Sins of the House of Borgia (24 page)

“Read,” she commanded.

The document was in a hand I did not recognise, though measured and careful, the hand of a scribe.

“Read,” Donna Lucrezia repeated, “out loud.”

“‘This lord,’” I read, “‘is truly splendid and magnificent, and in war there is no enterprise so great that it does not appear small to him; in the pursuit of glory and lands he never rests nor recognises fatigue or danger. He arrives in one place before it is known…’”

“Yes, yes, that’s enough. He sent it as a joke, you see.”

I frowned. I did not see. Donna Lucrezia sighed, and explained. “It is a report from the Florentine embassy which came to him at Urbino. He had the messenger intercepted and the report copied. He sent it, he says, for my amusement, that I might see how easily he had charmed the ‘maidenly republicans,’ he called them. You see, he takes nothing seriously, Violante. What am I to do?”

“You must write and tell him your mind, madonna. If he understands how he has hurt you, he will withdraw from Urbino; I am certain of it.”

Though tears were sliding down her face, carving salt channels through the scratches on her cheeks so I marvelled they did not seem to sting her, she laughed at this. “If he had any consideration for me, he would not have taken it in the first place. The Montefeltri are my family now, and they were forced to flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs, according to Donna Isabella, who has taken them in.”

“Cesare is your family also, madonna,” I ventured.

“Cesare is…” Now she began to cry in earnest, greedy, gulping sobs that threatened to use up all the air in the darkening room. “The very devil,” she wailed, stringing out the syllables of the word as though making a sound picture of the devil’s own tail. She began once again her pantomime of pacing, scratching, tearing at her hair, and muttering about Nepi, and, without waiting to be dismissed, I fled to get help.

“Why does she keep talking about Nepi?” I asked Angela as we hurried in search of madonna’s cowering servants and shooed them back to restore order.

“Nepi?” Angela looked puzzled. “You, there, find madonna’s chaplain. And the physician. Go!” she roared at a scrawny boy I thought I might have seen with Ferrante. “Nepi,” she repeated, in a tone of dawning understanding. “Lucrezia fled there with Rodrigo after his father was murdered. He was only a baby, and everyone knew Cesare had killed Alfonso of Bisceglie. Not with his own hands, but as good as. Michelotto,” she mouthed, not quite prepared to release the feared name into the balmy evening air of Belfiore. “Lucrezia was heartbroken. She swore she would never speak to Cesare again. A few weeks later, Cesare stopped over at Nepi on his way to Cesena to join his army. No one knows what happened, except that Lucrezia returned to Rome all sweetness and light and life carried on as though Alfonso had never existed.” She shrugged. “That’s all I can think of.”

***

Though Donna Lucrezia ceased her ravings, and waited with the docility of a child who knows she has been naughty and strives to make amends while her servants made good the damage to her rooms, restoring upset furniture and torn down hangings where they could, consigning the rest to a bonfire beside the muck heap at the back of the stable yard, she was clearly not herself. She fainted while making confession in the ducal chapel. Her physician pronounced that she was running a fever, for which he bled her, and recommended complete bed rest for at least a week. Madonna, however, was having none of it, insisting upon an immediate return to Ferrara. No doubt Angela had reported to her the uneasiness of Ippolito and Giulio and, with her husband in Milan with the French court, and Duke Ercole said to be on his way there in response to Cesare’s invasion of Urbino, she was determined to secure her position as duchess.

“What if the journey puts the child at risk, madonna?” I remonstrated with her as I supervised the packing of her wardrobe and she lay on her bed, her swollen feet, clad in purple silk stockings, as round and shiny as
melanzane
.

“If I am to lose the child, it must be in Ferrara,” she replied. “I am far enough advanced now for it to be seen to have been a boy.” The weather had turned. A flat, grey light filtered through fine drizzle, in harmony with her pallor and the determined lines drawing her mouth down towards her jaw. I had rarely seen her father without a smile on his face, yet in repose, this is what he looked like, fleshy and ruthless, sentimental and without conscience. I determined to say no more. For one reason or another, God was bound to be watching Donna Lucrezia.

