Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  Yet I had his letter, in which he clearly said if he were to love anyone, it would be me. I did not question myself too closely about why he was not free, but satisfied myself with vague notions to do with the fact that he was married and also a soldier, liable at any moment to death or maiming. A true mistress must understand these things. She must have patience and forbearance and not badger her lover with demands nor seek to tie him down. And, if he were not free to love me, neither was he free to love anyone else. La Fiammetta, or the kidnapped Dorotea Caracciolo. So, drawing up a stool to Angela’s bedside, with the letter in my hand, smoothing my thumb over the crumpled sheet, feeling the creases, and the sweeping indentations of his nib in the vellum, I composed myself to wait for my fortunes to change.

  I must have slept, for the next thing I remember is a voice, low and hoarse, rasping against my ear with the insistence of a file.

  “Violante? Violante?”

  I lurched into wakefulness and stared at Angela. Was it a death rattle that had cut through my exhausted half-sleep? Darkness had descended beyond the shutters, and my eyes strained to see her.

  “Why aren’t you at Belriguardo?” she demanded, her voice, though weak, sounding perfectly lucid. “Or are you in disgrace too now, by association?” She attempted a smile, then frowned as her dry lips cracked with the effort. For a moment I could not speak, just sat there with tears of relief and self-pity sliding down my face and Cesare’s letter clutched in my hand.

  “What is it?” Angela persisted, looking from my wet cheeks to the letter and back again. “Has he written again? Has he said something to upset you?”

  “You’ve been ill. That’s why I’m here. Giulio sent a message to say you were dying. Donna Lucrezia came back…yesterday, I think. I’m supposed to take care of you and look at me just…” I could not say any more. I must light candles, give the patient water for her parched throat, check the warming pans, the bedding, her pads…But where to begin?

  “Is there some water?” she asked, as though prompting me. “My mouth tastes like the floor of a piggery.”

  I poured water and held it to her lips. “The awful contemplation of death has done nothing to clean up your tongue, then.”

  She sipped from the cup then fell back against her pillows. “You say Giulio was here?” she asked, with a smile that seemed to seep into every corner of her thin, pale face. “You know, I remember almost nothing, except being able to see his face, all the time. I had dreams the colour of his eyes, in daylight, candlelight, and he smelled like honey.”

  I have heard tell of those who have come as close to death as a man’s razor to the skin of his cheeks, and how they have seen the light of heaven at the end of a long tunnel, and inhaled the perfume of the land of milk and honey.

  “He watched you without ceasing until madonna arrived. She packed him off to bed. He was worn out. Shall I send someone to let him know the crisis has passed?”

  “Not yet. I must look a fright.”

  “You know that won’t matter to Giulio.”

  “I can’t see him,” she said, as though that were the end of it, then added, “but I miss him.”

  “Do you think he has not seen you worse, while you were in your delirium? He has nursed you as tenderly as a mother.” Even as I said it, I thought what a stupid, meaningless phrase it was. Mothers are fierce and angry, frustrated because they cannot live their children’s lives for them and make their mistakes for them. Mothers die. “And he will not take it kindly if you refuse to see him. He will think you have rebuffed him.”

  “How can you be so wise and ingenious about the life of my heart when you crash about like a moth in a lantern when it comes to your own?”

  I didn’t know. How could I?

  ***

  Angela recovered quickly once her fever had broken, and plans were laid for madonna’s court to remove to Belfiore. Madonna had hoped to return to Belriguardo, or to go to the summer villa at Medelana, but, although Ippolito’s physicians believed either would be ideal for Angela’s recovery, Giulio’s doctors favoured less of a journey. Belfiore, standing on an island in the Barco, within the confines of the city but away from the heat and foul air of the old quarter surrounding the castle, was their preferred option. Besides, the duke had just told Pietro Bembo he could go to Belriguardo to be able to work on his verses in peace, and the muse of so great a poet must not be frightened off by a gaggle of chattering women and their attendants.

