Sins of the House of Borgia

by Sarah Bower

  We curtseyed.

  “Angela,” said madonna. Her voice was hoarse from weeping. Her words sounded like sobs, as though the grief inside her could not help but spill out when she opened her mouth. “I will speak to you later. For now, I have matters I must discuss with Violante. Alone.”

  “But…”

  “Later. Refresh yourself. Change your clothes. All this way on horseback must have worn you out.” How could she know the details of our journey? Angela threw me a look of helpless puzzlement and withdrew. Gesturing to me to sit beside her on the pallet, madonna went on,

  “I can’t face her just yet. She will ask me about Giulio and, oh, Violante, I have done everything wrong.”

  “Wrong, madonna?”

  “When Alfonso came to offer his condolences, I shouldn’t have let him go; I should have hung on to him. Now they will all be plotting my downfall at Belriguardo. You know there are already murmurings that my marriage is not lawful because I was not properly divorced from Giovanni Sforza.”

  “Oh madonna, that is old gossip. You cannot imagine Duke Ercole would take any notice of it. No one can prove now one way or the other whether or not that marriage was consummated.”

  “There is always Giovanni’s word. While my father lived, no one took him seriously. Now, however…Oh God, I wish I could talk to Cesar, I wish…Do you think he still lives, Violante?” She had begun to rock back and forth like a madwoman. An earthenware pitcher and cup stood beside her. I poured water and offered it to her, as much to distract her from her morbid speculations as to quench a thirst. She looked at the cup and shook her head. Just then, Girolamo, who had slept sweetly while rocking in his basket on the back of my horse, woke up and began to grizzle.

  “Oh, let me see him,” exclaimed madonna. “I expect he has grown a good deal in the country.”

  “I thank the Creator he is strong, madonna.”

  “Give him to me, let me hold him.”

  I passed him into her outstretched arms and immediately his grizzling gave way to a full-throated bawling. “I’m sorry, he must be hungry,” I said.

  “In him at any rate his father lives.” She kissed his forehead and handed him back to me. “Feed him,” she said with a smile both warm and wistful. “If I had only been able to give Alfonso a son, things would be very different, for me and Angela.”

  “So you do not expect the duke to give his permission for Giulio to marry her?”

  Donna Lucrezia shook her head. “Even if Cesar recovers, how much ground will he have lost? What if we get a hostile pope who will not reappoint him gonfalonier? Della Rovere wants Saint Peter’s throne, and he has many supporters and no love for Cesar.”

  “Cesare also has supporters. Surely there must be enough cardinals whose votes he can influence to keep Cardinal Della Rovere at bay?”

  “He has always tried to ensure that. We…he tried to be prepared for Papa dying. He was an old man, though he never behaved like one, did he? But who would have thought Cesar might be close to death himself when it happened? That was a trick Dame Fortune kept well hidden in her sleeve. And Della Rovere is clever, as clever as Cesar probably, and has friends in France.”

  I shifted Girolamo to my other breast, wincing for I was suffering from sores on my nipples. My child had a strong suck and little regard for his mother’s comfort.

  “Cabbage leaves,” said madonna.

  “I have tried them,” I replied, though my mind was on other matters. “Della Rovere does not have blood ties in France as Cesare has. His daughter has French royal blood in her veins.” I had tried to keep my tone neutral but it was clear from the look of understanding madonna gave me I had not succeeded. We sat in silence for a moment, the light leaking between the window shutters mellowing to the colour of old gold and apricots, the only sound in the room the tiny, wet sucking noises made by Girolamo as he fed. Then Donna Lucrezia sighed, and reached out to touch the baby’s downy red curls with the tips of her fingers.

  “There is something you must do for me,” she said. “It will be dangerous, but you are better placed than anyone else. You must go to Rome.”

  “Rome? Me?”

