Blood & Beauty

by Sarah Dunant

  ‘God’s blood, how is it possible? Seven men against two fighters and a page? They were paid half a king’s ransom.’

  ‘Assassins are keen to stay alive to enjoy the money. I said you should have let me do it.’

  ‘You’d need to be blind and crippled to fail with those odds.’ Cesare, disturbed by Michelotto in Fiammetta’s house, is exhibiting the fury of a thwarted child. ‘If you had done it, someone would have known and my name would be on everyone’s lips.’

  ‘You think it won’t be anyway? Who else would pay a gang of Orsini louts to attack the Pope’s son-in-law?’

  ‘I’m not the only one who wants him dead,’ he snarls. ‘The Pope has given him land from Rome’s best families, and anyone who supports the French hates Naples.’

  ‘Not as much as you hate Alfonso.’

  ‘We could be lucky yet, my lord. He may die of his wounds.’

  But Fate, usually so sweet for Cesare, in this case is not to be relied upon. Alexander, shocked by the insolence of the attack, has Alfonso put to bed in a room in the Borgia tower. Half hospital, half fortress, sixteen men from the Vatican guard are stationed outside, while the Pope’s own doctors tend him, every move watched by his wife and sister, who never leave his side. He survives the night. Two days later the King of Naples’ own surgeon arrives to take over. The duke’s wounds, it seems, are not mortal – ‘unless’, as one of the papal secretaries write to his old employer, the Duchess of Urbino, ‘some new accident intervenes’.

  He, like every other commentator in town, knows who is behind the attack, though many are too nervous to commit the name to paper for fear of reprisals. Such is the Pope’s son’s growing power. Cesare for his part bluffs it out, visiting the duke soon after, while he is still half conscious. At their places by the bed, neither woman will look at him.

  ‘You are a most fortunate man to be so cared for,’ he says, staring down at the swollen face.

  Alfonso’s eyelids flicker open, then close again.

  ‘My sweet sister,’ Cesare says, directly to Lucrezia. She lifts her eyes but they are blank, cold. Behind her, Sancia hisses like a cornered cat.

  ‘We will find out who did this,’ he says sternly. ‘The duke is a man with many enemies.’

  To the Pope he is more forthright. ‘Neither I nor any of my men laid a finger on the Duke de Bisceglie. But I tell you that I am not sorry for what happened. The man is a liability to our cause and as long as he remains alive in the palace it will lead to more conspiracy and discord.’

  Alexander, harried on all sides, is vacillating between outrage and strategy. ‘The King of Naples is demanding that we send him home as soon as he is fit. It may be for the best.’

  ‘Just so long as she doesn’t go with him.’

  But that is exactly what they are planning. Lucrezia and Sancia have taken up residence in the patient’s chamber. They sleep on pallets at the end of the bed, dressed in simple gowns, their hair pulled back in white cloth like working girls. They are tireless in his care, bathing, feeding, dressing his wounds and overseeing the preparation of every meal in case of malevolent intent. They play their roles with a sweet intensity: ladies of leisure are not often given such a profound sense of purpose.

  When he is strong enough to speak, at first he and Lucrezia talk only of mundane things: the warmth of the day, which meat he would like to taste, how the bolster pillow must be laid so that it does not touch his head wound. The world they have created inside this room, regulated by the progress of the sun and the humble repetition of domestic chores, feels unmarked by malice.

  It is not until the first week has passed and Sancia is called out by a message from Jofré that the two of them are alone.

  ‘She has been like a wild animal in your defence, you know,’ Lucrezia jokes. ‘Even the royal surgeon from Naples is frightened of her. He marvels at your recovery. Says he has never seen such a thing and that you will be dancing again soon.’

  ‘Not in this palace. No, Lucrezia,’ he says firmly as she tries to interrupt. ‘It must be talked of. We cannot live in this room for ever. Sooner or later your brother will kill me, or have me killed. Unless I kill him first—’

  ‘No! No. We will protect you.’

  ‘What? A man hiding behind his wife and his sister’s skirts? What kind of image will that give to our son of his father?’

