by Lisa Hilton
He was right, and for a while a grim calm fell on the city as the barrels were broken out and the troops swarmed in huddles to drink. We waited there, mindless of the soaking, gelid rain, helpless, watching. I pulled at my lady’s sleeve.
‘Look, they’re moving up, to the convent.’
The height of the Rocca gave us a clear view over the whole city, with the nunnery of Santa Maria enclosed within the walls on the north-eastern side, so close, it seemed, that we might have reached through the mizzle to pluck a leaf of ivy from its walls.
‘Turn the guns,’ she ordered.
The Countess had seen battle before. I did not know whether she wanted to fire Forli’s beloved convent for revenge; or whether my lady hoped to give the sisters a kinder fate than that she knew awaited them. For a few moments, the cannon smoke obscured Santa Maria as the shot found its target. The tower of the nuns’ chapel swayed drunkenly, then slowly, hovering a moment in the sudden space beneath it, collapsed. The upraised arms of the Virgin, toppled from her niche, lodged in the walls as her veiled head crashed to the ground. Roaring with rage, they went on.
‘They will have barred the doors?’ I asked.
‘Surely. All the maids of the city will be inside,’ she replied, her mouth set tight.
But the doors might have been sculpted in butter for all the protection they gave.
I wanted to stop my eyes when I saw them dragging the women through the town, the nuns in their dark habits and the lighter dresses of the girls, their hems already smeared with blood. They brought them praying and weeping across the city, right up to the walls of the Rocca. We could hear them, above the gunfire, the steady murmur of the nuns, calling on the Mother of God to save them, the screaming of the girls, calling on their Countess to save them.
‘My lady, we might open the gates.’
‘We can keep them off long enough to get the good sisters inside.’
‘No.’
‘My lady—’
‘I said no. Do you challenge me?’
She had done worse, I knew. This was not the first time she had stood on the ramparts of her fortress, defying those who came against her, this was not the first time she had closed her ears to pleading and her heart to pity.
They herded them together, perhaps thirty or so, surrounding them with a wall of staves and bayonets. Then one woman was dragged forward, falling to her knees, her white head cloth slipping into the mud, her face washed bright with the rain turned up to us, desperate.
‘It is Suora Cecilia.’
I knew her, I had seen her often when I went to the porch of the convent to buy herbs and dried fruits for the Countess’s farmacia. Sometimes she would put aside a twist of candied rose petals or cherries in a paper for me. A kind woman, her pale face gently laced with wrinkles. She had taken her nun’s name for the saint of music, she told me, because her greatest joy was offering her voice to God when the sisters sang the orders. That voice had sung Matins this morning and now it was cracked and broken, calling again and again on her lady to save her. They pushed her down in the filth and her shift rose up, exposing the soft flesh of her thighs that no one had ever seen. Then a blow from a boot silenced her, and they began.
I had never seen Venice. I had often wondered about it, that city on the water where all the wealth of the world passed through. I had heard of the women there, those prized and beautiful creatures whom even kings would beg for a night of favours. They had a custom there, that if one such woman betrayed the man who had her in his keeping, his friends would take her, one after the other, to punish her. Seventy-five was the longest any of them had lasted, I heard, amidst the sniggers of the grooms back in Careggi. It took six until Suora Cecilia’s body lay broken in the mire, but as they pushed the others forward, one after the next, I could not bear to count. The Countess could not fire on them, even had she wished to, they were too close to the foundations of the walls, and they knew it. She stood it out, my lady. She had warned the people of Forli that they would have no quarter. Even as I hid my face in my cloak and sickened groans of the men about us were drowned by the whoops and cheers of those below, she watched, looking down, her countenance as calm as the statue of the Madonna which lay shattered in the street.
Hell came to Forli that day. One by one they took them, and those that lived were left to crawl away in the dark. They took their clothes and burned them, and left them to creep away naked with nothing to cover their shame. There were not many, I think, who wished to live. When, at last, it was done, I was flensed inside, scoured out with weeping. I begged that I might be allowed to go down, with my bag of medicines, to go amongst them and see what I might do to help. I should not have cared if they had taken me too; I should have gone gladly, if it meant I could give some succour to those poor damned creatures.
