Sins of the House of Borgia (68 page)

C
HAPTER 1

F
ERRARA, 22
A
PRIL 1507

These are the letters I will never send, the blood of my heart. The deed is planned for tomorrow. I am entrusting these to Juanito, with orders to bring them to you should I die in the attempt. From my words you will be able to reconstruct me, as Isis did Osiris.

The rumours had been eddying around us for weeks. I am certain all of us had rehearsed what we would say and do, how we would think and feel, if they were confirmed. Yet when Juan Grasica arrived, and dismounted slowly in the castle courtyard, as if, by delaying the end of his journey he could also deny its purpose, we were not ready. We were like the city militia who drill every year for the spring floods, then stand amazed as the river races through the streets, carrying off their sandbags and leaving a trail of yellow mud, drowned pigs, and broken furniture in its wake.

Juanito had been well briefed for his task. He went first to Ippolito to deliver his news, but I suppose they were behind the times in Pamplona, in the wild country of Navarre. Relations between Ippolito and Donna Lucrezia had never quite recovered after the
Coniurga;
the unspoken names of Giulio and Ferrante hovered between them like the fairies who sour the milk. This was no time for Ippolito to pretend otherwise, so he charged Fra Raffaello with carrying Juanito’s message to madonna.

Easter had come early that year, and madonna had been preoccupied during Carnival by a visit from Don Francesco, so some of the marriages she had negotiated for her young ladies were taking place in the weeks between Easter and Corpus Christi as Carnival had fallen in the dead of winter. Madonna had also suffered another miscarriage, which some attributed to too much dancing and going about on horseback and others, behind their hands, to too much activity of another sort in the company of Don Francesco Gonzaga who had come to Ferrara without Donna Isabella, who was about to give birth again herself.

We were in the Camera Dal Pozzolo, sewing a trousseau for a distant Gonzaga cousin who was to marry the Venetian ambassador’s nephew the following Saturday. I remember these inconsequential details, even the fact that I had just re-charged my needle with the cream silk thread I was using to embroider bouquets of love-in-idleness around the neck of a nightgown. I remember Fra Raffaello’s flushed cheeks and working mouth and the way self-satisfaction and terror warred in his eyes, and the calm way madonna laid her work in her lap as the slave scratched on the door and she said, “Enter.”

What I do not remember, what I have since had to reconstruct in my imagination, is how I felt as Fra Raffaello bowed his head and said, “Madonna, you must brace yourself. I have news of great seriousness.”

“Yes,” she said. I am sure she knew, as I did, what he was going to say next.

“News from the King of Navarre,” he went on, working himself up to his task. Madonna did nothing to help him; the gaze she levelled on him was as cool and grey as the oblong of unseasonal sky showing in the window behind her. Though she valued his spiritual counsel he was not, ultimately, in her confidence, merely in that of the Duchess of Ferrara. Watching her, it became clear to me that she was, in her way, as good at wearing masks as Cesare had been. Had been. I had thought of him in the past tense.

“His messenger brings word of the death in battle of the Duke of Valentinois, madonna.”

“The Duke of Romagna,” she corrected, but almost under her breath. Fra Raffaello showed no sign of having heard her.

“God granted him a brave end in a just cause,” he continued.

Donna Lucrezia nodded as if in appreciation of a poem or a piece of music. “The messenger,” she asked, “who is he?”

“A man called Juan Grasica, madonna. I believe he is...”

“I know who he is, brother. I will thank you to leave us now, and ask Juan Grasica to attend us.”

“Will you not pray, madonna?”

“Of course I shall pray, but not here and now. I find myself a little at odds with God just now. The more I try to please him, it seems, the more He tries me.”

The friar bowed and retreated.

