Sins of the House of Borgia (70 page)

***

Had it not been for Donna Lucrezia’s black clothes, the ash cross on her forehead, the scabs on her face and hands, I could almost have believed I had dreamed everything, from Fra Raffaello’s self-conscious solemnity to the abject, animal intensity of her suffering. I could almost believe she had sent for me to tell me Cesare would be returning to Italy in the spring. She had already spent some time alone with Angela that morning, and had received Agapito, now secretary to the papal legate in Bologna, but with whom she could share close memories of her brother. There were few at court who were willing to talk about him. The duke could not even see the point of official mourning, though he had agreed to Ippolito arranging a requiem Mass in the cathedral. I hoped there would be new music for it.

“I owe you my thanks,” Donna Lucrezia said to me as I curtseyed. She was lying on her bed, which she did not yet feel strong enough to leave. She had Juanito’s satchel beside her, and also the empty filigree box she had once charged me with giving to Cesare if anything should happen to her.

“I have done no more than my duty, madonna.”

“Violante, ever since I have known you, you have always done far more than your duty. And now I am going to ask one more favour of you.”

I bowed.

“Later today I must speak to Giovanni. He knows Cesar is dead, of course, but I have not yet spoken to him directly nor ascertained his feelings on the subject. He was, as you know, very fond of Cesar. He is also very fond of you, and I would like you to keep me company during our interview. There is much he cannot understand, and I fear this will only serve to sharpen his grief.”

“Of course, madonna. I will do my best to comfort him.” I wondered who would comfort Girolamo, if he needed it.

“There is something you must know about Giovanni first.” She paused. Some unaccustomed note in her voice made me look at her. The skin under her eyes was smudged with grey and her lids were puffy and pleated like those of a much older woman. The gaze she turned on me seemed nervous, partly guilty, partly defiant. With the air of someone who had made what might be a reckless decision she went on, “Giovanni is not my father’s son, but Cesar’s.”

“I see.” I realised I was not surprised. An image floated to the surface of my memory, of Cesare in the courtyard of the Castel Sant’Angelo, stooping to kiss the child’s sleeping head before the groom lifted him out of the saddle. A tender action, the action of a fond parent. I supposed madonna had hesitated because she was afraid how I would react when I realised Girolamo was not Cesare’s heir after all. I found I was not angry. What was there left for either of them to inherit? Perhaps I should be glad Girolamo had been put into Don Alberto’s care rather than being left to drift aimlessly around Ferrara as Giovanni appeared to do.

“No, my dear, you do not see. Cesar is his father, and I am his mother.”

I should have left then. I tell myself I stayed out of compassion for madonna, or out of the habit of waiting to be dismissed, but it was my own prurient fascination that kept me there.

You are the Jewess. It’s true what they say. Look Dorotea, is she not the very spit of my illustrious daughter.
“I have been a complete fool, haven’t I?” Donata. The gift. They had seen their opportunity and grasped it.

“No, Violante, you have been deceived by people who are, perforce, very good at it. I realised my mistake almost immediately, as soon as I saw how genuinely attached you had become to Cesar. I tried to get him to stop it…”

Oh, so that made everything better; if madonna had tried to act on her conscience, she, at least, was exonerated.“You make it sound as though he and I were somehow deeper in the wrong than you were,” I said, with a degree of wonder.

“I love him.” Her voice rose to an hysterical quaver and I feared for a moment she was plunging back into the grief which had overtaken her after her interview with Juanito, but she took control of herself and went on, “just as you do. More than that. There has not been a day, a moment of my sentient life when I have not been tortured by guilt for him and me alike. And now…” She waved a hand at her room, “here I am with all my comforts and he is, he is…” Words failed her. She shuddered.

“You told him to write me that letter, didn’t you?” I asked. Because I had to know, and because I, too, shrank from thinking about where Cesare was now. I had an irrational urge to pray he had been right, that religion was no more than story telling and he was nothing now, just flesh falling quietly from bone in the dry, red earth of Navarre.

She nodded miserably. “But he was unwilling to break off with you completely. Perhaps that flatters both of us. Cesar always prized honesty. Most people find that strange, and many have seen it as a weakness in him. He has, on occasion, relied more on a man’s reputation for honesty than on the evidence of his own eyes. It is my belief he valued it as we always value things we cannot have. And he recognised it and valued it in you. I have convinced myself he would want me to tell you all this, but perhaps it is just that I cannot support all my memories, all my…love, on my own. If I am to continue to live, and care for my son and make plans for him, I have to know there is someone else in the world to help me bear the burden. And obviously I cannot tell Giovanni himself. Not yet. Probably never.”

“Isn’t what you have already said enough? You took me into your household to be a plaything for your brother. My son, whom I always believed to be his heir, is not. Am I the only one who didn’t know what was going on? Angela?”

“Angela was completely opposed to my plan from the beginning. She befriended you to protect you. You have every right to be angry, and I have no defence. I merely ask you, out of your natural compassion, to hear me out.”

But it was not her deceit that angered me, it was the fact that she had left me nothing to mourn. The man I grieved for had never existed. I could not trust myself to reply to her request so watched in fierce silence as she began to pull sheaves of documents out of Juanito’s satchel. “You may read these,” she said, spreading them around her on the bed. I shook my head, held up my hands as if to ward off a blow, but she pushed the pages at me with abrupt, insistent little thrusts of her hands.

Some were neatly written on good, clean parchments, some scrawled on dog-eared palimpsests. There were even a few frayed squares of linen which looked as though they had been cut from bed sheets, or even shirts. The ink was faded in places to a pale, yellowish rust, scarcely visible, let alone legible in the artificial dusk of madonna’s shuttered room. As I had noticed before, all these documents were in Cesare’s hand. I now saw that they were letters, and that all were addressed in the same way.

