The Borgia Confessions

by Alyssa Palombo

  “No,” I said reluctantly. “It is not worth the scandal it would cause. Everyone would know the culprits, and as of now we have Milan right where we want them: doing our bidding. Murdering Ludovico’s and Ascanio’s cousin, as gratifying as it would be, will do us no good.”

  Michelotto nodded. “As you wish, my lord.”

  “I suppose I should thank you for telling me of this gossip, for it is something I should know, yet I find that I cannot,” I said through gritted teeth.

  Michelotto bowed. “I understand completely, Your Eminence.”

  “You are dismissed.”

  Chapter 77

  MADDALENA

  Rome, January 1498

  “Soon you shall have your mistress back at the palazzo,” Cesare said to me as we lay in bed. “In a few weeks she shall give birth to her child and be back at home. Then perhaps the gossip will stop.”

  “You do not need me to tell you that Romans will always find something to gossip about,” I said, running my hands lazily over the muscles of his chest.

  His expression darkened. I had hit a nerve. “Yes. I know it well. But as long as they are not gossiping about my sister, I don’t care what they say.”

  There were other rumors circulating of late about Lucrezia and Cesare. I wondered if Cesare was aware of those. Yet that was something I didn’t wish to ask him.

  He sighed and turned over onto his back, drawing me against his side. “At least now her marriage is annulled. Soon this whole debacle shall be behind us.”

  It had happened in December; Sforza had finally given in to the pressure being applied to him by both the Borgias and his own cousins, Ludovico and Cardinal Ascanio. He had signed the decree attesting to his impotence, and the divorce was made official. I had been sent for to accompany Lucrezia to the Curia the day she appeared there and made a brief speech before the College of Cardinals, in Latin, expressing her gratitude to be rid of her false marriage. Heavy with child, her clothes had been adjusted in the days leading up to her appearance—by me, at the request of both Cesare and Lucrezia—to hide her pregnancy as much as possible. I had done the best I could, and if one did not know the truth one would imagine she had merely gained weight—or so I hoped. Still, there was bound to be gossip and speculation. There was no avoiding it, however much Cesare might wish it otherwise.

  “I wish I knew who the father was,” he wondered aloud. “I know it was not Giovanni Sforza, of course, but she never would say who it was.”

  “It was not Lord Sforza,” I agreed.

  He lifted his head and looked at me. “Do you know who it is, Maddalena?” he asked.

  I hesitated. I remembered the letter I had once carried to Perotto Calderon, how secretive Lucrezia had been, how furtive he had been in accepting it. How, the day she had confessed to me she was with child and I had asked who the father was, she had looked at me impatiently and said, Honestly, Maddalena. I am surprised you do not know.

  It had to have been Calderon. Who else could it have been? What else could she have meant?

  Her divorce was official; her family knew she was pregnant; what difference did it make if I told Cesare who I thought the father was?

  Because you are betraying your mistress’s confidence, a voice in my head whispered. She swore you to secrecy when you carried that letter. It is all of a piece.

  But was not my first loyalty to Cesare now? Did I not owe him more than I did Lucrezia?

  What harm could it do?

  “She had me carry a letter to a man for her, once,” I said aloud, my decision made. Cesare went very, very still beside me. “To whom?” he asked softly. “To what man?”

  “A groom in the service of His Holiness,” I said. “A man named Pedro Calderon. Called Perotto.”

  Cesare was silent. “Only once?” he asked finally.

  “I was sent to him the once, yes. She said Pantasilea usually carried messages to him, but she was ill that day, so she had me do it.”

  He was silent for so long that I thought he’d fallen asleep. When I sat up and looked over at him, I saw he was in fact still awake, staring up at the bed canopy, thoughts tumbling through his head.

  “I did not mean to distress you,” I said softly.

  He pulled me to him, kissing me deeply. “You have not distressed me. Not at all,” he said. “Quite the contrary, my Maddalena. Do not think any more of it.”

