the effects of their corruption. What infamy, what nerve. ‘How dare they?’ He rages around the palace, his servants running after him. After months of silent moroseness there is worry that he might be tipping into madness. Entering what had once been Lucrezia’s rooms, he overturns chairs and smashes vases, tearing the covers from the bed so that he can imagine better the sight of her, her chaste nightgown pulled up over her thighs as she opens her legs to let him in. Non-consummation? He, who had lain with her a dozen times in the first few weeks of their arrival in Pesaro alone. He, who had a child by his first wife. What do they take him for? An imbecile, a coward, a man without balls? Well, they have picked wrongly. He is cousin to the Duke of Milan. He will not give them what they want. Without his agreement, while they may force an annulment, Lucrezia’s declaration will be seen for what it is – a diplomatic lie – and make her damaged goods when it comes to remarriage. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. He may not have what it takes to cut his enemies’ throats, but he can stand up to this deceitful, immoral, conniving upstart family.