  ‘Then you will go to Naples. As soon as you are well enough to travel. The Pope has promised your uncle—’

  ‘Not without you.’

  ‘I will follow when I can.’

  There is silence. There is no point in saying the words.

  ‘They will not stop me,’ she says fiercely. ‘I am not a child any more. We will be together in Naples.’

  ‘And when the French attack us there?’

  ‘Then we will go to Bisceglie. Or somewhere else. Anywhere. Anywhere that is not here.’

  ‘Don’t cry. You are right. We will find a way.’ And he uses his good hand to pull her head on to his chest.

  ‘Look at you – two lovebirds.’ Sancia comes in, carrying a tray of oven-fresh biscuits. ‘See what a good job we have done. Angels of mercy, that is what we are.’

  ‘Indeed you are,’ he says.

  But when he lies back in the bed the gold-embossed Borgia coat-of-arms glowers down from the ceiling and in his dreams he fights with the hooded skeletons of death.

  After two weeks, his youthful strength and their nursing begin to have an effect: with help, the leg wound is healed enough for him to leave his bed. When the women are sleeping one afternoon, he manages to get himself up as far as the window, with its view of the Borgia gardens beneath.

  Cesare, whose day is just beginning at this hour, has taken to walking amid the orange trees in the garden to clear his head. The two men register each other’s presence at the same moment. Alfonso feels a hot knot of fear rise in his gut, but he makes himself tall on his good leg, lifting the catch to pull the window open.

  Below, Cesare, unarmed, stands immobile, staring up at him.

  What a target he would make from here, Alfonso thinks. If I had a weapon now I could do it. I swear I could.

  Then, as if the thought has travelled from one to other, Cesare opens his arms out wide to expose his chest to the world and smiles. Alfonso’s head throbs, excitement and pain colliding. As he turns clumsily back from the window, Sancia is waking.

  ‘What are you doing? Get back to bed!’

  He lets her help him, but as she settles the covers he grabs her hand. ‘I need you to do something for me.’

  ‘What? Anything.’

  ‘Get me my crossbow from the palace and bring it here.’

  ‘Your crossbow? But you have no—’

  ‘Just do it, Sancia. Please.’

  By the time she gets back, Cesare is long gone from the garden.

  The bow sits propped by the window. ‘No reason – I just feel better with it here,’ he explains when Lucrezia questions him.

  Over the next week he waits and waits for another time, but either he is never awake when his carers sleep or, if he is, the garden is empty. He would probably not have had the strength anyway. A few days later Jofré visits for a few hours, sitting uncomfortably by the bed as he flounders for things to talk about. This split in the palace has made his life miserable. His natural allegiance is all to his brother, whom he adores, but he misses his wife badly and resents the way her attention is lavished on someone else.

  When Cesare hears of the visit he takes his brother to one side.

  ‘I only went because of Sancia,’ Jofré mutters, fearing he has been disloyal. ‘I never see her otherwise.’

  ‘I understand. You have been abandoned. I would feel the same if she was my wife. How was it in there?’

  ‘Ugh, it smells of death.’

  ‘What does he do all day? Just sit, smothered by women’s talk?’

  ‘More or less. Though he has a weapon with him now.’

  ‘Really.’ From the t
one of his voice, Cesare could not be less interested. ‘What kind?’

  ‘A crossbow. It sits by the window.’

  ‘Fine weapon. If he had the strength to use it,’ he says carelessly. ‘Why don’t you and I get out of this hothouse, little brother? Go out into town. Fiammetta can bring in some other ladies. Would you like that?’

  CHAPTER 54

  If Alfonso had been killed on the steps of the basilica that night it would have been so much simpler: less scandal, less fury, less suffering. For everyone. A calculated sword-thrust up and under the ribs to the heart would have done it in a matter of minutes. He might have died cradled in the arms of his Neapolitan comrade, for the order was to murder him, not all of them. Only him. Alfonso de Aragona: young, brave and honourable. A manly death, followed by suitable, traditional womanly grief: intense, certainly; spiced with outrage, no doubt, but clean and eventually over.

