Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  “It is a good sign, though.” I took my cue from her hint that her sickness was confined to mornings.

  “Let us hope so, my dear.” Clearly that was all she would have to say on the matter for now. “Catherinella, fetch me fresh water for washing, and inform Monsignor the cardinal I will be ready to see him in half an hour.” I raised my eyebrows; madonna was notoriously slow about her toilette.

  “Make that an hour, Catherinella. I’m sure he can find enough to occupy himself until then.”

  An hour, another hour. “Shall I take the dog out, madonna?”

  “No, stay with me and help me get ready. Let in some light. I shall need more than this to make myself respectable. And read my letters.”

  It was easier to speak frankly with my back to her. As I tied back the drapery, letting my gaze follow the swoop and dart of a swallow in the clear, pale sky above the glitter of the moat in the light breeze, I said, “His Eminence gave me to believe he might have a letter for me also.” I heard the rustle of linen and the swish of silk, and a soft thud as madonna shifted her position and the dog jumped to the floor.

  “From Duke Valentino?” Her voice was warm with affection, whether for him or me I could not tell. Donna Lucrezia pushed back the bedclothes and swung her legs to the floor. Her calves, I noticed, were in need of depilation, but I doubted she would be able to stand the pain of the hot wax in her present condition. Besides, if she truly were pregnant, Don Alfonso would be obliged to seek his pleasures elsewhere until his wife was delivered and churched, so her intimate appearance would not matter so much.

  “Yes.” My father and brothers did not write to me, my father believing I could only hope for complete assimilation into a Christian household by severing all my ties with my origins. My friends, Battista and Isotta, had promised to write in the extravagant grief of parting, and perhaps they would.

  “I hope he has written,” said Donna Lucrezia, patting my hand as I approached her to help her to her feet.

  She decided she had not the energy to dress, but received Ippolito sitting in a chair in a wrap of violet velvet, her bare feet thrust into matching slippers in the Turkish style, her hair arranged in a loose plait over one shoulder. I waited in such tension while they exchanged pleasantries about madonna’s health and Ippolito’s journey I could hardly keep my feet still. What a waste of time the high art of conversation can sometimes seem.

  Finally, madonna had mercy on me and said, “You have letters for me?”

  “Yes.” Ippolito unfastened his satchel and withdrew a bundle of parchments, their seals dangling like clusters of bright, wax fruit. “From His Holiness, who is still prone to weep every time your name is mentioned and chides you for not writing to him every day. And this from Madonna Giulia. From your noble mother.”

  Madonna frowned at her mother’s letter and put it down on the floor beside her chair.

  “And these from your illustrious brother.”

  The bundle contained three letters. Donna Lucrezia fanned them out as if they were a hand at cards, withdrew one, and held it out to me. “I think this is what you have been waiting for, Violante.”

  “Thank you, madonna.” It took all my will to prevent myself from snatching it up and running from the room. I slipped it into a pocket in my skirt where one stiff corner of the parchment grazed my leg each time I moved.

  “You may read it,” said madonna.

  “Thank you, madonna, but I…I would like to wait.”

  “I think Fonsi would like to be taken out now.” The dog was indeed snuffling about the edges of the room as though looking for somewhere to relieve itself. “Perhaps you had better take him before he disgraces himself in front of the cardinal. Send Donna Angela to me on your way out.”

  “Thank you, madonna.” Gathering Fonsi in my arms and forgetting to curtsey, I fairly flew from the room, feet slipping on the stair edges as I whirled down to the floor below, stuck my head through the door of the Camera Dal Pozzolo to summon Angela to wait on madonna, then continued down to the garden.

  Even here, however, there was little peace to be had. Don Alfonso had begun a renovation of the bathhouse originally built for his mother, and everywhere there were workmen, whistling and calling to one another as they barrowed loads of stone along catwalks or mixed their sharp smelling quicklime in great leather buckets. Ignoring their teasing, I hurried on to the vine walk, where I sat on one of the marble benches arranged at intervals along it.

