Sins of the House of Borgia (20 page)

She looked at me with eyebrows raised, as though awaiting my confirmation that her plan was a good one. Even while Angela lay suffering not more than twenty steps away, Donna Lucrezia was thinking of her own survival.

“I will do my best for her, madonna.” We understood one another, Donna Lucrezia and I; we were both becoming adept at living cut off from our roots, like roses in bowls of sugar water.

***

The Via dei Volte was so called because many of its tall, stooping houses had their upper floors built out to join one another, forming vaults over the street. Originally the main street of the merchants’ quarter, it used to be kept lit night and day; there were still sconces fastened to many of the house fronts, though most were buckled and rusty. When Duke Ercole razed the old north walls to make room for the new quarter, the wealthier merchants moved out of their cramped, dark houses into modern palazzi bordering the Barco. The Via dei Volte, more a tunnel than a street in places, was now a run-down warren of cutthroats and cut-purses, cheap whores and old witches who helped them stay in business with their aphrodisiacs and abortifacients. It was no place for an unescorted lady, and I wondered at the desperation which had driven Angela there, and at my own foolhardiness.

I longed for Mariam as, with my hood drawn across my face as if I were one of the veiled women of the Mohametmen, and my torch held aloft like a sword, I hurried towards the church of San Paolo which backed on to the Via dei Volte. I had not put on pattens, because it was impossible to run, or even walk quickly, on the ungainly little stilts, and my shoes quickly became soaked in the foul porridge of piss and turds and rotting vegetables which overflowed the gutters. Squelching past an empty gong cart whose driver seemed to be engaged in placing bets on a couple of scrawny hounds fighting over what I hoped was an animal bone, I was tempted to berate the man for his idleness, but knew I had to avoid drawing attention to myself. Even my oldest cloak was attracting covetous looks.

Reaching the church, I was forced to slow down, to look for signs that might indicate the house of a cunning woman, though what these might be I could not imagine. Bunches of herbs pinned to the doorpost, perhaps? Arcane carvings on lintels, charmed stones? Mariam’s image came to me as vividly as if one of the witches I was looking for had conjured her. I could hear her voice, prickly with scorn, see the pursing of her lips, the lines deep as scars beneath the dark down over her upper lip, listing remedies for fever. Wormwood, borage, marigold flowers, laburnum leaf. Laburnum leaf. Guaranteed to induce miscarriage, I had once been assured by Isotta de Mantova. So useful to know, she had said, with a world weary air, just in case. I would look for laburnum, or a picture of laburnum, or…what? The situation was hopeless.

Suddenly overcome with weariness, my wet feet frozen, I leaned against the high, blind wall of the church, heedless of dust from its peeling plaster sticking to my cloak, my hood slipping back as I raised my face towards the narrow strip of light between the buildings. My limbs shook so hard I feared I was coming down with some dreadful sickness breathed in from the fetid air. The stink of death and failure filled my nostrils. Angela had probably bled to death by now, alone, afraid, in terrible pain. After all she had done for me, what sort of friend had I turned out to be to her? What use my pretty speech to Duke Ercole? By the time I returned to the castle, I would probably find her bloody bed sheets had been stripped and burned and Fidelma’s things laid out in place of her Venetian glass perfume bottle, her tortoiseshell hairbrush, the little silver tweezers I had used to pluck out her hair to please Ippolito.

I plunged my torch upside down into a misshapen sconce beside a rotting doorway. The rusty ironwork came away, leaving the torch to fizz and splutter in the drain, its heat intensifying the stench until it made me retch and spit bile. A rat scurried over my foot. As I straightened up from my bout of retching, what little light filtered down between the deep, dank arches was abruptly blocked out and I felt a hand on my shoulder, heavy and broad, with a firm grip. A man’s hand. And suddenly I was not afraid any more, I was furious. I would be raped, probably murdered. The treasure I had been saving for Cesare, for my lover, would be stolen from me and I might die without ever knowing what it felt like to lie with him.

