Sins of the House of Borgia (14 page)

With an awkward movement, Don Alfonso shifted his left hand over his heart, freeing the right to take Donna Lucrezia’s and raise her from her curtsey. He remained slightly stooped, as a man does when he has been winded, or is trying to protect a wound in his midriff. Don Alfonso looked healthy enough, with his broad shoulders and choleric complexion, but perhaps that was only an outward appearance and the pox was eating him from within. I tried to catch Angela’s eye, but she seemed oblivious to the pantomime and was gazing intently towards the group by the fire; perhaps she hoped to see Ippolito among them.

“Your servant, madonna,” said Don Alfonso. He had a gruff voice and spoke with a pronounced northern accent.

“On the contrary, sir, I think it is I who am yours, if the contract exchanged between our families stands.” Donna Lucrezia looked her husband directly in his shrewd, blue eyes and smiled. It was clear he understood everything implied by her response, but he looked uncertain what to do with it. Suddenly, he doubled over, clutching at his chest with both hands. Donna Lucrezia gave a little gasp. A strange whimper escaped Don Alfonso. I feared he had suffered a seizure and took a step towards him to help him; it was an instinctive gesture, and one not missed by madonna, who gave me a reproving stare.

Don Alfonso straightened up, grasping in both hands a squirming bundle of white fluff. Extending his arms stiffly towards Donna Lucrezia, he said, “I brought you a present.”

My heart sank; once again, I tried to gain Angela’s attention, but she was still gazing off towards the fireplace. Despite growing up among men who loved hunting, Donna Lucrezia disliked dogs; she said they were noisy, messy, and their fleas made her sneeze.

“A lap dog,” prompted Don Alfonso, confirming my fears, as Donna Lucrezia remained rooted to the spot, her smile set like a mask. “Got its mother from an Indian I met in Venice.”

“It’s very…”

“Here, take it; let it get used to you, then it’ll sit quiet. Dogs like to have a leader. Wolves, you see.”

Donna Lucrezia looked as though she did not see, but she knew her duty and took the little dog from Don Alfonso, holding it cautiously under the front legs. It looked bigger dangling from her hands, its legs stouter, its snub face more fully formed.

“Giulio said you’d like it,” Don Alfonso ploughed on. “Said women like that sort of thing.” He nodded towards the group of men around the fire. “My brother. Giulio.”

One of the men nodded back, and now I understood why Angela was paying no attention to her mistress or Don Alfonso. You could see they were brothers; they had the same long noses, bent at the bridge as though they had been broken and imperfectly set, but there the resemblance ceased. Where Don Alfonso’s mid brown hair was cropped close to his head, Don Giulio’s was a tumble of blond curls. While Don Alfonso’s eyes were the washed out blue of a fine winter’s day, his brother’s were violet, with lashes thick enough to be the envy of any girl. He was clean shaven and his cheeks had the downy bloom of a peach. Instead of Don Alfonso’s thin lips, with their prudish downward curve, Don Giulio had a mouth like Ippolito’s, full and sensual and made for kissing. In other circumstances, I too might have found myself captivated.

“Thank you, my lord. Your brother is indeed thoughtful. I think you are fortunate in all your brothers. Don Ferrante, especially, has been a tower of strength to us on our journey. And Monsignor Ippolito, of course, is a good friend of my brother, the duke.” She must have known about Angela and Ippolito, yet she gave no hint of it, and Angela seemed unaware her lover’s name had even been spoken.

“They were made cardinal at the same consistory, I think,” said Don Alfonso, sounding slightly puzzled, then, solving the puzzle to his own satisfaction, went on, “Suppose that sets up some sort of camaraderie. Bit like the men you get your spurs with, that sort of thing. Eh?”

“I’m sure you’re right,” replied madonna warmly.

“Well, wife, will you sit with me a while? I dare say once we reach Ferrara, the celebrations will leave us little time to get to know one another.” He moved to place his hand beneath Donna Lucrezia’s elbow. Donna Lucrezia juggled the lapdog ineptly. They looked like a couple uncertain about a set of new dance steps, until I stepped forward and took the animal. Don Alfonso seemed to notice me then for the first time.