  The white marble façade of Belfiore was so perfectly mirrored in the still waters of the lake on the afternoon of our crossing that it seemed like a drowned twin of itself, a replica built by meticulous Nereids. But madonna was ill-disposed towards it even before we arrived on account of a series of rooms decorated with frescoes celebrating the accomplishments of her husband’s mother, the Duchess Eleanora. It was all very well, she snapped, to remind her the duchess had been a Spaniard like herself and, like herself, a member of the royal house of Aragon, but it would curdle her stomach and addle her brain to live among constant reminders of the duchess’s excellence at chess, at music, at dancing. Then she laughed. And at feasting; apparently the duchess had been very fat, like her daughter, Donna Isabella.

  “Do you suppose,” she whispered, dropping back level with me as we walked though these rooms, which ran along the west side of the palace and glowed now in the last glory of the sun before it sank into the lake, “old Ercole had to mount her doggy fashion? Or d’you think he’s enough of a man to have reached round that belly?” She had become flatteringly familiar with me since Angela’s illness, in the belief that I had somehow cured her.

  I laughed.

  “What’s the joke?” demanded Angela, twisting round in the wheeled chair in which I was pushing her. “Oh I do so hate being stuck down here with the dogs and the midgets!”

  I leaned down and told her, adding, “You and madonna would know more about the Este men and their capabilities than I would, my dear.”

  Angela launched into a vigorous defence of her virtue where Giulio was concerned, at which her cousin scoffed merrily, dropping nuggets of intimate information about Don Alfonso designed to trap Angela into her own revelations. Our laughter bounced off rotund Duchess Eleanora and her court. A spirit of scurrilous mockery scampered ahead of us along the gallery, only to be brought up short by the appearance of a procession of servants carrying our luggage in from the flotilla of barges moored to the palace jetty. Angela shrieked, but Donna Lucrezia told her to calm down before she made herself ill again. Servants had no more consequence than walls, nor any better hearing neither. A disingenuous statement, I thought, from a woman who had grown up among the labyrinthine intrigues of the Vatican.

  ***

  Spring turned to summer and we became well settled at Belfiore. As the child swelled in her belly, Donna Lucrezia grew stronger, more confident of carrying the baby to term and giving Don Alfonso the son who would cement her position as the proper heir to the ubiquitous Duchess Eleanora. She joked that she was even beginning to acquire a girth to match her mother-in-law’s, or perhaps that of the elephant whose visit to Ferrara was commemorated on the walls of the Sala del’Elefante.

  Angela too began to regain her health, though it was a slow process, so weakened was her blood by the fever following hard on her miscarriage. She remained thin and feeble, unable to take more than broths and syllabubs and in need of a great deal of rest. Our routine was relaxed. We took picnics out on the lake, listened to music in the garden in the evenings, the notes floating on air heavy with the scent of night stocks and heliotropes, and the incense candles we burned to ward off mosquitoes. We played cards, devised masques, and traded jokes with Gatto, Perro, and La Fertella. Being a household of women, except for the clowns, our chaplains, and Fonsi the dog, we spent most of our time drifting about informally in loose clothes, arming ourselves in our corsetry for only a very few formal events.

  Don Alfonso remained at the French court, so our only regular gentleman visitor
was Giulio, who would have stayed, I am sure, had his father permitted it. As it was, he was rarely accompanied by even so much as oarsmen to row him, slipping discreetly from the old landing stage on the city side where the game carcasses were landed after hunts in the Barco. Angela was convinced his little craft would be capsized by the slightest breeze and he would either drown or be eaten by descendants of the great worms with which Duke Niccolo had stocked the lake in the days when it stood outside the city boundary and formed part of its defences. Angela believed in the worms with an unshakeable conviction, despite the many and various fish the lake offered up for our table on fast days. Her illness had left her credulous, and the hostility she and Giulio had aroused by falling in love had convinced her the whole world was conspiring to do him harm.

  There is a certain kind of febrile, adulatory love which sees its object as impossibly fragile, not made to withstand the rough and tumble of life and the everyday living of it. Such a love was as much abroad as the marsh fever that summer.