  But weeks of high drama, of swooning, tension, coddling and pampering, the intimacies of wounded flesh and the gushing of women’s bleeding hearts as they pull a man back from the brink, a rope of salvation plaited thick with love and tears… all this means that the real death – which must follow – can only be a messier, more humiliating affair, and the grief that it triggers will carry long-term infection.

  The afternoon of August 18, 1500. The door to the room where Alfonso lies is smashed open and a squad of Cesare’s own men, led by Michelotto, throw themselves in, shouting about a bloody plot against the Borgias. They seize everyone, guards, servants and the Neapolitan doctors who are in the middle of their daily examination of the wounded body of their patient.

  Lucrezia and Sancia rise up like harpies, screaming and protesting, throwing themselves at Michelotto. He steps back, defending himself as best he can, his face in ugly anguish.

  ‘But I am ordered, Your Ladyships, I am ordered.’ And his voice is filled with such patent distress that for a second they are caught off-guard. ‘There is a plot to kill my lord Duke Valentino and I am ordered—’

  ‘By whom? Ordered by whom?’ the women scream back. ‘Not by the Pope.’

  ‘I – I do not know. I thought… but if this is wrong then… then the Holy Father is only doors away…’ And he glances anxiously towards the soldiers holding the prisoners, as if to stop them from going any further. ‘I am ordered,’ he repeats plaintively.

  ‘No!’ Lucrezia is already out of the room, hurling herself down the long corridor that connects the apartments, shouting, shouting for her father, Sancia fast on her heels.

  Three doors down in the newly repaired papal salon, Burchard steps back as the women rush in towards the Pope, who is already rising from his chair. ‘What? What is happening?’ he says, taking in the panic of these mad women.

  ‘Did you order the arrest of Alfonso’s doctors and guards?’ Sancia is close to hysteria.

  But Lucrezia doesn’t wait for an answer. Everything she needs to know is in her father’s face. She lets out another howl and turns on her heel, careering back along the corridor.

  She has been gone – what? Three, maybe four minutes? You could measure the time in heartbeats.

  The door to the room is shut, two of Cesare’s guards in front of it. They have orders too, oh yes. But even they are not going to physically manhandle the Pope’s own daughter. They stand shame-faced as she screams, then step aside as she moves towards them. One of them has been holding the handle on the smashed bolt so that the door now swings open easily.

  The room is empty of guards and prisoners. Michelotto stands by the head of the carved bed. At his feet lies the crumpled body of Alfonso, his head caught at a strange angle and his face, open-mouthed, in a rictus of terror.

  ‘I am so sorry, Duchess Bisceglie.’ Michelotto’s voice, in contrast, is now quite calm. ‘He was trying to get up out of bed. I think the shock of our intrusion must have started some internal bleeding and in his – weak state, well… he has haemorrhaged to death.’

  And as he says this he brings up both his hands as if to make it clear that at no point during the last five minutes have they been around Alfonso’s throat.

  The wailing is everywhere. Down the corridors, out of the windows, across the garden. The peace of the palace has not been so shattered since that terrible night when the Pope lost his son. And not just in the Vatican; in Santa Maria in Portico Lucrezia’s ladies take up the crying: high-pitched, like animals being gutted alive. Women’s grief: nothing rends the air quite like it.

  They have to use measured force to recover the body. Michelotto, who does not try to defend himself, leaves the room with the mark of Sancia’s nails as further decoration on his face. By the time the Pope and the papal guards arrive the room is in chaos, Sancia’s rage unstoppable: chairs upturned, covers thrown off the bed, pillows ripped open spewing hair and feathers everywhere, so that the garden on this hot August day sees a gentle snowstorm falling on to the orange trees. Lucrezia meanwhile sits on the floor by the bed, cradling her husband’s body in her lap like the dead Christ, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. When they try to take him from her, she throws her own body over his, and no one, not even the Pope, knows what to do. It takes her women, a wailing Greek chorus descending and enveloping, touching, fussing, stroking, to gradually release her grasp on him, so that he can be lifted up and carried away to be made ready for burial.

