Sins of the House of Borgia (31 page)

“You know he did. I’ve told you often enough. Michelotto turned up.”

She shrugged. “Well there is always an exception to prove the rule. And as I said, I know how you can get rid of it.”

“As Princess Sancia did.”

“Yes, darling, Sancia. I helped her ever so many times. Juniper’s the least painful but a needle is probably the most reliable.”

I sat down abruptly on madonna’s dressing stool before my legs buckled under me. “Was it…were they…Cesare’s?”

Angela shrugged. “Who knows? The only thing you can be certain of is they weren’t Jofre’s. All he ever did was watch.”

“Watch. I see.”

“You don’t, do you?” She squatted in front of me, taking my hands in hers. Hers were so warm. “But if you want to have this baby, well, that makes you family. So you might as well know what kind of family we are. Jofre’s impotent. He just likes to watch.”

“And Cesare...?”

“Well I don’t think her other lovers knew. But Cesare, well, you give him a stage and he’ll perform.”

I twisted my hands out of her grasp. “I know what you’re trying to do, Angela, but it won’t work. I don’t care about those things. I love him. My baby is part of him. I’m not going to let you kill it.” I tried to stand, but Angela laid her head in my lap, its weight pinioning me to the stool. Her arms slid around my waist and I felt the warm vibration of her laughter through the layers of my clothes.

“You’ve got quite a little belly there already,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “You’re going to have to tell Lucrezia. Sooner rather than later.”

“Do you think she’ll be less angry if she knows it’s Cesare’s?”

“I’m not sure,” said Angela, dropping her gaze. For a moment, she looked so like him it made my throat ache.

***

I meant to tell Donna Lucrezia the following day, the Feast of Saint Stephen, but she rose very late and then only to receive a messenger from her brother. The man had struggled through blizzards to bring secret dispatches to the duke, Don Alfonso, and Ippolito, and a note for madonna whose brevity was chilling. Sitting up in bed swathed in a fur wrap, sipping her hot water and lemon juice, she turned the single sheet, folded and sealed, over and over in her hand, examining it from every angle before demanding a knife with which to cut the seal. I had made sure I brought her her morning drink alone, to give me the opportunity of asking for a private audience in order to tell her my news. Now I made to excuse myself from her presence while she read her brother’s letter but she commanded me to stay.

“I have an anxious feeling about this,” she said. “Do not leave me alone with it.”

I stood at her side, my hands folded into my sleeves for warmth, arms resting on the little rise of my belly, brushing against the sideways swell of my growing breasts. She read the entire letter aloud.

Illustrious lady,
she began, then paused to sip her drink and grimaced at its sharpness,
and beloved sister, we beg to inform you that this morning, the Feast of the Nativity, we have had executed Ramiro da Lorqua, formerly governor of the Romagna, for the crime of embezzlement.

Madonna gasped. “Ramiro? Ramiro has been with him…oh, I can’t remember how long. Longer than Michelotto even. It is impossible.”

Ramiro, I thought, though I said nothing, that same Ramiro of whom he had written fondly only weeks ago when describing the incident with the winged lizard. Madonna read on, her tone weighed down with doubt and dread.

On Saint Stephen’s Day we shall leave here for Senigallia, to receive the surrender, and we would request your prayers for our safe journey.

Your devoted brother, who loves you as himself,

Caesar Valentinus

Given at Cesena the 25th day of December, the year of Our Lord 1502.

The letter was in the hand of Cesare’s confidential secretary, Agapito Geraldini, and countersigned by him.

“Prayers?” demanded Donna Lucrezia, frowning at me. “Since when did Cesare ask for prayers?” She shivered. “Send word to my husband and ask him if he will see me, then come back and dress me right away. Call the Dalmatian. Where is Angela?”

“I will fetch her immediately, madonna.” Angela, I knew, was waiting in our room for news of my meeting with madonna.

“And Violante, perhaps we had better pray…”

“Yes, madonna.”

