Sins of the House of Borgia (30 page)

I was afraid for him. I longed to confide my fear in Donna Lucrezia, to hear her tell me she knew he was in control, always a step ahead of his enemies. But it was clear from her tense and doubtful smile that she was as much in the dark as her father. Then I remembered Michelotto mentioning San Leo when he found us in the orange garden, and I realised that the balance had tipped. For once, I knew more about Cesare’s plans than his beloved sister or even the pope. I hugged my knowledge to me as if it was a lover, a comforter, a shield, but I said nothing to Donna Lucrezia. If I shared what I knew, its power would dissipate. She would ask me questions I could not answer. She might come to believe me capable of betraying Cesare and warn him away from me. So I kept my counsel, and told myself there was nothing to fear.

On Saturdays madonna, accompanied by Duke Ercole, was in the habit of visiting Sister Osanna. She took me with her only once, but the holy clairvoyant’s reaction to my presence was so curious and unnerving that, without anything being said, the decision was taken to leave me behind in future. The very moment I entered the visitors’ half of the parlour, a few steps behind madonna and carrying her ermine wrap, Sister Osanna fell into a kind of fit, toppling sideways from her chair, her back arched and rigid, legs twitching, a foam bubbling between her lips and dribbling down her chin. Her left hand remained raised, the index finger pointing crookedly in my direction, until Sister Lucia, who was accompanying her, suggested to madonna that she send me away.

Doubts were expressed about the authenticity of my conversion and I was sent to see Father Tommaso. Fidelma took my place on the Saturday visits, though I do not think this pleased the duke as well as my presence did. Fidelma’s Christianity held so much more conviction than mine, she did not need the exposure to the holy sisters to ensure her place in heaven. And I was more attractive to the old man’s eye than the scrawny Mantuan, especially since my gowns had been altered to show off my new, womanly shape.
He no longer kept a mistress, but he was inclined to pinch my buttocks occasionally when he had drunk a cup too many, and on several occasions sought me out to try jewels on me which he was thinking of giving to madonna. As our colouring was so similar, he explained.

Father Tommaso set me meditations on the Holy Martyrs and prayed over me in Donna Lucrezia’s chapel until my head was spinning like Saint Catherine’s wheel and my unchristian stomach growled for something cooked on Saint Lawrence’s gridiron. Secretly I meditated on the coming of Christmas, and my own saint, my Saint Valentine. Perhaps he would stay until Epiphany. As an honoured guest of the family he would no doubt be given rooms close to madonna’s, to which he could invite me. I saw him standing at the door to his bedchamber, clad only in a fur-lined robe, a blazing fire and the corner of the bed visible behind him. I felt him envelop me in his arms, the two of us skin to skin, tented in fur. We would have entire nights in which to perfect our lovemaking and mornings jewelled with frost on which to ride out hawking. Perhaps the lake would freeze over and there would be skating parties. Beyond the range of the lanterns we would glide together where the ice threw back a perfect reflection of the star-spangled sky so it would be as though we were flying through the heavens themselves, the ring of our skates echoing the music of the spheres.

***

Christmas morning brought a light sprinkling of slushy snow from a dirty yellow sky, just enough to mute the city’s colours but not to gladden the eye with a blanket of sparkling white. Although, much to the delight of Ferrante, Cesare’s young officer Vittorio had arrived in Ferrara on Christmas Eve, there was no sign of his master.

We attended Mass in the cathedral where Ippolito preached on the iniquities of the census which had taken the Holy Family to Bethlehem. His meaning was not lost on any of us; it was common knowledge that the pope had recently imposed new taxes on the clergy to pay, it was said, for a new levy of troops for Cesare. We stole apprehensive glances at madonna, who sat beside her husband beneath a white silk canopy, holding his hand and wearing an expression of enigmatic gravity. We had to fight our way back across the piazza through a crowd which had gathered to hear a mendicant friar’s rant about the humility of the baby in the manger. Some appeared to be listening seriously, but as many were pelting him with cabbage leaves and doffed their caps reverently as we passed by, tall and stately in our pattens, our slaves holding skirts and cape hems clear of the slush of snow and crushed fruit.

