Sins of the House of Borgia (52 page)

So there was nothing to stop me making my own way to his apartments. I had no need to wait for a summons as if I were some slave girl he might look to for necessary relief. I would simply make my way to his rooms and wait for him, and if he kept me waiting too long I might even send a slave myself to remind him of his obligation.

“Well, no need to ask where you’re going in your finery with your hair all crimped.” Monna Vannozza. She stood at the foot of the private staircase flanked by two of the Swiss guards like a small crow courted by a brace of parrots. As she looked me up and down in contemptuous silence, I could hear the muffled hubbub of conversation from the dining hall and delicate scents of vanilla and beeswax reached my nose, a combination which to this day makes me think of chestnuts. “I dare say he’ll keep you waiting,” she went on. “There is more at stake here than your fluttering heart.”

“Of course I know that, madama; I am not stupid.”

“Yet you put on a good pretence of it. Violante, walk with me a moment.” She took my arm, not too firmly but with a demeanour that made it plain she did not expect me to resist, and led me out of earshot of the guards, into an alcove which housed a classical Venus without arms.

“I have spoken to you of the danger I believe you present to my son,” she began, “and you have chosen to pursue your own selfish course despite me. Perhaps, then, you will listen if I tell you I believe you and your son are at risk from him.” She paused, scratching at the dust caught in the folds of the Venus’ draperies with a slightly yellowed nail. “My son is a passionate man, Violante.”

I wanted to say, I know, but then I realised. I had seen Cesare angry and wilful; I had known him flirtatious and seductive, and helpless with laughter, but not passionate, never that. He had, it seemed to me now, something cold, detached, and analytical at his core, a kind of personal Dis where all passion would freeze. If he were capable of it, I wanted to find out for myself, not stand beneath a marble Venus and be told by his mother. “I must go,” I said.

“Wait, let me finish. This…passion of his, there is no other word for it. It is something very particular, and very deep. Hidden, perhaps, where you do not see it. But I do, and I see it sucking you in. You are like a small boat in the vortex of a sinking ship. Take heed of me. Go back to your own room, I beg you.”

If she had spoken as plainly about Cesare’s passion as it was her custom to speak about most things, perhaps I would have done as she asked. Perhaps not. This pleading without substance merely aroused my spite. “Did you think taking him off to Mass every morning was going to make him change his ways?” I snapped. “Did you imagine he would be asking Pope Pius to restore his red hat rather than the white lance?”

To my astonishment, she gave a snort of laughter. “I am not a fool, girl, and I understand Cesare a good deal better than you do. He goes to church not to be seen by God but by the men close to our new Holy Father. Pius is as pious does and he surrounds himself with devout servants. I believe Cesare even took Holy Communion with him just before the coronation. I’ll wager there was some merriment in Hades that day. I believe it is a measure of Our Lord’s compassion my son did not choke on the sacrament.”

A measure more, I thought, of Cesare’s lack of belief, for anyone who paused to reflect on the notion that the bread and wine were miraculously transformed into a man’s flesh and blood when the priest said his words over them was bound to choke. But I was in no mood for theology. “Well, you know how Cesare loves his food. And so I must not keep him waiting for his supper. Excuse me, madama.” I pushed past her out of the alcove. Wrong footed by my rudeness, she let me pass.

***

I need not have worried about keeping Cesare from his supper. Apart from the guard on his door, who recognised what I was there for even if he did not know who I was, and stood aside for me with an unmistakable leer, the private apartments were deserted. A fire burned in the reception room, by whose light I saw a low table spread for two with delicate porcelain and gold cutlery. There were even forks, I noted with some misgivings, for I was not very adept in the use of forks. Don Alfonso had brought some from Venice shortly before I left Ferrara, and though we had all tried them at private dinners in Donna Lucrezia’s apartments, most of us had made a pretty poor fist of it and ended up dropping our food in our laps.

