Mirror Mirror (31 page)

The girl couldn't speak and couldn't breathe. Lucrezia advanced upon her into the room, and put her hand as roughly upon the girl's waist as she could manage. She pushed Bianca against a post in the middle of the room, and flipped the girl's long apron up, as if intending to forage between the girl's legs. But instead she caught the corners of the apron and pulled them back around the post, and she ducked behind and tied the corners together, so the girl was caught, at least momentarily, tied like Saint Sebastian at the pillar, and in nearly as lusciously fainting a state.

Lucrezia wheeled about again. Her eyes in this cottage worked poorly; was it the mask, or did the light bleed improperly from the lamps? She found she could make out little of the furnishings. There was nothing with which to attack the girl—no poker from the fireplace, no conveniently clawed kitchen implement. Only a few carved stone tables, or were they sarcophagi?—and a statue of someone very like Proserpina in a sitting position, munificently holding out an apple.

The woman turned back and looked at Bianca. The tightened apron around the girl's rib cage had pushed up her small breasts and made them prominent. With a roar Lucrezia pushed her masqued face against the girl, rubbing, and the girl sagged against the post, which now looked like a stalagmite in some cave.

Lucrezia didn't want to leave with the job incomplete this time, but she thought she heard a sound. A sound, surely? The tramp of small feet? Were those creatures coming back? She wouldn't be caught here by a tribe of midgets. Or was that the roar of time in her ears, had she been here longer than she ought? The girl's pale skin was whiter than before—was it cadaverous! Perhaps. Lucrezia fled, praying it might be so.

Two bites from the Apple

B
UT THE
mirror wouldn't let her alone. Try as she might, shroud it in black lace from Seville, blow out the candles in the room, close her eyes—the mirror still gripped her. At last she could take no more, and she positioned herself in front of its harsh eye, and demanded the truth of it.

She no longer knew, nor even cared to question, whether the shapes revealed therein were phantasms of her mind or whether there was a magic at work. She wiped the spittle from her chin—she was chewing her own lips from rage and frustration—and saw the dwarves reviving the young woman once again. They loosened the makeshift bodice formed by the tied apron. They settled her upon the floor and rubbed her wrists with oil of lemon flowers. She could smell the tang of coastal fruit through the looking glass, and she gashed her wrist against the side of the ornate frame, wanting to beat the offending scene out of the bowed mirror. But the mirror would have none of it;
it showed her Bianca de Nevada until it was through. It showed how young she became, when refreshed by the dwarves; how the color stole back into her cheeks, and her anthracite hair bloomed more luxurious than ever, and her limbs, flexing for circulation, the more perfect and admirable than ever. And her life more hers than ever.

Lucrezia watched as the dwarves presented the girl with a small leather sack drawn closed with a cord. The girl opened it and a splash of water flowered in her lap. She withdrew a handful of coins, which she set aside, in a bowl held up by a reclining statue. Lucrezia felt a scalding of gorge in her gullet.

So she fell back, at last, to the tradition perfected by her ancestors. What a library of recipes they'd amassed—poisons that had killed cardinals and princes, dukes and their wives, inconvenient lovers overstaying their welcome.

When Cesare had abducted Caterina Sforza at Forlì, he'd wrested from her the secrets of her signal achievement, a
veleno attermine,
which promised perfect sleep. But Lucrezia Borgia would improve upon this unfailingly reliable decoction. She'd assure her own ascendancy while dooming the durable child to death at last. She'd use the last Apple brought from Agion Oros, use it for her redemption and Bianca's downfall at the same time. The same fruit that killed Bianca would give Lucrezia mastery unfathomable. Perhaps even the wisdom to adjust the mistakes of time, to correct the past.

She had seen what a bite of the Apple had done to the stone-faced beast. A mere slice of it had given the creature a mouth, an upright posture, the talent to pass through stone. What might it do for a person more magnificently human than most?

The mirror, maddening one minute, was helpful the next. Lucrezia began to realize that it alerted her when the dwarves were ready to leave. They would begin to appear in garb more clearly like human garments. They constructed a clumsy box with wheels and shafts, and practiced hauling it about. They were on a campaign of some sort. What were they up to? No mind, never mind; enough that they were gone.

She couldn't guess the colloquy the dwarves engaged in: whether to behave as their kind didn't behave, to leave behind the morally neutral state of their natures and commit a more human act. Lucrezia didn't associate the stone dog to whom she'd offered the Apple and the dwarves who had gone on to eat the rest of it. She was an unwitting Eve. But now they were on their own. They would take the mirror, without permission, and damn the cost. They wanted to keep Bianca safe.

She wouldn't be a crone this time, nor play the role of a waggish courtier. She would face the child in finery. She had Primavera wring the juice from ten lemons and work it into her fair hair. If Bianca, stars glowing in the highlights of her midnight hair, would preen as Hecate, Lucrezia would pounce as Aurora. She sat on the top step of the flight above the loggia, turning her tresses in the strengthening sun. Summer would be here before long; she would reign as the goddess of dawn. The peacocks screamed at the competition; she threw her head back and answered them.

The time came at last. She plucked the Apple from the silver stem—the second of the reported three, the third said by Vicente to be hidden in the treasury of the Doge.

