Sins of the House of Borgia (44 page)

“You can have my bed tonight,” said Mariam, setting the lamp down on the chest. “You look dead on your feet.”

“I have walked a lot of the way.”

“From Ferrara?”

“My horse was stolen, then…”

“Shhh. Sit down.” She took a stub of candle on an iron dish and lit it from the lamp. “I’m going to the kitchen for hot water and some food. If anyone comes near, you blow out the lantern and you hardly even breathe.”

“I’ll go. I don’t want to get you into trouble. I have my mule. I can get to the Vatican in no time.”

“And what do you suppose you would find there? You’re going nowhere till you’ve had a bath, a supper, and a good night’s sleep. Your brother should be ashamed of himself. Calls himself a righteous Jew and won’t even open his house to his own sister when she needs him. Your parents would turn in their graves.”

“Mariam, what has happened here?”

Understanding my need to know was greater even than my need for food and rest, she sat down opposite me, resting the candle on the floor beside her stool. “Last spring the pope levied new taxes on the Jews. It was supposed to pay for a new public well. As you know, the only one we have is the one in the Piazza Giudecca and that almost dried up last summer. But we soon discovered the money was going to pay for troops for your…for the Duke Valentino. So a lot of people refused to pay. Beatings of Jews increased. There were groups of young louts hanging around the synagogue on Saturdays, shouting, pushing us around. Nobody actually said they were the duke’s men but everyone knew it. Your father negotiated a meeting with the pope to try and sort things out. I don’t know what happened but he came back bulging with rage like an angry toad, and that night the duke ordered raids on the homes of all the leading Jewish families. They stole money and jewels, even our
menorahs
. When they came here, your father tried to reason with them, but one of them hit him with his pike handle. He died three days later.” She reached across to pat my knee, to comfort me, though I felt no grief, not then, just a cold fury which seemed to turn my vital organs to ice, one by one, brittle and sharp.

“He never regained consciousness. He suffered very little, thanks be. The pope sent a message of condolence and promised Eli the duke would see his men suitably punished.”

Oh, he is very good at suitable punishment, I thought. Mariam waited for me to say something, but what I had to say was not to her. With a sort of embarrassed clucking in the back of her throat, she rose, picked up her candle and went to the kitchens for food and hot water.

I submitted to her kindness, allowing her to strip me of my worn and travel-stained clothes and sponge warm water gently over my shoulders as I sat hunched before the fire in a small laundry copper. She tutted at my sore nipples and went off to rummage for some salve or other among her simples. While I dried myself, she unpicked the rest of Donna Lucrezia’s gold from my bodice and piled the coins carefully on top of her chest before dumping all my old clothes on her fire, even Beppo’s doublet, though its wool padding threatened to stifle the blaze. Then she gave me underclothes, and a gown to put on which I recognised.

“This is one of my old ones,” I exclaimed. “It’ll never fit me now.”

But it did, it fitted me passably well, though it was a little short in the hem and tight in the bodice, and I realised how brief a time I had been away.

“Have you kept all my clothes?” I asked, as Mariam thrust a dish of artichokes fried with oil and garlic into my lap.

“You never know when things might come in handy. Now, eat up while I see to the baby.”

The artichokes were one of Mariam’s own specialities, but they tasted bitter and metallic, as though they had been left too long in the skillet, and the sliminess of the oil made me nauseous. My skin glowed from the bath but my blood still felt cold, my tears for my father frozen. I set the food aside and tried to take pleasure in watching my son luxuriate in the warm water, wriggling his stout legs and arms and squealing with glee as Mariam splashed his belly and tickled him with the corner of the wash cloth. She showed great confidence with him for a childless woman. For as long as I had known her, since I was handed into her care by Señora Abravanel at the end of our journey from Toledo, Mariam had been old, with no family but ours. Perhaps by now Eli and Josefa had children. I thought of asking her, then decided I didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter anyway. Mariam dried Girolamo then laid him on the rug and set about applying goose grease to his thighs and bottom to ease his sore skin.