‘There is nothing to be done for them, Mora. Forli had made its choice. This is war.’
I did not care if I angered her, I did not care if she dashed me from the walls with her own hands.
‘For shame, my lady, for shame.’ I tried to stare her down, then I turned my back on her and walked slowly to the stairwell. I could feel her eyes on my back as I left her.
‘Mora.’ Reluctantly, I went back. She bent her face down to mine then, her hand on my shoulder was trembling.
‘I cannot bend, Mora, I cannot. But it does not mean that I cannot feel.’
That evening, in the Rocca, we danced. With the bodies in the mud outside, we danced. For the troops in their miserable encampment in the park, it was a sorry Christmas feast. But my lady had platters of roast meat sent out to them, and despite the driving rain insisted that the shuttered windows of the sala be opened, so that the light and the sound of the lutes and the scent from her Moorish incense burners might drift through the night to the Palazzo Numai, where Valentino was lodging. None amongst us had any stomach for it, yet the Countess was implacable. That night, and the nights that followed, we would be gay, that the sound of our rejoicings should reach Valentino’s ears and he would know that she cared nothing for him, that every day the Rocca would be relieved.
From dawn to dusk, the guns bombarded the city, then as it grew dark my lady would send for me to dress her and reappear in one of her finest gowns, silver or azure fringed with gold, for all the world as though she were still the Pope’s beloved daughter and not his enemy. We lined the window seats with the plate spared from the carts to Florence. The Countess ordered us to place candles and mirrors against it, so that the rich gleam could be seen by the wretched souls in the streets below, whom the French had forced to pin white crosses to their remaining pathetic rags as a sign of the occupation. Caterina still believed that the Rocca would hold, that Florence or Venice would send troops, but as the year looked set to turn, even as she danced proudly over the wreckage of her city, I sensed that in her heart, she knew she was alone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ON ST STEPHEN’S DAY, WE AWOKE TO SILENCE. THE storm and the fire from the French guns had stopped, and our skulls rang with the quiet. There was no word from the town, though the scouts on the ramparts reported that the lines were still drawn up to the south and north-west of the Rocca. The Countess bade me accompany her to the farmacia, where we spent a morning of ghostly peacefulness, preparing a mix of egg yolks, sugar and Brionia water, to smooth and whiten the skin. It astonished me that she could appear so tranquil, and I asked her if she thought that Valentino might have reconsidered.
‘No, Mora,’ she answered grimly. ‘But then all the more reason to make the best of it. I don’t want to make an ugly corpse.’
Towards noon, as the mixture was cooling in a china pot and we were cleaning our hands with scraps of muslin, a maid came to inform the Countess that a messenger was positioned on the main drawbridge.
‘Dress me,’ muttered my lady, and we hastened to her rooms. I laced her hurriedly into one of her finest gowns, scarlet tabby with a gold mantle, and she added her sable pelisse, scrabbling in her jewel chest for he
r ruby pendant. Caterina paused before the looking glass, tweaking at her hair beneath her working linen cap, before loosening it and arranging it becomingly over her shoulders. The glance she gave herself was one I had not seen in a long while – expectant, satisfied, flirtatious.
‘They’re lighting up the city, Madonna.’
From the window, I could see a train of torches, illuminating one by one the climb to the Rocca.
‘How festive,’ she replied sardonically, rubbing a layer of rouge over her lips. ‘Shall we?’
I followed her out onto the ramparts above the gatehouse. I saw how she set her shoulders so as not to tremble with the cold. Below us, he waited on his white horse. Like Caterina, Valentino was dressed in red, an elaborate gold-frogged doublet beneath a scarlet cape, soft leather boots with gold spurs, and a huge soft hat with white eagle feathers that he swept off as Caterina stepped forward. I hung back, hovering with the guards in the doorway, so that I could only see the colours of him, his face obscured by the Countess’s body and the rise of the wall.
‘Caterina, Countess of Imola and Forli?’
‘Monsieur le Duc.’
Their voices carried easily in the still cold, the Countess spitting the French title with courteous contempt.