The Apple sat in a bronze dish like something pagan. Had Lucrezia a more fanciful mind she would have supposed it to be humming at a level just below the threshold of the human ear to comprehend. But fancy was for servants and infants, and poison was the real work at hand. She set about with the tools of her trade to re-create, in the darkest way she could,
al-iksir.

Roots of mandrake, a knife with a handle made from human pelvis carved into obscene figures, a mortar and pestle for the mashing of savorless mushrooms, a drop of Fra Ludovico's communion wine for perversion, an alembic, a small fire underneath it in which she fed scraps of human hair, bits of the girl's old childhood garments, a letter from María Inés to Vicente, feathers of geese, and a live mouse
she'd caught by overturning a water bucket. (The mouse escaped with a singed tail.) But the crucial ingredient of choice was quicksilver, crushed and refined in a crucible, then reduced into a more docile and transparent state through the private alchemy for which her family was known.

She varnished one half of the Apple with the poison—the half toward which the last remaining silver leaf pointed, like a trembling needle. The tight, unwithering red skin of the holy fruit took the application sympathetically; indeed, only by the closest peering could she see the faint line that marked the edge of the brushwork.

One side, holy improvement; the other, an instant death.

The world was so easy to face with a tool like this in her hand.

She dressed carefully, finely, in the richest gown she happened to have on hand, and tied ropes of pearls about her waist and looped other strands of pearls through her hair. Then she flung open Vicente's wardrobe and pulled from a hook a crimson cloak that had belonged to María Inés de Castedo y Nevada. Lucrezia didn't know if Bianca would recognize the garment, but it felt superb to dress herself in it. The fit was perfect.

She swept through the
salone,
startling Primavera, who was just getting around to opening the wooden panels at the windows. The old woman crossed herself and followed as fast as her legs allowed.

Lucrezia flung open the door onto the loggia. Fra Ludovico was carting armloads of brilliant yellow
ginestra
to the roofless chapel. “Looks like our Duchessa is off to market,” he said, but at a second glance he added, “and she intends to
buy
the market. Where on earth are you going?” Her look was so venomous and straitened that without delay he flung down the blossoms in two intersecting lines, making a yellow cross on the ground. It didn't hold her back. She trod upon it and kept going.

Appearing at the corner of the house, Vicente was on his way to continue his search. Daily he was making ever wider circuits out from the house, and one day he knew he would not come back. Now he
gasped and fell into a fit of catarrh, raising his staff against her. That very cloak. “Villain,” he said, or tried to, his voice merely a throttle of phlegm in his throat.

“Bother,” she answered, distractedly. “Who can tell me where Michelotto is?”

Vicente wouldn't and Fra Ludovico wouldn't and Primavera Vecchia couldn't even if she wanted to. Lucrezia found her son by herself, loitering in the sheepfold at the bottom of the slope. She proposed that he escort her into the woods for a walk. She was eager to see the rural springtime flowers. She would have company, and a young man's arm, as she didn't want to slip into a bog or tread upon a snake.

“You are too lovely to walk in the woods,” he said cautiously.

“Then let the woods improve themselves as I pass by.”

The cottage came into view. Michelotto seemed surprised to find it; perhaps he didn't remember having seen it before? Or who might live within? No matter. Lucrezia paused at the edge of the clearing and said, “Let's pause, have a bite to eat, you and I.”

She withdrew from an inner pocket of the cloak a portion of cheese, a small loaf of bread, and the Apple, which was wrapped in a coppery silk cloth for safekeeping.

“I don't care for bread or cheese,” said Michelotto, “though the Apple looks fine enough.”

“The Apple isn't for you,” she said. “But isn't it appetizing?”

She held it up, and her own hunger for it began to gnaw at her. The air in the clearing fell still, and the bees about the doorway of the dwarves' cottage seemed to cease their noisy commerce with flowers.

“Please,” he said. “I rarely ask you for anything.”

“Eat the bread if you're hungry,” she said again. “The Apple is for another.”

“Who?” he asked, and she realized that, just possibly, he didn't see the cottage before them. What a liability a slanted mind was.

At last, cursing mildly below his breath, he grabbed the bread and broke a segment off, and fitted a hunk of cheese upon it, and ate
the two together, his eyes on the Apple all the while. It took little enough time for his eyes to grow heavy, as she knew they must. Still, waiting, she was almost driven mad herself by the rosy scent of the Apple.

Then Michelotto stretched, and yawned happily, and fell to the ground, heavy as lead. She waited a minute or two, and shook him roughly, but her labors over the bread had proved effective. He didn't stir. Had she a mind to, she could have sliced his heart out of his chest and held it up for review, and he would never have awakened until the sedation wore off. How helpful to have a talent for cooking.

She got up and walked to the door of the dwarves' cottage, and rapped upon it with impertinence.

“I am told not to open the door to anyone,” came the voice of Bianca de Nevada from within.

“And a sensible precaution, in these times,” said Lucrezia Borgia in her own voice. “I hear tell of men abusing the lonely maidens in their cow stalls and convent cells around here. But I'm a friend of your family's, and I'm in sorest need. You may remember me or you may not; you may think of me well or ill; it doesn't bother me. But my companion has fallen ill, and I want a scupper of water to revive him.”

She could hear Bianca pause.

“There is water in every stream,” she said.