by Sarah Bower
Madonna tended to sleep on the floor, curled up like a child, with her knees to her chest and her thumb in her mouth. So when she awoke on the last morning, squinting into a bright bar of sunlight that fell through a gap in the shutters, the first thing she saw was the travel-stained satchel Juanito had left and I had stuffed under her bed and thought no more of.
“What’s that?” she demanded, removing her thumb from her mouth and wiping it on the remains of her bodice. “What is it?” she repeated as Angela and I struggled into full consciousness and tried to discern where she was looking. “Under my bed? It wasn’t there before.”
“Ah.” Realisation dawned. “Juanito left it. I don’t know what’s inside.”
She sidled across the floor, still lying on her side, flexing her body like a snake, until she could reach her hand under the bed and seize hold of the satchel. As she pulled it clear, the flap fell open and some documents fell out. They were faded and battered, but the handwriting, with its loops and curves and tendency to slope towards the end of each line, was unmistakable. Donna Lucrezia sat up. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, then looked at her hand, the nails broken, the cuticles crescent moons of grime, as though it was something unfamiliar and rather horrible.
“Leave me,” she said.
“But…” Angela began.
“You have nothing to fear. Go.”
***
I went to my room with the intention of trying to sleep. But though my body was leaden with exhaustion, my mind felt sharp and restless, expectant. Unable to settle, I dragged my travelling chest from under my bed and delved in the bottom of it for the letter Cesare had written me from Rome and the drawing done by Ser Leonardo. First I had to take out my mother’s recipe book and the more recent letter I had received from Gideon. I had surprised myself by keeping it, in the uneasy peace following the Coniurga. I thought it odd and impudent and anyway, he would be long gone by now.
I laid all these items in a row on my bed and stared at them as though I expected them to tell me something. I picked up Cesare’s letter and re-read it, but it remained as elegant and incomprehensible as it had always been. I laid it aside and my gaze shifted to the drawing, the hooded eyes, the expression of the mouth obscured by his beard and moustache. It was a wonderful drawing, the face true and human with the slight irregularity of the nose and the pouches under the eyes, but it was lifeless, a figment of burnt wood and lamb skin, a moment caught and pinned like a beautiful moth.
“I’m sorry,” I said to it, and suddenly I was sorry, for everything we had not done together, for the torchlit skating parties I had once imagined, the summer walks in scented gardens, the songs not sung and the dances not danced, the verses we had never exchanged, the sweet nonsense we had failed to whisper to each other. I had always assumed there would be a future and now, abruptly, at the stroke of some anonymous Navarrese’s sword, there was none. Crumpling the picture against my heart, I sank down on the bed among those other small relics of my time on earth, and wept until my eyes burned and my throat ached and I thought I must have wept all the tears that were mine to weep.
I was not aware of Angela’s presence until she flung herself down on the bed at my side and put her arms around me.
“That’s better,” she said, stroking my hair and my back, pulling a kerchief out of her sleeve for me to blow my nose on. “It’s important to cry.” There was solace in her affection, her physical closeness. I managed a weak smile, but the look she returned was deeply serious. “After Giulio was attacked,” she said, “I felt cold inside. As though I’d turned into a statue, or one of those mechanicals they put on carnival floats, just going on doing things automatically.” She gave a sudden laugh. “And you were so disapproving.”
“I wasn’t.” I thought of the time we had spent alone together at Medelana, after Giulia was born. Was that disapproving?
“Oh, you were, underneath. You thought I should have stuck by him in spite of everything. I know you, Violante, remember? You didn’t have to say anything. And you were right. But I just couldn’t. I kept thinking, what if I find him repulsive and he senses it? How much worse would that be than my just doing what everyone expects of us?”
“Us?”
“Me and Lucrezia. The Borgias. Ruthless. I was wrong, though. If I’d been braver and more honest, Giulio wouldn’t be locked in that room.” She shuddered. “I tell you, Violante, there’s not a day goes by I don’t think about it. What if this, what if that. And Giulia looks so like him now, not a trace of me in her anywhere. As though God made her to test me.”
