Sins of the House of Borgia (60 page)

So I will tell you I was relieved when she said, “I wish you to accompany me to the duke’s rooms, Violante. He has arranged to bring the cardinal and Don Giulio together. He wishes to make peace between them before the festivities begin tomorrow. Then we shall go to Angela. I have a proposition for her also.”

***

It was a horrible interview. Giulio, wearing a patch over his right eye and with the left still very swollen and discoloured despite the treatment with pigeon’s blood, stood in a shadowy corner of the duke’s private salon
,
outside the light cast by the lamps. Ippolito, who had been ordered back from Mantua by the duke, looked like a sulky bulldog. He stood as far from Giulio as possible in the intimate room, and refused to accept the challenge of his brother’s ruined beauty. Apart from the three Este brothers and madonna and myself, only the duke’s aide, the poet Niccolo da Corregio was present. I wondered if he was intended to compose a eulogy on the event.

The duke looked to Ippolito to open proceedings, but he refused to speak, so the duke told Giulio how sorry Ippolito was for the wrong he had done him. Then Giulio, shaking off the servant who had him by the elbow to guide him, stepped into the light. I sensed Donna Lucrezia, at my side, wince and look away. I kept my own eyes down because my position required me to do so, and saw Ippolito’s scarlet-shod feet shuffle a little beneath his soutane.

“My lord,” said Giulio, addressing himself to the duke as though they were alone together, “you see how I am. Yet,” turning to Ippolito, “I must thank God and Our Blessed Lady who have granted me my sight. And although my case has been most cruel and inhuman and done to me with no fault of mine, nonetheless I pardon your lordship and will not cease to be to you the same good brother I have always been.”

Duke Alfonso, who appeared unaware of the irony in Giulio’s tone, which, perhaps, I had picked up because I had only my ears to rely on, mumbled something then gave up and burst into tears, whereupon Correggio prayed the brothers to love one another and enjoy their state or the duke would be forced to act against his natural inclination to forgiveness.

“You will exchange a kiss of peace,” said Duke Alfonso, recovering himself. No one moved. I held my breath and I am certain Donna Lucrezia did likewise. Finally, Giulio took a step towards Ippolito.

“Your grace?” prompted the duke, and Ippolito also stepped forward. I fancied I heard no kiss, merely the rasp of beard on beard.

***

“I have laid my plans in the nick of time,” said Donna Lucrezia as soon as Giulio’s house slave had closed the door behind us and we were alone with Angela in the small day room
overlooking the garden where she now passed most of her days. Though she had no idea when her baby was due, it was clearly a matter of weeks rather than months. She lay, huge and inert, on a daybed beside the room’s single, tall window. Her thin wrap revealed not merely the swell of her belly and breasts, but the fat which mounded her thighs and shoulders and upper arms. On a table at her side stood a dish of sweetmeats and candied fruits, and a jug of sweet, yellow wine. She neither looked at us nor offered us refreshment but continued to stare out of the open window over the wet, brown garden while her hand moved mechanically between her mouth and the dish of sweets. There was no fire lit and the room was freezing. In the silence which followed Donna Lucrezia’s remark I heard nothing but the thin chirping of a winter robin, and realised even the fountains in the garden had stopped working.

Donna Lucrezia gave a sigh of exasperation. Signalling me to pull a chair up beside Angela’s daybed, she sat, leaning forward, her forearms resting along her thighs. It was a masculine pose; it reminded me of her brother. “Well if you won’t speak to me, at least you can listen. This morning my husband effected a reconciliation between his brothers. If you will care for him, Giulio is free to leave the Corte and come home.”

Another silence. It was to be a day of eloquent silences, it seemed.

“In that case,” madonna continued, “ he must stay where he is until he…grows accustomed to his condition. You must marry, clearly. I have spoken to the lord of Sassuolo, Alessandro Pio, to this end and he will gladly have you. He is most generous, for I fear your dowry cannot be much. What I have I must spend for Cesare’s release. I wrote to your brother. Suffice it to say if he were as rich in ducats as he is in excuses, there would be no problem. Still, we shall manage. Don Alessandro complimented your beauty,” she cast her cousin a sceptical, unheeded look, “and your accomplishments and told me he counted himself most fortunate. Make sure you do not disappoint him.

“We will have the wedding at Carnival. In the meantime, you will go to Medelana for the birth. It is far enough away to be discreet. The duke has most generously offered his bucentaur for your journey. Violante will help you pack.” At this, Angela turned her head in our direction and fixed her cousin with a bovine stare. Her eyes were dull, her complexion pasty, and she had spots on her forehead. Her hair was untidily bound, and tendrils like tarnished copper wires clung to her temples. I wanted to weep. I wanted to gather her in my arms and tell her nothing had changed; it was still we two together with our jokes and schemes, and the men could all go fry in Gehenna.