  As I drew the letter from my pocket, I watched the play of sunlight and shade on my hand, on the stiff parchment, and the seal hanging from the scarlet ribbon which bound the letter. My fingers traced the address, pausing on a smudge where “l” looped over towards “a,” worrying a stray blob of sealing wax with the tip of a nail. Not the neatest of writers, I thought, with a surge of love which made me smile at a gardener shovelling up behind Fonsi.

  I broke the seal with sweating fingers. Cesare had kept his silence so long, and his silences were generally held to precede the anonymous glint of steel in moonlight or the whisper of poison slipping into a glass. What, now, had he to say to me?

  Madam

  Well, it was hardly the way a hot-blooded lover would begin a letter to his mistress.

  My illustrious sister, the Duchess Lucrezia, to whom I defer in all things, insisted that I write to you, to put an end to your misery. Doubtless she flatters me to think that I should have such power over your peace of mind. I am certain that any unhappiness you have suffered since quitting Rome must have been a consequence of leaving behind friends and family, and of the rigours of travel in the middle of winter. But now you have, God be thanked, reached Ferrara in safety, I do not doubt your spirits have lifted in that lovely and prosperous city and this letter will be forgotten as soon as read.

  Here there was a space between the lines, a pause to draw breath. Perhaps he had laid his writing aside at that point to do something else and had come back to it later.

  Violante, my sister admonishes me to tell you the truth about myself. She says your steadfastness deserves it. Let us begin with a truth about my sister. Perhaps one reason why she and my noble mother do not see eye to eye is that they are both as stubborn as mules and not to be gainsaid in anything. I am a busy man, without the resources to do battle against Donna Lucrezia, so I shall endeavour to obey her command. How Ser Castiglione would approve, for he has often accused me of using the ruse of charm to conceal the scandalous fact that I am not a true courtier whose heart and sword arm are consecrated to the service of the fairer sex. I allow him to get away with this because he also praises my ingenuity in devising practical jokes.

  Perhaps the task your mistress has set me is not so daunting as I had anticipated. There, already, are two truths. That I prize certain things higher than the love of women, and that I am a trickster. I can give you a list, Violante. I can tell you I am the Church’s general and the ruler of a state founded on practical, secular principles, that my mother’s family were painters in Mantua and my father’s descended from the royal house of Aragon. That I once wore priest’s robes but was never ordained, that no confession I have ever heard was freely given, and that absolution is not in the gift of priests, but in the judgement of posterity. I can tell you, in the sure and certain knowledge you will never be able to distinguish one from the other, that I keep my friends close and my enemies closer. My soldiers adore me, my subjects pay their taxes on time, but my father fears me. I can straighten a horseshoe with my bare hands, and you have seen me kill bulls, but I am sick. Sickness smoulders in me like fire at the heart of a damp haystack; it ticks in the night like a death clock in the rafters.

  I could tell you I was lonely, which would soften your heart towards this confession, but that would not be true, so I will tell you how I see my heart as an island in a cold lake. When the lake freezes over, you may approach it, but you risk being stranded, and the island is a hostile desert where basilisks live, not a sylvan glade where unicorns roam. I cannot be bother
ed with enticing virgins, Violante.

  But Galen says the heart is just a kind of bellows, squirting blood around the body, and Galen was a soldiers’ physician. If this is so, I ask myself, who pumps the bellows? God? My own will? Or whatever force, blind, deaf, mute and without wits, makes basilisks basilisks and unicorns unicorns and keeps the planets on their treadmill. Now there is a truth it would be worth knowing.

  There are so many matters a man might pursue if he grew old and still. Do you know there was a German at the university in Bologna two years ago who taught that the earth revolved around the sun? It is an interesting proposition. If we are not at the centre of God’s universe, then what are we here for? Perhaps we are just a random accident, a throw of the celestial dice. As Caesar said on the banks of the Rubicon, alea iacta est. Our fate is what we make it.

  It is a disappointing little stream these days, the Rubicon; I expect you did not notice when you crossed it on your journey north. But cross it you did, so you too have cast your die.