“I think He is a great ironist. He tests you by your daughter’s presence and me by my son’s absence.” I felt another tide of grief wash against my heart. “I shall never get him back now, shall I?”
Her silence told me all I needed to know. Eventually she patted my knee and said, “Cesare wasn’t brought up by his mother. I wasn’t. Most people aren’t. It doesn’t do us any harm.”
“Most people are at least allowed to know who their mothers are.”
“Oh, Lucrezia will relent on that. Now he’s properly settled in Carpi and there’s no longer…any likelihood of his circumstances changing again, there can be no harm in it. It will be fun. We can visit together when my husband and Don Alberto meet. I’ll tell you what. We’ll slip Alberto’s wife a doubtful oyster, and when she dies you can marry him.” She was beaming now, rocking back and forth like a child herself, full of the excitement of her plan. It was Ferrante and Giulio all over again, another impossible scheme to give her the illusion of control over her life. The domestic version, I thought, with wan amusement, of what her dead cousin had tried and failed with his armies and his politicking.
***
Had it not been for Donna Lucrezia’s black clothes, the ash cross on her forehead, the scabs on her face and hands, I could almost have believed I had dreamed everything, from Fra Raffaello’s self-conscious solemnity to the abject, animal intensity of her suffering. I could almost believe she had sent for me to tell me Cesare would be returning to Italy in the spring. She had already spent some time alone with Angela that morning, and had received Agapito, now secretary to the papal legate in Bologna, but with whom she could share close memories of her brother. There were few at court who were willing to talk about him. The duke could not even see the point of official mourning, though he had agreed to Ippolito arranging a requiem Mass in the cathedral. I hoped there would be new music for it.
“I owe you my thanks,” Donna Lucrezia said to me as I curtseyed. She was lying on her bed, which she did not yet feel strong enough to leave. She had Juanito’s satchel beside her, and also the empty filigree box she had once charged me with giving to Cesare if anything should happen to her.
“I have done no more than my duty, madonna.”
“Violante, ever since I have known you, you have always done far more than your duty. And now I am going to ask one more favour of you.”
I bowed.
“Later today I must speak to Giovanni. He knows Cesar is dead, of course, but I have not yet spoken to him directly nor ascertained his feelings on the subject. He was, as you know, very fond of Cesar. He is also very fond of you, and I would like you to keep me company during our interview. There is much he cannot understand, and I fear this will only serve to sharpen his grief.”
“Of course, madonna. I will do my best to comfort him.” I wondered who would comfort Girolamo, if he needed it.
“There is something you must know about Giovanni first.” She paused. Some unaccustomed note in her voice made me look at her. The skin under her eyes was smudged with grey and her lids were puffy and pleated like those of a much older woman. The gaze she turned on me seemed nervous, partly guilty, partly defiant. With the air of someone who had made what might be a reckless decision she went on, “Giovanni is not my father’s son, but Cesar’s.”
“I see.” I realised I was not surprised. An image floated to the surface of my memory, of Cesare in the courtyard of
the Castel Sant’Angelo, stooping to kiss the child’s sleeping head before the groom lifted him out of the saddle. A tender action, the action of a fond parent. I supposed madonna had hesitated because she was afraid how I would react when I realised Girolamo was not Cesare’s heir after all. I found I was not angry. What was there left for either of them to inherit? Perhaps I should be glad Girolamo had been put into Don Alberto’s care rather than being left to drift aimlessly around Ferrara as Giovanni appeared to do.
“No, my dear, you do not see. Cesar is his father, and I am his mother.”
I should have left then. I tell myself I stayed out of compassion for madonna, or out of the habit of waiting to be dismissed, but it was my own prurient fascination that kept me there.
You are the Jewess. It’s true what they say. Look Dorotea, is she not the very spit of my illustrious daughter. “I have been a complete fool, haven’t I?” Donata. The gift. They had seen their opportunity and grasped it.