“I cannot go today. I need to rest,” she said. When she opened her mouth to speak I noticed her diet of sweets was beginning to discolour her teeth.

“You will be on board the barge before dark,” said Donna Lucrezia. “Violante will go with you. I have retained a midwife and
comatre
who will also travel with you. You have nothing to fear. The country air will do you good. Now, up off that bed and let us see to your packing.”

As madonna and I each took one of Angela’s arms and heaved her up off the daybed, my first thought was that I was glad to be going with her. My second was of the ugly, charming face of Gideon d’Arzenta.

***

By the time Angela and I boarded the duke’s bucentaur, the light had drained from the low clouds and the river slapped against the jetty as thick and black as molasses. Looking back towards the city I could see the Corte and the castle ablaze with lights for the Christmas Eve festivities, and searched my heart for some sense of envy or exclusion. Yet I was content, happy to be alone with my friend even in these circumstances, about to set out on the river in the winter dark, into what was, however temporary, a kind of exile. The ducal barge was as luxurious as a small palace, with the walls of its staterooms velvet padded and hung with tapestries to keep out the cold and the thud of the oars. As well as the midwife and
comatre
, we had slaves to attend us and a cook, and madonna had lent us La Fertella to keep us entertained. Perhaps neither she nor Angela remembered the clown had been given to her by Ippolito.

But though all these things contributed to my contentment, if they had been taken away, they could not have lessened it. As we had waited for madonna’s litter to be brought round to Giulio’s palace to carry us to the dock, she had taken me aside.

“I have some news which will please you,” she announced. “You know Sancho came back via Naples? He stayed one night with my brother Don Jofre.”

“And is my son well?” I should not have interrupted her but I could not help myself, and she seemed content to let the matter go.

“Very well,” she said, her expression alight with a very charitable joy, “as you will soon see for yourself. He will travel to Ferrara with his sister Camilla and the Duke of Camerino in the new year.” Perhaps I asked her how this had come about, perhaps she simply chose to honour me with an explanation, I cannot remember. At the time, I hardly took it in, it seemed to matter so little why he was coming in comparison with the wonderful fact that he was coming, that in a few, brief weeks we would be reunited and I would be whole again. The reason, it seemed, was that Don Jofre, who had been widowed the year Cesare was sent to Spain by the sudden death of Princess Sancia, wished to marry again and his new bride was reluctant to take on the care of the three little Borgia bastards. Under certain conditions, Duke Alfonso had agreed to their coming to Ferrara. I did not ask what those conditions were, and madonna did not tell me. Not then.

C
HAPTER 3

F
ERRARA,
C
ARNIVAL, 1506

I was so young then, and confused lust with love as the young do.

Looking over Angela’s naked shoulder, at her candle-lit reflection in the long mirror, I thought how our lives move forward in tiny increments. Like a spring tide, we take great sweeps back and forth, yet each high water creeps only a little higher than the last.

On Christmas Day, as we sailed to Medelana, she had given birth to a baby girl aboard the bucentaur. The child was small, brought on early perhaps by the upheaval of travel, but she was strong. Angela was decisive in choosing the name Giulia for her daughter, but then handed her straight to the wet nurse and seemed to take no further interest in her. All the time we stayed in Medelana she bewailed the ravages of pregnancy on her body and set about trying to restore it to its former glory. She bound her breasts with bandages soaked in a paste of ground fig kernels to restore their firmness and had me rub her belly with sweet almond oil and lavender to banish stretch marks. Even before she had stopped bleeding she took to walking and riding on the estate, which I feared would bring on a falling of the womb but she was convinced would help to tighten her women’s parts so her new husband would take pleasure in her. At least, she said, in the only reference I heard her make to her daughter, the child had been a girl, and small, so did not stretch the quim like a boy.

Donna Lucrezia had chosen the
comatre
wisely. She had attended a great many women who, for one reason or another, desired to return to a man’s bed as soon as possible after childbirth. Make a game of it, she suggested with a laugh not altogether respectful. Mix a little rosewater in with olive oil and let him massage you. Well, Angela and I had not a lover or a husband between us, but we had each other, and we whiled away our time in the country with games the
comatre
had probably never dreamed of.

But now, with her wedding scarcely an hour away, she was still not happy with her appearance. “God!” she exclaimed, twisting this way and that as tongues of candlelight flickered across her skin, “I look an utter hag. My belly sags like a sow’s and my tits are flat as pancakes. He will run screaming back to his mother and she will feel perfectly vindicated.” The bridegroom’s mother was less than happy with the match, which was why Angela had not travelled to Sassuolo for her wedding but was to be married secretly in Donna Lucrezia’s chapel and would stay on at court afterwards. Angela had greeted this plan with relief; she had no wish to be buried in the country with only her dairy and her fruit orchards to occupy her.