I took a spill from an alabaster vase standing on the hearth and lit the candles, trimmed and pristine in an ornate silver-gilt stand. The clean, sweet scent of beeswax mingled with pine resin from the smouldering spill and a wraith of jasmine which set up a starved tingling in my women’s parts. I sat down on one of the divans arranged along two sides of the table, my hands squeezed between my thighs to stop them shaking. Desire fluttered in my belly like a trapped moth. Never mind the forks, I thought, for I would have no appetite for food. Wine shimmered honey gold in a crystal jug, but I dared not pour myself a goblet in case I spilled any. I looked around the room in the hope of finding something to distract me.

It was richly furnished, the wall panels decorated with scenes from the life of Caesar, the ceiling studded with gilded bosses which featured bulls and lilies and Saint Peter’s keys. A set of ebony chairs inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl stood sentinel around the walls, and the divan where I was seated and its companion were upholstered in Alexandrine velvet. A motto was carved into a marble panel set above the fireplace:
Aut Caesar, aut nihil.
Caesar or nothing. Nothing, I thought, casting my eyes once more around the elegant, empty room, a stage awaiting its principle actor.

A log collapsed in the fireplace in a shower of sparks. I raked the embers and tossed in another from the copper log box on the hearth. As the heat intensified and the candles burned down, my eyelids grew heavy, but I had to stay awake. What would Cesare think if he found me asleep? Taking one of the candles from the massive candelabrum I determined to explore. After all, it was only a small set of rooms, and I would easily hear his tread on the stairs, the clatter of arms as his guard came to attention. I would have plenty of time to return to the reception room and arrange myself on the divan as though I had never stirred from it.

The rooms were linked by doors of walnut, first a small bureau containing a work table set with writing materials. A magnifying lens lay on top of an open book, a Euclid by the looks of it, or perhaps a Vitruvius, for it was filled with annotated diagrams and only sparse lines of Latin text. Vitruvius, Donna Lucrezia used to say, was her brother’s Bible and guns his Holy Apostles preaching their gospel of power and destruction. There was also a locked book case, its contents chained behind ornate brass grilles, their jewelled bindings giving off a sullen glint in the light of my candle. Such valuable texts had perhaps come from the library at Urbino. The thought sent a frisson of unease through me as I pushed open the next door and found myself on the threshold of my lover’s bedroom.

And there I stayed, held fast by an overwhelming sense of intrusion. I felt like a child who has inadvertently stumbled on her parents making love. Why? Was this not where I wanted to be, where Cesare intended me to be? I stared at the bed, its curtains tied back to reveal perfectly plumped pillows, silk sheets and a brocade coverlet turned down at one corner. I longed to lie on it, to lift the sheets and slide under them, to rest my head on the pillows just as he did each night, yet I was barred by its complete impersonality. Not a single crease or indentation betrayed the fact that anyone had ever slept in this bed, dreamed or made love in it, or simply stared into the dark and waited for the night to end. It might almost have been put there along with the gold forks and the new candles, to set the stage for a seduction.

Yet the jasmine scent was stronger here, drawing me into the room. A fire was lit here too, and by its uncertain, flickering light I saw faces gazing down at me from the walls, mocking, impassive, eyeless. They flashed sudden, toothless grins, made soundless screams, pouted at me enigmatically with ruby lips. Though I knew they were hanging from the walls, they seemed nevertheless to be hovering just in front of them, challenging my sense of the possible and bringing to mind Monna Vannozza and her stories of spells and changelings.

But Monna Vannozza was as mad as Don Sigismondo and I knew what they were, these glowing faces. They were masks, gold masks. No doubt they were the masks made by Fidelma’s brother and given to Cesare by Donna Isabella. I smiled to imagine her expression if she knew he had used them to decorate his bedroom, that den of mysterious vices. I walked slowly around the walls, holding my candle up to each of them, admiring the wit and delicacy of the worksmanship, the tiny quirks of expression which had made them spring to life in the firelight.