Lucia, mi cor
he had written at the head of every one. Lucrezia, Lucia. It was so obvious I felt even more foolish, and angry with myself, that I had not realised it sooner. His faith in me to heal him, the cut shoes, the talk of the calf, his delirious kiss that had no artifice, merely the desperate hunger I had once known myself when I thought of him, all the clues were there and I had stumbled into the mess of it as blindly as Cupid.

***

“You know the beginning of it,” she said as I shuffled the letters around on the bed with the futility of someone trying to find a winning combination in a poor hand at cards. “My mother has told you.”

“Your mother told me she believes you are a changeling and that you kept Cesare alive for some nefarious faery purpose.”

“And you are inclined to agree with her.” She gave a brief, stifled laugh. “My mother is only comfortable with things she can find an explanation for. Cesar and I are…were…perhaps, the same, but found ourselves with one foot on each side of the divide between this world and…somewhere else. Sometimes I feel as though I am living through a never-ending All Hallows’ Eve.”

“What did Cesare think?” I wanted to make her tell me.

“He remembered having the impression, when he saw me for the first time, that everything in the world had shifted a little to make room for me. And that when Juan pushed him out of the way so he could look at me, it didn’t make him cross because he knew it was no longer important.”

“You do not believe Cesare killed Don Juan, do you?” It was a time for plain speaking, for unimaginable truths.

“I know he didn’t. Juan was murdered on the orders of the Orsini. The girl Juan was going to meet that night, the honey-trap if you will, belonged to an Orsini family. Cesar’s only crime was to persuade Papa to call off the hunt for the murderers and let him arrange a proper revenge. It made him look guilty.

“And there’s something else. At my son Rodrigo’s baptism, he was given to Don Paolo Orsini to carry from the basilica back to Santa Maria. I was watching from a window as I hadn’t yet been churched so couldn’t attend the ceremony myself. The moment he was placed in Don Paolo’s arms he began to scream, and he’d been good as gold up till then. Surely that was a sign of their guilt.

“Cesar was quite capable of murder, as I know to my cost—and his—but there was no reason for him to want Juan dead. On the contrary, Juan gave him a foot in the Spanish court, as long as he behaved himself. And he wasn’t vicious, you know, just young for his years and rather silly.”

I felt a kind of awe, listening to her cool analysis of Don Juan’s murder. I began to understand what Monna Vannozza saw in her that made her fear her daughter.

“But I am getting ahead of myself. You must stop asking questions and let me tell my story as it unfolds. She gave no sign she was aware of the effect she was having on me.“I have virtually no memory of the time we all lived together at my mother’s house. I was about six when I was sent to Aunt Adriana, and Cesar and Juan were long gone by then. We would meet at Santa Maria for visits from Papa, but, as you know, we only spent long periods together in the summer, at Caprarola.” She pronounced the name with tenderness, and her expression softened. “On hot nights we used to sleep on the roof and sometimes, if I got frightened or felt lonely—the stars can make you feel lonely, can’t they, so far away and not concerned with us at all—I would snuggle up with Cesar under his blankets. Never Juan because he would just make a fuss about being too hot, or me stealing all the bedclothes or something. And not Jofre, of course, because he was only a baby himself.” She paused and rummaged among the letters strewn about the bed. Retrieving one, she handed it to me. “Here,” she said, “read. Let him tell you in his own words.”

“No. Please. Anyway, I cannot read your language.”

“You can if you want to,” she said.

It was as though I was trespassing on a place of the deepest secrecy and privacy, yet I was not; I had been invited in, and I had not refused the invitation. I began to read.

The first night they allowed me above decks on the voyage to Villa Nueva del Grao there was a full moon. Do you remember—of course you do—how we all used to sleep on the roof at Caprarola, and you would creep under my blanket and ask me all the questions that were racing around your head and stopping you falling asleep? How could bats see in the dark? How did the planets know where to go? What would happen to the six-legged calf? Could you marry me when we grew up? I suppose we were about eleven and six then.

One night, when the moon was full, I explained to you about how the moon controls the tides, and you said I was like the moon and you were the sea, always following me about. And I said nothing, because I knew it was truly the other way around.

I was entranced all over again. Looking up, I met her eyes and she knew the meaning of my look instantly.“They’re all like that,” she said. “Here.” She handed me another.

We started so young, you and I
, I read.
We were like soft clay for the moulding. Our bodies are what each made of the other, stroked and smoothed to fit one another perfectly. And then we were fired in life’s kiln, set forever in a form to suit only each other.

She began to speak again. “It all began to change about the time Cesar went away to school. The first summer we went to Caprarola and he came from Perugia, he was different. He was bigger, broader, his beard had begun to grow, and he just wanted to be off with Juan doing what he called men’s things. They went hunting and fishing and fussed over their puppies and fought little bulls just as they had always done, but they also spent hours in corners giggling over some book Cesar had acquired which he told our mother’s husband was a Platonic dialogue illustrating suitable conduct for young men. It was nothing of the sort, of course, but it was in Greek and Ser Giorgio’s Greek wasn’t very good.

“We would still sleep on the roof and I would still get in beside him, but sometimes he would turn his back on me and get impatient with my chatter. Then one night my hand brushed against…”

“Please, madonna, I am sure I need not hear all the details.” But I could not stop her telling them, either as a way of reliving them or of seeking atonement, or perhaps something of both.

“I was shocked,” she said, “but he grabbed my wrist and held my hand there, and then I was curious. I was always curious, you see. Not a very feminine attribute. And then I was content, because I realised whatever I was doing gave me some power over him. I didn’t feel left out any more. It restored us to the way we had been, me and Cesar together and Juan and Jofre on the outside.

“And that’s the way it stayed, despite the cost. Perotto, Pantasilea, Djem…”