“He will love you just as we all do,” I said.

“Really?” She turned towards me. Unsoftened by the polished silver of the mirror, her face looked tired, the skin below her eyes fragile and puffy and a deepening of the lines at the corners of her mouth once caused by laughter. Whatever the artists may say, it is the flaws which make human beauty. Perhaps that is why the Creator did not abandon Adam when he ate of the fruit.

“Really.”

I was right. Don Alessandro, attended by a cousin from Carpi, could not take his eyes off his bride throughout either the brief service or the longer supper which followed. I thought he would burst with glee when madonna finally took mercy on him and, rising from the table, ordered Perro and Gatto to escort the happy couple to the bridal bower. In the lull that followed, while we waited for a space to be cleared for the actors and musicians who were to entertain us while Don Alessandro and Angela made good their promises to one another in the neighbouring room, it seemed to me there were more absences in the room than just theirs. I thought of Giulio, still staying in the Corte Vecchio, of his baby daughter in Medelana, of his closed house and the silent fountains in his garden. I wondered about Girolamo, on the road from Naples, as I did a thousand times a day, pleading in silent desperation for his safety to whatever deity might hear me. I tried to imagine what he looked like now, but all my mind ever showed me was his father’s face, and that was the greatest absence of all.

“Do you miss him?” Angela had asked me one evening at Medelana, when we lay together in front of the fire drinking wine mulled with honey and cloves.

“Who? Here, eat.” I threw a handful of raisins at her.

She threw them back. “I’m dieting. You know that and you know who.”

Perhaps because I had drunk more wine than was good for me, I found myself striving to give an honest reply. “In here,” I said, tapping my fingers against my temple, “I can never forgive him for the way he tricked me. But the rest of me…yes, I miss him.”

“Does he know?”

“Would he care?”

She shrugged, causing her shift to slip off one golden shoulder. “Write to him and see if he writes back. Some of his letters seem to get through.”

“No.” I sat up, suddenly uncomfortable with my body, aware of the cold breath of the empty summer palace on my back. I shivered, hugged my knees. “There is nothing in my heart which makes me feel inclined to do him any kindness. He doesn’t deserve it and he wouldn’t thank me for treating him as a charitable case.”

Angela broke into slow applause. “Oh what a pretty speech.” She knelt behind me and wrapped my gown about my shoulders like a cloak. “What you really mean is, you’re afraid he wouldn’t write back. You’re still running from the truth about my cousin, aren’t you, Violante? Just because he is free with his favours doesn’t mean he can be cheaply bought.”

“I know that. I’m just not sure any more that he’s worth the price.”

Her hands froze on my shoulders then, and I knew I had touched on more of a truth than I had intended. I had given voice to what was in her own heart concerning Giulio.

***

After the wedding, Don Alessandro returned home alone to his mother, while Angela hurled herself into Carnival like a parched man jumping into a river. She danced all night, frequently with Don Alessandro’s cousin from Carpi, and accompanied Donna Lucrezia every day on masked rides around the town in the company of certain of the duke’s favourites. In the front row at every spectacle, she attracted several champions for the Battle of the Eggs and blew a kiss to a man who succeeded in sticking a pig while blindfolded. Hers were the most extravagant gasps of admiration for il Cingano, the duke’s gipsy, when he walked a tightrope strung across the piazza with iron bars chained to his ankles.

The court held its breath when Ippolito, extravagantly masked in a confection of pearls and peacock feathers, but Ippolito nonetheless, asked her to partner him in a chaconne
.
We sighed when she accepted, and danced with matchless grace behind her own mask of white satin trimmed with tulle ribbons that floated around her head like angels’ breath. Duke Alfonso and Donna Lucrezia were as energetic and splendid as it was possible to be, their very presence at the heart of the festivities a mask to cover the grieving stones of our castle of ghosts.

On Shrove Tuesday I went to visit Giulio. I took him pancakes and a dish of
pane perso
from madonna’s own kitchen; I did not like to think of him embarking on the long privation of Lent without a little of the holiday fare to cheer him. When I arrived, however, he already had company. Ferrante and Don Alessandro’s cousin, Don Alberto Pio da Carpi, were with him. An empty wine jug stood on a low table between them, and they were well on their way to finishing a second. Don Alberto’s presence surprised me. Ashamed of his scarred face and the clumsiness brought on by his damaged sight, Giulio had stayed away from Carnival altogether, and received scarcely any visitors. Ferrante called on him daily. He would, he said, have gladly admitted his brothers the duke and the cardinal but neither had seen fit to interrupt his revels to while away dull hours with an invalid. Of Angela, and his daughter, he said nothing, though his readiness to spend time in my company, to listen to me read, or even sit in silence, was eloquent enough. The odour of Donna Lucrezia’s court clung to me. I was Angela’s friend and had been with her at the birth of her baby. For him, perhaps, I embodied hope, possibility.