Hanging right beside his bed, where a pious man might hang a crucifix, was a mask shaped like a skull, the jaw articulated with tiny gold pins and set with mother of pearl teeth. A diamond was mounted in one of the canines, giving the skull’s grin a certain roguish charm. This death’s head had the sort of smile which forced you to smile back. Tomorrow morning, I asked it, reaching up to touch the fine sweep of the cheekbone, will I wake up looking at you? If not tomorrow, one day, you may be sure, the skull replied. The fire popped and spat, the wax in my candle sizzled softly before spilling over on to my hand where it stiffened and dried. The silence left by Cesare’s absence blanketed everything as I made my way back to the reception room, carefully closing each door behind me.

How much longer? I crossed to the window and pushed the shutters ajar, but there was nothing to see, nothing to hear except the restless conversation of leaves in a rising wind and beyond them the river slapping against its banks. These rooms overlooked the palace garden, but the entertainment was all indoors this evening due to the lateness of the season. A sudden animal scream pierced the darkness, just a rabbit perhaps, or a water rat, and I thought of the leopards, their lithe, silent bodies, the secret glint of their eyes, the bloody strings of flesh in their teeth. No rest, not in this house. Closing the shutters, replacing my candle in the stand on the table, I sat back down to wait.

***

A taste overshadowed the place between sleeping and waking, something dry and dark and bitter on the tip of my tongue, the inside of my lower lip. I opened my eyes to find the darkness sculpted by candlelight into the shape of a face, Cesare’s face, so close to mine it was little more than an abstraction of light and shade. But my body recognised him, drawing itself around him like a closing fist.

“The powder of the cocoa beans,” he whispered, “a peace offering.”

I licked my lip, discovering with my tongue the tip of the finger which had opened my mouth, tasting salt now, mingled with the strangeness of the cocoa grains. “What hour is it?” I mumbled, still half asleep.

“No idea. The fifth or sixth maybe? It’s the middle of the night in any case. I could not get away sooner. The Florentine ambassador arrived very late with some story about an amorous adventure that had gone wrong, and there is much fence mending to be done between me and Florence. Besides,” he added, straightening up from where he had been squatting in front of me, stretching and yawning, “I like Messer Niccolo. He has a quick wit.”

I sat up, smoothing my hair and skirt, dabbing the remains of the cocoa from my lips with a fingertip.

“What do you think of it?”

“Strange. Bitter. It tastes like…tree bark. What do you do with it?”

“Apparently there was some in the wine sauce for the hare, but I could not taste it. That is why I had this ground separately.” He tapped the lid of a small spice box lying on the table next to the salt.

“You know what they will say? That you have brought it up here to mix with poisons. The career of the cocoa bean will be over before it has begun.” We laughed and he sat down beside me, his long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles.

“The cocoa bean as metaphor. Are you hungry?” I shook my head. He poured two cups of wine. “Drink then. You were sleeping with your mouth open. It must be dry.” I felt myself beginning to blush, and he caressed my burning cheek with one finger, tracing a line like a duelling scar from my temple to the corner of my mouth. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you looked gorgeous. I almost didn’t want to wake you, but I did really. Music?” His mouth was so close to mine I could feel his breath on my lips, smell wine and cardamom and jasmine. I could see nothing but his eyes, huge and black with a mote of quicksilver somewhere at their heart, but there must have been a musician in the room with us because a lute began to play, a fountain of notes pouring into the hot spring of desire which was dissolving me.

We kissed, first with artifice and then with greed. Something fell off the table and crashed to the floor, then there was more knocking, shouting, scuffling, a thud like the sound of a body hitting the door. The lutenist stopped playing. Cesare was on his feet, dagger drawn. “Back me up,” he ordered the lutenist, waiting with his free hand on the door catch until the man had put down his lute, drawn a short sword, and stepped up beside his master. Then Cesare hauled open the door and sprang through it just as Don Jofre fell across the threshold into the room. A kind of lunatic mirth rose up inside me and I began to laugh uncontrollably, though neither of the brothers could see the joke. Cesare looked murderous. He kicked Jofre over on to his back and pinned him there with one foot planted on his breastbone while the lutenist held the point of his sword to Jofre’s throat and several men at arms with pikes at the ready blocked off the head of the stairs.