“Get away from me,” I yelled, kicking out at the stranger’s shins, twisting to loosen his grip on my shoulder. “I’m not alone, you know. There are people with me. Beware.” I heard a sharp hiss of pain as my kick found its target. The man removed his hand from my shoulder, though the skin continued to burn where my struggles had chafed it.

“Violante?”

I knew that voice. As I pulled up my hood and straightened my cloak, I found myself looking into the incredulous eyes of Don Giulio.

“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked. He sounded angry, but his gaze was dark with worry. “This is no place for a young lady. I shudder to think what might have happened to you had I not found you. What can your mistress be thinking of to let you go roaming about like this without an escort?”

“She doesn’t know,” I said miserably.

“Ah, I see, you have come in search of the purveyors of love charms. Something to try on Duke Valentino perhaps? I can see how you might want to keep that secret from Donna Lucrezia.” He gave me a sympathetic smile as he stepped aside to make way for a donkey laden with firewood. To my astonishment, the urchin driving it saluted Don Giulio with his stick and Don Giulio nodded in return. “I have an interest in the chemical science,” he explained. “That boy’s father, being a woodsman, knows a great deal about the chemic properties of plants. It is for my garden,” he added. “That is why I come here.”

“And I…for Angela.” There was something about Don Giulio, some air of candour in his broad, open face that made it impossible to lie to him. Perhaps his woodsman could help. Better for Angela to be disgraced in his eyes than dead through my neglect.

“I need not ask why, I suppose.” A bitter twist briefly disfigured his beautiful mouth.

“She…she got something from a cunning woman near San Paolo, she said. And now…oh Giulio, she is terribly sick. I’m afraid she will die. I wanted to find the woman, to find out what she had given her and if there was any antidote.”

“Take me to her.” Turning to the servant who had accompanied him, he said, “Go to my house and tell Ser Pandolfo to come to the castle immediately. He will find me in the Torre Marchesana, in the duchess’s apartments. Ser Pandolfo is my physician,” he explained.

“You are very kind, my lord.”

“It’s quite simple, Violante. I love her. Nothing she has done could cause me as much pain as the thought of continuing to live in the world if she had left it.”

***

I thought she looked a little better when Giulio and I entered the room, and she had enough energy to protest at my bringing Giulio to her unannounced. Catherinella was sitting with her. The bed was made with clean linen, her hair had been brushed and her face washed. Though I realised all this must have been done at Donna Lucrezia’s bidding, I was still somehow left with the impression that the power of Giulio’s devotion had been at work. I could see they had much to say to one another, so dismissed Catherinella and went myself to wait in the courtyard for the arrival of Ser Pandolfo. By the time I returned, accompanied by the doctor and a servant bearing his case of cups and fleams, Angela appeared to be asleep, a faint smile on her lips and her fingers entwined in Giulio’s.

“I think the worst is over,” Giulio whispered as we entered the room, “but I will not leave her. I have sent word to Ferrante requesting him to take my place on the trip to Belriguardo. I will go to Mantua direct as soon as I can.”

The following day, she was well enough to sit up and take a little chicken broth while Giulio read to her. In the afternoon, she even joined in when he and I sang part songs to while away the time. Now that Donna Lucrezia had left Ferrara, Giulio decided he would take Angela to his own palace to recuperate, with me to chaperone her. Giulio lived on the Corso degli Angeli, in the heart of the new city, where the roads were wide and a proliferation of parks and gardens sweetened the air. We were trying the life out of one of the household slaves, chopping and changing our minds about what gowns to take with us, when Angela suddenly complained of a headache and begged me to close the window shutters for she found the light unbearable. Brushing her hair back from her face, I felt her forehead, which was burning with a dry heat.

“I’ll send the slave for water,” I said. Angela had lost so much blood her body was struggling, in the summer heat, to restore itself to the cold, damp humour which Aristotle tells us is natural to women. “And send a messenger to me,” I instructed the slave. “I will write to Giulio and tell him you’re not fit to travel today after all. Perhaps tomorrow.”

But we were not destined to travel the next day.

