The Borgia Mistress

by Sara Poole

  A dark flare of anger moved across the Spaniard’s face, but he clearly had no choice. Scowling, he lowered his blade, but he failed to incline his head, as the rules of honorable combat required.

  Grudgingly, he said, “The bout is yours, signore.”

  At once, Cesare lowered his own weapon and slapped the Spaniard heartily on the back. “Well played, Don Miguel!” he said, loudly enough for all to hear. “I swear I thought you had me beat a time or two.”

  Whether anyone believed that was questionable, but the Spaniard at least appeared mollified. “Next time,” he boasted as they walked together from the field, “I will leave you in no such doubt.”

  From the corner of his eye, Cesare met my gaze. I raised a brow. He grinned, dropped back behind the Spaniards, and came over to me.

  “Have you been sent to retrieve me yet again?” He took a seat beside me, pulled his shirt away from his skin, and sighed. “Don Miguel wanted to fight. Had I begged off, he would have taken it as an insult no matter what the reason.”

  I stared out across the rapidly emptying amphitheater. Venus winked in the eastern sky. With the setting sun, a chill wind was springing up. I shivered slightly and wrapped my arms around myself.

  “You don’t owe me any explanation. Save it for your father.”

  “There’s no point. He’s made up his mind that I’m an ungrateful son. Nothing I say will make any difference.”

  He spoke casually, as though accepting of the reality and untroubled by it, but I was not fooled. Cesare yearned for his father’s approval as a man will lust after water in the desert. The problem was that they were too alike, being possessed of fiery temperaments and indomitable wills, yet also different in crucial ways. Whereas his father was genuinely outgoing, boisterous and high-spirited, Cesare’s nature took a much more secretive and inward-looking turn. He was inclined to suspicion and the nurturing of grudges, although he did his best to conceal both tendencies. Between us, there was no room for any such pretense. I would not allow it.

  “But you are ungrateful, aren’t you?” I asked. Or was I supposed to believe that he had reconciled himself to becoming a cardinal? He who had dreamed all his life of the armies he would lead and the glory he would win with his sword.

  “It is not … entirely as bad as I thought it would be. I don’t actually have to do anything priestly, thank God. I’ve been working to strengthen the fortifications and improve training for the garrison. And I’ve been looking after the Spaniards, of course. They take a great deal of tending.”

  I smiled despite myself. Cesare had held various church offices since childhood, none requiring anything of him but all filling his coffers through the payments of benefices and the like. However, by the time a man—even one so young—advanced to the point of becoming a cardinal, he was expected to also be a priest. The holy orders of chastity, poverty, obedience meant nothing, being routinely ignored even by the lower clergy. Cesare had every reason to know that he would remain entirely free to acquire mistresses, sire children and see to their advancement, and so on, just as his father had done. Perhaps even more important given his warlike temperament, he had the example of no less than Borgia’s great rival, Giuliano della Rovere, who when already a cardinal had personally led an army to subdue Umbria.

  Yet Cesare had, at least so far, avoided committing himself entirely to the church that Il Papa expected him to lead one day. Preoccupied as he was by the prospect of war, His Holiness had let the matter slide for the moment, but I doubted that could continue indefinitely. Especially not if it fed the rumors that the Pope’s eldest son would not vow himself to the Christian god because he was a secret follower of Mithra, worshipped by Roman soldiers in hidden caves and grottos, many of which still existed.

  Such rumors titillate the average Roman dinner party, but in the mouths of enemies, they can be deadly. Ultimately, Cesare would have to decide where his loyalties lay. I could only hope that when the time came, he would make an entirely rational decision unimpeded by loyalty to any god, pagan or otherwise. For truly, I think the Greeks had it right when they claimed the gods only amuse themselves with humans, wagering with our lives as children will with tokens of clay.

  “That one just now, the one you were dueling with,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “Don Miguel de Lopez y Herrera, Ferdinand and Isabella’s beloved nephew. They have sent him to encourage friendship between us and, of course, to spy on me.”