“Not circumcised, then,” she observed, with a slight pursing of her lips.

“Neither is his father,” I said, and saw how she was about to say more, and how something in my expression stopped her. I wondered if she had ever been with a man, ever even seen a grown man naked, and felt suddenly far older than her.

“How little I know about you, Mariam.”

She shrugged. “Nothing much to know,” she said, beginning to wind Girolamo in clean bands.

“Leave him. He likes to play.” I remembered him lying on the rug in Taddeo’s orchard while Angela and I ate strawberries and drank frascati. I had not thought of Angela once, I realised, since leaving Medelana. Guiltily, I tried to imagine how she must be feeling, now that she no longer had any prospect of marrying Giulio, but any emotion other than my anger at Cesare was beyond my grasp. I was filled with it, lying like a rich meal in my belly, the taste of it in my mouth, its colours in the shadows which wavered across Mariam’s walls.

“I have thought too little of my family’s honour for too long, Mariam.”

“You were obedient to your father. What more can be expected of a girl? If you ask me…”

“My father wished me to serve Donna Lucrezia and make a good marriage.” We both gazed at the baby, who smiled and gurgled and stretched his long fingers like the petals of a lily opening to the sun.

“He knows he’s the centre of attention.”

“Yes.” Like father, like son. I scooped him up and held him close, wrapped in the clean shawl Mariam had found for me. He fixed me with that unblinking stare of his. Madonna used to say babies look like that because they are born blind, but even if that were so, Girolamo was not blind now. He was hungry for the world and all it had to tantalise and enchant his senses.

“Keep him for me, Mariam. Have him circumcised. Have him taught Torah. Bring him up a Jew. Keep the gold, that should cover much of the cost of him and I have no need of it.” Now I knew what I wanted to say to her the words were falling over themselves to escape my mouth.

“You know I can’t. You know Ser Eli would forbid it utterly. You can stay here tonight and be gone before dawn. That’s the best I can do for you, for your mother’s memory.”

“Please, Mariam. It’s me Eli’s repudiated, not Girolamo. He’s a baby. You can make anything of him. He doesn’t have to be a Borgia. He can be a Sarfati, grow up with Josefa’s children, go into business with my brothers. I named him for my father, you know.”

“You think you can give your child away just like that?” Mariam did not raise her voice, but spoke to me in a furious hiss, like an angry goose. “You think your poor mother dragged you all the way from Toledo and died doing it just so you could go giving away babies as if they grew on trees? He it is who gives us children and only He can decide to take them away. You lie with the son of a pope and believe yourself greater than the Almighty?”

“I just want him to be safe.” I sounded like a plaintive child myself.

“Safe? There is no safe in this world, but Esther…”

“Yes?”

“There is love. You follow love.”

“And duty?”

“You follow love.” Her eyes shone among the soft creases of her face and her liver-spotted hands plucked at her skirt. She made it sound so simple, yet what if love tore you two ways? Mariam, it seemed, had no more to say on the matter. She bossed me to bed, just as she had done when I was a child, tucking my son into the crook of my arm. I had only the vaguest memory of her climbing in beside me, the dip of the mattress beneath her weight. My sleep was profound and dreamless, and when Mariam woke me just before dawn, nothing was any clearer than it had been. I seemed to be caught in some kind of endless relay race, in which parents handed heartbreak on to their children.

While I fed Girolamo, Mariam packed a small satchel for me with the remains of last night’s bread, a pot of the salve she had given me for my breasts and, most particularly, Donna Lucrezia’s gold, counting out the coins with great deliberation. Then she went to the shelf where she kept her simples and some bunches of dried herbs and took down what looked like a book. A book? Mariam?

“I kept this for you too,” she said. The leather binding was salt stained and battered, what might once have been red morocco turned rusty brown with age and neglect.

“What is it?”

“Your mother’s recipe book. It was among your things when you came here. I don’t expect you remember. There never seemed to be a good time to hand it over, but now you’re a grown woman with a family of your own, you should have it.”