  Chapter 78

  CESARE

  Rome, February 1498

  “Yes, Your Eminence?” Michelotto said, bowing as he stood before my desk.

  “I’ve a task for you,” I said.

  “Your wish is my command, my lord.”

  “Do you know of a chamberlain in His Holiness’s service named Pedro Calderon?”

  Michelotto thought about it. “Perotto?”

  “Yes. That is the man.”

  “I do indeed, my lord.”

  “Good. And there is a maid in my sister’s service by the name of Pantasilea. Do you know her as well?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Good. This shall be easy enough then. They need to be silenced.”

  Michelotto did not flinch. “Permanently?”

  “Yes,” I said, without hesitation. “It seems this low-born Perotto is the father of my sister’s child, and Pantasilea has been aiding and abetting their affair all along. They cannot be allowed to tell anyone of this.”

  Michelotto bowed. “Understood, my lord. Consider it done.” He moved to leave, but hesitated.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Does anyone else know of this?” he asked. “Their affair?”

  “They are the only ones with proof of it,” I said. “Satisfying as it would no doubt be, I cannot do away with everyone in Rome who speaks ill of my sister. These two are the only ones who could prove anything, if they were driven to it. If they were offered the right price.”

  “Are they?” he asked. “What of the little maid, the one you take to your bed?”

  “What of her?” I bit out.

  “I assume she is how you found out this particular information. I did not tell you of it.”

  I rose from my chair. “Maddalena Moretti is not to be harmed, for any reason,” I said, speaking each word slowly and clearly. “Indeed, you will consider her safety as paramount as my own. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, my lord. If you are certain.”

  “I have never been more certain of anything in my life,” I retorted. “Maddalena will keep what she knows to herself. And I will not have her hurt, under any circumstances.”

  He bowed. “Of course, my lord. I should never have mentioned it.”

  “Indeed. Now go. You have work to do.”

  Michelotto turned and left, and I sank back down into my chair and closed my eyes. Maddalena. No, I would protect her with all the powers at my disposal, especially now, after everything we had been through together. I needed her. We could not have brought down Savonarola without her. And she was beautiful and kind and faithful and somehow without bitterness—everything I was not. I did not know when my desire for her body had morphed into something else, into this compulsive necessity, but it had. And I could not go back.

  Chapter 79

  MADDALENA

  Rome, March 1498

  It was at the marketplace that I first heard the news. I was on an errand for Donna Sancia—with Donna Lucrezia still in the convent, Donna Sancia and Donna Adriana had put my idle hands to work—and was trying to hurry back as quickly as possible. It was cold for March, and the sooner I could be back beside a fireplace in the palazzo, warming my fingers for my embroidery, the better.

  “Yes, that’s right,” a woman at one of the stalls said. “They were two of the pope’s servants. Or perhaps one was his daughter’s maid? Anyway, they fished both bodies out of the Tiber two days ago. Both dead, of course.”

  I froze, cocking an ear toward the gossips beside me, straining to hear more.

  “No doubt they did not end up in the
river accidentally,” the woman’s companion said.

  “I shouldn’t think so. I heard they both had wounds around their necks. They’d been garroted.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, turning toward the two women, unable to bear it any longer. “But do you know their names?”

  “Whose names? The names of the servants?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The second woman screwed up her face, thinking. “I don’t know as I’ve heard.”

  The woman who had been telling the tale spoke up. “The woman’s name was something odd, I know that. And the man’s name was something Spanish—Caldera?”

  “Calderon,” I whispered.

  The woman snapped her fingers. “Yes! That’s it! And the woman’s name began with a P, I’m sure of it…”

  “Pantasilea.” She had gone to the convent with Lucrezia, so I hadn’t noticed she’d been missing.

  “Yes, I believe it was!” she crowed. Her smile faded as she studied me. “Not friends of yours, were they?”

  “I … I had met them in passing before,” I managed. “Excuse me.”

