by Lisa Hilton
‘Taste it for me, Mora,’ she said carelessly, ‘in honour of our hosts.’
I swallowed a morsel of chicken in lemon sauce, sipped at her wine, chewed some soft bread, all delicious after the coarse scraps we had been given on our journey.
‘I think it is safe, Madonna.’
I wondered if she would help me if the food was tainted, or whether she would watch me writhe and retch on the floor, now that her scheme had failed and I was no more use to her. She ate and drank a little, then turned to me, the lines visible in her wearied brow.
‘I think you may dispense with those things, Mora. I dislike seeing you dressed so. It reminds me of what you have endured, for my sake. I am sorry for it.’
Before, I should have been glad of her care for me, proud that she would notice my feelings, but now I was wary. I was still useful then. No more than that.
‘We will rest soon. Tomorrow or the next day we shall have visitors, I suspect. I have some commissions. You may send to the Palazzo Riario and have them told that I am come. They will bring what is fitting. Sleep, then come to me tonight.’
So she was still plotting. Even here, a politely treated prisoner, she would not give up.
‘Change your clothes. Your old gown will do. I still have friends here, who I can call upon. You shall go to them.’
‘Yes, Madonna.’
I saw nothing of the marvels of Rome, that night. It was raining as I left the palazzo. In moments my skirts and cloak were sodden with it, it trickled inside my hood and ran down my breast. I was to find a place near the Piazza Santa Maria, in the Trastevere quarter south of the Vatican. The unpaved streets were foul with mud and worse, I held up my soaked gown and tried not to think what I walked across. The streets were as narrow as those of Florence, the façades of fine houses jostling against swaying hovels. I passed a few pigs rootling at a bundle of rags and felt my gorge rise as I saw a naked foot crunched in a probing snout. It was an evil place, beside the river there. I expected every moment to feel a hand on my cloak, a knife against my throat, but I went on, past the sagging doors of taverns, which emitted a fug of sweat and wine into the close frozen air, starting at every cry that blew from the shadows. A hand shot from a broken barrel, scrabbling crabwise towards my leg, a hissed request for a coin. I shuddered and kicked out, sending up a splatter of filth. For all the city was crammed with rejoicing souls, this place seemed to me the refuge of the damned.
I was a long while walking. The streets twisted on themselves like a knot of wool, here bright with lamplight and liveried servants waiting with litters, here as black as the tomb, so I had to hold my hands before me, sliding along the slimed walls and dreading a warm clutch of flesh. Sometimes I smelled incense, drifting down from high balconies, and saw a woman’s shape pass before a lighted window, so I could almost hear the swish of a silk sack on a waxed floor. I stepped over abandoned reeking creatures pooled in spirits and their own vomit. I wondered where Valentino lay, whether he slept in the soft arms of a priceless whore, or if he sat, his black sleeve trailing on a lintel, looking out over this place of nightmares. I longed for the wagons, the clean smoke of a campground and familiar faces, I was weary, so weary, and I cried a little at it, but I went on, for something in me impelled me to see it out. Eventually I saw the sign Caterina had told me of, a relief over a doorway lit by a guttering stump of tallow. A lion’s head, crudely done in wood with a painted red flame about its neck. I gathered my hood over my face and pushed open the door.
‘Good evening,’ I called hesitantly.
‘Filthy, if you ask me.’
The space was no bigger than a closet, piled like a bazaar with all manner of objects, from brocade curtains to cooking pots, crammed in anywise in tottering heaps. Crouched on a settle, his knees drawn up to his chin, was an old man, his hooked nose and reddish beard recalling the cruel drawings I had seen in my childhood, when the burnings began in Toledo. He was busy at a candlestick, rubbing at it with a cloth to bring out a gleam that caught the sparks from the stove and made his eyes shine yellow.
‘I am come from the Countess of Forli. She is at the Belvedere. She said to remind you of her service and that I am to wait for what she requires.’
He chuckled. ‘La Leonessa? So she is come at last, with the Pope’s son? The whole of Rome has been talking of it. Come, warm yourself a little.’