For the rest of that day and most of the next, we ladies were left to our own devices while madonna consulted with her husband and his family over the contents of Cesare’s despatches. Though we passed our time mainly in the Camera Dal Pozzolo, where our small looms and embroidery frames were set up and we kept a good supply of poetry books, song sheets, and a couple of old lutes, even there the frisson of nervous excitement pervading the Corte reached us. Every time we heard voices in the gardens, or hooves in the courtyard, someone rushed to a window or out into the stairwell to look and listen. Around the middle of the second day, a disconsolate Strozzi called on us in our tower, but though he did his best with rhymes and jokes and banter with madonna’s clowns, even the Ferrarese girls, to whom Cesare was little more than a name, a cold breath on the back of the neck, a ghost in the guise of a knight of Saint John, remained distracted and serious.

I was in agony. I tried to pray, but my prayers came back to me, useless as echoes. To what god could I pray, a
conversa
asked to pray for an atheist? What did he mean by his request anyway? Was it some kind of code? If so, clearly madonna did not understand it. Or had something occurred which was enough to frighten Cesare into a reliance on religion? Had Lady Fortune deserted him? Was he dead? Surely I would feel it if he were, now his seed was growing inside me.

Then it happened. The message came. I dropped a ball of yarn I had been winding with Fidelma and, as I bent to pick it up, my eye picked out a tiny lion in the design of the rug beneath my chair. San Leo. All this had begun with the rebellion at San Leo. I forced my mind to go back over Michelotto’s rude interruption of my tryst with his lord. What had he said? What exactly?
He’s got the assessment of fortifications at San Leo you asked Leonardo for.
He had asked his engineer to undertake a survey. As if he already knew, as if he were planning something of his own.

I handed the yarn to one of the others, saying I needed to answer a call of nature. Angela threw me a meaningful look, a frequent need to urinate being, she assured me, one of the certain signs of pregnancy. Closing the door quietly behind me, I raced to the duke’s apartments in the Corte. Needless to say, I had never entered them before. But as I stood outside the door to his solar, waiting for his doorman to find out if Donna Lucrezia was there, I felt no nervousness, just a consuming desperation to reassure madonna that her brother was not in danger.

I could hear voices behind the door, the rumble of the men’s, the occasional, lighter interjection from madonna, but I could not discern what they were saying. Suddenly Fonsi started yapping and a hound growled in reply, and there were murmurs of strained laughter. One of the duke’s exotic cats shot through the flap in the base of the door, its tail puffed up like a flue brush. Then I heard the footman’s voice, a brief, gruff response from the duke and the footman’s soft shoes whispering back towards the door. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and stepped into the room.

The hunting scenes on the wall hangings seemed alive in the light from the fire and the ranks of candles in brass stands, hounds baying after fleeing stags, huntsmen’s spears plunged into the flanks of spotted boar. The Este and Donna Lucrezia were seated around a deep fireplace, Ferrante and Don Alfonso side by side on a settle, Giulio on the floor with the spaniel in his lap, Donna Lucrezia on a low faldstool. Sigismondo was not there. The duke leaned forward in his high-backed chair as I walked towards the family group, his thin lips compressed to nothing, eyes as blank as a snake’s. He held a small silver hammer in his right hand, the sort used for cracking nuts, and tapped it steadily against the palm of his left. He favoured me, I kept reminding myself as I approached; he had often shown it.

“You have something you wish to say to the duchess?” he asked, his tone dangerously quiet. As Donna Lucrezia turned towards me I noticed the patches of hectic colour on her cheeks that told me how angry she was beneath her calm exterior. I hesitated.

“Whatever you have to say you may say in front of my family,” she said, shifting almost imperceptibly closer to Don Alfonso. I looked from her faint and inscrutable smile around the faces of the Este turned expectantly towards me, from Don Alfonso’s small, hard eyes, blue and bloodshot, to Don Giulio, his gaze open and violet as a summer evening sky. How could I speak in front of them, every one still outraged, however discreetly, by Cesare’s treatment of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino? Yet what excuse could I make for my intrusion? My mind whirled; I could no longer think.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, feeling my cheeks begin to flame, the sound of the duke’s hammer cracking a nut going off like a shot inside my head. I turned and fled, aware at the edge of consciousness of Ferrante rising from the settle and taking a step towards me.