C
HAPTER 8

F
ERRARA,
A
UGUST 1502

You are my first and last and only love.

It began with a member of the duke’s chapel choir. We were attending a service to celebrate one of the innumerable saints’ days which claimed our obligation. If I had known what would result from this particular Mass, perhaps I would have remembered which it was, and burned candles, or named a child in his honour.

But all I knew was that the day was hot, and the incense-laden air of the chapel stifling almost beyond endurance. My fan seemed to raise the temperature rather than reduce the stuffiness, the way stirring a cauldron serves to release clouds of steam. How Donna Lucrezia could breathe through the heavy veil covering her scarred face, I could not imagine. I tried to concentrate on the service, but found my attention fixed instead on the dark patches of sweat beneath the choir master’s arms, rhythmically appearing and disappearing as he conducted the singers; on a single dust mote standing in the hard stream of light from the chapel windows.

Suddenly there was a commotion in the choir. A boy, his sweat-shining face like polished ivory, dropped to his knees and slumped sideways. The music faltered, stumbled. With a series of rapid, emphatic hand movements the master steered them back on track. A couple of acolytes, feet tangled in their lace-trimmed albs, hauled the boy off through the door to the baptistry. Our worship continued unabated, and I felt sharper now, as though the faintness I had been experiencing had engulfed the choir boy instead. When we heard later that he had died, an irrational and unexpected sense of guilt overcame me, almost as if his death had been meant for me.

We began to hear of more deaths. The fever started like marsh fever, with sweating and shaking and aches in the joints, but within hours the victims were seized with vomiting so severe it tore their vitals and left them bleeding from every orifice. Though the quarters in the Corte Vecchio set aside for the choir were thoroughly cleaned with hot water, and pomanders of ambergris and camphor hung from the roof beams, two more boys fell ill. The passage linking the castle to the Corte Vecchio was locked, and incense set to burn before the gate, but even so, Donna Lucrezia’s doctors stepped up their campaign to persuade her to leave the city once again. Don Alfonso was sent for from Milan, however, and she was determined to see him and take his advice.

He and his father reached Ferrara about two weeks after the death of the choir boy, by which time the dead carts were collecting bodies from outside most of the humbler doors of the city each morning, and an intrepid group of Franciscan friars had begun to hold mass funerals on the edges of the lime pits which had been dug outside the Porta degli Angeli to receive the dead. The lay clergy had retreated within the walls of the cathedral, where masses were sung continually and those who could came to beseech San Giorgio to fight off the dragon of infection and San Maurelio to absolve them of whatever sins had brought this calamity upon them.

Don Alfonso let it be known he would see his wife once he had met with the city council to see what might be done to alleviate the people’s suffering and slow down the rate of infection. That gave us three or four hours’ grace to devise some means of disguising the scratches which still scarred madonna’s face. Lead powder was Angela’s solution, but not too thick, I warned, or Don Alfonso would think madonna sick of the fever also. Elisabetta Senese set to work with pestle and mortar to concoct a paste of lead powder, carmine, and rose oil which would match madonna’s own complexion. Madonna, meanwhile, to my unease, spent an hour closeted with Fidelma.

When Don Alfonso arrived in madonna’s apartments, he was still in his travel clothes, though he had made a cursory attempt at washing his face and hands and had beaten the worst of the dust from his cloak and boots. Like an artist’s sketch half erased, he wore a smudged, unfinished air, his eyes distracted and unfocused, his mouth working with anxiety. When madonna, accompanied by Fidelma, came through from her dressing chamber to the Camera Dal Pozzolo, her face was unveiled and bare of makeup. I heard Angela, beside me, catch her breath, sensed her draw her hood closer over her head. Don Alfonso stared at his wife, the hand he had lifted to kiss stranded in his great paw with its grimy fingernails. Recollecting himself, he bowed, let his beard brush the back of madonna’s hand, then straightened up and glared around the room at us as though he wished we would melt into the walls.

