Sins of the House of Borgia (69 page)

The squire bowed. “I have nowhere else to go, madonna.”

As I saw Juanito out and told him where he might find Sancho, I also asked him to tell Sancho to send a messenger to Donna Angela in Sassuolo.

***

Angela arrived the following evening, on horseback and accompanied only by a groom. One of her ladies-in-waiting was to follow on with her luggage, she explained, to fill the awkward space between us. The last time I had seen her had been the previous winter when, madonna having pawned some of her jewellery and sold a small parcel of land she had forgotten she still owned in Calabria, had managed to raise a dowry for her cousin sufficient to mollify Don Alessandro’s mother. The whole Pio clan had come to Ferrara for a second, public wedding in the duke’s newly decorated rooms in the Corte. We had feasted on platters of oysters with oranges and pears, on pike dressed with crystallised borage flowers and anchovy salads, and you would hardly have known it was Advent. For dessert there were nudes fashioned from liquorice biscuit, the eating of which occasioned a great many jokes suitable for a wedding, though Don Alessandro’s mother did not seem to be amused. After dinner we had formed a noisy procession, headed by musicians and acrobats, and a fire eater produced from somewhere by La Fertella, to escort the bride and groom to their lodgings in the town. Our cheeks glowed with cold and wine; torchlight sparkled on jewels and danced along the snowy streets, threw wild shadows up the walls of buildings, picked out the gleam in the eyes of watchers behind their window shutters.

Only fleetingly had I felt the dark pull of the Torre Leone as we passed, glancing up as I always did to see if the food baskets were still hanging from the pulleys on the roof, for their daily journey up and down the sheer face of the tower was the only evidence we had that Ferrante and Giulio were still alive. From where I was in the procession I had been unable to tell whether Angela looked in that direction or not, and my thoughts had shifted quickly back to my own joy.

Don Alberto Pio had brought Girolamo with him to Ferrara for the wedding. Giovanni’s attachment to me, which had begun with Cesare’s commendation of my Greek joke, had deepened during our time at Nepi and in Rome. We were, I suppose, like soldiers who have campaigned together, bound by a common experience not shared by anyone around us. So, when he played with Girolamo, he often wanted to include me in their games. Elated and heartbroken, I had watched them race hoops through the Sala Grande or play at jousting with their hobbyhorses and broom handles. I had referreed their fights when Giovanni tried to dominate his nephew and Girolamo, small and wiry, tenacious and bold, had fought back. Though not as plump as he had been, Giovanni was still indolent and somewhat slow of wit. Girolamo, though, was much as I imagined his father would have been if he had not been so poorly at that age, as he had become after Donna Lucrezia was born and he decided to live.

We had also just heard that Cesare was free. He had broken his collar bone, some ribs, and an ankle jumping from the end of the rope he had hung from his window, having miscalculated the drop, and his journey to Pamplona had been a torture. But now he looked forward to celebrating Christmas there with his brother-in-law, and to the year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and seven which he knew would see a rise in his fortunes.

And now he was dead.

As Angela and I greeted one another in the castle courtyard, in the cool spring dusk, the contrast of present sorrow with past happiness seemed to reinforce the gulf that had opened up between us now she was a married woman with a good name and a substantial household.

“How is she?” asked Angela as we made our way to madonna’s rooms.

“I can’t describe it. You’ll see for yourself.”

***

Donna Lucrezia’s mourning for her brother was as desperate and visceral as his dying must have been. There was no dignity to it, no restraint or self-consciousness or thought. Once Juanito had finished his tale and left us, she had utterly collapsed. She tore at her clothes, her hair, the skin of her face and arms, and howled as though possessed of a devil, unearthly, guttural moans and growls that made me think of fighting cats and the beggars who do not have the decency to die silently by roadsides. She took handfuls of ash and rubbed it all over her head and face and breast, and when the fire was re-lit she shovelled hot coals out of it and tried to walk on them, so I had to douse it with the first water that came to hand, the contents of a chamber pot. The Dalmatian slave fled in terror, crossing herself repeatedly, her long white fingers fluttering in front of her long white neck.

