Sins of the House of Borgia (40 page)

“Love,” said Taddeo, in the tone, both regretful and resentful, of a man who has discovered the antique Venus he had set his heart on is nothing but a modern fake, “is somewhat like my pike. Introduce a little salt into their pools and they all die.”

“Did you never mean to marry me, then? You knew the duke’s father was an old man and might have died at any time.”

“Do me the honour of not doubting my word, madam. Have I not kept my promise to you, even though your duke has failed to acknowledge his bastard?”

Now I felt the tears behind my eyes, the grief squeezing my throat, but I leaned closer to Angela and fought it.

“So what has changed?”

“Poison, madam, poison. That says to me the duke has got too big for his boots. He has become careless. Careless men will lose their states as easily as they might lose a pair of stockings or a throw of the dice.”

“We will see what Donna Lucrezia has to say about this,” said Angela.

“I dare say she will do as her husband requires of her, at last.”

“Come, Violante, we will return to Ferrara.” She pushed me in front of her, turning away from Taddeo with a haughty toss of her head. “You will allow us horses, Ser Taddeo, if only to hasten the hour when we are out of your sight.”

He did not reply immediately and though I refused to look back at him, I could sense some struggle taking place within him; it seemed to disturb the thick, peach scented air as we passed through it. Then he said, more gently, “You may have my coach, Violante, and whatever supplies you need for the journey.”

Even a fake may have some value, if it is good enough.

***

On arriving at Ferrara, we found the castle deserted and the court removed to Medelana. We sent the carriage back to Occhiobello and set out on horseback to make the journey into the mountains, riding astride, with stirrups, like a couple of camp followers, said Angela, and I think we both wondered if something of the sort was what our suddenly terrifying and empty future might hold for us. We had no escort, and it was very likely our future held nothing more than a band of brigands with long knives and a sharp eye for expensive horse furniture. But the road was quiet and the air grew clearer as we left the city behind us and climbed away from the river plain. We even sang from time to time, to humour Girolamo, who lay in a reed basket lashed to my pommel. Angela called him Moses.

There was an inn, we knew, at Quartexana, where parties travelling from Ferrara to Medelana would usually break their journey. I was all for stopping there only to change our horses but Angela insisted we stay the night. It would be madness to travel after dark.

In the inn parlour, rumour was rife. Though we sat in a private booth to eat our evening meal, the conversations of our fellow guests were clearly audible through the drawn curtains, hot words turning the food to ashes in our mouths.

“They say the Holy Father was heard making a pact with the devil with his dying breath.”

“By his confessor, of all people.”

“Pleading for a few more years, I heard.”

“And the devil there beside him in the guise of a black monkey.”

“I heard the old sot was so bloated they couldn’t ram his corpse into its coffin.”

“And the duke’s men looted his apartments so thoroughly there weren’t even the vestments left to bury him in.”

Attempting to force the innkeeper’s wife’s stringy mutton down my throat with a gulp of thin wine, I stared at Angela, and saw my own wretchedness reflected in her miserable expression. How long had the pope been dead? I wondered. Even rumour can only travel at the speed of a fast horse. Even if Cesare had still been alive when these myths of his father’s end fled Rome, he might well be dead by now, suspended like a daemon between his final breath and the first whisperings of the tales that would become his legend. I imagined our fellow guests were talking this way solely for our benefit. I was certain they knew who we were. The curtain shielding us was somehow transparent to them if not to us. We were mocked, degraded, defenceless.

“We should travel on tonight,” I muttered to Angela, half choked by a gobbet of gristle. “We’re not safe here.”

“Nobody knows who we are, sweetheart; how could they? And I swear, any more of that road tonight will shake out all my teeth.” She flashed me a wide smile. “Imagine if I were to present myself to Giulio transformed into a toothless crone.”

“Do you think Cesare is dead too?”

“Cesare? He has the constitution of an ox and a digestion to match. I doubt there’s a poison invented that could kill Cesare.”