He said nothing, however, so we remained where we were.

“What the devil have you done to your face, wife?” he demanded. “Looks as though you’ve been in a tavern brawl. Or got at by Sigismondo’s rats.” He gave an uncertain laugh. Donna Lucrezia smiled a holy virgin’s smile, but said nothing.

“Well?” said Don Alfonso. Madonna’s gaze flicked nervously towards Fidelma. Whatever they had planned was clearly not equal to the occasion. There was nothing for it, I thought, stepping forward, but to rely on my status as Angela’s saviour and Cesare’s inamorata, and erect a truth on this foundation of lies and wishful thinking.

“My lady was so mortified by the Duke of Romagna’s actions towards your family in Urbino, she inflicted these wounds on herself out of grief.” Let him draw his own conclusions as to her reasons for that grief; the grief itself was genuine enough.

“I did not give you leave to speak, Violante. But what she says is true, husband.” She knelt, leaning on Fidelma for support. “Forgive me. I should have thought of your displeasure at seeing me so.”

“Get up, woman.” It relieved me to hear how his gruff tone wavered towards sentimental tearfulness, and warmed my heart to see how he batted away Fidelma’s hand to help madonna to her feet himself. We can keep her feet hidden, I thought, my mind racing ahead, for he will not be bedding her again until the child is born. Though the low bawdy houses he preferred were bound to be full of the sickness so we would have to ensure the right kinds of girls, plump and on the coarse side, capable of gutting a capon or tickling the master’s cock with the same cheerful competence, were put in his way as a line of defence for our lady.

Husband and wife dined together that evening, but then Don Alfonso went straight into conference with his father, Ferrante, and Giulio to plan their campaign against the fever. The city was placed under siege. No one was allowed in for fear of bringing in further contagion, nor were the able-bodied permitted to leave for they were needed to bake the bread and butcher the meat, and drive the dead carts to the sulphur pits where the corpses were burned. Although Jews were usually allowed to live and work freely among the Christian population of Ferrara, now the duke ordered them into the old quarter surrounding the synagogue. For their safety and the security of their property, he said, because the Jews might be blamed for the outbreak and attacked.

“That’s what Queen Isabella said,” I remarked to Fidelma, as the voice of the duke’s officer, hoarse and punctuated by phlegmy coughs, rose from the square to the loggia of the Corte Vecchio where we had gone to hear the announcement, “in the Edict of Expulsion.” Or so my father used to say, in the same tough, ironical tone I now found myself using with Fidelma, a tone at odds with his words, as though there was something else he was trying to tell me.

“It’s a sensible precaution,” she said. “And compassionate not to expose Christian souls to temptation when they are in danger of dying unshriven.” The priests were refusing to enter the houses of the sick for fear of infection; Ippolito had been quick to offer to travel to Rome to request a papal dispensation for the granting of absolution by lay people, and doubtless it would be granted, but it had not yet arrived.

“Why are you here? In service with Donna Lucrezia, I mean? If you are so sincere in your conversion, would not convent life have suited you better?”

“I struck a bargain with my father. He is a goldsmith. He said, if I wanted to be a Christian, I might at least be some use to him. He has done some work for Donna Isabella Gonzaga in Mantua, and she recommended him to Donna Lucrezia, but because those two dislike each other, he thought to increase his chances by sending me to Ferrara. We cannot choose our destiny. Look at Saint Paul, or Christ himself. We must do God’s work where we find it.”

***

Night and day the city squatted under a pall of dirty yellow smoke that reeked of rotten eggs; it was hard to believe this was intended to purify the air. It clung to our hair, caught in our throats and lurked in the folds of our clothes, coated the bright buildings in soot and turned our skin the colour of butter. The crop of red crosses which bloomed on street doors was no respecter of rank, fresh paint dripping like blood from the carved bronze gates of the nobility, the stout iron bound doors of the city’s merchants, and the ragged hides covering the entrances to the lowest hovels alike. The taverns were full morning, noon, and night of the sick, the dying and the grief stricken, seeking oblivion. The duke ordered them closed, but that only led to trouble in the streets, when gangs of drunks encountered processions of hymn-singing flagellants, so they were re-opened. The carcasses of animals which had starved to death when there was no one left to feed them littered the streets and were scavenged by packs of dogs run wild as their masters sweated out their lives on straw pallets or feather beds. At least the smoke kept the flies away.