‘I come to ask you, madam, if you will not render yourself peacefully into my protection, as your uncle of Milan chose to do. Forli is no longer yours to command.’
‘I will not.’
‘I have a guarantee, from His Holiness the Pope, that you will be compensated with another state, where you may live quietly and honourably with your children.’
‘I care not for His Holiness’s guarantees. And this is not the first time, Monsieur, that I have defied threats to my children.’
‘Then, madam, I will make you repent of this foolish pride.’
‘I repent, sir, that I ever trusted in the protection of the Pope. I repent that there is no longer justice in Italy, so that the Pope might declare untruthfully that I have failed in my obligations to him. And I trust that Christ, the protector of innocents, will defend my cause. I have no need of your guarantees.’
‘But madam, I will have Forli, in spite of your cause.’
‘And I shall die for it like a man, sir, if I have to. I wish you good day.’
They were so well matched, the two of them. They might have been speaking in a ballroom, or a play, old hands at the game: he, gorgeously dressed and supplicating, she the proud virgin on a tourney tower. I recalled the subtleties at Piero’s spring feast, long ago, a marchpane lady and her sugar knight.
The next day, as though to remind Caterina of her glory days in Rome, Valentino sent the cardinal of San Giorgio, her nephew by her first marriage, with another offer from the Pope. He came puffing up on his mule, greeting her pompously, calling her ‘cousin’.
‘You are no cousin of mine, sir!’
He rummaged amongst a pouch of papers and held one up that she might see it.
‘His Holiness offers four thousand ducats, Countess. A pension that he will pay to you every year, if you will leave his state in peace.’
‘Forli is mine!’
‘And a safe conduct, see here, and you may remove all your possessions unmolested.’
‘What has he given you, Raffaele? How much to betray your family? Or did he promise to hurt you less next time he shoved his holy staff up your miserable arse?’
There were gasps of shock from the watchers, but I knew my lady, my courteous, perfect-bred Sforza lady. She was enjoying this.
‘If you will reconsider, Countess—’
‘I’ll consider nothing, you wretched catamite. Is there no end to your villainy that you would hide under the Borgia’s cloak to save your own sorry skin? I spit on you, do you hear? I spit on you and your false and shallow heart.’
And she did. She sucked up a gobbet and plopped it over the wall, right on his bald holy head, cool as an urchin firing cherry stones. The cardinal took out a handkerchief and slowly wiped his brow, mindful of his state.
‘You are most unwise, Countess. You are a woman, you can understand nothing of His Holiness’s mind.’
‘I understand his sacred greed all too well, Raffaele. Get you gone, and pray that you don’t meet your uncle in Hell. I will have none of such dishonest dealing, none of it. The Borgia is a thief and you are his gull and I curse the day you were born a Riario.’
Again and again she refused. At length, the cardinal kicked up his mule like a chastened schoolboy, while the Countess wept with rage and recalled the vengeance she had taken for her Riario husband, of how Forli had swum in the bloody tide of her anger.
To her defiance, Cesare responded by declaring the Countess an outlaw, with a price of five thousand ducats on the head of her corpse, and ten thousand to any man who could take her alive. Caterina drew up her own proclamation, which she had read into the winter silence from the walls of the Rocca, offering an identical ransom for the Duke. They moved against one another like accomplished chess players, each wryly mirroring the other’s advance. There was almost laughter between them, as though this really were an elegant game, as though Forli were not burning, as though the stench of corpses did not carry to the Rocca on the winter air, creeping into our apartments even though I lit the purest Persian incense to keep it out. And the princes of Italy watched the play, and sent letters applauding the Countess for her gallantry, and no one came to relieve us. But the net, the long ago plot of the spider Pope, was slowly, irrevocably, fastening us in its mesh.