  I fear this letter will not have achieved what my sister hoped, but I cannot tell you more. I dislike writing. Look at it, tangled like ill-kept harness, as muddled as a badly drawn map. I am only comfortable with actions, which cannot be misconstrued. I urge you to consider more the act of my writing than the words I have pinned to the page like so many insects collected by a natural philosopher.

  The truest truth I know is that I cannot tell you the truth. All I can say to you is this, with as much honesty as I am capable of, as Donna Lucrezia says you deserve, that I am not free to love a woman, but if I were, perhaps that woman might be you. One day, I fear, you will know why.

  Your servant in those things I can be.

  Valentino

  I could make no sense of the letter. Was he drunk when he wrote it? Or ill, as he suggested? Certainly the hand changed, after the opening passage, after the space between the lines where, I suspected, most of the answers lay. The writing leaned forward, was less careful, with letters missing and some words unfinished, as though his hand were racing to keep up with his thoughts.

  I looked up, resting my eyes on the dappled sunlight falling through spring green vine leaves. I breathed in the clean, medicinal perfume of blue-starred rosemary, waiting for tears, but all that came to me was a line from Dante.

  There is no other penalty

  Than to live here without hope, but with desire.

  This is the fate the poet consigns to the unbaptised, to my people.

  But I had been baptised, and I was young, in love, and alive. In this life, desire can no more live without hope than a candle flame without air. Surely he had honoured me with words written from the heart, sincerely and without artifice. And had he not said he would love me if he could? Just because he was not free to love at the moment, surely this could change. Perhaps he merely wished to spare me the pain of losing him while he was still obliged to fight for the security of his state; perhaps, if I remained patient and steadfast, he would come to me in the end. I presented a smiling countenance to Donna Lucrezia’s questioning glance when I returned to her chamber, which seemed to set her mind at rest; she had much greater concerns than her brother’s dalliance with one of her ladies-in-waiting.

  Angela questioned me more closely later in the day, when we were in our own room dressing for a dinner to be given by madonna for her father-in-law.

  “So?” she began, breaking off briefly to ask me if I thought her neckline was high enough; Duke Ercole disapproved of Roman fashion, which had plunged us into a flurry of stitching collars and fichus into the necks of our gowns, though it was a relief not to have to lace oneself so tight to push up the breasts. “What did he say?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t tease, you know perfectly well who. You’d hardly go running off into the garden with a face as pink as a pomegranate to read a letter from those school friends of yours.”

  “He said…” What had he said? I glanced at my travelling chest, where I had hidden his letter beneath one of the loose compartments. “He said he would love me if he could.”

  Angela frowned. “Really? He wrote that?”

  “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Frankly I’m surprised he can even spell the word love. It’s just not something he ever…”

  “Well you’re just his little cousin. I don’t suppose he would speak to you of love.” I felt myself beginning to flush, a defensive sweat prickling between my breasts and under my arms.

  “Violante…”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh…nothing. What do you think about La Fertella? Isn’t he just the funniest thing? How clever of Ippolito to find him.” Ippolito had brought La Fertella as a gift to Donna Lucrezia. A small, dainty man with the dark, darting eyes of a bird and a narrow jaw almost completely filled by his pale, mobile lips, his strength as a clown lay not in banter or practical jokes, like Gatto and Perro, but in conjuring and mime. Donna Lucrezia was delighted with him.

  “Are you pleased to see Ippolito?” I was standing with my back to Angela, rummaging in my jewel case for the necklace Donna Lucrezia had given me at my baptism. When she did not reply immediately, I turned to look over her shoulder at her reflection in the mirror she held. In the brief moment she remained unaware of being watched, I read the panic and confusion of a lost child in her expression, and realised things must have gone much further with Don Giulio than I had imagined. Then her reflected gaze met mine and she smiled.

  “What are you going to do when Cesare comes? Will you give yourself to him?”

  “Is he coming, then? He has not said so.”