  “You must go to my brother in my stead, Violante.” She gave a brief, bitter laugh. “You know, just before we came up here from Ferrara, dear Messer Pietro fell sick of a fever. Alfonso was away, and I went to see him. I sat on the edge of his bed and administered a decoction of willowbark to bring down his temperature. I mopped his chin and stroked his hair, and he held my hand and told me he would die of love for me if nothing else. Simple things, though risky.”

  “Yes, madonna, very.” Yet I had already been so shocked by her telling me I must go to Rome I could not really feel the impact of her candour about her affair with Bembo.

  “And now the world has turned, and it is safer for me to minister to my lover than to my own sweet brother. I cannot endanger my position here even further by going to him. If…when he gets well he will need friends like the Este. So you must go in my stead. He has an affection for you…”

  “And for many women, madonna.”

  “I cannot think of another he has watched save his sister from a fit, though. That is an experience which is apt to give him confidence in you as a healer, which matters more now than…well…other things. And Violante…”

  “Yes, madonna?”

  “You must not return.”

  “I swear to you you will not see me in Ferrara until Cesare is well again. Madonna, I am honoured by your faith in me…”

  “I mean, Violante, that you must not return, not even when my brother is restored. It will not help my position if I am thought to be harbouring my brother’s bastard.”

  “Oh…yes…I see.”

  “Go to your family. He will be safe there.”

  “No one will think to look for the Duke of Romagna’s son in the household of a Jew, you mean.”

  “Before you let your sharp tongue run away with you, girl, consider that you would not be the mother of the Duke of Romagna’s son if it were not for the favour I have shown you. Must everything we Borgias say have a double meaning? Might it not simply be that, with my own family bereft and scattered, I appreciate the value of families?”

  “I am sorry, madonna.”

  “You must leave at first light, and there are arrangements to be made. Send Sancho to me. I will have him prepare you a safe conduct for your journey. Choose a good horse, and I can spare you one of my personal men at arms. Oh, and one other thing…”

  “Yes, madonna?”

  “Try to send me word of Giovanni.”

  “Surely his mother’s family will have taken him, madonna.”

  “He is a Borgia. Who but we will want him now?”

  “I still want Girolamo.”

  “You are different.”

  “I am merely a mother, like Donna Giulia. She would not let her child come to any harm.”

  “Yes, well. I hope he is with Cesare.” For some reason the image came into my mind of Giovanni’s plump fist curled around Cesare’s fingers as he handed the little boy into my custody on the day of our departure from Rome.

  “Then I hope so too, madonna.”

  “I will not see you again before you leave, Violante. I wish you godspeed.”

  “And I pray all will be well with you.”

  “I had better see Angela now.”

  “Yes, madonna.”

  Only as I closed the door behind me and stood for a moment, looking down into the courtyard, a patch of sun-yellowed stone, the corner of a water trough framed by bourgainvillea leaves, did I think of the pope. And how a certain flatness in the light, as though the world I knew were suddenly just a picture of itself, marked his leaving of it.

  CHAPTER 3

  ALPE DI SAN BENEDETTO, AUGUST 1503

  My life has taken on the quality of a dream, but I do not know which is real, this, or the other, where you still live.

  He is wearing fine, soft gloves with lace cuffs, and his face is pal
e, so pale, hollowed out like a skull, though not a skull. His eyes shine with quicksilver tears, which makes me realise it is not him I am looking at but his reflection in a glass mirror. I reach out to touch him and my fingers pass through the mirror as if through water. The image ripples, breaks, dissolves, and turns the water in the mirror the same whey-blue as his skin. I cup my hands and he drinks from them, lapping up the milky liquid like a cat, his tongue tickling my palm…

  Don’t bother with this one. Look at her hand. You’d get a dose more than you bargained for.”

  It was true, however much I had tried to tell myself otherwise. The rash had appeared on my palms just after we left Medelana, and nothing could account for it other than a recurrence of the French pox. I lay still, listening to the men’s retreating footsteps, their boots scuffing the brittle rock and splashing in puddles. Two pairs, it sounded like. I suppose that was what saved me, though saving myself was the last thing on my mind as I lay there, feeling the cold seep of water through my clothes and blanket. An outcrop of rock had provided shelter the previous evening, but the wind must have changed during the night, blowing the rain straight on to the ledge where we had pitched our camp.