“Fidelma,” said madonna, “go and tell your little friar I will receive Juan Grasica in my own chamber. The rest of you, leave me. Not you, Violante,” she added as we all laid aside our work and prepared to absent ourselves, “you will come with me.” She rose from her chair and, on an impulse, I stepped forward and put my arms around her. After a brief hesitation, she returned my embrace. No matter how often I replay the scene in my memory, I cannot be certain what was in my mind. I do not know whether I sought to comfort her or myself, or whether I was trying to make contact through her with some emotion I could not feel.

Juanito was not admitted to her private chamber until I had dressed her in the mourning clothes so recently put aside after the deaths of her father-in-law and her baby son. She chose the deepest mourning, a skirt and bodice of plain black, a chemise without any lace or embroidery, black hose and shoes. I washed the makeup from her face, brushed her hair loose and adorned her with no jewellery but her wedding band and the cameo poison ring I had brought from Rome. Then she stooped to dip her finger in the ash of last night’s fire, and made a cross with it on her forehead.

“Should have let the priest do it,” she muttered, “but Cesar would like it this way. I am ready now, Violante. Please call Juanito to me. I will lie on my bed. I don’t think I have the strength to sit.”

“Perhaps you should delay seeing Juanito, madonna.”

“No. I shall see him now.”

“Yes, madonna.”

Poor Juanito. He was not a young man; like Michelotto, he had joined Cesare’s household when Cesare went away to school in Perugia and had kept company with every twist and turn of his fortunes. He looked grey when he entered the room, grey with exhaustion and misery and the dust of his wretched journey which rose around him in a cloud as he pulled off his cap and knelt to his lord’s sister. His limbs were so stiffened by his long ride I had to help him up.

“Please sit, Juanito,” madonna urged him but he refused. He stood to attention beside her bed, one hand clutching his cap over his breast, the other spread protectively over a bulging satchel which hung at his side.

“Very well, but I warn you, this will be a long interview. I require you to tell me everything.”

“I expected you would, madonna.”

“Begin please.” Signalling me to sit beside her on the bed, she took my hand. By the time Juanito had finished his story my fingers were numb and my knuckles bruised from the pressure of her grip.

“My lord, as you know, was to escort his excellency Don Carlos from Flanders to Spain.” We both nodded. Cesare’s conviction that he had a part to play in upholding the infant Don Carlos’s claim to the throne of Castile had not been shaken by the sudden death from influenza of the boy’s father, Philip of Flanders. On the contrary, it was this which had made him decide on escape. As he had written to madonna on his arrival at his brother-in-law’s court in Pamplona, he had no intention of sitting about like a hen in a coop waiting for that old fox Ferdinand of Aragon to get him.

“As part of his preparation, he and King Jean wished to strengthen Navarre’s defences and they asked the Count de Beaumonte to hand back the fortress at Viana. He refused, saying he was a vassal of King Ferdinand and not of King Jean, so his grace the king put my lord at the head of an army and required him to take Viana by force. Madonna, you should have seen him the day we rode out of Pamplona. It was like the old days, men cheering and women weeping by the roadside, small boys hanging on to his stirrups and himself so big and handsome,
soro,
like a young falcon.

“We went to Larriaga first and besieged it.”

I could see madonna was becoming impatient, but she let Juanito continue out of charity. By dwelling on the details of the campaign, he kept his beloved lord alive to his heart, and this gave him the courage to go on. After a great deal of arcane talk of bombasts and breastworks, culverins and ballistas and the calculation of firing trajectories and the digging of trenches, it transpired Cesare had lost patience with Larriaga, which refused to fall to him, and had raised the siege and gone to Viana.

“King Jean held the town,” Juanito explained, “but Beaumonte’s son was holed up in the castle. He was running out of food, though, and no supplies or reinforcements could get through without the King and Don Cesar hearing of it. So it looked like an easy job, a quick finish and off to Flanders. The weather up there was terrible. Flat, brown hills with nothing to stop the wind or keep off the rain. Nothing but sheep and ravines for them to fall into. My lord decided not to post sentinels at night as he said the storms were our best defence. We had a decent house, good stone walls, but even inside there it was freezing. King Jean had given Don Cesar a fine wolfskin cloak and I don’t think he once took it off, not even to sleep unless, saving your presence, ladies, he found other means of keeping warm.