“By Jove,” he said, and for a dreadful moment I thought I had acted too boldly by Ferrarese standards; you could see Donna Lucrezia feared as much too. Then Don Alfonso continued, “You’re as like as two peas in a pod.”

Donna Lucrezia looked, not only relieved, but genuinely delighted. I was, after all, some six years younger than her, and my face was a better shape; poor madonna struggled with the receding chin she had inherited from her father. It was really only the hair we had in common, and mine was not bleached.

“This is Monna Violante,” she said. “She has not been with me long, but I favour her. She and my cousin, Donna Angela, are inseparable.” The seconds stretched out as Angela registered madonna’s attention upon her, dragging her eyes from the fireplace to cast them down in a perfect parody of modesty and drop Don Alfonso a curtsey. I felt a sigh of relief escape me and was sure Don Alfonso must have heard, though he made no sign of it.

“Rum sort of name,” he commented.

“A nickname. Given by my brother,” countered Donna Lucrezia, and I saw the same mixture of impotence and resentment cross Don Alfonso’s face that I had often seen on Ferrante’s whenever Cesare was mentioned. Rearranging his expression into a smile, he addressed himself to me.

“Well, it would be ungallant of me to ask how you got it, but I trust you will do no more to deserve it in Ferrara.”

“She did nothing to deserve it in the first place,” said Donna Lucrezia smoothly. “It is an irony, that is all, an acknowledgement of Monna Violante’s integrity.” Then, offering Don Alfonso her arm, she allowed herself to be led down the hall towards the fire. At a signal from Don Alfonso, the rest of the men retreated to give him and his bride some privacy.

Angela and I sat down side by side on a bench drawn up to the table. I managed the occasional glance at Donna Lucrezia and Don Alfonso, though mostly I was occupied trying to prevent the little dog jumping on to the table in pursuit of food; it was not very strong but it wriggled prodigiously.

“They look all right, don’t they?” I said to Angela, seeking confirmation of my impression that, despite the dog, Donna Lucrezia appreciated her husband’s romantic gesture in coming to meet her this way, ahead of all the official ceremonies in Ferrara; and that Don Alfonso, whatever might have been reported to him, had been pleasantly surprised by madonna’s discreet bearing and modest attire.

“Fine,” she replied, glancing briefly in their direction before her gaze returned to Don Giulio as iron does to a lodestone. “Oh my God,” she whispered, clutching my sleeve so I was forced to let go of the dog which pranced off among the dinner plates, “they’re coming over.”

Sure enough, the ground between us and the group of men was shrinking as they shifted towards us, still chatting among themselves, not looking in our direction, trying to ensure that neither their lord nor Donna Lucrezia would notice the impropriety. I thought of Cesare’s chestnut supper, and told myself life in Ferrara was going to be very different.

Unnoticed by us, Ferrante had joined his brother’s party and now presented us, taking up a position between us and Don Alfonso’s men as though he were our chaperone. They bowed, we curtseyed, then we stood in an awkward circle, chatting about our journey, the weather, the relative merits of travelling on to Ferrara by road or water, the imminence of Carnival and how it was celebrated in Rome and Ferrara. Few of them knew much about the former. I was not much excited by prospects of the latter, where throwing eggs at prostitutes seemed to be the main source of entertainment.

Angela said nothing. My worldly and accomplished friend, who had conducted her campaign to win Ippolito with such finesse, stood beside me like a gawky girl, winding her skirt in her fingers and staring at the ground, the wall hangings, the dog cavorting among the dishes on the table, anything other than what she longed to look at, the beautiful violet eyes of Don Giulio.

C
HAPTER 6

F
ERRARA,
F
EBRUARY 1502

Never simple, simply happy...

As Duke Ercole was a widower, his daughter Isabella, Marchioness of Mantua was to welcome madonna to Ferrara. It was clear from the outset that Donna Isabella undertook her task with an ill grace. Her court had given shelter to many of those exiled from the Romagna by Cesare, including madonna’s first husband, Giovanni Sforza. She made no secret of her deep disapproval of her brother’s choice of bride and her resentment that madonna, as Duchess of Ferrara, now outranked her on her own home ground.