I thought of the sick child madonna had conjured for me, living on bread sops and goats’ milk, gasping for air on hot afternoons, his lips and fingernails blue as sloes. “But if someone has tried once, they will try again. With something a little more certain. A blade, or the
garotta
.” His own favourite.

“If they have tried—and remember, we do not know that for sure—they will not get a second chance. Come now, we’re exhausted. It will all look less bleak in the morning.”

She was right. It was impossible, even after the landlady’s execrable breakfast of rye bread fit to sole shoes and a cheese so salty it stung the tongue, not to feel optimistic. The verges were studded with tiny flowers, fragrant cushions of saxifrage and juniper, gentians like flakes of virgin blue chipped from the face of the sky. Pale grey stones crunched like sugar under our horses’ hooves, and when we stopped to drink, the water in the swift running streams tasted of the clean air of the hills. But as we clattered through the gate into Medelana and looked up at the villa which dominated the slope above the town, I shivered to see how its high, blind curtain wall cut into a sky the fragile blue of a robin’s egg.

***

We were met by Ippolito. Standing in the courtyard, his soutane blowing against his legs in the dusty breeze, he banished the groom and held our horses himself as we dismounted. Though he gave Girolamo, whom he had not yet seen, a perfunctory smile as I gathered him up out of the basket, it did nothing to dispel his grim, preoccupied demeanour. He did not kiss either of us; he made no comment on our arrival, unescorted, hatless and sunburned as a couple of peasants.

“I had to tell her,” he said. “Dear God, I wish you two had been here. It was dreadful. I thought she had run quite mad.” Remembering the scenes at Belfiore when she had heard the news of Cesare’s invasion of Urbino, I could well believe it. “And the best I could find to deal with her were Fidelma and that empty-headed Elisabetta Senese.”

“You will take us straight to her?” asked Angela. Was no one ever going to get to the point?

“What news of Cesare?” I demanded. Ippolito shook his head. My legs, still shaky from long hours of hard riding, threatened to give out completely. Tripping over a loose thread in my skirt, I longed to fall, to rest my cheek against the cool, worn flagstones and never rise again.

“She had a letter from Cosenza this morning. Cesare’s hanging on, but only just, by all accounts. He has the Vatican under siege. No one goes in or out, not even for His Holiness’ funeral. Michelotto’s in charge. Cesare is raving most of the time, they say. Cosenza does his best to be encouraging, but reading between the lines, it sounds like Dante’s inferno in there.”

“Was it poison?” asked Angela.

“Cosenza doesn’t think so. The physicians all agree it’s the tertian fever. It’s been a particularly bad summer for it, apparently. The trouble is, with Cesare keeping them shut in the palace, in his very bed-chamber, Cosenza says, there’s no one to make an announcement so the rumour-mongers are having a field day.”

“He has lost his judgement then,” said Angela, a flat note of finality in her voice. Cardinal Cosenza was a reliable reporter, an old and loyal friend of the household at Santa Maria in Portico and a palace cardinal of long standing.

“But he can get well. Many survive the tertian fever, and he is young and strong.”

“Oh Violante, if your love were medicine, he would be well already.” Angela gave a little laugh and squeezed my arm, but Ippolito looked dark and preoccupied. The hearts of women were clearly far from his thoughts.

“Who is here?” asked Angela, trying to sound casual, as we climbed the wide, shallow stairs from the courtyard to the first floor whose arcade was smothered in dusty bourgainvillea leaves. The flowers were all gone this late in the summer.

“Giulio is at Belriguardo with our father. Alfonso and Ferrante are there too. I am only here because I had to bring her the news about her father.” He gave a gallows laugh. “Being the priest in the family, I suppose they thought I was best placed to bring her comfort.”

“And have you?” asked Angela, arch with disappointment.

“See for yourself.” He stopped before a closed door and knocked. We waited. He knocked again with greater insistence. The door opened a little way and the wan face of the Dalmatian emerged from the shadows.