I thought Angela’s presence would calm madonna, but she scarcely seemed to notice her cousin’s arrival. When I tried to leave, however, she rose briefly to the surface of the pit she had fallen into and forbade me to go. “You are me,” she said. “There is nowhere for you to go.”

“Violante just wants to get some food and drink for me, cousin,” said Angela, “and a broom to sweep up the ashes.”

Donna Lucrezia stared at her as if she had no idea who she was or what she was talking about and shook her head. A hank of hair caught on her lip. She stuck out her tongue and hooked the hair into her mouth and sucked it. That seemed to distract her for a moment, and she allowed herself to be led back to her bed.

“Do you think we should restrain her?” Angela asked me. “At least until we can get her physician to see her.”

But before I could reply she was up again, spitting out the hair, heading for her bedroom window, muttering about ropes and drops and how Cesare could have been a good mathematician if he had only had more patience. I ran in front of her, slammed the shutters closed, and used my girdle to make them fast while Angela once again wrestled madonna back on to her bed.

“I’m going for her doctor,” said Angela. “This is much worse than I’d expected.”

“What had you expected?” She gave me an odd look then, both calculating and troubled, but did not reply to my question.

When she returned with the physician, madonna smashed a perfume flask and yelled through the door that if anyone other than Angela were to come through it she would stab them with the broken glass. It was a floral perfume, with notes of jasmine, and its scent wreathed like a ghost around the bed furnishings and ceiling bosses, the chair legs and the jewelled crucifix on the prie dieu, and clung to our skins.

Donna Lucrezia had cut her hand, but when I tried to bind it she pulled away from me. “You think that matters?” she asked, her tone full of contempt.

Fra Raffaello received the same treatment, as did Ippolito and even the duke, who arrived on a lightning visit from Genoa, where he was helping the French king to crush a rebellion. No doubt he was glad to have a rebellion to go back to. For two weeks, madonna would let no one near her but Angela and myself. She raged and wept and called out Cesare’s name, sometimes pleading with him in her rapid, incomprehensible Catalan as though she could persuade him to come back. She would not let us change her ragged clothes, so we tried to cover her with blankets which she would trail around the room after her, knocking over furniture, swiping books and cups, hairbrushes, jewellery, and powder pots off tables until the floor was sticky and treacherous with a porridge of spilt wine and makeup and broken glass. She soiled herself with the random wilfulness of a small child. On the rare occasions we could persuade her to eat and drink, she pushed food into her mouth with her fingers and lapped water from a basin, and a pappy crust formed on her lips and chin which cracked and irritated the skin.

When she slept, which was rarely and for short periods, Angela and I would sit slumped in half-conscious silence, without the energy to speak, let alone attempt to clean up the sad chaos of our surroundings. I waited, braced for my own sorrow which I was certain must come, but it did not, not then. It was as though madonna’s grief, in all its savage grandeur, shamed mine into hiding itself. No one could mourn as she did; even the women of Troy seemed like faint pretenders compared with her. And I was so tired, too tired to muster the resources needed to properly grieve for my first love, my son’s father, the man whose dark eyes and clever smile had defined the whole world for me.

Madonna tended to sleep on the floor, curled up like a child, with her knees to her chest and her thumb in her mouth. So when she awoke on the last morning, squinting into a bright bar of sunlight that fell through a gap in the shutters, the first thing she saw was the travel-stained satchel Juanito had left and I had stuffed under her bed and thought no more of.

“What’s that?” she demanded, removing her thumb from her mouth and wiping it on the remains of her bodice. “What is it?” she repeated as Angela and I struggled into full consciousness and tried to discern where she was looking. “Under my bed? It wasn’t there before.”

“Ah.” Realisation dawned. “Juanito left it. I don’t know what’s inside.”

She sidled across the floor, still lying on her side, flexing her body like a snake, until she could reach her hand under the bed and seize hold of the satchel. As she pulled it clear, the flap fell open and some documents fell out. They were faded and battered, but the handwriting, with its loops and curves and tendency to slope towards the end of each line, was unmistakable. Donna Lucrezia sat up. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, then looked at her hand, the nails broken, the cuticles crescent moons of grime, as though it was something unfamiliar and rather horrible.