Halfway across the square, Fidelma hesitated and turned back towards the friar, who was mounted on the back of a flatbed cart. Elisabetta Senese walked into the back of her and lost her balance. Helped to her feet by a giggling Vittorio and a moon-faced youth who followed Elisabetta about like a pet dog but later died of smallpox, she slapped Fidelma across the face for causing the ruin of her new Christmas gown. The friar’s congregation was quickly distracted by the prospect of a fight. The friar looked across to see what was happening. Fidelma, apparently oblivious to Elisabetta’s slap and the red welt beginning to rise on her sallow cheek, lifted her chin to look over the top of the rabble; she was so tall in her pattens it was easy for her. It was as though her gaze was joined to that of the mendicant in his mud-spattered woollen robe and threadbare black cloak, by a taut, invisible string. I looked around for Angela.

“Angela,” I whispered, tugging on her arm to distract her from dusting down the flushed and trembling Elisabetta, “
Angela.
”

“What?”

“I think that must be Fidelma’s Fra Raffaello. You know, the hedge preacher she thanks for her conversion. Look at them.”

She turned. I noticed the gash of blood darkening the lapis blue of her skirt. “You’re bleeding,” I whispered. “I’ll walk behind you.” Due to the complexities of her love life, Angela had lost track of her cycle. She swore at me, then smiled and thanked me, but her change of mood was lost on me, Fidelma, and her friar forgotten. With a sick clenching of my bowels, and a flush rising up my neck as I contemplated what an utter fool I had been, I realised I myself had not bled for months.

Not since Cesare left.

My face burned. Cold sweat trickled down my sides, making me shiver. It couldn’t be… Angela had said… Perhaps it was just some lingering side effect of the pox. But oh God, what if it had made me barren? What hope of a good marriage then? “Come on,” I said, giving Angela a sharp shove in the back. “Madonna and Don Alfonso are almost at the Corte. We’ll be missed.” She cast me an irritated look but set off obediently to catch up to Donna Lucrezia, with me close behind as though I were helping to keep her skirts clear of the snow.

***

“We’ll have to talk about this later,” she said as she bound on a pad and stepped into a fresh petticoat, and I dabbed at the stain on her brocaded overskirt with a damp towel. “We can’t do anything in a hurry and there’ll be trouble if we miss present giving.”

“D’you think he might be there by now? In the Sala Grande?”

“Dearest Violante,” she shook her head in a kind of benevolent exasperation, “he’s not coming. I doubt he ever was. It was just his get out strategy. I’ve known Cesare all my life and I’ve never yet known him do what he said he’d do. Deceit is like a drug with him. He has no idea when to stop using it.”

I blinked furiously. I refused to cry and smudge the shading I had so carefully applied to my eyelids with a burnt stick. Whatever Angela said, Cesare might still arrive, and what would he think of me if my skin were blotched and my eyes swollen with weeping for him? What competition would I be then for the bewitching Dorotea Caracciolo?

***

The present giving in the Sala Grande seemed interminable. The duke and his family were seated on a dais at the head of the hall, with the ladies and gentlemen of the household obliged to stand in packed ranks, gentlemen down one side, ladies down the other, leaving room for all the stewards, secretaries, treasurers, cooks, grooms, the head of Don Alfonso’s foundry and his chief potter, the tiny, bow-legged man who trained Duke Ercole’s racehorses, the poets and musicians and court painters, to process down the middle of the hall to receive their gifts. Slaves wearing new red and green tunics and chamois leather gloves carried the gifts from a long table set out below the dais, up to the duke and his family in the order in which they were to be presented.

I tried to distract myself from my aching back and pinching slippers, and the odour of unwashed bodies inadequately masked by clashing perfumes, by wondering how much drill the slaves had been put through by the duke’s chief steward in order to ensure the under falconer’s wife received her jar of candied fruits and Sigismondo’s personal valet his set of embroidered handkerchiefs and not the other way around. I played a game with myself. If the groom responsible for Don Alfonso’s racing pigeons received his gift before the keeper of Ferrante’s peacocks, Cesare would arrive in the next five minutes. If I could count to fifty before the head brewer’s small daughter could cover the ground from the hall door to the dais, he would not come until dinner time. If more than three of the candles in the great bronze stands flanking the dais burnt out before Duke Ercole’s speech of thanks to his staff for their year’s service was complete, it would be tomorrow. Whatever Angela said, my stubborn heart refused to entertain the notion he would not come at all.