“Come dawn on March 12, a Tuesday it was, we were awakened by a great commotion, shouting, bells ringing, the guards on the city walls running about like scalded cats saying we were under attack. We found out later Beaumonte had managed to get supplies into the castle under cover of the storm, so the weather turned out to be his friend, not ours, and what the guards had seen was just his escort returning. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“I heard Don Cesar shouting for his armour, but he was in one of his rages, stalking up and down like a leopard in a cage, cursing so even the trollop in his bed looked embarrassed, so I couldn’t manage to get him into any more than his light armour and a corselet and I had to throw his helmet down the stairs after him because he forgot it.”

Donna Lucrezia smiled while I thought about the “trollop” in Cesare’s bed, unwrapping his body from the wolfskin cloak like a gift, and wondered if she had tried to stop him going.

“By the time I got to my own horse he was gone. Hadn’t even stopped to check his girth the groom said, which was not like him as you know and was a measure of how impatient he was with the whole business of these little Navarrese and their domestic squabbles. He was so angry he rode like a madman even by his standards and of course none of the rest of us could keep up so…”

“Go on, Juanito. I wish to hear everything. I have said so.”

“When he rode into Beaumonte’s ambush he was completely alone. I didn’t realise what had happened till I saw his horse galloping back towards us. Even then I thought…well, he was a great fighter and nearly twice the height of the little Navarrese.” Juanito cleared his throat. He fiddled with the fastening of his satchel and cast a pleading glance at madonna but she gave him no quarter.

“By the time I got there they had made off. They’d taken everything, his armour, his weapons, even his clothes. One of them had had the decency to put a stone over his genitals, that was all.” Tears spilled out of the squire’s eyes and made tracks in the dust on his cheeks. Only the pressure of madonna’s hand crushing mine kept my own tears back by giving me a simpler and more immediate pain on which to concentrate.

“It was still pouring with rain so his body looked quite clean, just the earth around it was red. The king came up then, and covered him with his cloak. He said a prayer, then had him carried back into the town. I did the laying out myself, madonna. I wasn’t having strangers take care of him. I’d been his body servant since he was fourteen years old so it was only right.”

“Thank you, Juanito. It was proper and considerate of you.”

“He looked like a bridegroom when King Jean’s six best knights carried him into the church of Santa Maria. I’d brushed his hair and trimmed his beard the way he liked it, and dressed him in his best armour, the black with the gold chasing on the breastplate. He always used to say it felt like a second skin, that armour. He had his wedding ring and his Order of Saint Michael that King Louis gave him, and King Jean gave a coronet in place of his ducal insignia which had got lost somehow in all that fuss in Naples.”

“Tell me how his face looked.”

“As I say, madonna, he looked most handsome and serene. The church was full of weeping women. They tell me there were twenty-five wounds on his poor body, though his face was unmarked. All I know is it was too many for me to count and he must have put up the very devil of a fight.”

“Twenty-five. Good. That is five times the five wounds of Our Lord on the Cross. Were his eyes open or closed?”

“Closed with pennies, madonna, of course.”

“When you found him.”

I wished she would stop. I was not sure Juanito had the strength to continue, yet she did, so he and I must also.

“Open, madonna. Sort of…surprised looking.”

“And could you see anything in them? They say the image of a man’s killer will imprint itself upon the eye for a little while after death.”

“Do they, madonna? Well perhaps I got there too late. I could see nothing in his eyes but the rain.”

“The gods must weep for the death of such a one. Thank you, Juanito, you have spoken well and bravely. You know Sancho, my majordomo?”

“I met him in Medina del Campo, madonna.”

“Go to him. He will give you money and find you lodgings. As soon as I am able, I will make more permanent arrangements for you. I would like you to stay in Ferrara, Juanito, so we can talk sometimes about the old days.”