“Leave me,” she said.

“But…” Angela began.

“You have nothing to fear. Go.”

***

I went to my room with the intention of trying to sleep. But though my body was leaden with exhaustion, my mind felt sharp and restless, expectant. Unable to settle, I dragged my travelling chest from under my bed and delved in the bottom of it for the letter Cesare had written me from Rome and the drawing done by Ser Leonardo. First I had to take out my mother’s recipe book and the more recent letter I had received from Gideon. I had surprised myself by keeping it, in the uneasy peace following the
Coniurga
. I thought it odd and impudent and anyway, he would be long gone by now.

I laid all these items in a row on my bed and stared at them as though I expected them to tell me something. I picked up Cesare’s letter and re-read it, but it remained as elegant and incomprehensible as it had always been. I laid it aside and my gaze shifted to the drawing, the hooded eyes, the expression of the mouth obscured by his beard and moustache. It was a wonderful drawing, the face true and human with the slight irregularity of the nose and the pouches under the eyes, but it was lifeless, a figment of burnt wood and lamb skin, a moment caught and pinned like a beautiful moth.

“I’m sorry,” I said to it, and suddenly I was sorry, for everything we had not done together, for the torchlit skating parties I had once imagined, the summer walks in scented gardens, the songs not sung and the dances not danced, the verses we had never exchanged, the sweet nonsense we had failed to whisper to each other. I had always assumed there would be a future and now, abruptly, at the stroke of some anonymous Navarrese’s sword, there was none. Crumpling the picture against my heart, I sank down on the bed among those other small relics of my time on earth, and wept until my eyes burned and my throat ached and I thought I must have wept all the tears that were mine to weep.

I was not aware of Angela’s presence until she flung herself down on the bed at my side and put her arms around me.

“That’s better,” she said, stroking my hair and my back, pulling a kerchief out of her sleeve for me to blow my nose on. “It’s important to cry.” There was solace in her affection, her physical closeness. I managed a weak smile, but the look she returned was deeply serious. “After Giulio was attacked,” she said, “I felt cold inside. As though I’d turned into a statue, or one of those mechanicals they put on carnival floats, just going on doing things automatically.” She gave a sudden laugh. “And you were so disapproving.”

“I wasn’t.” I thought of the time we had spent alone together at Medelana, after Giulia was born. Was that disapproving?

“Oh, you were, underneath. You thought I should have stuck by him in spite of everything. I know you, Violante, remember? You didn’t have to say anything. And you were right. But I just couldn’t. I kept thinking, what if I find him repulsive and he senses it? How much worse would that be than my just doing what everyone expects of us?”

“Us?”

“Me and Lucrezia. The Borgias. Ruthless. I was wrong, though. If I’d been braver and more honest, Giulio wouldn’t be locked in that room.” She shuddered. “I tell you, Violante, there’s not a day goes by I don’t think about it. What if this, what if that. And Giulia looks so like him now, not a trace of me in her anywhere. As though God made her to test me.”

“I think He is a great ironist. He tests you by your daughter’s presence and me by my son’s absence.” I felt another tide of grief wash against my heart. “I shall never get him back now, shall I?”

Her silence told me all I needed to know. Eventually she patted my knee and said, “Cesare wasn’t brought up by his mother. I wasn’t. Most people aren’t. It doesn’t do us any harm.”

“Most people are at least allowed to know who their mothers are.”

“Oh, Lucrezia will relent on that. Now he’s properly settled in Carpi and there’s no longer…any likelihood of his circumstances changing again, there can be no harm in it. It will be fun. We can visit together when my husband and Don Alberto meet. I’ll tell you what. We’ll slip Alberto’s wife a doubtful oyster, and when she dies you can marry him.” She was beaming now, rocking back and forth like a child herself, full of the excitement of her plan. It was Ferrante and Giulio all over again, another impossible scheme to give her the illusion of control over her life. The domestic version, I thought, with wan amusement, of what her dead cousin had tried and failed with his armies and his politicking.