So although I set down the food and begged to be excused, Giulio insisted I stay and his companions, mellowed by the wine, put forward their own enthusiastic, if somewhat muddled, arguments in my favour. I sat, and answered their enquiries about my health, how I had enjoyed Carnival, what had been my favourite masques and spectacles, but all the time I had the feeling I had interrupted something. Our polite conversation skimmed the surface of a deeper, darker exchange, and I was uneasy. When madonna’s Dalmation slave appeared in the doorway to Giulio’s gloomy sitting room and told me, in her still scarcely comprehensible Italian, that madonna required me to come to the Camera di Paravento,
I could have hugged her
.

The Camera di Paravento was a new addition to her apartments, a room divided by a trellised screen behind which madonna would sit with her ladies while gentlemen danced on the other side. It was a device she used to allow the unmarried girls in her care to observe the young men she had in mind for them without compromising their modesty. I was sure either the slave had misunderstood her orders, or I had misunderstood her. There had been no talk of finding me a husband since my return from Rome; at my age, and with my history, I was pretty well unmarriageable. Nor had I much modesty left to compromise. But the Dalmatian made her way decisively enough along the adjoining walk between the Corte Vecchio and the Torre Marchesana, so I followed without question, picking my way through the thicket of scaffolding poles like a fairy-tale child lost in a forest. After the holiday, work was to begin on raising a roof over the walk, and not before time, I thought, as I stepped through a crust of ice into a puddle.

Madonna was attended only by Fidelma, which was also strange, as admiring the turn of a young man’s calf or giggling at the sinuousness of his hips when performing the moresca was not her favourite pastime. Fidelma’s heart was devoted to Fra Raffaello with his saintly pallor and the silvery glow of sanctity in his black eyes, though she believed she had given herself to the god of the Christians and petitioned madonna to allow her to enter a convent at every end and turn. She had fulfilled her promise to her father; her brother had his commission from the duchess; surely now her life might be her own. I found her naivete touching when I did not find it irritating.

“Look,” said madonna as I entered, and the slave busied herself pouring wine and handing a plate of dates wrapped in marzipan. She held up a rough-edged silver disk. “The design for my medal. Ser d’Arzenta presented it yesterday.” He had come to court yesterday and had not sought me out? Well, I had told him not to. “What do you think?” Madonna handed me the disk. On the face was a very true likeness of Donna Lucrezia in profile. I feared she would not think it flattered her enough, for it did not spare her her receding chin or a tendency to plumpness in her cheeks. On the other hand, he had captured the wry, determined set of her mouth as if he had known her all his life.

“I find the image very pleasing, madonna.”

“Good. So do I. It is honest, as Fidelma observed.” She would; her feet were as big metaphorically as they were in life. “Honesty is a trait I should admire, as duchess.”

“Yes, madonna.” What could I say? Perhaps, as the chosen conduit of her love letters, and the woman who, she believed, loved her brother as much as she did, I was the only person in the world with whom she could be honest.

“And I would not wish to be portrayed as some slip of a girl. That would not inspire confidence in my subjects. It is right I should look a little…matriarchal. Now,” she continued, before any of us had a chance to dwell on the frightening irony of the word matriarchal, “turn it over. Look at the reverse.”

The reverse was decorated with a blindfold Cupid bound to a laurel tree, and beside the tree a violin with its bow and a music stand, its voluptuous outline brushed by the tips of Cupid’s wing feathers.

“It is very well executed, madonna.” The composition was perfect, the tree arching over the figure of the god and its curve reflected in the angle of his body as he pulled at his bonds. All was fluid, windblown, captured on the edge of change, so you felt that if you closed your eyes for a second, the next time you looked, the image would be different. I could not equate its grace with Gideon’s huge, bony hands, his flat-tipped fingers and scuffed knuckles.

“How do you read it?” madonna demanded.

“I must defer to you in that, madonna. You have the benefit of a superior education.”

“Absolute nonsense. When we first met you matched me quote for quote from Dante, and your Greek is…quite subtle.”

I thought of Giovanni, and my one Greek joke, and how he and my son and Camilla would be here any day now. “Well,” I began, “Cupid bound to the laurel cautions us against loving unwisely.”

Madonna smiled and nodded, though in the winter light which reached us only through the screen it was hard to tell whether or not her smile reached her eyes. “Go on,” she said.

“The violin, perhaps, represents your illustrious husband as he plays it so well, and the bow his…virility.” I heard Fidelma gasp. “And…the bow points to Cupid, and his wings touch the violin, so he blesses your union, madonna.”