by Sarah Bower
I knew what he was going to say, and opened my fist to reveal the ring.
“That’s it,” he affirmed. “You are to deliver it to Donna Lucrezia. When she sees it, she will take you back. Your son is to be brought up by his grandmother. It is unlikely you will see him again. Do you understand?”
My legs began to tremble. I slumped down on the stool, was vaguely aware of Michelotto gripping my elbow to steady me, of wishing he would just let me fall and keep on falling, away from this empty castle, away from Cesare’s betrayal and my humiliation, and the aching emptiness that was forming inside me where my joy in my baby used to be. “Last night, you say?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you? Somehow I doubt that. I do not matter to him, so why would I matter to you?”
He had no reply to this. “Cover yourself,” he said, pulling at the coverlet which had slipped down my shoulder. “Go and dress. And don’t try anything stupid. I shall be at this door, and the other is bolted from the outside. And the drop from the window is very long. And perhaps you’d better let me look after the ring.” He held out his hand and I placed the ring on the flat of his palm.
I thought of the long drop to the river, of course I did, then I remembered that, however bereft I felt, my son was not dead. What if he came looking for me one day, only to be told I had given up so easily I had thrown myself out of a window when he was taken from me? What kind of puny love would that be? Love charged me with the duty of staying alive and believing we could be reunited. You follow love, Mariam had said; she had never told me it would be easy.
I dressed briskly. I wanted to cover my body as quickly as possible, to conceal its shame and imprison its rebelliousness in whalebone and laces and layers of cloth. It was time to grow up now, I told myself, yanking my corset tight across my bruised breasts and pulling up the neck of my chemise to conceal the place where my lover’s teeth had grazed my flesh. As I picked up my bodice from the floor and began to straighten its ties, I noticed a fine, gingery hair caught in one of the eyelets. I remembered how Cesare had appreciated the changes wrought on my body by childbirth, as he ran his deceiver’s hands over my breasts and belly and between my thighs. Permanent changes, that would not fade like bites and bruises or turn to lies like my lover’s endearments.
I recalled the mottoes on his ring. Do what you must, come what may, I told myself. One heart, one way.
THE BOOK OF GIDEON
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland
CHAPTER 1
REGGIO, OCTOBER 1505
Send me something you wore. Send me stockings you have danced in or a chemise you slept in on a hot night. Send me your pillowcase or your hairbrush. Reassure me I am still alive.
Madonna’s in a gay mood this morning.”
“Perhaps the baby is a little stronger.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s more to do with some letters that got through from her brother.”
Only now, despite myself, did I start to pay attention to the conversation, to sort out in my mind one speaker from another and make sense of what they were saying. A bevy of new girls had joined madonna’s household since the old duke’s death the previous winter. They were all the same, all impossibly young and hopeful, as concerned with necklines, hair ornaments and the shapes of shoe heels as if their lives depended on such things. Which, I suppose, in a manner of speaking, they did. I had no wish to differentiate between them. Though Angela chided me, and reminded me I had been just the same, I believed her memory faulty; I had never been so frivolous; I had never had the chance.
“Oh I do wish I’d met him,” said the first speaker. “They say he was terribly good looking.”
“Well I don’t suppose he is any more, not after a year and a half in a Spanish dungeon. Violante, you must remember him? Was he very handsome?”
I was aware of Fidelma pausing in her work, her needle poised in the air like an antenna.
“Well?” prompted the curious girl.
“Nose like a hawk,” I heard myself saying, “and his eyes were too close together.” Then I laid my work aside and muttered something about needing the privy, because I did not want to talk about him any more.
I went to fetch my cloak, and found a slave to escort me to the house where Angela and Giulio were staying. I had to get out of the rocca before Donna Lucrezia sent for me, as I knew she would if she had received letters from Cesare. She refused absolutely to countenance any notion that I might find it painful to hear news of him, or even that I might have simply lost interest.
When I had remonstrated with her, told her how he had deceived me over Girolamo, and how uniquely cruelly he had done it, she had responded with a chilly smile and said, “It is the basic rule of deception, Violante, to employ your victim’s susceptibilities against himself. And besides, what harm has he really done you? The child is safe; he made sure you were brought here unscathed. Surely you did not expect to keep your son with you forever. It is not the way of things. Look at my own Rodrigo.”
And look at yourself, I wanted to say, at the presents you choose for him, the letters you write to him your husband knows nothing about, how you are distracted when there are rumours of plague in Naples, or the summers are too hot and the winters too cold. “You had time to say goodbye to him, madonna.” You were not lying in your lover’s lying arms while your son was whisked away into the dark, into memory with all its tricks.
***
Angela herself answered my knock at the street door. With her hair bundled under a broad-brimmed straw hat, her skirt kilted up above her ankles and her feet encased in scuffed old riding boots, she looked like a beautiful peasant.
“We’re gardening,” she said, and I hoped the owner of the house who had been displaced by the arrival of the duke’s brother would not mind the consequences of Giulio’s passion. “Come and join us. You look pale.”
“And you look as brown as a farm girl.”