Although Don Alfonso and Donna Lucrezia had decided to complete the journey to Ferrara by road, when Donna Isabella, accompanied by Don Giulio, met us in Malalbergo, she insisted we travel by boat.

“It will make us late,” protested Don Alfonso, glowering at his sister.

“But I rose at dawn to bring a bucentaur especially,” Donna Isabella countered, making a great play of raising weary eyes to her brother’s face. Donna Isabella was plump, with reddish hair, whose unfashionable curliness she disguised with coiffures almost as elaborate as Donna Adriana’s. She had a small, mean mouth and a crude, fleshy nose, but her eyes were very fine, and she knew how to deploy her forces to best advantage.

Though she kept up her determined cheerfulness in public, those of us close to Donna Lucrezia knew how she had been dreading this encounter. Donna Lucrezia could handle men but the friendship of other women did not come easily to her.

“I would rather she had sent her husband on this errand,” she muttered as Angela, Geronima, and I helped her dress. There was a general murmur of agreement. We had all met Don Francesco Gonzaga in Rome, and had been delighted with him, despite his thick lips and a nose which looked as though it had been squashed by a mis-kicked ball in Florentine
calcio
. He tended to wear a permanent frown, because he was vain, and believed frowning made his somewhat bulbous eyes look less prominent, but this could not disguise his love of pleasure. He was rumoured to loathe Donna Isabella, because she had a brain and liked to use it, and to enjoy many mistresses as well as some of his prettier pages.

“Unlikely in the circumstances,” said Geronima, and even she sounded regretful.

“Perhaps,” said madonna, raising her arms and turning her back so Angela could lace her corset, “we should find some opportunity to comment on his absence. As a reminder of the sort of thing that tends to happen to my husbands. If they displease my father. Or my brother.” Her tone contained just the slightest hint of irony, as though she had tried, and failed, to keep it out. “Good God, girl, not so tight. Do you want me to fall in a faint at Isabella Gonzaga’s feet? Let me out a little. It’s not as though there’s any danger of my looking fat in comparison to her.”

***

“She looks like an overdressed toad,” Angela whispered to me later, as the two women smiled and embraced one another on the muddy shore and we stood to one side, Angela trying both to attract and evade the violet gaze of Don Giulio. Sleet drove into our faces before an icy wind. The countryside looked flat and brown and sad. As Donna Isabella temporarily forgot herself and attempted to board the little ship ahead of Donna Lucrezia, one of the horses waiting on the towpath raised its tail and defecated. I saw Don Giulio glance at the steaming turds, at his sister and madonna in a tussle of satin and sable, at Angela hiding her face in the fox edged hood of her cloak, and smirk.

At Torre del Fossa we disembarked while the horses were unharnessed and the oars broken out for the final leg of our journey. Here Duke Ercole and all his court awaited us on the canal bank. The Este arms snapped from the top of the watch tower which gave the village its name. Snatches of music and conversation came to us on the wind from the deck of the duke’s own bucentaur, its prow almost as high as the tower and fantastically carved with the twin-headed eagle of the Este. A row of squat, homespun peasants blinked the sleet from their eyes as their new duchess, in her gown of drawn gold with crimson satin sleeves, her hair sparkling with diamonds and snowflakes, a pearl the size of a small pear rising and falling at her bosom, knelt in the mud to kiss her father-in-law’s hand. We held our breath. Duke Ercole raised madonna and kissed her on both cheeks then, stretching his thin lips in a smile, waved Catherinella forward to dust the mud from her mistress’s skirts. We exhaled shakily.