He hunched his spindly legs further and I wedged myself gratefully into the space next to the stove. My hood began to steam, the smell of the drenched wool was rancid around my face. Cautiously, I lowered it a little.
‘You’re a good servant, to come along to a place such as this for your lady.’ His eyes moved over my face, caught my own, but he said nothing, and I was grateful to him for that.
‘She said you have something of hers, something she sent here some months ago. She has need of it.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. If she had, why should I give it to you, then? You might be anybody.’
‘I am the Countess’s own maid.’
‘And I’m the Pope’s uncle.’ He brandished the candlestick at me. ‘True, you don’t look much in the way of a thief. But all the same—’
‘She said I was to remember her to you, good Signor Moise. To remind you that you have dealt together before, when she lived here at Rome. You have the collar, she says, that she sent from Forli, and you may keep it now, if you will furnish her with money and . . . something else.’
‘Your proof?’
‘I have no proof, sir. They have taken everything from her. She has not even a ring to set a seal with. But the collar is marked on the clasp with the Sforza wyvern.’
He considered this a while, his hands rubbing, rubbing at the silverwork in his lap.
‘So it is, so it is. And I may have it, you say?’
‘Indeed, if you will do as she requires.’
‘She is fallen very low.’
I tried for sadness, a loyal look of resignation. ‘Indeed, sir. It is a terrible thing.’
‘Those men of hers sent from the Romagna. The poisoners? They can still hear them screaming, over to the Castello.’
‘I have never been here, sir. I do not know you.’
‘Very well. Will you see it?’
‘I should like to.’
I waited in the lulling heat of the stove. I could hear him moving in an upper room, then he returned with a square casket, a cheap-looking wooden thing.
‘Come here, to the light.’
It poured across my hands like water, a stream of emeralds set in gold filigree, a princess’s dowry in fine mesh.
‘A fishing net, see. His last Holiness’s little joke. Will you wear it?’
‘I?’
‘Come. I’ll find you a glass.’
I pushed back my trailing hair. Before he fastened it around my neck, he showed me the fastening, two serpents with pale figures in lapis lazuli waving from their mouths, captured mermaids.
‘That’s it, the wyvern. Here now, have a look.’
He held the stinking candle to a flat silver disc. It was cool on my skin and heavy, though it had not felt so in my hand. I looked, and saw a face I did not recognise staring back at me. The stove’s heat after the night air had brought up a flush on my cheeks, the stones’ rich green was darker than my eyes, making them flare in the dimness. A few silver strands curled along my cheekbone and lost themselves in the golden netting. I was not ugly. What had Caterina said, when she saw me first at Forli? Rare. I stared and stared. In the dancing lines of the glass his face was visible behind me, we looked a long time until I felt a current pass between us, a snap of understanding. He had known cruel words, and faces turned away, and hateful eyes which saw nothing beyond their own fear of strangeness.
‘Thank you.’
Signor Moise became businesslike, unsnapping the collar and stowing it away, handing me a dense little sack and bidding me to bind it close in my gown that it should not chink as I made my way back. ‘Please to tell the Countess it�
�s what I have. I dare not go out for more.’
‘She will be glad of it, now.’
‘And the other thing?’
‘Poppy.’
He turned his face away. ‘She shall have it, but I know nothing of this, nothing. Get you gone now.’
All the strange sweet kindness between us had dissolved. He was pushing me towards the doorway, shoving a little flask into my curled hand.
‘Be safe. Keep your hand to the walls on the right, you’ll come out in the Piazza Santa Maria. I have not seen you.’
When once I had come to a lighted place and felt less terror at the thought of the money I carried under my cloak, I wondered at what it would be to wear such things, to be accustomed to them, to feel that you deserved them. I wondered if she remembered it, in all that she had lost, sitting at her throat, fastened there by the very hands of a Pope. I thought I understood a little, now I had felt it against my own skin, of how she could never let go, how she could lose everything rather than abandon her pride in those two serpents, consuming, ravenous.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I KNEW THE LEGATE WHO CAME TO CALL UPON Caterina the next day, I remembered him from the garden at Forli. A greasy man, with wisps of grey hair protruding from his cap, a sheen on his sallow skin like new cheese. I stood quiet behind her chair while he explained the Pope’s plans for Imola and Forli. She might retire to Florence, or wherever else in Italy she might choose, there would be a generous pension, commissions for her sons, preferment in the church. Her treasures would be returned, she could live quiet, and rich and respected. All she had to do was sign her name to a paper waiving the rights of her ruined city.