The connecting walk between the Corte and the castle remained closed. The kitchen door through which food and drink were brought on to the premises was washed every day, and the staff handling grain sacks and wine barrels, jars of olives and boxes of salt fish were ordered to wear gauze masks over their mouths and noses. We were forbidden fresh meat or fruit and vegetables ripened in the contaminated air; even milk and eggs were denied us, so we learned to subsist on little more than the same
polenta
the peasants ate. No one was allowed in or out of the ducal residences; even letters were burned. Yet the fever was cunning, and beat us at every end and turn, and, at the end of July, one of madonna’s ladies, Giuliana Cecharella, a demure girl with a talent for close work, was found dead in her bed, her back arched and her private parts fully displayed where she had kicked away her bedding and her night-clothes in her final paroxysms. As both madonna’s physicians were also sick, she had died unattended.

In the evening, madonna complained of pains in her abdomen.

“Where my waist used to be,” she said ruefully, attempting to dismiss her symptoms as nothing more than wind brought on by the enforced diet of grain porridge. But I feared for her. I could see the humours at war in her, her depression at the death of Giuliana, alone and unshriven, her body tossed into the sulphur pits with every kind of labourer and street urchin, and at the same time the deep joy of a woman close to her term. Whenever the child in her belly moved, the dull absence was banished from her eyes and her whole face was animated by delight and excitement. There seemed to be some imbalance between the elements of her own blood and that of her child’s. I thought the child must be born to save her, yet the child was not due until the beginning of Advent.

I said I would stay in madonna’s room that night, seeing that her doctors were themselves laid up in their sickbeds, and she did not protest. Though I settled comfortably enough on my makeshift bed of quilts piled on madonna’s floor, I slept little. Night was the best time during the fever, when the air cooled and the fires died down and it became possible to breathe properly again. I was content to lie awake, cocooned among feathers, listening to the purr of nightjars and the mewing of owls, and the rustle of mice under the floorboards. It comforted me to think of the wild creatures continuing their lives oblivious of us and our sufferings. I felt secure in my insignificance; if I mattered so little, perhaps the pain in my heart mattered even less and would, given time, become bearable.

Or disappear completely. That thought jolted me out of my drowse. I could no more live without that pain than without air to breathe or water to quench my thirst. If I succumbed to contentment, the love that lodged inside me would soften and dim and I would be ordinary again, just one more young woman of good birth and little fortune to be deployed by my mistress in building the web of influence that would fasten her securely in her new life. Loving Cesare was my distinction; it singled me out. My family, my faith, even my language, had all been taken from me, and I had filled the spaces they left with this love. If I allowed it to seep away, who knew what might take its place and make me unrecognisable to myself?

With my will bent to nurturing my necessary pain, I was fully awake when the sound of Donna Lucrezia retching banished Cesare from my thoughts. Disentangling my limbs from the pile of quilts, I hurried to her side, whisking back the bed curtain and crouching to hold her head until the fit of vomiting had passed. The moonlight filtered through the window shutters catching the sheen on her black skin, Catherinella detached herself silently from the darkness and squatted beside me, cradling a basin in her arms. When Donna Lucrezia recovered from her spasm, I lit the candle at her bedside and together the three of us examined the contents of the basin for the black blood of the fever.

“The light is poor,” I said.

“There was blood pudding at dinner,” said madonna, the memory making her retch again. Only Catherinella remained silent; perhaps, despite the fever, she was incapable of seeing a threat in the colour black.

Donna Lucrezia lay back against her pillows; wisps of damp hair escaped from her lace nightcap plastered to her forehead.