Caterina was growing desperate. She had the guns trained on the Palazzo Numai, she sent a squad of guards into the city in the night to attempt to kidnap Valentino, whose French soldiers cut them down at the very foot of the Rocca, and sent their heads back as a gift the next morning. Valentino’s men were digging into the foundations of the fortress, attempting to deviate the springs that gave us water, Caterina turned the guns on them. The earth beneath the battlements became a hideous puddle of blood. The surviving citizens, huddled around their pathetic fires in the remains of their homes, repented of their cowardice and of having submitted so easily to Valentino. Each day, they saw their Countess on the ramparts, her breastplate fastened over her gown, going among the soldiers to rally them. They whispered of her that she descended into the city at night, flashing a Turkish scimitar, taking her silent and stealthy vengeance on those who had betrayed her. Notes arrived from the town, declaring love for the Madonna of Forli and begging her forgiveness, but Caterina cast them into the fire. She was pure Sforza now. The hardening I had seen in her at Giovanni’s death was complete. It had sculpted her like granite. She thought no more of her children, or her people, or of me, or even, I thought, of victory. She thought only of the battle, giving herself over to the urge for blood with more passion than she had ever known in the arms of her lovers.
In the last days of the year, hope arrived. The Florentines sent forty men, who had made their way south disguised as pilgrims journeying to the jubilee celebrations at Rome. It was not the four hundred that they had promised, but they were admitted to the Rocca and swiftly set to the guns. They told the Countess that Giovanni’s brother Lorenzo was sending a mission on her behalf to make peace with the Pope. From Milan came news that Ludovico Il Moro had formed a pact with the German emperor and was preparing to retake his city from the French-appointed regent. If my lady could hold Forli until Il Moro had Milan, Valentino would have to withdraw and ride north to fight for his French masters. Caterina was quick to spread the good news amongst the men, and insisted that the music and dancing continue nightly in the Rocca, that Valentino might know she was not cowed. Yet I knew that in her heart she was preparing herself for the end, and that, in part, she welcomed the crisis that would come.
And I? I could not be afraid, for I knew I should live to witness Caterina’s humiliation. I had seen the end; I knew how it should go. My only hope was that the man in black, whoever he was, would allow me to remain with her, to serve her in her g
rief as I had done in her happiness. I thought then that I knew my destiny, that my fate had not been cast in the marketplace at Toledo, or in the Medici palazzo, or in the hills of Careggi. I thought that I could choose, and I chose Caterina, because I came to know, in those long days in the Rocca, that I loved her.
On the last day of the year, the French hanged a twelve-year-old boy, a pharmacist’s apprentice, claiming he had tried to poison one of their commanders. They burned the body in the piazza, except for the head, which they mounted on a pole and paraded through Forli. They nailed his right hand to the door of his father’s house, and that was the end of 1499. Valentino’s patience turned with the year. The Countess continued to taunt him, sending out rumours that he could not pay his troops, that the French king would abandon him, that the Pope had disowned him. For her part, she declared that she would not leave Ravaldino until her fortress and her own body were in pieces. So Valentino moved his guns from the north-west wall, behind which lay Caterina’s rooms, to the south-west, where the belt of the ramparts joined the massive central tower. The cannon no longer ceased at twilight. Valentino was in a hurry. For ten days the artillery fired at the Rocca without cease, pounding the walls night and day.
Caterina’s ladies shut themselves in the sala, weeping and praying, or staring dumbly into the space that was shattered every few moments by the relentless thunder of the guns. I had never been much amongst them, first for shyness and later as I had my duties in the farmacia and my study to occupy me. Nor did I care for their talk, for it was all of beaux and letters and gossip, of who they liked and who they thought to marry. Such things could never be for me. They were not Forlivese, but Roman too – one could hear it in the nasal twang of their quick chatter. They were all girls of good family. One was a cousin of Donna Alfonsina, Piero’s wife, who once, I supposed, had been my mistress in Florence. They talked of what would happen to the republic now, if the French and the Borgia triumphed. Of how Piero was become a sot, idling his days between the tavern and the gaming house, loudly proclaiming the treachery of the Florentines to anyone bored enough to listen, and how Donna Alfonsina still conspired for him, that the Medici might return to their lost palazzo. I had always thought them slight creatures, who cared for nothing more than fine clothes and the latest poems, yet I pitied them deeply now, when even old scandal failed to liven their tongues. The French, they said, were gallant, they did not harm well-born women, but none of them could forget what had become of the sisters of Santa Maria and they bewailed the callousness of their mistress, who had not seen fit to send them south to safety.