‘You waste your time, sir. I will not sign.’
He spent an hour in wheedling and persuading, she smiled on him calmly, and offered him wine, and pushed away the proffered pen. He came again, the next day, this time accompanied by one of Valentino’s captains, and the discussion was not so civil. The captain stood there twisting his hand over his sword-hilt, and it was in all our minds, the story of how Valentino had sent his men into the bedchamber of his sister Lucrezia’s husband and how they had cut him down before her very eyes. I wondered that Caterina had not the image of the blazing Rocca before her, how she could be deaf to all those remembered screams, but she would not sign.
‘You may kill me here, sir,’ she spat contemptuously at the captain. ‘You may cut down a defenceless woman if you choose, but I will not give away my rights, or my son’s. It will be a proud day’s work for you, no?’ In fact,’ she rose to her feet, ‘you may tell Monsieur le Duc that he had better have me murdered, for I will die before I see a Borgia bastard on my lands. Tell him that, sir, with my compliments.’
It continued for a week. Each day the legate came, and each day Caterina refused him.
‘I must play for time, Mora,’ she told me. ‘I have written to my son Ottaviano and he will get word to Monsieur d’Allegre. The French will not see their honour besmirched. They will give him men, and he shall free me.’
How could I say that it was I who had seen to it that the French would give no thought to her honour, that all Rome knew she had been Valentino’s whore? There would be no troops, and her son would be ashamed to call her his mother. I could not help it, she was becoming my lady again. As I saw her, so proud, so immoveable, I could not help it, I began to pity her and feel for her as I had done before her last stand at Forli. My hands grew gentle once more as I combed her hair and pinned it up; she felt it, I think, in my touch, my sorrow that she was alone and defeated and that her bright hope would come to nothing. For she still dreamed, Caterina. Her uncle still held Milan against the French and from there in the north, when the first apple blossom began to appear on the trees in the park, came a priest, Fra Lauro, sent by Il Moro to give succour to the Countess.
‘His Holiness can hardly refuse me a confessor,’ she observed gleefully. ‘We will be in Milan by the end of the spring, Mora.’
She talked much of Milan then, which she had not seen since she was a child. How it stood within its circlet of canals on the Lombardy plain, where the air was so clear you could see the snow on the peaks of the Alps, of the huge red fortress of the Sforza; how, in the spring time, the city sang with the rush of meltwater which fetched down rainbows from the peaks and spun them through the streets. It was as lovely as Venice, lovelier, she said, for in Venice there was nothing to see but water, but in Milan, there were mountains which seemed to reach to Heaven. Her eyes lit up as she spoke of it, while I thought of another city, a magical place where a crystal river ran beneath the ground, and I wanted to weep at how long it had been since I, too, had believed that there was a place where I might go home.
Fra Lauro was a priest, true, but he was no confessor. The money I had fetched from Signor Moise’s shop was to be disbursed by him, to bribe the guards and hire the horses who would carry the Countess from the city, to where she might join her son and his men in the countryside and there ride north. They spent hours closeted together, writing, planning, the letters went out under his surplice, but I did not trust him. There was that blindness in Caterina, that belief that the Sforza name would carry all before it, yet when I thought on Ottaviano, that dull, indolent youth who had rode out with Ser Giovanni, I could not believe that he cared enough for his mother to come to her side. Had he not watched from the square in Forli as she defied the rebels to cut her own child’s throat? Had she not imprisoned the boy when she suspected him of conspiring with the nobles of Forli to murder her second husband? And had she not betrayed his father’s memory with the man who had taken their state? How far did she think he would heed the call of his Sforza blood?