“No, Violante, you have been deceived by people who are, perforce, very good at it. I realised my mistake almost immediately, as soon as I saw how genuinely attached you had become to Cesar. I tried to get him to stop it…”
Oh, so that made everything better; if madonna had tried to act on her conscience, she, at least, was exonerated.“You make it sound as though he and I were somehow deeper in the wrong than you were,” I said, with a degree of wonder.
“I love him.” Her voice rose to an hysterical quaver and I feared for a moment she was plunging back into the grief which had overtaken her after her interview with Juanito, but she took control of herself and went on, “just as you do. More than that. There has not been a day, a moment of my sentient life when I have not been tortured by guilt for him and me alike. And now…” She waved a hand at her room, “here I am with all my comforts and he is, he is…” Words failed her. She shuddered.
“You told him to write me that letter, didn’t you?” I asked. Because I had to know, and because I, too, shrank from thinking about where Cesare was now. I had an irrational urge to pray he had been right, that religion was no more than story telling and he was nothing now, just flesh falling quietly from bone in the dry, red earth of Navarre.
She nodded miserably. “But he was unwilling to break off with you completely. Perhaps that flatters both of us. Cesar always prized honesty. Most people find that strange, and many have seen it as a weakness in him. He has, on occasion, relied more on a man’s reputation for honesty than on the evidence of his own eyes. It is my belief he valued it as we always value things we cannot have. And he recognised it and valued it in you. I have convinced myself he would want me to tell you all this, but perhaps it is just that I cannot support all my memories, all my…love, on my own. If I am to continue to live, and care for my son and make plans for him, I have to know there is someone else in the world to help me bear the burden. And obviously I cannot tell Giovanni himself. Not yet. Probably never.”
“Isn’t what you have already said enough? You took me into your household to be a plaything for your brother. My son, whom I always believed to be his heir, is not. Am I the only one who didn’t know what was going on? Angela?”
“Angela was completely opposed to my plan from the beginning. She befriended you to protect you. You have every right to be angry, and I have no defence. I merely ask you, out of your natural compassion, to hear me out.”
But it was not her deceit that angered me, it was the fact that she had left me nothing to mourn. The man I grieved for had never existed. I could not trust myself to reply to her request so watched in fierce silence as she began to pull sheaves of documents out of Juanito’s satchel. “You may read these,” she said, spreading them around her on the bed. I shook my head, held up my hands as if to ward off a blow, but she pushed the pages at me with abrupt, insistent little thrusts of her hands.
Some were neatly written on good, clean parchments, some scrawled on dog-eared palimpsests. There were even a few frayed squares of linen which looked as though they had been cut from bed sheets, or even shirts. The ink was faded in places to a pale, yellowish rust, scarcely visible, let alone legible in the artificial dusk of madonna’s shuttered room. As I had noticed before, all these documents were in Cesare’s hand. I now saw that they were letters, and that all were addressed in the same way.
Lucia, mi cor he had written at the head of every one. Lucrezia, Lucia. It was so obvious I felt even more foolish, and angry with myself, that I had not realised it sooner. His faith in me to heal him, the cut shoes, the talk of the calf, his delirious kiss that had no artifice, merely the desperate hunger I had once known myself when I thought of him, all the clues were there and I had stumbled into the mess of it as blindly as Cupid.
***
“You know the beginning of it,” she said as I shuffled the letters around on the bed with the futility of someone trying to find a winning combination in a poor hand at cards. “My mother has told you.”
“Your mother told me she believes you are a changeling and that you kept Cesare alive for some nefarious faery purpose.”
“And you are inclined to agree with her.” She gave a brief, stifled laugh. “My mother is only comfortable with things she can find an explanation for. Cesar and I are…were…perhaps, the same, but found ourselves with one foot on each side of the divide between this world and…somewhere else. Sometimes I feel as though I am living through a never-ending All Hallows’ Eve.”
“What did Cesare think?” I wanted to make her tell me.