  I pushed my way through the crowd and headed back for the palazzo, my errand abandoned. I would simply have to tell Donna Sancia that they did not have what she needed, I thought dimly, in the part of my mind that was still coherent.

  The rest of it was screaming denials, shouting in disbelief, crying excuses. I wanted to put my hands to my ears, shut out all the noise, except it was coming from inside my head and I would never be free of it.

  Cesare had done this. He must have. I remembered the dark look on his face as he’d said that he did not care what Romans gossiped about, so long as they did not gossip about his sister. I thought of her pregnancy, right when she’d been declared virgo intacta and been granted a divorce. I thought of the new marriage Cesare and his father had already arranged for her. Anyone who knew of the child was a danger to their plans. And Perotto and Pantasilea knew everything there was to know. So the Borgias had to make certain they could never tell what they knew.

  Cesare had done this. He’d had two innocent people murdered.

  No. No. I had done this. I had told him my suspicion that Perotto had fathered Lucrezia’s child, and how Pantasilea had carried their messages. I began to giggle, almost hysterically, as I remembered what I’d been thinking: what difference did it make if I told Cesare? What harm could it do? I laughed harder and harder, until passersby began giving me alarmed looks.

  I had done this.

  Oh, God, but I was a fool. How had I learned nothing from my spying in Florence? How was I still so naive when it came to the Borgias, specifically to Cesare Borgia? He—they—had used me before, sending me to Florence and using me to destroy a holy man. How did I not know better? Why had I thought I could tell him the truth and he would do nothing with that knowledge?

  When would I learn?

  No doubt Cesare, with his power and money and network of spies, would have uncovered the truth anyway. Eventually. I tried to tell myself this, and while I believed it readily enough, it could not wash the blood from my hands. It could not clean the stain from my soul. My soul, which was now further comprised by my association with the Borgias. With the man I loved.

  I had to find a church, any church, and prostrate myself before the altar. I had to confess, so I need not bear this hideous burden alone.

  I stopped walking, pressing my hands over my mouth as a sob escaped me. I could not confess. I could tell no one, not even a priest, less I put him in danger as well.

  Oh, God, oh God, what hell was this? Was this the punishment for my sins? That this guilt should burn within me for all my days, unconfessed and unshriven?

  I should have married Federico, and gone to the country, and forgot all about Rome and the Borgias and lived a quiet life among the grape vines and run a farm and borne my husband lots of children. I should have taken the chance to leave this place and its sin and temptations behind me when I had had the chance. For what had staying brought me in all this time but wickedness and suffering? Had the pleasure, the intimacy, been worth this?

  Forgive me, Fra Savonarola. I sought to end my sinning, and only mired myself deeper in it. You were wrong to believe me worthy of mercy, as Maria Maddalena was.

  When I got back to the palazzo, I threw myself on my knees in the chapel, silently begging God for forgiveness. I did not know what it was I did, oh Lord, even as those who crucified Your Son knew not what they did. And still he forgave them. I pray that you may still forgive me.

  Yet even as I prayed, tears streaming down my cheeks, I knew I might better pray for protection than forgiveness.

  For I, too, knew the secret of Lucrezia’s pregnancy. She had told me herself, and all but confirmed the identity of the father. I knew everything that Perotto and Pantasilea had known. Why was I alive while they were dead? Or was I to be strangled and thrown into the river next?

  Surely if he had wanted me dead, Cesare would have sent his kept assassin Michelotto for me as well. Surely if any of those merciless Borgias wanted me dead, I would even now be rotting in the river Tiber.

  But Cesare … he cared for me. Perhaps it was not love, but he cared for me. I knew that by now; it was plain enough. If he wanted nothing more from me than a quick fuck, he would take his pleasure and send me on my way. But it had never been like that between us. Never.

  Surely it was enough to protect me.

  Wasn’t it?

  * * *

  That evening, as the sun set, a servant wearing Cesare’s livery came to seek me out. I was to come to his master that night. He found me in the kitchen, where I had just deposited some dishes from upstairs.