The book felt both strange and familiar in my hands, the leather as warm to the touch as my lover’s skin. When I unwound the thong from the toggle which held it closed, a few loose leaves drifted to the floor, carrying with them old smells of our kitchen in Toledo, of fried almonds and orange oil, cinnamon and roast lamb, precious vanilla, like a silk lining for the nostrils, scents as frail and desiccated as pressed flowers. Uncertain what Mariam expected of me, I bent to pick up the loose pages, to hide my face.
Lokum,
I read,
a sweet made from rosewater by the Moors of Al-Andalus. I do not think there is a Spanish name for it.
Lokum. In exile, Cesare would teach me to make lokum, and we would be happy. Mariam had said, follow love, and now love had shown me a signpost.

“Thank you, Mariam. You should know men may come for me from Don Jofre Borgia. If they do, be sure and tell them I am going to the Vatican and will return the mule to San Clemente.” The mule. I had forgotten it until now. If it had been stabled, or left in the courtyard, Eli must know I was still here. Perhaps Don Jofre’s men had already come for me and Eli had sent them away. No, of course not; it was barely light, no hint of day yet but a faint paling of Mariam’s square of wax-papered window.

“I think you had better forget the mule, Esther. I’ll let you out by the back gate. If anyone asks, just say you are going to the market in Campo de’ Fiori. You have to go early to get the best vegetables.” I hardly heard her, so loudly did my impatience to be gone rage in my head. My father was dead and my brothers cared nothing for me. Now, at last, I was truly Violante, the
conversa
, the girl with no family name but the one my son gave me. Borgia.

***

A silvery mist clung to the river, from which the figures of other early risers, bargees, and beggars, bowed women with great covered baskets, emerged with the silence of wraiths. The mist seemed to dampen sound as well as sight. I had to step smartly down the river embankment to make way for a raucous hunting party, young men and women in bright velvets and plumed hats riding skittish horses, with falcons balanced on their wrists. I thought I recognised one of the young men, an Orsini cousin who had accompanied Donna Lucrezia to Ferrara, but he showed no sign of having noticed me. Below the embankment was a different world, where the paupers who slept under the bridges lay caught in the mud like Adam awaiting the Creator’s hand. A row of men in manacles and leg irons, chained together at the neck so their heads looked like beads strung together on an ogre’s necklace, clanked aboard a sailing barge, bound for Ostia and the galleys.

Yet, as I climbed the steps in the westernmost pier of the Sant’Angelo bridge, a ragged rim of sunlight began to show above the roofs and towers to the east. Gulls mewed as they curved across the sky above the mist and the undersides of their wings caught the gold of the sun. I smiled at them, my heart caught in a sudden bliss of pale aquamarine, oyster pink, primrose yellow. I thought of the gulls wheeling past the high windows of Cesare’s apartments in the Vatican, of his valet opening the shutters to get the best light to shave him by, and the new sun catching the red lights in his beard. You follow love. Love is the most constant of constant things.

A crowd had gathered in Saint Peter’s Square. This would not have been unusual except for the early hour. The parties of pilgrims and other foreign visitors who came to look at the palace of the ruler of Christendom would appear later, after Mass and breakfast and the customary haggling with the city guides. All heads were turned towards the north side of the square, in the direction of the Porta del Popolo. As I joined the throng I was jostled and carried forward in a sudden lurch.

“What’s going on?” I asked, not being tall enough to see over the heads of several men in front of me.

“The duke’s leaving,” said one over his shoulder. Leaving? How could he be? Don Jofre had promised I would see him this morning. Something must have happened, but what? Tying Girolamo more securely into my shawl so I had both arms free, I fought my way to the front of the crowd, ignoring those who jostled and swore at me as I trod on toes and elbowed ribs. As I dodged a big pikeman in Cesare’s livery who was struggling to keep a passage clear for his lord’s cortege, the mass of people behind me fell suddenly still and silent. For a second it was as though the whole world had stopped; I half expected the birds to drop out of the sky, a thousand tiny Icaruses falling for the one who had truly flown too close to the sun.