Angela and Giulio were openly living together as man and wife, and it was accepted they would marry in due course, once Duke Alfonso had won over his brother, the cardinal, who was now his chief adviser. In the weeks since the birth of madonna’s son, they had grown even more confident of their happiness. By proving herself capable of bearing a living boy, madonna had surely swept away the last possible stain on her name. And the latest falling out between Ippolito and Giulio, over the cappellano Rainaldo, had been conveniently terminated by the musician’s sudden disappearance. Giulio thought him dead; Angela said he was probably sick of being fought over and had gone to someone else’s court. Ippolito said nothing.
“Look who’s here,” she called as she led me through the arched colonnade to the garden. Giulio emerged like a dusty faun from a bed of fuschia bushes, shaking the pink fairy flowers out of his hair.
“Violante.” He stepped out of the bed and gathered me into his arms, into his scent of earth and sweat and greenery, his wooden trowel scraping my back.
“Really, dear,” Angela remonstrated, taking it from him, wiping the earth from the blade with a hand whose nails, I thought, probably contained enough dirt to make a new flowerbed.
“Are you all alone?”
“I brought a slave. He’s gone to the kitchen.”
“You should have let us know you were coming. As you see, we’re unprepared for guests.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Violante is hardly a guest, Giulio.”
“I came on the spur. Had to get away for a while.” Addressing myself to Angela, I added, “There has been news...”
“Of Cesare,” said Angela, relieving me of the need to say his name. “So Sancho must have got to see him finally. Do you know how he is?”
I wanted to retort I neither knew nor cared, but I bit my
tongue. He was her cousin after all. I shook my head. “I left before Lucrezia could send for me.”
“Well, I expect she will let me know if there’s any news of note.”
“I expect so.”
“Leave it there, Angela. Violante hasn’t come here to talk about Cesare. Quite the opposite, I suspect. We’ll go round to the west terrace, get the last of the sun, and have a cup of something.” Clapping his hands for a slave, Giulio led us around the house to the balustraded terrace, enjoining us to step on the cushions of thyme sprouting between the paving stones. “It will cheer your heart, Violante. All the day’s sunshine trapped in those tiny leaves. A miracle.”
“You cheer my heart, Giulio.”
He handed us into the old, comfortable chairs, covered with rugs, which mouldered contentedly in the evening light the way I liked to think he and Angela would, when they were full of years and the bare parterres below us were stuffed with mature plants. A house slave came out with a jug of sweetened lime juice.
“We had ice this morning,” said Angela, “but it’s all melted now. The cart should really come round twice a day.”
We sipped our drinks and contemplated the long, blue shadows cast by the fruit trees at the bottom of the garden, the fiery face of the setting sun cross-hatched by their branches. In silence, we listened to the earth breathe, to the last flurry of birdsong in the cooling air, the whisper of mist creeping up from the river and along the narrow streets of the town.
“October already,” said Angela, pulling a stole around her shoulders.
“Thank God,” said Giulio with feeling. It had been a terrible summer, hot and plague ridden, and as the old duke had sold off most of the previous year’s grain surplus to pay his architect, many people in Ferrara had gone hungry. Madonna was forever telling us, had it not been for the generosity of Francesco Gonzaga in providing transport through his territories for grain ordered from Piemonte, more would have died of starvation than from the plague.
“All the same, an early cold won’t help Alessandro.” The new heir was sickly and underweight, and reluctant to take the breast. Like his uncle Ferrante, joked the wags, though I thought of another of his uncles, and watched to see how much determination there was in the set of his pale lips or the curl of his tiny fists.
“He’ll live if he wants to,” I said.
“How can anyone not want to live?” asked Giulio.
“Surely a child cannot have any say in the matter.”
“Oh he can,” I said, and as Giulio reached out his hand to Angela, wished I had not. She was afraid she had damaged herself by procuring her miscarriage, and that she would never be able to give Giulio children, and clearly she believed I was showing myself privy to some kind of knowledge only vouchsafed mothers. I thought I should go; there was no place for my calloused and embittered spirit in their paradise. I rose and made my excuses.
“When we all get back to Ferrara, you must come on a proper visit and dine with us, you and Ferrante,” said Angela. It was part of the life Angela and Giulio were planning for themselves that Ferrante and I would marry.
“He is kind,” Angela had told me. “He will be a consolation, and when you find another lover, well, he’s hardly going to be consumed by jealousy, is he?” Simple.
***
“Where have you been?” Fidelma, looking more severe than she sounded, in her plain, dark gown and a hood which entirely concealed her hair. “She’s been calling for you.” Since I had been away, and Angela had withdrawn from her cousin’s household to live with Giulio, Fidelma had become one of madonna’s longest serving ladies, and seemed to feel this entitled her to adopt a proprietory tone. It was a measure of her standing with our mistress that Fra Raffaello had been asked to preach in her chapel three times during the previous Lent.
“I went to see Angela. Give me five minutes to change my shoes and tidy my hair.”
“She shouldn’t do this. It’s God’s will, what happened to Duke Valentino, and there’s no gainsaying it. If she thinks he will ever be allowed back in Italy, she deludes herself—and you.”
“Not me, Fidelma. Nor him, I suspect.”
