by Sarah Dunant
Lucrezia knows that this story is meant to frighten, even to act as some grotesque warning, but instead it is stirring again a memory of her own past: the young Pedro Calderón, handsome and courteous, whose only crime had been to offer a little romantic comfort during her own loneliness, but who, in doing so, had brought upon himself her brother’s furious jealousy.
It does not matter what a woman does. Only what others say about her had been Cesare’s furious retort. Your reputation must be stainless. Stainless, do you hear? Without it you are no use to anyone.
Reputation: such a sly, partisan word. Men may father a dozen children out of wedlock and be admired for their virility. When Alfonso d’Este openly takes all manner of loose women to his bed, his “reputation” is not affected one jot, but his wife’s would be destroyed if it were discovered that she is even thinking of finding solace elsewhere. A dalliance of words, a cache of love letters, an exchange of poetry, and it is as if the deed is already done.
“You look so pale, Sister. I hope I haven’t upset you?” Isabella is frowning solicitously. She is always at her most generous when she has got what she wants. “I am sure she has stopped screaming now. At least I pray to God that she has.”
—
After she goes, Lucrezia banishes her ladies and sits alone in her garden as dusk falls. She takes in deep breaths, a vestige of orange scent and woodsmoke as the city prepares for supper and darkness. Ferrara at its best, spring nudging into summer.
Close by a pigeon lands laboriously on the garden wall, then flaps down again nearer her feet in search of the crumbs that sometimes fall there. It has bright orange beady eyes, and when it walks on pink splayed claws, it juts its head out, as if its body is too cumbersome to accompany it smoothly. She thinks of Alfonso’s scaly hands, Ercole’s thick torso and Isabella’s cold beady eyes, her body encased in vast skirts that come juddering behind her. The Este family as a flock of strutting pigeons! The laugh sticks in her throat.
She puts her head back and gazes up at the sky. High above the battlements, the swifts are coming in, feasting on the wing, dipping and wheeling so high that they resemble flakes of ash tossed by the wind. There is poetry everywhere in the world if you look hard enough. In the year that she has spent living in her castle tower, she has never once heard a woman’s screams rising up from the dead. And she does not intend to listen for them now.
SUMMER
1503
Times vary and evil and good fortune do not always remain on the same side.
—Niccolò Machiavelli
CHAPTER 40
Who would make war in such weather? In the great fortress of Gaeta, between Naples and Rome, the besieged French troops stand on the battlements staring down at the Spanish enemy camped beneath. At least inside the walls they have the shade of stone buildings to rest in. Imagine it being too hot for killing, not so much the brutality as the exertion. Cannons pound the walls from dawn until sometime after midday, when the sun overwhelms; then everyone crawls under canvas or carts or trees, anywhere that might offer a little shade. The sea is barely half a mile away, but anyone tempted to find comfort there would be strung up as a deserter when he returned. If only conquest could be left till the autumn. But it can’t. Weather and war. History is made of it.
In Florence now the heat is daily gossip. A merchant taking down his stall in the central market at midday drops a basket of eggs on the cobbles and the whites start to sizzle, so that beggars have a free meal alfresco. Then there are the dead, whose bodies stew in the heat so they bloat and start to leak, creating the most dreadful stench in morgues and graveyards. As the fever comes in, the worst job in the city is that of the gravediggers, who must work through the night to keep up with the demand. One man digging a family grave drops the church keys into the earth and, going down to retrieve them, is so overcome by the fumes that when they find him next morning he has become one of the corpses. Digging your own grave. How can it not be true when so many have heard the story, every second one learning it first from someone who swears he knows someone who knew the man personally?
In her house off Via Guicciardini, Marietta Machiavelli, heavily pregnant, is packing to leave for the country. She has put on a lot of weight these last weeks and moves sluggishly, like an overloaded galleon with no wind in her sails, her underbodice and petticoats soaked with the sweat that gathers constantly under her heavy breasts. She is due sometime within the next weeks, though everyone knows that first babies are a law unto themselves when it comes to staging their arrival. In the village of Sant’Andrea in Percussina, midwives and wet nurses have been employed and will be ready.
At first she had not wanted to go. “I am giving birth to a Florentine and his first journey should be with his parents to the Baptistery to be registered. And what kind of wife leaves her husband when the world is being turned upside down?”
“One who cares for him almost as much as he cares for her, which is why he is sending her away in the first place.”
She had given a little humph. Who would be married to a diplomat? There is always an answer for everything, and she is not as fast as she was. If the baby is the boy she has prayed for she will soon be outnumbered: two clever Niccolòs in the house. She had better have a few girls quickly to even the score.
But once it is decided she goes meekly enough. In the heat it can be a boon not to share the bed with anyone, and she is feeling the need of safety, like an animal building its nest. Niccolò is amazed, even a little alarmed, at this easygoing new wife of his.
“There will be no fever there, and the women in the village will take care of you. Things are born all the time in the country.”
“You are sure you will cope here without me?”
“I shall look after myself very well.”