  I looked at him with hollow, wan eyes and said, “Tell His Eminence I am ill and cannot come.”

  He nodded agreeably and departed. I looked wretched enough to appear ill. And in truth, I was—ill in my mind, my soul, my spirit.

  And if I was deadly wrong, and whatever Cesare felt for me was not enough to protect me from their Borgia games, let them come for me. I would not go willingly. Not this time.

  PART SEVEN

  DUKE VALENTINO

  Rome, July–August 1498

  Chapter 80

  MADDALENA

  Again I helped my mistress prepare for her wedding.

  It was different this time. There was no torn lace, no panic, no last-minute mending. I was not needed to save the day.

  Lucrezia was not nervous. She was relaxed and smiling, twirling before the mirror in her new gown, yellow and trimmed with gold. She gave birth to a son in March—a son she named Giovanni, after her brother, she specified—and who was being raised, discreetly, in Rome. He was brought to her when it was deemed safe. Already she had regained her figure, as slim yet shapely as ever.

  And she was happy. She was free of the husband she never loved, and this day she would marry a man she did love.

  When she had returned to Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico from the convent, she had been exhausted from the ordeal of childbirth, and devastated by the deaths of Pantasilea and especially Perotto. She must have truly loved him, if the way she grieved was any indication. She did not eat for days, and Donna Adriana and I nearly had to force food down her throat to ensure she did not make herself ill. No doubt that was how she’d gotten her figure back, though I would as soon have had her a little plumper and spared us all the ordeal.

  Even once she was eating regularly, she was still listless, prone to fits of weeping, liable to take to her bed. If she knew the truth of what had befallen her lover and her maid—if she knew that her beloved brother was behind it—she never spoke of it.

  She surely did not know of my part in the incident, and I prayed she never would. I had watched her grief those months and let it scald me, let it dig its claws into my flesh, and accepted it as my penance. My penance for what I had done, and how I had gone back to Cesare’s bed anyway.

  Surely this was how a drunk must feel, I had mused one night as I made my way to
his bedchamber. They drink and drink even though they know how sick it will make them, and yet they do it anyway. And the next day they hanker for the drink all over again, as though their sickness had never happened.

  That was how it was, for me, with Cesare. I could not stay away, even though I knew it might well destroy me. He might destroy me.

  When he had next sent for me after my refusal, I had gone. I no longer wanted to be scared and hiding. If I was to be punished in some way, let it come, so that I no longer need dread it. Yet when I had arrived in his rooms, he had folded me tenderly in his arms and murmured in my ear, “Maddalena mia. You are well? I was worried when you said you were ill.” And I had melted into his arms, I had made love to him, and I had reveled in the knowledge that I was right. He would protect me.

  For now.

  Yet when we were in bed together, we were only a man and a woman, and he was my lover who knew how to bring me pleasure, and I was his, and knew just how he liked to be touched and stroked and kissed, and where. He craved the things I could do to him, and I knew it.

  And so I went to his bed whenever he called, and I hated myself for it.

  But when I first thought that he might have killed his brother—and after, when I learned the truth—had I not rejoiced anyway? Had I not been glad that so evil a man as Juan Borgia was dead?

  Did I not trust Cesare Borgia because he was a killer? Or because he had once killed someone I did not feel deserved to die?

  I was complicit in his sin, in all of it. And so where else was there for me to go?

  Isabella knew something had happened. She could tell I was changed. Yet I could not tell her, for her own safety. And so, while our friendship remained, there was a hole between us that we had to skirt, lest we both fall in.

  Madonna Lucrezia had come out of her depression upon meeting her new bridegroom, Alfonso of Aragon. He had arrived in Rome earlier this month, and already she was smitten. He was about her age, and handsome—a male version of his sister Sancia—with a brilliant smile that he was not shy about bestowing upon her. And best of all, he appeared to love her on sight as well. My mistress was perhaps the happiest I had ever seen her.