  “What does he tell them, do you suppose?”

  “As he finds my household considerably more congenial than that of Their Most Catholic Majesties, he tells them what I encourage him to say. We are Spain’s most faithful ally, but we are beset by enemies who are also theirs. It is in their interest to support us unstintingly.”

  “Do you think they believe him?”

  Cesare shrugged. “I can only hope that they do. Given my father’s talent for making enemies, we need all the friends we can get. This insane notion he has of making Juan king of Naples…”

  Long rivals for their father’s approval, Cesare and his brother despised each other. Having no siblings of my own, I could not claim to understand the depth of the enmity between them. But I did know that Juan was a dangerous fool who should not be trusted with the simplest task. To leap him over all the other pieces on the board and crown him in glory was such breathtaking folly that even I could only marvel at it. Yet such was Borgia’s intent. As a first step, he had married Juan off to a cousin of King Ferdinand’s. The happy bridegroom was in Spain, where he was expected to be making himself pleasant to Their Most Catholic Majesties.

  “Be assured,” I said quickly, “that I will take every precaution to keep Il Papa safe. But His Holiness is unlikely to agree to any measure that could give the impression that he is afraid. He will continue to go wherever he wishes and meet with whomever he pleases.”

  “We will have to find other ways to protect him,” Cesare said. Bending a little closer, he lifted my hand and brushed a kiss across my palm. His breath warm on my skin, he asked, “Come to my bed tonight. I will slip away from the Spaniards as early as I can.”

  Anticipation shimmered through me. I thought of what Borgia had said, of the women who threw themselves at the feet of his son. I would never be one of them.

  “Come to mine,” I said and took my leave.

  * * *

  After a quick visit to my rooms to wash away the mud of the road and don fresh clothes, I made my way to the grand hall of the palazzo, where His Holiness was to dine in state with the dignitaries of his own court as well as the town notables. Later, he would take most of his meals in private; but on these first few nights in Viterbo, he intended to show himself grandly.

  Cesare was seated to his father’s right, with the young Spanish lords arrayed nearby. Despite the courtesy with which he had been treated on the dueling field, Don Miguel de Lopez y Herrera appeared to be in a foul temper. As I watched, he shoved a serving man offering a basin for hand washing so harshly that the fellow stumbled back and would have fallen had he not been caught and steadied by another. The water splashed over the floor and had to be mopped up hastily by a page. Cesare frowned but said nothing, his silence a reminder of how vital the friendship of the Spaniards had become.

  Drifting around the edges of the assembly, I kept an eye out for anything unusual, any break in routine that might signal trouble. Finding nothing, I let my attention stray back to the guests. Lucrezia sat at her father’s other side, a slim figure garbed in gold with her blond hair arranged in ringlets around her face. She was laughing at something Borgia had said and appeared to be ignoring her Sforza husband entirely. I sighed, thinking of how excited she had been at the prospect of marriage and how she had romanticized her husband-to-be before ever meeting him.

  The plain fact was that Borgia had sold her to the peacock-proud Sforzas in return for their support in getting him elected pope. With that goal obtained, the alliance with them had lost much of its appeal. Betting was
five-to-three in the streets of Rome that the thrice-betrothed Lucrezia would be twice-married before too long. Predictably enough, her present husband was not amused, but he seemed genuinely smitten with her and disinclined to take any action that might further sour his formidable father-in-law. There were times when the darkness of my nature that precluded any such tender longings did not seem so great a disadvantage after all.

  As the evening wore down, I sought my quarters, there to await Cesare. Wrapped in a black lace robe that I knew he particularly liked, I sat propped up in bed with a favorite book, Boccaccio’s On Famous Women. I was in the midst of the life of Medea when a loud knocking interrupted me. Puzzled as to why Cesare would make such a clamor, I slipped my knife into my hand and eased open the door, finding myself face-to-face with a harried Spanish servant who made no pretense of addressing me politely but said only, “Venga.”