Donna Lucrezia now joined the duke’s barge, leaving the rest of us to follow on. They were entertained by the court musicians and poets declaiming eulogies of the Este and the Borgia. We in the second barge were left to our own devices. We sipped hot, spiced wine and watched the dreary country slip by on either side to the creak and splash of the oars, flat fields crossed by irrigation ditches lying like strips of lead under the wintry sky, black vines and bony poplars, low buildings the same dun colour as the people who lived in them and the soil they tilled. My Spanish heart ached for colour. Glancing across at Angela, I wondered if she felt the same, but she looked so withdrawn I doubted she had noticed our surroundings. I looked away again, drawn to a concentration of shadow on the horizon, beyond the lattice of poplar branches lining the canal bank. As I looked, the blur resolved itself into a block from which four square towers emerged, and I had my first sight of the castle of the Este which was to become my home. It looked bleak, forbidding, and horribly cold.

“You can almost hear Parisina Malatesta weeping from here,” said Angela with a shudder. Parisina and her lover, Ugo d’Este, who was her stepson and had been Duke Ercole’s eldest brother, were nearly as famous in those days as Dante’s Paolo Malatesta and Francesca di Rimini, but today, the dungeon where they were held and executed by Duke Niccolo, is famous for holding other prisoners and Ugo and Parisina almost forgotten.

***

“You know the first thing he will show you is where the block was set up for the executions.” Triumph mixed with bitterness in Donna Isabella’s tone as she stared down at the diamond and ruby necklace which had once belonged to her mother and now adorned madonna’s slender neck. We were standing on the long staircase leading up from the main courtyard of the Corte Vecchio to where the head of the Savi and other civic dignitaries were waiting to make their speeches of welcome. Donna Isabella commanded the top step so Donna Lucrezia was obliged to look up to meet her eye.

She had refused to come down the stairs to greet her sister-in-law in the courtyard. Too crowded, she said, surveying the melee of people, horses and mules, baggage carts, oxen, the litter the Holy Father had given to madonna for the journey angled like a stranded boat, its curtains dragging in the mud. But I think she was hoping madonna might trip on the worn, slippery marble, hoping she might break that pretty neck or at least dislodge the tiara of diamonds and sapphires and enormous pearls which had also once belonged to the Duchess Eleanora.

She must have heard how madonna’s horse, startled by a sudden loud noise during the procession into the town, had reared up and thrown her. No doubt she was infuriated by the way madonna had turned the mishap to her advantage, once she had been helped to her feet and remounted, calling out to the crowd in halting Ferrarese, “You see, I have fallen in love with all Ferrara.”

There had been much clapping and cheering and waving of little pennants in Don Alfonso’s colours of red and white. Then someone let off an arquebus, and the duke insisted madonna abandon her mount for something more placid or he feared she might fall again.

If Donna Isabella was hoping Donna Lucrezia had exhausted her stock of charm and good fortune in extricating herself so graciously from the incident, she was destined for another disappointment as madonna said smoothly, “I believe the lady’s husband imprisoned Ugo and Parisina below the Torre Marchesana, where I am to be lodged. My husband has already warned me his father will wish to show me the place and that the doors to the prisons are very low.” She laughed her mischievous laugh as Donna Isabella straightened up and madonna drew her into a sisterly embrace. “Perhaps he thinks I am particularly accident prone and am in danger of striking my head.” She dabbed artlessly at the tiara.

***

Duke Ercole suggested madonna’s Roman ladies might like to accompany her on her visit to the execution site, where dark stains on one of the flagstones might have been damp or might have been the mingled blood of the ill-fated lovers. Though not generally considered an imaginative man, Duke Ercole entertained some lurid notions concerning the morals of young Roman women and felt bound to make it clear to all of us that the ladies of Ferrara were expected to adhere to higher standards.

We began our excursion in high spirits. It was three nights since our arrival and, though she had said nothing to us, Donna Lucrezia seemed content with her husband. Whatever his reputation for drinking and whoring and spending long hours in his foundry or his pottery kiln, one or other of which was frequently setting fire to the northern end of the castle gardens, he had been punctilious in his attentions to his wife. Each evening he made the short walk along the gallery linking the Corte Vecchio to the castle where he joined her for a private supper, and he did not return to his own rooms until first light. From madonna’s languid smile as we dressed her, and the dark shadows under her eyes which we concealed with lead powder and oil of violets, we deduced Don Alfonso had learned a pleasing trick or two from his whores. She had even conceived enough affection for her little dog to give it a name. She called it Alfonsino, Fonsi for short.