The sun rose a little earlier each day, and its warmth called out the scent of the pine trees on the terraces below the Belvedere, and we waited. The poppy, of course, was to be my part. Fra Lauro told me that when the word came from Milan I was to administer it to the Countess’s bodyguard, those twenty Spaniards picked by Valentino himself to surround her, that they should sleep away her going. They trusted me, he observed, I was one of their own. So much of Caterina’s life had been this, I thought – confined, impatient, pacing before a window with a view from a painting, awaiting the arrival of letters, of men, of swords to release her only to be confined once more, tighter and tighter, so that from the Vatican itself she had come here, full circle, like a doll in a Chinese box, watching out her life in a series of littler and littler rooms.
I walked in the park and tried to make sense of it. My loyalty was creeping back on me. Somewhere, in the dark streets of Trastevere, I had lost my hatred. Caterina would make use of me, but then who was there that she would not make use of to obey the call within her that held her enslaved, as powerless in the end as I had been on the merchant ship to Genova? Mind and be nice to the gentleman. She had been, as I had, a bride before she was a woman, shivering in her shift before a man who owned her, and I saw it then, why she might never bow, never submit. The wolves ran in both of us. Had I too not tasted the pleasures of cruelty? I would not betray her a second time. I would see her safe, I thought, and find my way to the troupe, and go with them, as I was meant to, to my place outside the world. I had never been much for the God of churches and priests, but I knew what I had done was sinful, and in this way I might atone. Besides, I did not think I could face another season of riding and running. I was sickening, I felt it. Sometimes I was gripped by a pain in my belly so sharp I bent with it like a scythe, trying to cram it down inside me. My stomach was tender and sore, I shook as if with fever and thought longingly of the little phial of poppy tincture that would take it away. I made a tisane of camomile, which soothed it some, and hoped it was an ague that would leave me when the heat came to Rome.
But in loving her thus again, even just a little, I had forgot the curse that was on me. In April, Fra Lauro came with a sorrowful face and a letter to show that Il Moro was once more fled from Milan, locked up at Loches, the prisoner of the French. My lady refused
to be discomfited, she would join her son still, she said, and then they would work from Florence to retake their city together.
‘Perhaps you should sign, Madonna? It is no disgrace now, with Milan lost.’
‘I tell you, Mora, I will not sign, I will never sign.’
‘But then you would be free, and in time—’
‘I will not sign. Do not press me, little witch. I would not think you a traitor, too.’ I keened inside, to hear that.
Fra Lauro agreed, and reassured her, and took his leave. Just a little longer, he said, and he would send word where the horses waited, and I should pour out the poppy and we would fly. I knew that we should not see him again, that he would melt into the chaos of Rome with the last of my lady’s money, lost like a snowflake in a Lombardy spring. Though it was not he who betrayed her, at the end. Valentino’s men came and searched the Belvedere and found the letters and the promises of money, but it was not this alone that sealed her fortune. It was that parchment I had worked over a corpse in Forli, that the plague might fall upon the Pope. They had kept the Forlivese prisoners alive, saving them in case they were needed to testify that the Countess of Forli had tried to murder the Holy Father. They waited until she was friendless, until they were sure of her stubbornness, and then they pounced, running down the thread of her fate to bind her and bleed her for the last time. No chivalrous French gentleman would ride out for her now, the poisoner, the whore. There was no name for it even, no name for such a crime. It was beyond treason, it was blasphemy, and she would be lucky if she did not burn.
She was to be tried at once, they told her. The oily legate was with them, his rancid mouth grinning in triumph. She wore a blue gown, that day, Caterina, with scarlet strings in the sleeves where her shift showed white. Quite calm, her hair drawn off her face, her long hands arranging a little posy of snowdrops, behind her the darkening gloss of the trees and the hills of Rome, she sat and listened to the legate as he read the charges. Witch, he called her, and the soldiers spat upon the floor. I saw her eyes move swiftly across them, and I feared that she would try to run, that she would provoke them to cut her down there, in sight of St Peter’s, and stain the floor with her blood. I could not be still.