  Seated in the loggia on the roof one morning, working at my corner of an altar cloth Donna Lucrezia had promised for the cathedral in gratitude for Angela’s recovery, I turned aside to rest my eyes from the close work for a moment, and caught sight of Angela and Giulio in the garden. The loggia faced north and east, away from Ferrara, so we could not have seen his boat crossing the lake from its vantage point. She lay on a cushioned marble bench beneath the shade of a chestnut tree. Her face was fitfully veiled as its leaves shuffled and slid over one another in the morning breeze from the lake. Giulio perched beside her on an arm of the bench, with a book open in his lap. The jewels in its binding flashed from time to time as he picked it up and, I suppose, read to her from it. Perhaps that was why the scene had caught my eye.

  I envied her her simple good fortune in being able to sit in a sunny garden and listen to her lover read, to smell the sunlight in his hair and feel the warmth of his body filling the small, complicated space between them, to savour the unique cadences of his voice. With a sensation that felt like an infidelity, I realised I could no longer hear Cesare’s voice. And the more I tried to conjure it, the more the memory of it fell apart, crumbling the way the old Moorish brick in Toledo used to if you brushed against it, staining your hand or your skirt desert red, the ancient buildings eaten away by the homesickness of the men who built them.

  “Leave your work awhile, Violante. Rest your eyes.” It was not until Donna Lucrezia spoke to me, and the musicians who had been entertaining us with lute and theorbo suspended their playing, I realised my eyes were full of tears and madonna must have noticed me rubbing them. The back of the hand in which I held my needle was slick with moisture; I might have put out my eye, or left the stain of my tears on the altar cloth.

  “Yes, madonna.” Her slight, kind smile swam in my vision.

  “Go and fetch cousin Angela. Her convalescence is making her lazy.” Polite laughter from the rest of the women, a jagged, butterfly flight from one to the next.

  “Yes, madonna.”

  ***

  By the time I had made my way down four flights of stairs to the garden, hotly pursued by a wheezing Fonsi, Angela and Giulio were no longer alone. Cardinal Ippolito had joined them, his robes fairly pulsing scarlet in the sun’s glare. Giulio had discarded his book and risen to face his brother. It was obvious the two men were arguing. Not wishing to trespass on a family squabble, I scooped up the little dog and withdrew behind a trellis of honeysuckle bordering the knot garden. I did not mean to eavesdrop, but it was impossible not to hear their raised voices.

  “I haven’t crossed the lake in this heat to be ignored,” yelled Ippolito, sounding, I imagined, much as he must have done in the nursery when thwarted by his brothers and sisters. “Our father summons you back to Ferrara.”

  “Oh, he’s always trying to draw me away from here. He doesn’t mean it.” Giulio sounded unconcerned; nothing mattered to him that summer but Angela and her restoration to health.

  “He does this time. An embassy has come from Florence. There is to be a family council.”

  “Well I am not family as such, am I? It is your council he wants, and Ferrante’s, probably even Sigismondo’s before he would consult me.”

  Ippolito’s soutane hissed against the gravel path as he paced. “Stop being petulant, Giulio. You know he loves you.”

  “Of course he loves me. He loved my mother, which is more than he did yours, I dare say. But that doesn’t mean he values my opinion. No royal blood of Aragon runs in my veins.”

  “Giulio, I must speak with you privately.”

  Giulio laughed, a harsh, uncharacteristic sound which made Fonsi whimper and wriggle in my arms. “Surely we three have no secrets from one another.”

  “Giulio…” Angela’s voice sounded weak and plaintive.

  “I mean it. Anything you have to say to me you can say to Donna Angela.”

  “Angela…my dear.” The term of endearment seemed to fit awkwardly in Ippolito’s mouth. I was surprised, for it did not seem to me this argument was really about whether or not Duke Ercole required all his sons to meet an emissary from Florence. “It is not that I wish to have secrets from you…after all we’ve…suffered together.” His words sounded as though he had plucked them from thorny bushes. Once again that laugh from Giulio and the dog squirming in my arms. “It is not you,” Ippolito ploughed on, “so much as your…family.”

