Sins of the House of Borgia (45 page)

Then the bells of the basilica began to toll the morning Angelus, the pikeman drew himself to attention, and a group of mounted soldiers rode out of the palace gates, their pace slow, their mien solemn. They were followed by eight men bearing a litter closed with curtains of crimson damask, and behind it a riderless, high-stepping war horse decked out in black velvet and bearing Cesare’s ducal coronet and other insignia on a cushion strapped to its back. I saw people cross themselves and heard a woman burst into tears somewhere behind me.

I had to know. Not knowing is the worst thing. What you know, you can deal with. Eventually. I ran across the empty space between the crowd and the litter. The distance seemed interminable; as I reached out my hand towards the gold-fringed curtains the blood hissed and pounded in my ears as though I had run all the way from Ferrara. So I did not hear the shouting, the thud of galloping hooves, the rasp of a sword drawn from its scabbard. Then suddenly my feet were running on air, an unimaginable jumble of ridges and points was digging into my left side, and my nostrils were filled with the smells of horse and leather.

“Back off, Don Jofre!” shouted a familiar voice.

“Michelotto?” He could not have heard me; I could scarcely catch my breath for speech.

The men carrying the litter halted in consternation, though they did not set it down. Michelotto lowered me gently to the ground as the crowd oohed and aahed as if they were watching a display of acrobatics.

“What the devil…? She was…she might have…” Don Jofre, breathless, red in the face, his sword still raised, reined his horse in nose to nose with Michelotto’s and glared at him. He was a head taller than his brother’s henchman, and of higher rank, yet there was no doubting who was in command of the situation.

“She meant no harm,” said Michelotto and Don Jofre’s gaze slid away. He sheathed his sword, fiddled with his reins, then turned his horse and rode back down the column to wherever he had come from. Michelotto smiled at me, displaying a jagged array of worn, brown teeth. “Is the child unharmed?”

Girolamo was bawling lustily enough to reassure me he had come to no harm. I nodded. “Thank you. Cesare…?” I jiggled Girolamo in my arms to soothe him, to be able to hear Michelotto’s response.

Michelotto’s pomegranate face looked grave. “You helped Donna Lucrezia. You will help him.”

“Michelotto, I’m not…she would have got well anyway, I suppose.”

“That is not what he believes. Let him see you.” Michelotto leaned from his saddle and lifted one of the curtains. His actions seemed interminable, his movements as slow as the sun crossing the sky, so the moment when I could peer into the dark interior of the litter came as suddenly as the sun’s disappearance below the horizon.

The smell hit me first, a sickening stew of vomit and faeces and stale sweat. And old dog. He had his blind hound with him as always. It was hard to believe anything human or animal could breathe in such an atmosphere. A hand reached out of the gloom and grabbed my shawl, so emaciated the skin had taken on the colour of the bones beneath and I thought it must be the hand of an unquiet ghost. Pulling me close, into that closed, blood dark space, that abject stench, he whispered, “Lucia. You have come to save me. Like you did before. All will be well now.” Then he was overcome by a violent bout of retching and spitting.

I caught a glimmer of his face as he sank back against his pillows, and he was smiling. His smile terrified me. I could not bear the burden of his trust. Then I realised that burden was not mine to bear. “Who is Lucia?” I asked Michelotto as he escorted me to the back of the procession where, he said, he would find me a place in a carriage.

“Oh, just a name. He gets confused. Torella has bled him so much I doubt there’s enough blood left in him to keep his mind sharp. You know Cesare and…women.” He looked sheepish, which made me uncomfortable.

“Michelotto, why are you being so good to me all of a sudden?”

He nodded at Girolamo, now thoroughly absorbed by sunlight flashing off harness and weaponry. “His son, my son,” he said, and I could have hugged him; if Michelotto did not doubt Girolamo’s parentage, then surely neither did Cesare. “Here,” he went on, drawing rein beside a closed carriage drawn by a matched six of very fine greys, “you climb up here.”

As I opened the door a woman’s voice asked, “What’s happening? Why have we stopped?” It was a strong voice, almost as deep as a man’s, and accustomed to answers.

“Don Cesar wishes this lady to join you, Monna Vannozza, if you please.”