“Tell your mistress her cousin and Monna Violante are here,” said Ippolito, speaking loudly and deliberately, as if that would make him understood. The Dalmatian’s inability to speak or understand Italian had, it seemed to me, developed into a positive act of will, a way to deny the collar around her neck and keep the road home clear in her mind’s eye. Her face disappeared again, a sallow moon swallowed by cloud. Ippolito pushed the door wider and stood aside to let us pass.

All the window shutters were fast, and at first I could see nothing. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I realised there was, in fact, almost nothing to see. The room was bare of furnishings except for a pallet on the floor, up against one wall. There madonna sat, hugging her knees, her hair hanging lank and loose to either side of her face. Her gown was coarse black linen, her chemise frayed where the lace had been torn from it. She wore no jewellery but her wedding ring, and the ash cross of mourning was marked on her forehead. I was not sure she had noticed our entrance, then I saw the whites of her eyes gleam briefly in a bar of afternoon sunlight shining through a gap in the shutters as she glanced at us and looked away again.

We curtseyed.

“Angela,” said madonna. Her voice was hoarse from weeping. Her words sounded like sobs, as though the grief inside her could not help but spill out when she opened her mouth. “I will speak to you later. For now, I have matters I must discuss with Violante. Alone.”

“But…”

“Later. Refresh yourself. Change your clothes. All this way on horseback must have worn you out.” How could she know the details of our journey? Angela threw me a look of helpless puzzlement and withdrew. Gesturing to me to sit beside her on the pallet, madonna went on,

“I can’t face her just yet. She will ask me about Giulio and, oh, Violante, I have done everything wrong.”

“Wrong, madonna?”

“When Alfonso came to offer his condolences, I shouldn’t have let him go; I should have hung on to him. Now they will all be plotting my downfall at Belriguardo. You know there are already murmurings that my marriage is not lawful because I was not properly divorced from Giovanni Sforza.”

“Oh madonna, that is old gossip. You cannot imagine Duke Ercole would take any notice of it. No one can prove now one way or the other whether or not that marriage was consummated.”

“There is always Giovanni’s word. While my father lived, no one took him seriously. Now, however…Oh God, I wish I could talk to Cesar, I wish…Do you think he still lives, Violante?” She had begun to rock back and forth like a madwoman. An earthenware pitcher and cup stood beside her. I poured water and offered it to her, as much to distract her from her morbid speculations as to quench a thirst. She looked at the cup and shook her head. Just then, Girolamo, who had slept sweetly while rocking in his basket on the back of my horse, woke up and began to grizzle.

“Oh, let me see him,” exclaimed madonna. “I expect he has grown a good deal in the country.”

“I thank the Creator he is strong, madonna.”

“Give him to me, let me hold him.”

I passed him into her outstretched arms and immediately his grizzling gave way to a full-throated bawling. “I’m sorry, he must be hungry,” I said.

“In him at any rate his father lives.” She kissed his forehead and handed him back to me. “Feed him,” she said with a smile both warm and wistful. “If I had only been able to give Alfonso a son, things would be very different, for me and Angela.”

“So you do not expect the duke to give his permission for Giulio to marry her?”

Donna Lucrezia shook her head. “Even if Cesar recovers, how much ground will he have lost? What if we get a hostile pope who will not reappoint him gonfalonier? Della Rovere wants Saint Peter’s throne, and he has many supporters and no love for Cesar.”

“Cesare also has supporters. Surely there must be enough cardinals whose votes he can influence to keep Cardinal Della Rovere at bay?”

“He has always tried to ensure that. We…he tried to be prepared for Papa dying. He was an old man, though he never behaved like one, did he? But who would have thought Cesar might be close to death himself when it happened? That was a trick Dame Fortune kept well hidden in her sleeve. And Della Rovere is clever, as clever as Cesar probably, and has friends in France.”

I shifted Girolamo to my other breast, wincing for I was suffering from sores on my nipples. My child had a strong suck and little regard for his mother’s comfort.