Almost as though she meant to confirm my supposition about Cesare’s state of mind, the first thing madonna said to me as I entered her room was, “Good news. They have moved him to La Mota.”
La Mota was the great royal fortress of Medina del Campo, the impregnable heart of Spain. I could not see how this was good news.
“He says he is visited there often by emissaries of Philip of Flanders, who works for his release. He says Philip wishes to entrust him with the task of bringing Don Carlos to Castile, now that his mother is queen.”
“Is she to be allowed to rule, then?” Philip’s wife, Juana, Queen of Castile in name since the death of Isabella the previous winter, was generally held to be insane and was kept under virtual house arrest by her father, King Ferdinand.
Donna Lucrezia shrugged. “She is not my brother’s concern.”
“Where is Don Carlos now?”
“In Flanders, I believe.”
“Cesare will not return to Italy, then.”
Madonna laid a hand over mine. “I am sorry. Not yet. He must rebuild his position before he can come back and confront Pope Julius.”
I was not sorry; my concern was for Girolamo. Donna Lucrezia had been gracious enough to keep me informed about him, though sometimes I believed it would have been easier if she had not.
Cesare had managed to negotiate his freedom from Pope Julius on condition he went into exile in Naples. The three children, Girolamo, Giovanni, and Camilla, had gone there with him, to the house of Don Jofre and Princess Sancia. The pope, however, had double-crossed him. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Between Julius and Cesare it was impossible to know who was cheating whom. Cesare had been arrested again, this time at the behest of Queen Isabella, who wanted him to stand trial in Spain for the murders of Don Juan and Alfonso of Bisceglie. If Cesare did ever return to Italy, I was certain it would put the life of his son and heir in greater danger than ever.
“But Sancho has seen him,” Donna Lucrezia went on, in the same bright, brisk tone she used when handling petitions for which she had no easy response, “and says he is well. A little thin, but in good spirits. And these letters,” she waved a fan of travel-stained parchments at me, “are full of how much more comfortable his quarters are than at Chinchilla. And how King Ferdinand shows him favour since the queen’s death. Ferdinand is our kinsman, after all.”
“The duke will have a warmer winter, at any rate.”
“He will be in Flanders by the winter,” replied madonna, as if she would brook no opposition to her assertion. “Free.”
“How is Don Alessandro today?” I asked, peering into the lace-shrouded crib which stood beside madonna’s bed. Though she was dressed, she was still confined to her chamber, unable to wear shoes because of the swelling in her feet and ankles left over from the fever she had suffered after the birth. The baby looked serene, his little face between his cap and his swaddling bands as pale and still as a child saint’s. With a sharp stab of loss, I recalled Girolamo at the same age, his cheeks a weathered red, his features scrunched with all the frustrations of being bound and helpless and dependent.
“He has taken a little milk,” said madonna, “but he is too quiet.”
“I expect he is listening.”
I had never spoken to Donna Lucrezia about my conversations with her mother. On my return, I had simply witnessed Michelotto handing her the ring, then left him to deliver whatever news of her brother he saw fit. I had done what I was charged with; he would never be able to say I had deceived him as he had deceived me. I went back to the room I had once shared with Angela, to her outmoded gowns and a stale wraith of her tuberose perfume, and resumed my household duties as though I had never been away.
But now madonna said, “So you know, then? About Cesare? I am hopeful. Alessandro shares his birth sign, you know.”
&nbs
p; I knew. Hope, he had said to me once, trying, I think, to be kind, is the thing we should be most afraid of. I stretched my hand towards the crib, intending to stroke the baby’s face, but I could not bring myself to touch that soft skin. I rocked the crib once or twice and murmured some of that soothing nonsense that seems to enter a woman’s head as soon as a man’s seed takes root in her. His features twisted a little. He opened his eyes. I thought he was going to cry, then noticed his irises had swivelled up into his head so only the whites of his eyes showed. A bubble of saliva appeared at the corner of his mouth.
“Madonna, I think...”
“Holy Mary, it’s another fit, isn’t it? Quickly, run for Castello and the comatre.”
Doctor and nurse were not far away. Alessandro had suffered several fits in the night, and I could tell from the expressions on their faces, the encouraging smiles they donned like masks before going into madonna’s chamber, that his life was despaired of. I made to retire, but madonna pleaded with me to stay. I drew a stool up to her bedside and sat holding her hand while the doctor and the comatre did what they could.
When death entered the room, the doctor stood back with his head bowed. The comatre lifted the rigid little body from the crib and laid him in his mother’s arms. Donna Lucrezia kissed his forehead and whispered to him in her own, old language, “Adeu, nen petit.” Then she meekly handed him to the priest, who said what he had to say and bore the body away for laying out.
Castello packed up his equipment and departed with no more than a brisk, mute bow. The comatre tried to give some advice about breast binding and an ointment of rose oil and pomegranate pills for shrinking the womb before I shooed her away. Given her profession, she should have learned more tact in dealing with mothers bereaved of their babies, but she had come to Reggio on the recommendation of Donna Isabella, whose liking for her sister-in-law had not increased during the months I was away. And now, no doubt, she would rush back, for Donna Isabella was also pregnant. For the fourth time.