“Whether I please or not is clearly immaterial to my son as the lady is already getting into my carriage. Has his brush with death taught him no humility?”

“I must get us moving again, madama. Don Prospero Colonna will not wait for us forever. My respects, Monna Violante.” He bowed and rode away, shouting commands as he went.

So I was to travel with my lover’s mother, the redoubtable Vannozza dei Cattanei, the spirit of whose absence from the life of Santa Maria in Portico had always seemed to me stronger than her presence in it would have been. What mother simply hands over the care of her only daughter to another woman and takes no part in her upbringing? She was a frequent visitor to her sons’ homes, and they to hers, but she had never set foot in Santa Maria while I lived there. Thinking these thoughts, it was not difficult for me to keep my eyes down and my expression suitably grave as I seated myself opposite Monna Vannozza.

“Hey, Violante!” A boy’s treble, slightly wheezy.

“Giovanni!” Although I had never especially liked the child, I turned and embraced the Infant of Rome with such passion I almost knocked the breath out of him.

“I say,” he said, pulling away from me and stroking the feather in his cap, “have you broken my feather? Where’s Lucrezia?”

“Holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Monna Vannozza, “you are the Jewess. It’s true what they say.”

“I was born Jewish, but I have converted, madonna,” I said. Her tone was not friendly, and I wondered if she was one of those who mistrusted
conversi
. She was said to be a pious woman.

“Lucrezia is her godmother, Nonna,” explained Giovanni.

“Yes, dear,” said Monna Vannozza, but continued to stare at me as if she dared not look away. The carriage lurched into motion, stopped again, then settled into a slow walk. The rumble of its wheels vibrated through the floor; the murmurs of the crowd came muffled through the dustblinds, which admitted a blurry, underwater light. “Look, Dorotea, look. Is she not the very spit of my illustrious daughter?”

“I have never had the honour of seeing the Duchess of Ferrara, madonna.” It was a gentle voice, meek, with an uncertain, wavering quality as though speech were something its owner rarely experimented with. Dorotea? Was this, then, the mysterious Dorotea Caracciolo, the woman Cesare was supposed to have kidnapped? I stole a look, and saw she was doing likewise, though not so much at me as at Girolamo, on whom her sad, dark eyes rested with a kind of saintly resignation. She shifted the weight of a bundle she carried in her lap from her left knee to her right. The bundle gave a small cry. A baby. She had a baby.

“Well, she is, you may take my word for it. It is uncanny.”

I thought Monna Vannozza was labouring the point, but perhaps she could not really remember what her daughter looked like. Dorotea’s child began to grizzle.

“Is she hungry?” demanded Monna Vannozza.

“I hope she’s not going to start crying again,” said Giovanni, puffing air down his nose and folding his arms in a parody of a vexed adult.

“She shouldn’t be. She was fed just before we left.”

“Here, give her to me.” Monna Vannozza held out her gloved and heavily jewelled hands. Rings glistened on every finger, even her thumbs, and three or four bracelets hung from each wrist. She must have been wearing most of her portable wealth. Dorotea handed over the baby. She looked to be close in age to Girolamo.

“How old is she?” I asked, wishing I had not felt compelled to do so, hoping my enquiry sounded merely friendly.

Dorotea smiled. She had a beautiful mouth, the lips full and shapely and the same dark rose colour as a November olive. “She was born just after Easter.” Not more than six weeks before Girolamo. I felt jealousy settle behind my ribs like an incubus and hoped it would not sour my milk.

“And your child?” enquired Monna Vannozza.

“In May, madonna.” Monna Vannozza looked proud; Dorotea shifted her gaze from me to the top of her baby’s head and I fancied I saw a slight blush tinge the saint-like pallor of her cheeks. I found myself wondering if he had kept her indoors these two years, like a toy in a cupboard, to be fetched out on his whim. Her skin looked too thin for wind and sunlight. At least that had not been my fate. I felt better. Then I felt like a peasant, and hid my hands among Girolamo’s wrappings, and was glad my hair was loose so I could shake it close around my chapped cheeks.

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A boy, madama.”

“Splendid.”

“Good,” said Giovanni, “he can be my friend. There’s only Camilla and she’s a girl. Where’s your husband, Violante? Did he die of the fever too, like my papa?”