  I wanted to die. My bones ached and my teeth chattered with fever. I could not return to Ferrara, yet how could I present myself to Cesare sick and disfigured with the pox? How was that going to help me convince him Girolamo was his responsibility? Yet convince him I must, if Angela’s antics with dead chickens had failed to cure me. I thought of Sigismondo prosecuting his war against the rat king, and of the old whore who used to beg for alms from mourners carrying their dead out of the Porta di Guidizio. She had protected what was left of her nose with a battered leather sheath, prompting a great many jokes about what she might have done better to sheath in the first place. My body had betrayed me; it was no longer subject to my will but to the random fortunes of disease.

  “Take the horses. They look as though they’ll fetch a decent price,” said the other man, the one who had not turned my palm to the light of his torch before deeming me unfit even for rape. His voice grated like a squeaking cart wheel. Where was Beppo? I wondered. He would stop them taking the horses. I ought to rouse myself, but I was so stiff and tired and the weight of the wet blanket was pinning me down, pressing me into the mud, the dark, the grave-cold. I did not care about the horses.

  “She might have some money on her.”

  “Well I’m not going to search her. I’m not going to touch her.”

  “Let’s kill her, then.”

  “No point. She’s seen nothing. She looks half dead anyway. Too cheap a price to sell our souls to the devil for.” They laughed and their footsteps squelched away.

  A thin wailing sliced through me like a hot wire. I wanted to stop my ears but I could not move my hands. My hands were bound by the wire, bound around Girolamo’s tiny, warm body. Like Talia in the old tale, I was roused from my stupor by the needs of my child. Shrugging off the blanket, I sat up and looked around, my sore breasts throbbing as the baby’s cries brought in my morning’s milk.

  “Wait a minute,” I told him. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. A few early birds were singing, attempting to conjure a dawn from the lowering, rain-filled sky. The swollen stream roared and rattled its way through the gorge where we had sheltered last night and out down the mountainside. But it was quiet, too quiet. No hooves crunched the rock-strewn pasture, no harness jingled, no fire crackled. I could not hear Beppo singing. I would not have thought I could miss so tuneless a noise so much, but I had grown used to it. Every morning of our journey I had woken to Beppo’s singing and the smell of something roasting over a fire. Girolamo’s crying grew louder and more insistent, as though he too missed Beppo’s songs and was trying to fill the space left by their absence.

  “Beppo!” No reply but the echo of my voice bouncing back at me off the walls of the gorge. I called again, but I knew in my bones he was not going to reply. Panic swelled in me like a djinn in a lantern, but I struggled to contain it. I had to feed Girolamo. I bit back the urge to scream and burst into tears, and crept to the back of the ledge where the overhang still afforded a little protection from the rain. I could scarcely remember when it had not been raining, when there had been August sunshine to fill my bones with hope and blind my eyes to the bleak truth of my situation.

  It took me a little time to settle Girolamo. Covered by layers of permanently damp clothing, the cracks in my nipples had no chance to heal, which made feeding an ordeal for both of us, but there was a toughness about my son, a certain set of his tiny, pointed chin and an unblinking steadiness in his gaze that made me certain he was meant to live, whatever might happen to me. I wonder sometimes if my own mother saw the same quality in me, on the beach at Nettuno. Once he stopped bobbing his head about and struggling against his swaddling, his rhythmic sucking calmed me, and I began to try to take stock of my situation.