“Or let someone else do it for you,” she says gaily, running a careless hand down the smooth nap of his doublet. She is not grown so placid that she is blind to those nights when, he claims, the council has kept him at his desk till dawn. “I only hope she does it as well as me.”
He is rearranging his face in response when Marietta laughs.
“Oh, don’t worry. I am not upset. On the contrary, it is better for a wife to know that her husband is cared for. And we are married almost two years now, remember? It is fine—I do not expect you to recall the date. It is not Roman history after all. Marriage is marriage. People tell me this is how it is and that I should get used to it. Though they also tell me it is better not to mention it, but, well, I am doing my best, wouldn’t you say?” She looks up at him almost coyly. Her face is plump, like a full moon. When she smiles it gives her dimples. It is true that in recent weeks her whale proportions have dampened his desire, and there have been other attractions elsewhere. He knows himself too well to expect it to be any different. As does she.
“My mother said I would never find a husband because I spoke my mind too much.”
“Now you tell me! I should have known this during the marriage negotiations.”
“Oh, you still got a bargain.” She turns away, busying herself with her bags. “I have always known that you were a man with more on your mind than your wife. We will let it rest at that,” she says, thinking how proud she will be of herself, making so light of difficult things. “And don’t forget that it is also your job to keep Florence safe for your family. God knows what we would do if Duke Valentine invades—”
“I have told you—whatever happens he will not make a move against Florence.”
“That is what everyone said about Urbino,” she says, for it is still her pleasure to try to keep up with him. “And what about Sant’Andrea in Percussina? That is south of here. Are you sure he won’t come there?”
He laughs. “I think if I tell him you are in residence he’ll give it a wide berth. Marietta, we agreed that such things are not for you to worry about.”
“Still I cannot help it if I do. It is your fault: all those thoughts you have leaking out from your head into mine. I
was never so concerned about the world before I met you.”
“And you need not be now. Just remember what the cardinal said to you.”
She smiles. Such a wonder it had been. Francesco Soderini’s elevation had been celebrated throughout the city: a procession and a special service in the Badia for the clergy, followed by the new cardinal himself saying mass for everyone. The whole of Florence had been trying to get into the church, but as wife of the secretary who had accompanied Soderini on diplomatic missions, she, Marietta Machiavelli, had been reserved a place in the center of the pews. She had sat stuffed into her best dress (made from the bolt of red silk, because the color does so suit her), her stomach straining hard against the stitches, a pomade to her nose to cut out the worst of the crush of bodies. And afterward, the cardinal himself had come up and spoken to her, giving his blessing both to her and to the child in her belly, and telling her she had the most worthy husband and that Florence owed a great debt to him. She had blushed so much that it had made him smile and he had told Niccolò what a lucky man he was.
Oh, a woman could die happy with such honor heaped upon her. Except that dying would not get this baby born.
“Come, Wife, if you don’t leave now the heat will be chasing you all the way into the hills.”
He watches till the carriage disappears down the cobbles, on its way past the Palazzo Pitti toward the southern gate of Porta Romana. Next time he sees her there will be a child. If fate is kind enough to give him a boy, he will have him reading Latin and Greek by the time he is ten. If the republic lasts he might find a way for him to be employed in government early. A privilege he was not allowed, as Florence had spun into the chaos of invasion and pious tyranny. Would he be a better diplomat now if he had had more experience? Or did those years standing on the sidelines watching madness unfold give him the means to see it in a different perspective?
If the republic lasts…By the time he enters the side entrance of the Palazzo della Signoria, Marietta is already long forgotten. He has chosen to keep the latest developments from her because no pregnant woman needs to know that Italy is now teetering on the edge.
Three days before news had come that Cesare Borgia was moving his troops—five thousand of them—out of Rome toward Viterbo, on the northern border of the papal state and Tuscany. The pretense is that they are on maneuvers, ready to join with the French and therefore no threat to anyone. But Niccolò is not the only one who is not fooled. The morning’s first dispatch brings news from Milan. The French army—twice as many men—is on the march into Lombardy.
He sits at his desk conjuring up distances and timings. If Gaeta doesn’t fall within the next seven or eight days, the duke will face a stark choice: either to keep his pledge to join King Louis’s attack on the Spanish or stand against him and risk the security of his own towns as the French march south to confront him. He and Biagio already have half a month’s salary wager on which it will be.
Though he has kept his preparations a secret from Marietta, Niccolò is already packed and ready. He has another half month’s salary riding on whether he will be in Rome before or after he becomes a father.
He needs to win at least one bet, because a birth with all the trappings, feasts and ceremonies will be a costly business.
CHAPTER 41
With Isabella’s departure, the atmosphere in the Este court changes.
Alfonso, like a cat chased from his house by a visiting dog, appears back at more court functions, and Lucrezia joins him. He has never been a man interested in gossip, and whatever he might think of her recent commitment to poetry, in the company of his overbearing sister she has always quietly taken his side. If he were better with words, he might try to tell her how grateful he is, for he has noticed how she has blossomed these days. Along with the furnaces and the casting pit, there is a kiln in which he has been known to fire bowls and jugs that he has designed and then decorates himself. And the foundry men who work with him have noticed that he has been busier on such things in the last few months.