  5

  The servant led me down corridors and around corners, past guardsmen who scrupulously averted their eyes as we went by and scurrying servants who did the same, until we arrived at the wing of the palazzo that housed Cesare and his father. Beyond the cordon of guards put in place by Vittoro, we approached the wide bronze doors of Cesare’s apartment, passed through the antechamber where the new young cardinal met with petitioners and counselors, and came at last to his private quarters tucked away in a corner overlooking the gardens.

  Lamps had been lit, casting long shadows over the century-old murals depicting the martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist. Treacherous Salome came off particularly well in the artist’s rendering. His Eminence, as Cesare was now known, lay on a vast bed shrouded in curtains and roofed by a tapestry canopy. Herrera hovered over him. The Spanish grandee had the look of a man queasy with the shock of sudden sobriety.

  Cesare, by contrast, appeared pale but otherwise entirely himself, except for the long red gash down his left arm. He was bare-chested and absent his boots.

  “It’s not that bad,” he assured me in response to my scowl. To the Spaniard, he said, “Gracias, Don Miguel. Déjame con la señora, si se quiere.”

  I was unsure exactly what Cesare had said, as he had spoken in the Castilian of the Spanish court. Among themselves, the Borgias spoke the Catalan of their forbearers. Those of us who served them found it useful to learn something of that language, similar to yet sufficiently distinct from Castilian to make understanding what he had just said difficult. Even so, I realized that he had thanked Don Miguel and asked to be left alone with me.

  The Spaniard rattled off a rapid-fire response of which I caught precisely nothing and took his leave, but not without a contemptuous glance in my direction. The servant who had fetched me departed with him. Cesare and I were left alone. I made haste to examine his injury. The gash extended from below his left shoulder down the length of his arm to the elbow. A little deeper and it would have done serious damage to the muscles and tendons.

  “Just clean this up for me, if you would,” he said. “I’d rather no one else knows about it.”

  A basin of bloody water, evidence of his own efforts to deal with the wound, was on a table beside his bed, along with a needle and thread. There was no sign of his valet, who I gathered had been banished.

  All too aware of my own limitations, I hesitated. “You do understand that my … expertise lies in a different direction?”

  “I don’t care about that. How’s your sewing?”

  “Appalling. I can barely thread a needle.”

  I was not exaggerating; the needlework expected of every properly reared young woman had ever been my bane. But given the circumstances, I would have to gird myself to do better.

  “How did it happen?” I asked as I refilled the basin with clean water from an ewer near the bed. I tried to sound at ease although inwardly I was trembling. I cope well enough with the monthly results of being female, but otherwise I have a particular horror of blood and avoid it whenever possible. Except, of course, for those times when the darkness comes upon me. Then I have killed bloodily and wallowed in the results.

  I am a contrary creature, to be sure.

  “Herrera mistook an officer’s wife for a woman of the town,” Cesare said. He sounded weary and more than a little exasperated. “The officer took offense, there was a fight, I intervened.”

  “You took the blow meant for a drunken lout because he happens to be a nephew of the Spanish monarchs?”

  The notion angered me more than I would have expected. Cesare was no child and had not been one for many years. Yet just then I felt an odd sort of protectiveness toward him, which I told myself came solely from my responsibilities for the welfare of la famiglia.

  Cesare shrugged. “Something like that. It doesn’t matter. What is important is that this go no further. Herrera is already screaming that he was insulted and wants the officer’s head. Can you imagine the reaction of the garrison to that?”

  The garrison of the town Il Papa was counting on to protect the route an enemy army would have to take into Rome.

  Stabbing thread through a needle, I said, “Has there been trouble before this?”

  Cesare glanced at what I had in my hand and looked away. “The charms of Viterbo have paled quickly. The Spaniards are bored. For that matter, so am I.”

  “Not to worry. The usual hangers-on came in your father’s wake. There’s a fresh supply of whores, touts, entertainers, and thieves to keep everyone occupied.”