In defiance of Duke Ercole’s purpose in bringing us to Ugo and Parisina’s place of execution, there was much giggling and flirting as we hitched up our skirts to climb down the ladders to the dungeons, displaying ankles and calves and even knees to the young men who waited at the bottom to catch us. Many of them had travelled with us from Rome and were pursuing flirtations which had developed on the road. But the hilarity flickered and died as we made our way through a mouldering wicket gate, along a narrow passage whose walls oozed slime, to stand outside the cell, not much wider than the sluices which controlled the water level in the moat, where Ugo d’Este had defied his father, rejected his confessor, and sacrificed his life for love.

“Good source of food during a siege anyway,” joked one of the young men, scraping a snail from the back of the iron-bound door, but nobody laughed. I felt Angela shift and sigh at my side and reached for her hand, which felt clammy in mine. Though the duke offered madonna his arm, she gave a slight shake of her head, took a torch from one of the link boys, and, stooping under the lintel, stepped alone into the cell.

When she re-emerged, her face was white and beaded with perspiration which sparkled on her forehead in the torchlight, her expression serious and inscrutable. Like a mask, it drew attention to her eyes where I almost fancied I could see the ghosts of the martyred lovers reflected on her dark, dilated pupils.

Then the moment passed, the dank air stirred by polite laughter as she remarked, “It is as well neither of them had to suffer imprisonment in such a place for long. Your father’s anger and compassion were as happily blended as the traitors’ blood, your grace.”

I have often wondered if she remembered her words in the years to come. Whether she came to regret them or not, they served their purpose that day with Duke Ercole. To Donna Isabella’s chagrin, he now conferred on Donna Lucrezia the family jewels which had not been given by Ippolito at her proxy wedding. He was captivated, not only by her wit, but by her success in bringing Sister Osanna to Ferrara and her excellent understanding of falconry. Angela saw the duke’s generosity as evidence of Donna Lucrezia’s way with men, though I, being my father’s daughter, I suppose, reasoned that the jewels were merely on loan whereas madonna’s dowry, the money to pay the expenses of her household, and still in a strong box in Duke Ercole’s treasury, was not. I was sure the jewels were a sop, and a certain ironical twist to Donna Lucrezia’s mouth when she admired herself in them made me certain she thought so too.

“Such a hypocrite, that Isabella,” Angela remarked in the privacy of our room. “You know her eldest boy is to be betrothed to Luisa?”

“Luisa?” What was she talking about? I had hoped, as we were yet again on the subject of the Este and their shortcomings, to lead the conversation around to Giulio, but instead she veered off in this new, and surely irrelevant, direction. Isabella’s son could not be more than a baby.

“Yes, Luisa. Cesare’s daughter.”

Of course she must have a name. Doubtless I had heard it before, but I did not want to know it, neither the name of his daughter, nor of his wife. The gentlemen of Cesare’s household who had accompanied us to Ferrara had stayed on, for Carnival, I had convinced myself, just for Carnival. But if that were the case, the duke would have sent them packing, to put up at inns or the houses of the better-off citizens. Duke Ercole was parsimonious about household expenses, unless they related to his orchestra or his nuns, or his pack of long-haired, blue-eyed cats from Persia, who had their own grooms and their own little doors cut into the bases of all the doors in the Corte Vecchio. Even though his frescoes were permanently threatened by damp and eruptions of fungi, he forbade fires to be lit before nightfall.

Cesare’s young men remained in the ducal palace because they were awaiting the arrival of his wife, the Princess Charlotte, and her daughter, and because, in Ferrara, if you were not nodding and smiling at the Venetians, or keeping a weather eye on the Emperor, you were allying your interests with those of France. Whether Cesare himself would then come to Ferrara, or whether he would meet his wife in Rome, or somewhere in the Romagna, was not known.