  We had been travelling alone, keeping away from the main roads. Beppo said it was wisest. To begin with, I had protested. I had money sewn into my clothing and Donna Lucrezia’s letter of recommendation to the governors of her brother’s cities and the castellans of their forts. Exactly, said Beppo, who had been soldiering in the Romagna when Cesare was still learning Greek declensions and fighting with a wooden sword. Its cities had changed hands so often the citizens had mistrust of their rulers running in their blood. He did not think either madonna’s money or her recommendation would count for much with them. He had been proven right at Imola, where the gatekeeper would not even summon the governor without Cesare’s personal countersigns. At Forli, we found a group of flagellants outside the gates, chanting anti-papal slogans and lashing themselves with bundles of thorn twigs under the eye of a phalanx of archers with very twitchy fingers. Beppo thought it wiser to move on than to reveal ourselves in earshot of either the flagellants or the archers.

  So we took to the mountains, the bony spine of land dividing Cesare’s duchy from the Florentine Republic.

  “They’ll shoot before asking questions up there,” said Beppo, “but we don’t want to answer questions, do we? And I’m a good shot myself.”

  Where was he? I rushed Girolamo through his feed, did what I could to clean and change him, and scrambled down towards the track carved into the gorge beside the stream which Beppo said would lead us to Arezzo. Beppo had a cousin in Arezzo. I resumed calling his name. I told myself he had gone hunting for our breakfast, or had chased the thieves and was even now making his way back up the gorge with our horses, or had simply taken himself off behind a rock somewhere to move his bowels. This thought set my belly griping with one of its periodic bouts of flux; without time to conceal myself, I squatted over the stream to relieve myself, my groans bouncing back at me off the walls of the gorge as though the mountains themselves were sick.

  We had been riding down the gorge, following the flow of the stream, before stopping the previous night, so this was the direction in which I continued. I knew Arezzo was somewhere to the south, but as long as the sun remained hidden, I had no means of navigation other than to trust that Beppo had known where he was going. As the morning wore on, my empty stomach yearned for his reappearance, though my head kept telling me I was on my own now, and listing in a remorseless litany everything I had lost to the thieves. All my dry clothes, clean clouts, and swaddling for Girolamo had been packed in my horse’s saddlebags. My good shoes, I remembered as I stubbed my toe against a rock, had been among the things packed on Beppo’s horse. I had no tinderbox to strike a fire, nor any means of getting meat to roast over it if Beppo were gone. All I had were the gold coins madonna had given me, sewn into my corset, and her letter of recommendation wrapped in an oil cloth and tied into my underskirt.

  My situation was so hopeless there seemed to be nothing to do but laugh. So I laughed, and some idiot locked inside the mountains laughed back, and perhaps there were hyenas laughing, and jackdaws, and all manner of the Creator’s holy fools, laughing fit to spi
ll their empty guts at the fall of Duke Valentino, his Jewish whore, and their little orange-headed bastard. I laughed so hard I lost my footing and slipped a way down loose scree, the small stones chuckling under the weight of my body. Something complicated broke my fall, both hard and yielding, and oddly shaped.

  A body. I stopped laughing and wiped the tears from my eyes with the grubby corner of my shawl. Beppo’s body. They must have caught him unawares, for there were no signs of struggle, no cuts or bruises or torn clothes, just a clean, almost bloodless wound through the left side of his chest. Wedging Girolamo against a rock, I scavenged the body like a practised grave robber, all the time watching myself, interrogating myself. Had I learned this ruthless practicality so quickly out of necessity, or had it always been there, in my Jewish blood, passed down from Moses, whose compromise with the enemy had marked him out as just the kind of man the Lord of Hosts needed to lick His people into shape?

  Not that there was much to find. The thieves had taken Beppo’s sword and bow, his leather corselet, boots, and gloves. They had, however, overlooked his meat knife, perhaps because of the way he had fallen, concealing it from view, or perhaps because it possessed only domestic virtues, its blade carved from bone and ineffective against most flesh unless it were well cooked. I took it anyway, and his padded doublet which remained serviceable thanks to the neatness of the fatal wound. I could not bury him here, where the mountains’ bones were only thinly covered with earth, so I piled a cairn of stones over him to keep off the buzzards and said some lines from the songs of David.

  Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the name of Yhwh Elohim.