“He remembered having the impression, when he saw me for the first time, that everything in the world had shifted a little to make room for me. And that when Juan pushed him out of the way so he could look at me, it didn’t make him cross because he knew it was no longer important.”
“You do not believe Cesare killed Don Juan, do you?” It was a time for plain speaking, for unimaginable truths.
“I know he didn’t. Juan was murdered on the orders of the Orsini. The girl Juan was going to meet that night, the honey-trap if you will, belonged to an Orsini family. Cesar’s only crime was to persuade Papa to call off the hunt for the murderers and let him arrange a proper revenge. It made him look guilty.
“And there’s something else. At my son Rodrigo’s baptism, he was given to Don Paolo Orsini to carry from the basilica back to Santa Maria. I was watching from a window as I hadn’t yet been churched so couldn’t attend the ceremony myself. The moment he was placed in Don Paolo’s arms he began to scream, and he’d been good as gold up till then. Surely that was a sign of their guilt.
“Cesar was quite capable of murder, as I know to my cost—and his—but there was no reason for him to want Juan dead. On the contrary, Juan gave him a foot in the Spanish court, as long as he behaved himself. And he wasn’t vicious, you know, just young for his years and rather silly.”
I felt a kind of awe, listening to her cool analysis of Don Juan’s murder. I began to understand what Monna Vannozza saw in her that made her fear her daughter.
“But I am getting ahead of myself. You must stop asking questions and let me tell my story as it unfolds. She gave no sign she was aware of the effect she was having on me.“I have virtually no memory of the time we all lived together at my mother’s house. I was about six when I was sent to Aunt Adriana, and Cesar and Juan were long gone by then. We would meet at Santa Maria for visits from Papa, but, as you know, we only spent long periods together in the summer, at Caprarola.” She pronounced the name with tenderness, and her expression softened. “On hot nights we used to sleep on the roof and sometimes, if I got frightened or felt lonely—the stars can make you feel lonely, can’t they, so far away and not concerned with us at all—I would snuggle up with Cesar under his blankets. Never Juan because he would just make a fuss about being too hot, or me stealing all the bedclothes or something. And not Jofre, of course, because he was only a baby himself.” She paused and rummaged among the letters strewn about the bed. Retrieving one, she handed it to me. “
Here,” she said, “read. Let him tell you in his own words.”
“No. Please. Anyway, I cannot read your language.”
“You can if you want to,” she said.
It was as though I was trespassing on a place of the deepest secrecy and privacy, yet I was not; I had been invited in, and I had not refused the invitation. I began to read.
The first night they allowed me above decks on the voyage to Villa Nueva del Grao there was a full moon. Do you remember—of course you do—how we all used to sleep on the roof at Caprarola, and you would creep under my blanket and ask me all the questions that were racing around your head and stopping you falling asleep? How could bats see in the dark? How did the planets know where to go? What would happen to the six-legged calf? Could you marry me when we grew up? I suppose we were about eleven and six then.
One night, when the moon was full, I explained to you about how the moon controls the tides, and you said I was like the moon and you were the sea, always following me about. And I said nothing, because I knew it was truly the other way around.
I was entranced all over again. Looking up, I met her eyes and she knew the meaning of my look instantly.“They’re all like that,” she said. “Here.” She handed me another.
We started so young, you and I, I read. We were like soft clay for the moulding. Our bodies are what each made of the other, stroked and smoothed to fit one another perfectly. And then we were fired in life’s kiln, set forever in a form to suit only each other.
She began to speak again. “It all began to change about the time Cesar went away to school. The first summer we went to Caprarola and he came from Perugia, he was different. He was bigger, broader, his beard had begun to grow, and he just wanted to be off with Juan doing what he called men’s things. They went hunting and fishing and fussed over their puppies and fought little bulls just as they had always done, but they also spent hours in corners giggling over some book Cesar had acquired which he told our mother’s husband was a Platonic dialogue illustrating suitable conduct for young men. It was nothing of the sort, of course, but it was in Greek and Ser Giorgio’s Greek wasn’t very good.