I felt the two women’s eyes on me, felt them waiting to hear what I would say. So, if Dorotea did not know who Girolamo’s father was, she had guessed. “He has been very sick, sweetheart, but he is getting well now.”

“Good. You’re nice. Cesare always said you were the most fun of Lucrezia’s ladies. He said you could make jokes in Greek.”

“Only one, and it wasn’t mine; it was something I had to memorise from Aristophanes when I was a little girl. I expect Don Cesare saw through it very quickly.” All the same, I stole a glance at Dorotea to see how she would take Giovanni’s remark. She busied herself arranging her child in Monna Vannozza’s lap and appeared not to have heard him. My gaze met not hers but Monna Vannozza’s and, for a second, Cesare’s eyes looked back at me, hooded and dark, full of watchful intelligence.

“Girls don’t usually learn Greek, though, do they?” said Giovanni.

“Well, I just used to sit in with my brothers, really.” I thought of the little tutor with the burning eyes and the tubercular bloom in his cheeks, and how it would have broken his heart to know all he had taught me came down to being able to flirt in a dead language.

“I bet Dorotea can’t speak Greek.” Giovanni made her lack sound unforgivable. I took his hand and squeezed it.

“Oh really,” said Monna Vannozza. “You are too precocious, child, be silent.”

“Sorry, Nonna.” He looked contrite, but when he thought Monna Vannozza wasn’t looking, he winked at me. I wondered how old he was now. Six, perhaps? Seven?

We seemed to reach the Porta del Popolo quickly, considering the crowds lining the narrow streets and the size of our party with its horse soldiers and foot soldiers, its baggage carts and mule trains and, no doubt, the special wheeled cages in which Cesare would have his leopards transported to hunts. There we stopped, presumably to meet Don Prospero who, Monna Vannozza explained, had been forbidden to enter the city because he was at the head of a troop of Spanish infantry. Don Prospero had placed his villa at Tivoli at Cesare’s disposal to aid his recovery and that, Monna Vannozza told me, was where we were now headed.

As she was explaining this to me, the carriage door was wrenched open and Don Jofre’s face appeared, the diamond in his cap winking fiercely in the mid-morning sun.

“You’re to come with me,” he said, jerking his chin in Dorotea’s direction. A puzzled frown briefly drew her fine brows together, but she turned without question to take her daughter from Monna Vannozza. After two years with Cesare, I supposed she must have become used to mysterious commands and sudden changes of plan; though everything he did made perfect sense to Cesare, he tried to ensure it made no sense at all to anyone else.

“Not the child,” said Don Jofre. His voice was harsher than his brother’s, not so carefully tutored. Don Jofre, I decided, was a lazy man.

“But..?” Dorotea’s pale, tapered fingers tensed around her child. Monna Vannozza’s jewelled hands did likewise. In this Judgement of Solomon, there was no doubting which mother would win; the backing of superior force can transform any travesty into a just cause.

“The child will be well cared for by my illustrious mother and her wet nurse. Your husband wants you, woman, doting old fool that he is. But he most certainly does not want any reminders of your sojourn with the duke. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll get plenty more babies on you, if he still has ink in his quill.” Don Jofre and his mother exchanged identical, spiteful smiles. Tears welled up in Dorotea’s disbelieving eyes; she blinked, and they spilled over, running unchecked into the corners of her beautiful mouth. I clung so hard to Girolamo he began to squirm and whimper, and thanked my Creator for making me stubborn and manipulative and for giving Donna Lucrezia a good conscience. They could not do this to me. Girolamo had no wet nurse.

“Oh do get a move on, Dotti,” snapped Don Jofre. “There are some men from Venice waiting for you, and they look none too comfortable around my brother.” He gave a bark of laughter. “I’m afraid they believe he has risen from the dead.”

“Jofre!” Monna Vannozza raised one hand from baby Camilla to cross herself. When Cesare was a baby, it was said, she had posed with him for a Madonna and Child, but had later forbidden the statue to be displayed because she felt it to be sacrilegious. Remembering this, I felt a stab of pity for her, trying to appease whatever malign fortune had put her child in the shadow of death.