“The marsh fever,” Giulio pronounced the minute he arrived, with Ser Pandolfo and his case of instruments in tow. His tone was bleak; he seemed to age before my eyes as he slumped against the doorpost and emptied his lungs in a long sigh. “Do what you can,” he said to the doctor, though both of us knew there was little to be done but wait and hope.

“Do you pray for her?” Giulio asked me, on the third or fourth day of our vigil. She had fallen quiet by this time, exhausted almost into unconsciousness by bouts of vomiting and fits of fevered dementia during which her body thrashed, her eyes rolled into her head, and she yowled and shrieked like a cat in heat.

“Who to? I was taught that the God of the Christians is merciful and forgiving. Is this merciful and forgiving of him, what he has done to Angela?”

She had lost control of her bowels and the room stank, however frequently I changed her linen or lit fresh candles scented with ambergris and liquorice root to purge the air. Nobody else attended her but we two and Ser Pandolfo. The servants would not come near her for fear of infection, and many in the castle were sick already.

“You have spent too much time in the company of Valentino.” Giulio gave a strained laugh which did nothing to lighten the atmosphere. “I hope you don’t speak this way in my father’s hearing.”

Wishing I could bite back my words, so glib, so thoughtless, I fussed over Angela’s covers to avoid having to look Giulio in the eye. He caught my hand, curled his fingers under my palm as I smoothed her quilt. “Pray for her,” he pleaded. “The hardest won prayers mean the most to God.”

How could he know that? I wondered. But the gentle directness of his nature made me want to please him, so I promised I would pray. I would not go to madonna’s chapel in the Torre Marchesana, a cramped, claustrophobic little room without outside walls, where the perfume of incense and the gilded leer of the saints overpowered the spirit. I would go to the Lady Chapel in the cathedral, and contemplate the image I called to myself the Madonna of Strangers.

It was Catherinella who had first drawn my attention to her. Donna Lucrezia liked to attend services in the Lady Chapel; she shared with her father a particular devotion to the Virgin. And she liked to surround herself with her little clutch of heathens whom she was bringing to God. Fidelma would make a great show of her piety, word perfect in her prayers, anticipating faultlessly when to stand or kneel. Catherinella would stand behind madonna as always, straight and still as the pillars supporting the roof arches, her eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance, not even seeming to blink. I was generally distracted, watching the other people in the cathedral out of the corner of my eye. I know of no better place for watching people than a big Christian church, whose nave and transept are like a crossroads where men of affairs strike deals, mothers show off their marriageable daughters, and beggars play on the consciences of the rich.

But one morning during Lent, when the cathedral was uncharacter-istically quiet, perhaps on account of the foul weather keeping people at home, their doors and windows shuttered against wind and rain, I had decided to amuse myself by trying to spot Catherinella moving. I made bets with myself, mostly to do with food for we had not yet broken our fast. If I saw her breathing, Donna Lucrezia would weaken and allow us morello preserves with our bread. If she blinked, the bread would be rye and moistened with nothing but a little oil. Thus it was, as I watched the bluish gleam of the whites of Catherinella’s eyes in the weak, dusty light, my own gaze drew a bead along hers to fix on the framed image of the Madonna and Child. The Madonna wore an ornate crown and mantle of beaten gold, and her face, as well as that of the child in her arms, was black. Only then had I noticed Catherinella’s faint smile, the expression of furtive recognition with which she regarded the black queen in her golden robe.

I do not know what made her black. Some fault in the pigment, perhaps, or smoke staining from the banks of candles which usually burnt before her, though not during Lent, blinding us to her true appearance. Perhaps, in the past, the faithful had been able to touch her and her face had been darkened by palmers’ sweat, coin grime, the rank breath of beggars. For in the sight of our Father, we are all beggars. Her blackness comforted me, though; it made me feel there was a place after all in the house of the Christian God for oddities like Catherinella and me. It reminded me that Mary was a Jewish mother like mine, sometimes beatific in her selflessness and sometimes, no doubt, on preserving days or when the laundry refused to dry, a scold. She might tell me off for having knots in my hair or a hole in my stocking, but I could talk to her.