  Likely an assortment of spies, intriguers, and troublemakers as well, but I said nothing of that.

  Cesare started to laugh, caught his breath as I took the first stitch, and remained resolutely silent as I finished the job. The hours I had spent in Sofia’s company had taught me more than I had realized.

  “You underrate yourself,” Cesare said when I was done. He examined my work closely before I bandaged the wound and appeared satisfied. “I’m going to tell Lucrezia how good you are with needlework. She can put you to work on that altar cloth she’s making.”

  “I know at least a hundred ways to poison you, each more agonizing than the last.”

  He did laugh then and, wrapping an arm around my waist, drew me down to him. “Stay with me,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”

  I was tempted, but I hesitated all the same. “You should not exert yourself.”

  Blue shadows were deepening beneath his eyes. He tried to stifle a yawn and failed. “I honestly don’t think I could.”

  A frank admission for one of his age and temperament. I laid my hand against his brow and was relieved to find no sign of fever. Even so, his condition could worsen during the night. It was best that he not be alone.

  So did I justify my natural yearnings. Intimacy—not of the sexual kind but borne of the true communion of minds—was exceedingly rare in my life. I told myself that was just as well, yet there were still times when I longed for it.

  “As you wish,” I said and settled into the bed beside him, drawing a light cover over us both.

  He turned on his side, fitting me into the curve of his body. Scant moments passed before his breathing grew deep and regular. I lay snug against him as my mind drifted back to the problems posed by the cantharidin and how they might be solved. I had gotten to the point of considering whether the time had come to test what I had accomplished so far when I became aware that Cesare was no longer asleep.

  Ah, the resiliency of youth! Still on my side, gazing away from him into the darkness of the bed hangings, I made no demure when he raised the hem of my gown to bare my thighs, nor when his hand slipped between them. I needed only to shift a little to accommodate him. We moved as one, urgency coupled with familiarity. I knew his rhythms; he knew mine. Yet still I was surprised by how quickly pleasure mounted. Whether from unmet need or the strange eroticism of the largely silent encounter, release overtook us both between one breath and the next.

  A normal woman, so well sated, would have slipped unfettered into sleep and dreamed only of her lover. Not I. Scarcely had slumber overtaken me
than the nightmare came.

  The same dream had tormented me for as long as I can remember. I am in a very small space behind a wall. There is a tiny hole through which I can see into a room filled with shadows, some of them moving. The darkness is broken by shards of light that flashes again and again. Blood pours from it—a giant wave of blood lapping against the walls of the room and threatening to drown me. I can hear a woman screaming. A few months before, waking suddenly, I heard myself call out her name: “Mamma.” But that was absurd. My mother died when I was born. She could not possibly be the woman in the blood-soaked room.

  I woke as usual in the clammy grip of terror, but from long practice lay unmoving, forcing myself to breathe slowly and deeply. I was determined not to disturb Cesare, who surely needed his rest at least as much as I did. Besides, I did not want to have to explain to him yet again about the nightmare. We shared a bed often enough that he needed no reminding of it.

  For the rest of the night, I dozed lightly, waking while Cesare still slept soundly, one arm thrown across my hip. Carefully, I slipped out of the bed and made my way back to my quarters on the other side of the palazzo. The guards were changing posts as I went, giving me some hope that I would not be seen. Not that it mattered. Borgia’s agents were everywhere, their reports flowing to him as a river fed by many streams before being swallowed by the ocean itself. For certain, he would know of the altercation in the town, but I suspected he would also approve of what his son had done, though he would not tell him so. At all costs, the Spaniards had to be kept sweet, until the pendulum swung as it always does. Then who knew what price Borgia would exact for having to endure them?

  In my own rooms, I bathed quickly, not bothering to wait for a servant to bring hot water. Simply dressed with my hair secured in a braid around my head, I hastened down to the kitchens; but did not linger there. Before long, I was on my way again with a roll stuffed with hazelnut cream in one hand and a sturdy market basket in the other.