I ran back to the Torre Marchesana, heedless of the snow now turning to ice beneath my feet, shut myself in Angela’s and my room and waited for the world to fall in on me. Madonna’s summons was not long in coming. Angela was her messenger, her face white as a goose egg as she peered around our door and told me I was wanted.

I went immediately; though delay could not make matters any worse, I decided it was best to confront my fate head on, before I had time to think about it. As I entered the room I dropped madonna a deep curtsey. With a swish of velvet, the thud of her small feet pounding the floor, she was close enough to grasp me by the ear and pull me to my feet. Then she slapped my face so hard I felt the bones of my jaw jar together and saw a heaven of exploding stars before my eyes.

“God’s blood and balls, girl, what did you mean by such behaviour?” she yelled, inches from my face, her breath, smelling of cloves, in my nostrils. “As if it were not enough that my brother, ‘who loves me as himself,’” she quoted with a sneer, “seems set on jeopardising everything we…I…Do you imagine playing mares and stallions with him gives you the right to meddle in matters of state? If that were the case half the women in Italy would be queuing up to advise me. You believed I didn’t know?” she went on, pausing only long enough to read the question that must have formed itself on my face. “You think when I ask Michelotto where my brother is and he says the duke is not to be found we don’t both know perfectly well what he means? Oh, grow up, Violante.”

Not knowing my true compulsion to tell her what I knew, or thought I knew, or had conjured out of a few words, half understood, she meant to humiliate me. Instead, she made me angry. My eyes felt hot and dry; a tiny muscle began to tick in my bruised cheek; my belly clenched with rage until I feared the baby might be crushed.

“I have every right,” I shouted back, rushing on before Donna Lucrezia could recover from her astonishment. “My only misjudgement was in thinking I could say what I had to say in front of the duke and Don Alfonso.”

“What are you talking about, girl?”

“I am pregnant, madonna. With Cesare’s child. I think that gives me at least as much right to be concerned for his welfare as you.”

Silence. A log settled in the fire with a soft crackle. I heard the foolish, monotonous cooing of a wood pigeon from beyond the casement. Donna Lucrezia stared at me, fists clenched at her sides, breast heaving beneath the lace fichu she had put on to appear modest in front of her father-in-law. A smile forced its way on to her lips, though her eyes seemed magnified by unshed tears. “Of course,” she said. Her face assumed an inward expression, brows drawn together in a slight frown, as though she were searching for something. “The eating.”

“Eating?”

“Yes. Surely you have noticed how Cesare eats? He is always ravenous.”

“I have not really had the opportunity, madonna.”

She looked surprised at this, then said, “No, I suppose you haven’t. When he was born, he was very poorly, you see, not expected to live. He was ill nearly all the time until he was five. He had to spend every afternoon resting. Can you imagine it?”

I could not. Cesare was notorious for the hours he kept, holding audiences in the middle of the night with bleary-eyed ambassadors, hunting at dawn with companions who frequently nodded off to sleep on horseback while he watched his pet leopards pit their cunning and agility against swift stags and bad-tempered boar. Perhaps he had accumulated a lifetime’s rest in five years of afternoon naps. Perhaps he had been born knowing the time would come when he would be forced to race against his father’s advancing years to build a state strong enough to withstand the old pope’s death when it came.

“Anyway,” continued madonna, “having spent five years living on little more than bread and goats’ milk, once he grew strong enough he developed an enormous appetite. It seems this little one,” and she nodded towards my belly, “is going to be just the same.”

I felt lightheaded with relief at the good natured way she seemed to be taking my news, so much so I feared I might faint and had to ask for permission to sit. Madonna herself drew up a stool for me, asked me if I needed water. We sat either side of the fire, madonna in her high-cushioned chair, the tips of her toes scarcely grazing the floor, me on my stool, trying to ignore my aching back. Seeing me reach for a log and the poker, she immediately admonished me and rang for her slave.