  Now it was Angela’s turn to laugh, her voice sounding stronger, I thought, than it had in many weeks. “Ah, I see,” she said, her tone as warm as the sun on my back. “What’s he done this time, then, that cousin of mine? Invaded Florence?”

  I heard scuffling, effortful grunts from the two men and a quickly curtailed shriek from Angela, but I dared not look out from my hiding place. This talk had gone too far for my eavesdropping to be construed as accidental or innocent.

  “What do you know?” demanded Ippolito. “What has he told you?”

  “Take your hands off her,” shouted Giulio.

  “Nothing,” said Angela. “You’re more of a fool than I gave you credit for if you believe Cesare confides in me. He’s as close with his thinking as a Jew with his purse.”

  I winced.

  “You see?” mocked Ippolito. “She likes a bit of rough handling. It merely serves to taper her wit.”

  A sharp smack followed by a silence which lasted just a little too long. I clamped my hand over the dog’s nose to quiet his whimpering.

  “Dammit, that’s a tooth,” said Ippolito, slurring his words like an old man who has suffered a seizure.

  “Oh Giulio, now how will you play your lute for me. Look at your knuckles. You must let me bathe them.”

  “Ask our new duchess, Ippolito; she has more letters from her brother than she does from ours. He must say something of his plans in them, for what else has he in his life but this hunger to devour Italy?”

  “You think he would move while Alfonso and our brother-in-law Gonzaga are at the French court? You’re a fool. He depends on Louis for half his army and the money to pay them with.”

  “Even if Alfonso and Francesco have Louis’s ear, they say Valentino is prepared to tickle more persuasive parts.”

  “Oh really, what nonsense. My late cousin Juan, possibly, but not Cesare.”

  “Do they?” persisted Ippolito, taking no notice of Angela’s defence of Cesare’s virtue. “And who are they? Ferrante’s kitchen maids?”

  Like a plump, fur-coated trout, Fonsi twisted out of my arms and flopped to the ground, galloping as fast as his stubby legs would carry him towards Angela and Giulio. There was nothing for it but to follow him and hope they did not realise I had heard the entire exchange. Angela crouched to pet the dog, but looked up at me. Though her eyes were shadowed by the broad brim of her sun hat, I could tell immediately, from a slight deepening of the lines bracketing her mouth which had developed since her illness, that she knew I had heard everything.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “
For the Jew joke,” she elaborated, seeing my frown of incomprehension.

  I stooped to retrieve the dog. In the moment when her face and mine were as close as the brim of her hat would allow, I asked, “Why should that offend me?” I straightened up, to see Giulio glowering at me, cradling his bruised knuckles in the palm of his other hand.

  “She must have heard everything,” he said to his brother, who came up beside him rubbing his jaw, which was already so swollen it had pulled his neat beard out of shape. Blood from his mouth made a splash of darker red against the scarlet breast of his soutane. Walking straight past Giulio without a glance, Ippolito put himself so close to me I could smell the blood on his breath.

  “Are you Valentino’s spy, girl?” His words came slurred as a drunk’s from his misshapen mouth. Afraid he would lay hands on me, I clutched Fonsi in front of me like a shield; if nothing else, his teeth were sharp and his temperament possessive. On cue, the little dog gave a high-pitched snarl, a sound like rice rattling into a metal dish, and I saw laughter welling in Ippolito’s dark eyes. His lips twitched; he winced and turned from me. “Be assured I shall be watching you from now on. And if you were thinking of getting word to him, remember how easy it is for a messenger to miss his way among our marshes. You would do well to remind your mistress the same. Giulio, the boat will leave in ten minutes. Be there.”

  I turned towards the house but Giulio, taking no notice of his brother’s command, brought a hard hand down on my shoulder and twisted me around to face him. Fonsi fell into a frenzy of yapping. Angela took him from me, stroking his head and making cooing sounds over him until he quietened and nestled, snuffling in her arms.