Though I worried about the weather. By the time we were finally released to prepare for the evening’s entertainment, and were crossing the courtyard towards the Torre Marchesana, the snow had begun to fall more thickly. Straw strewn cobbles were transformed into a blue-grey carpet, splashed with sparkling apricot where the torches fastened to the gate towers caught it. Fat, silent flakes whirled out of the darkening sky, catching in our eyelashes. Angela turned up her face and stuck out her tongue. Her skin glowed; snow-stars glittered briefly among her curls before melting in her warmth. Swooping groundward, she gathered a handful of snow, moulded it into a ball, and threw it at me. It caught me on the side of my neck and slid down towards my shoulder, a slick of ice, melting, dripping from my hair, soaking my shift and bodice.

The tears were hot; that was how I knew the difference.

“Please, Violante, please.” Angela flung her arms around me and pulled me close, smoothing my hair, pressing her cold cheek to my wet one. “I’m sorry. Don’t cry. It doesn’t mean anything, Cesare not coming. You know what men are. Take Ippolito. Dear Ippolito has been sharing a bed with Sancia all the time he was in Rome, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t just as hot for me now he’s come back. Men have short memories. We may not like it, but we have no option but to accept it. It’s just the way the world turns.”

I wondered if she would be so cool if it were Giulio who had been sleeping with Princess Sancia, but it would have been spiteful to say such a thing, and she was trying to cheer me up. But even if she was right, even if, when Cesare was with me, I had the power to drive all thoughts of other women from his head, I still had something to cry about.

“What about the other thing?”

“God, there you are.” Elisabetta Senese, the water mark still visible like the outline of a map on her yellow Venetian velvet. “Angela, you’ll have to talk some sense into her. She’s decided she wants a bath, it’s so cold. She’s already ordered the bathhouse prepared, but it will take hours to heat the water, and we shall be late, then the duke will fume and Don Alfonso will sulk and…”

“Well, I can’t go to the baths; I’m bleeding. Besides, Don Giulio told me he and all his brothers are performing a new work by Tromboncino tonight. For six violas. Tromboncino will play the sixth. God knows what Sigismondo will do, but we had better not delay.”

Tromboncino’s concerto for six violas notwithstanding, madonna insisted on her bath, but as Angela was indisposed, excused me to keep her company. We should wait in her apartments, she said, in order to oversee the new slave. The new slave had been sent by Cesare, and wore a gold collar embossed with his coat of arms. She was Dalmatian, he thought, washed up on the beach at Porto Cesenatico following the destruction of a pirate vessel by the guns guarding the port. A striking child, with high, sharp cheekbones, pale skin, and hair the blue black of crow’s feathers, she spoke no language any of us could understand and Donna Lucrezia had not yet given her a name.

As I watched her moving silently around madonna’s dressing chamber, laying out her clothes, smoothing the nap of her crimson velvet bodice with tiny, deft fingers, polishing a jewel on her sleeve, despite myself I began to remember the beach at Nettuno. I told myself that part of my life was over, irrelevant, exorcised along with my Jewishness by the priest who had baptised me. But the human mind cannot, it seems, be made to cease its work; it continues scrabbling about among its old records like a tenacious scholar, seeking out connections. How could my mother’s pathetic end be without purpose, if the thought of it was what had spurred my father to make his decision, and the memory of it was what drove me to accept? If the road which began at Nettuno would end with my becoming a mother myself?

“You can get rid of it, you know. I know lots of ways. From Sancia. No, you stupid girl, not like that! Two drops of musk in the rosewater. God, Violante, why did that lover of yours have to go and hang Catherinella?”

He didn’t, I thought, but I kept the thought to myself. “W…what? Get rid..? Sancia? But you said it wasn’t possible to get pregnant the first time.”

“Did he only enter you once?”