  “He never says what he intends to do. You know how he is. I doubt he even tells his valet what time to bring his shaving water, he’s so secretive. But he’s bound to come before long, and you need to be clear in your mind what you intend before he’s nibbling your ear in some dark corner and you’re wetting yourself.”

  The very thought drew my nipples tight and brought the familiar pressure between my thighs that Angela’s clever fingers were so skilled at relieving. Coming close behind her, I slid my arms around her waist and laid my cheek against her back, feeling the cross hatching of the laces tying her bodice against my flesh. Pressing my hands flat against the curve of her belly, I felt her hesitate, yield for a moment, then stiffen and whirl to face me, dashing my arms away.

  “Stop it,” she said, “we’re not children any more. It’s not a game.”

  “This is to do with Giulio, isn’t it?” I asked, once more busying myself with my jewel case.

  “This is to do with you and Cesare,” she replied firmly. “I know my cousin and he will not tolerate a tease. It seems the more devious a man is in his own ways, the more he appreciates direct dealing in others. If he has written to you of love, be sure it means something more to him than exchanging sonnets and nosegays. Be sure you understand him, or…well, who knows what may happen.” A vision of the tongue and little finger hanging from the window of the Savelli prison flashed into my mind, yet it no longer appeared as real or terrible as when Little Haim had described it to me, making sure my father was well out of earshot before giving me every grizzly detail. It did not seem to be the act of the man who had written that odd, ambiguous, introspective letter.

  Whom, it seemed, I must now take seriously as my lover. This realisation did not bring me the joy you might expect; there was a problem.

  “But what if I am not virgin when I marry?” It was different for Angela, I assumed, whose close relationship to the Holy Father would make her a desirable catch under any circumstances. Cut off from my own family, I would have no dowry but what Donna Lucrezia could provide for me and no worth but my virtue.

  “First,” said Angela, sitting on the edge of her bed and patting a space beside her, “all sorts of things might break the hymen other than a man.”

  I thought of her fingers, strong and slender and knowing, though I had never bled during our games.

  “Horse riding, for one,” she went o
n, her voice warm with laughter, her eyes dancing as I sat beside her, our knees touching, forgiven now she had managed to deflect the conversation yet again from Don Giulio. “And anyway, there are all sorts of things you can do. A little chicken blood on the sheets. There’s even a paste I’ve heard of, which you smear inside and it sets to create a likeness good enough to fool most men, but I don’t know what it’s made of, though I’d bet a gold ducat Aunt Adriana does. What you have to remember about a husband is, he wants to believe you’re virtuous, and beautiful, and good at everything from brewing to sketching in perspective. Otherwise he looks like a fool who’s struck a bad bargain. You see?” She kissed the tip of my nose. “You’re such an anxious little goose. Relax. When Cesare takes you to his bed, enjoy it. Most women do, I’m told. Learn from him. Perhaps, by the time you marry, you’ll know some tricks to keep your husband’s mind off how and where you learned them.”

  “You’re so wise.” I remained sitting a moment after Angela had risen, saying we must hurry to dress madonna as Duke Ercole could not sleep if he ate dinner any later than the twenty-second hour. I tried to imagine the bruising passion of Cesare’s kisses, how his body must look beneath the layers of black velvet and white linen, what scars were written on it, what stories it would tell, how it would feel when...

  “Come on,” said Angela, taking my hands and pulling me to my feet. As she dragged me from the room, I took a last look over my shoulder at my travelling case where his letter lay, crisp vellum next to pleats of dark red satin.

  I still have that letter; it is the second most important letter I have ever received. Sometimes, when I am alone in the house, I remove it from the bottom of the tin-lined sea chest where I keep it, and hold it between my flattened palms, warming his memory with my hands. Faded now, dog-eared and torn along one of its folds, the seal crumbled and its ribbon frayed and brown, stained with the water of an ocean Cesare never saw, it lies alongside the most important letter ever sent me. That letter drove me to action, Cesare’s to dreams. I wonder how differently my life might have turned out if it had been the other way round? If I, too, would not have lived to see the ocean?