The tenderness of pots: it is hardly the stuff of epic poetry.
Except that poetry is not as satisfying to Lucrezia as it once was. After so many words, so much quivering flirtation and drama, what is left to be said? And then there is the leaking poison of Isabella’s story. Though there is still no trace of screaming to disturb her sleep, there are moments when Lucrezia thinks she sees courtiers looking at her differently, waiting till she turns her back before they speak to each other. Perhaps she is picking up tension from her ladies. Certainly they are more flighty, with more whispered conversations in corridors and outside rooms. As ever, it is left to Angela to say the unsayable, though not when their mistress is present.
“What happened to Parisina’s ladies-in-waiting?”
Could it be there is such a thing as too much intrigue?
—
The city is starting to swelter when Bembo arrives back from a brief visit to the country, coinciding with the end of Isabella’s stay. Though his presence in a crowded room still blazes through her body, she finds herself hesitant, even standoffish. She avoids his eyes, finds reason to talk to others. By the time they meet—the excuse is a newly delivered volume she has ordered from Venice—it feels as if they have had a lovers’ tiff even though they are not lovers.
“You grow more radiant with every absence,” he says when they take their customary break for refreshment, her ladies settled in a circle at the other end of the room, eyes intent on their embroidery. “Everyone speaks of your brilliance as a hostess.”
“Strange. All I hear is the brilliance of your evening of poetry and song.”
“An entertainment, that’s all. The room was empty without you.”
“And the offer the marchesa made you to visit her in Mantua?”
He smiles. Though in the gardens of Asolani the men do most of the talking, when they stop it is almost always to find the woman has arrived there before them.
“It was, as you predicted, graciously put. And graciously declined.”
“How?”
“I spoke of her father, the duke, who has been generous to me for many years and whose hospitality I could not turn my back on.” He pauses. “However tempting her offer.” He has recently been refining Perottino’s thoughts on the many ways love can hurt, and the sweet poison of jealousy is much in his thoughts.
“My lady.” He brings his head closer. “I told you, you have nothing to fear from her. You eclipsed her as effortlessly as Venus nightly eclipses every star in the sky as she rises.”
“Then it might have been better if Isabella had been Venus on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” she says tartly. “That would have made my life easier.”
He glances back to where her ladies sit, eyes down, ears sharper than their needles. “This time has been difficult for us both. Might we be alone for a moment?”
She looks behind him to the circle. Oh, how tired I am of being watched, she thinks.
“Ladies, Signor Bembo is in need of paper and ink. Go to my study and find them for me, please,” she says gaily.
Camilla looks up with a question in her eyes. But Lucrezia stares her down.
As the door closes, they sit for a moment.
“Ah, Lucrezia,” he says, leaning over and taking her hand. “I have missed you so much.”
“How much?” she says lightly.
He laughs. “It would take me days to fashion the right words.”
“So try a few wrong ones.”
How he loves her sense of mischief and flirtation. It has been a stalwart defense when intimacy threatens to overwhelm them. But this…this feels a little different.
“I have come to ask you something: I want to dedicate my poem Gli Asolani to you.”
Whatever she had expected, it is not this.
“Gli Asolani? But it’s not finished.”
“No. Nor will it be for a year or so. However, when it is…”
“You are sure that is wise—I mean—it is
a poem about—”
“Believe me, I have considered it carefully. There is nothing but honor attached. It is about love in all its forms, explored and presented through a series of evenings at court. For that reason, and given its scope and ambition, it is only right and proper that it should be dedicated to a great duchess at a great court. And who else could that be?”
In the shiver of the pause that follows, it is hard not to feel the name of Isabella d’Este hanging in the air.
The work that will alter the course of Italian poetry. That is what Strozzi says about it. Gli Asolani, dedicated to her, Lucrezia Borgia, for so long reviled as a murderous, incestuous whore.
“You had written so much of it before you met me,” she says quietly.
“That may be true, but knowing you has changed it into something infinitely richer.”
“Then…then how can I possibly refuse.”
He moves her hand toward his lips again and kisses it, palm open now, gently.
Each time he woos her back it gives him greater pleasure, for she always grows more lovely. The air stills around them, and he feels the parasite of desire dig a little farther into his entrails. Yes indeed, parasite is the right word. She will always be his greatest muse, for each meeting sends him spinning back to his own ideas.
But Lucrezia has had enough of poetry.
She leans toward him and their mouths meet, sending a shock through her body. I will have none of you, Isabella d’Este, she thinks angrily, I am the daughter of a pope and the sister of a soldier. And I will not be crushed by your malicious gossip. The kiss deepens as their tongues start to play. Borgia bravery: always at its fiercest when most threatened. Whatever happens now, it is her choice. She is nobody’s victim.
His hand is kneading at her breast and a raging Etna is rising in both their groins, when suddenly he moans and pulls away.