  Not for Alfonso the skilled hands of the beauticians of death, no bier surrounded by flowers carried by noblemen, no obligatory parade of mourners. For him burial is a mean affair. Neither wife nor sister is allowed to attend. By nightfall it is all over; his body, accompanied by a small band of friars, entombed in a tiny church so close to St Peter’s that there is no room for any public display at all.

  But it is not over for the women. On the contrary, the violence of their grief keeps the palace awake all night. By next morning a small crowd is gathered outside the gates of the Vatican just to hear the noise, and the Pope’s waiting room is packed with dignitaries and ambassadors desperate to pay their respects and hone their stories. It is, everyone agrees, the most scandalous thing ever to have taken place in the history of an already scandalous papacy. How delicious.

  Cesare faces Alexander while the body is still being laid out and Burchard is waiting on instructions for the burial. The women’s ululation is a backdrop to the encounter.

  ‘It is insupportable!’ The Pope’s fury is almost as great as his daughter’s. ‘To kill a man inside the Vatican palace when he was under my protection. What? Have you gone mad? It makes a mockery of my authority.’

  ‘Worse than mad. I am very sane indeed. Tell me, Father, what else would you have had me do? If I had come to you and told you that he had tried to kill me, would you have given me permission to do this? No – how could you? I had no option but to do it without you.’

  ‘What do you mean, tried to kill you?’ These last weeks have tested Alexander’s patience sorely: though he knows that Naples is the price he must pay for his ambitions, such gross public violence is a challenge to his style of politics. ‘The man was half dead.’

  ‘Well, I tell you this: he was not so dead that he could not pick up a crossbow and aim it out of a window. He had enough strength for that.’

  ‘When? How? What happened?’ he pushes, as Cesare falls silent as if reluctant to repeat the tale. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘I was in the garden five days ago – you know I walk there sometimes when I wake. I was unarmed, no chain mail, simply a shirt and open doublet in the summer heat. I happened to look up towards the tower. And there he was, at the window with a weapon drawn. He must have had it brought to him. Indeed it must still be there, somewhere in the room – others must have seen it. And then he shot at me; though I dare say it caused him pain to pull back the bow, it nearly caused me a great deal more. If I had not turned at that second it would have gone through my neck. As it is, it only grazed my cheek.’

  And he tilts his face up so that it is possible now to see a line of newly broken flesh moving i
nto his hairline.

  ‘Should you need more than my word, here is the arrow itself,’ he says, pulling it from his belt and handing it to the Pope. ‘You can see the mark of the duke on its head. I am sure if your men were to check the quiver in the room they would find that one is missing.’

  Alexander is aghast. Though the story may be bizarre, the passion with which Cesare tells it and the evidence he brings give it conviction. Later, he will call the guards and they will find Alfonso’s crossbow leaning beside the window. They will ask the doctors and the servants how long it has been there and when they examine the quiver there will indeed be an arrow missing, though at what point that happened, how can anyone know?

  ‘The man may have had good reason to hate me, Father. I do not deny that. I hated him too. But it was my life against his. The House of Aragon would be only too happy to see me dead. As a soldier I have the right to defend myself when threatened.’ He drops to his knees before the Pope. ‘If you had known – had been a party to it – that would have made you guilty too. As it is, I carry his death on my shoulders. If what I did abused your authority, then I ask your forgiveness.’

  Alexander puts a hand on this handsome head of hair. What is it that he feels? Does he doubt his son’s word? Surely he must. But if so, it is a fleeting thought. The madness of hot blood, vendettas, the superhuman strength of a wounded but athletic young man driven by fear and the need for revenge; if one wants to believe, it is surely all credible enough. For death to have come so close to his beloved son, this marvellous young man who is poised to take the family from greatness of present into greatness of future. To have lost him! Sweet Mary, Mother of God, what is the death of Alfonso, half traitor by his allegiance to Naples, compared to that? From beyond the door, they both hear the muffled wails inside the palace. The Pope lifts him up.