Sins of the House of Borgia (74 page)

“Marry me, Esther,” he said as soon as the last one had left. “I couldn’t sleep a wink last night. I discussed my situation at length with the moths and the mosquitoes and quite a big lizard and they all said my finding you again like this was a providence and urged me to press my suit.”

I laughed. The muscles of my face felt stiff, and I wondered when I had last laughed. “Don’t tease me,” I ordered him. “It’s serious.”

“Too late then.”

“What about Xanat?”

He shrugged. “She is a native woman. Their customs are different.”

My memory showed me a picture then, a Judith with the Head of Holofernes in a basket carried by a black slave. “That’s just the way people talk about the Jews, Gideon, as if we aren’t people with feelings too. I thought you said you’d abandoned the old values. Xanat is a woman. There’s no difference between her and me.”

“Why are you here, then, if not to find me?”

I could not tell him. Even now Donna Lucrezia is dead I cannot tell him, or anybody. I pray the letters were destroyed. “When I was a girl, we had a housekeeper called Mariam. Once, when I had reached a kind of crossroads in my life, she told me her advice was to follow love. I wasn’t sure she knew what she was talking about then, but later I found out she did. I’ve tried to follow her advice. I was trying when I came here and I’m trying now. I’m sorry, Gideon, that’s the best explanation I can give you.”

“So marry me. Follow my love.”

“It doesn’t work that way. I have to follow my own, and I really don’t think you’d want to go where it’s taking me.” I picked up my pen, dipped the nib in a cup of water to clean it, then laid it aside. “There is one more thing you need to know about Cesare Borgia and me, one thing you didn’t find out from Don Giulio. He gave me my son, but he also gave me the French pox.” As long as Cesare had lived, I had gone on believing in Ser Torella’s pills, but his death had severed all my connections with hope, that sentiment he had warned me against. He was right; it is delusory. Sooner or later, if I managed to avoid snakebite, or the fever that turns the skin yellow or the one that blackens the urine, I was going to die of the pox. “He was a very jealous man, you see. He liked to brand his mistresses as his own.”

“It’s you I love, Esther. The disease is not you.”

***

He was right, but it is a mask I wear, a convenient way of hiding my feelings. I came to Cachiquin when my health began to fail, but not to marry Gideon. I have found a measure of peace watching he and Xanat grow older together, entwined like tree and vine. I told him I would live with him as a sister, and I do. I am a dutiful aunt to his children, spoiling and scolding by turns. I have delivered all of them into this world and buried two. I cook and clean, make and mend alongside Xanat and sometimes I still write letters for other people. There is no one left for me to write to on my own account, no one who knows exactly what the word “sister” means to me.

***

So, I have reached the end. I raise my strained eyes from the page and look out through the open door, at our yard of beaten earth, our chickens and goats and Gideon’s workshop where he makes the drying racks out of Toledo steel wire. Wraiths of blue smoke drift across my view of the forest, the trees all stripped of their lower branches and laced with vines, and their exotic scent is mixed with the homely smell of hot steel. Gideon says love is a heavy burden. I think of my parents, of Mariam, and Angela and Giulio, and Cesare and his Lucia, and two young men growing up in Ferrara who do not know who their mothers are, and realise I shall be content to lay that burden aside.

My eye is drawn to the orange tree, with its two hopeful green oranges and its jaunty, glossy leaves glittering against the darkness of the vanilla forest. I wonder if my son ever walks in the orangery when he visits Ferrara, if he ever sits in the loggia where he was made. I believed, when I began, I was writing this account for myself, but now I realise it was always for him, the boy with the black eyes and the clever smile, and the river of red hair, the boy I loved and left behind.

Finis

A
FTERWORD

This is a work of fiction, a weaving together of imaginary people and the imagined lives of real historical figures. It lays no claim to historical accuracy.

A converted Jewess called La Violante was among the women who accompanied Lucrezia Borgia to Ferrara. Cesare did have a son called Girolamo whose mother is unknown. The paternity of Giovanni Borgia, the Infans Romanus, was attributed first to Cesare and then to Pope Alexander. Again, his mother is not known. What evidence there is for Lucrezia being pregnant at the time of her divorce from Giovanni Sforza amounts to little more than gossip. There is nothing but circumstantial evidence that Camilla’s mother was Dorotea Caracciolo, or that Angela’s child was fathered by Giulio d’Este. On the other hand, neither is there anything to refute these suppositions.

Lucrezia was married to Alfonso d’Este for seventeen years and they had five children. Their second son, Cardinal Ippolito d’Este II, built the famous Villa d’Este at Tivoli. Lucrezia was sincerely mourned on her death in childbirth aged only thirty-nine, and is still fondly remembered by the Ferrarese for the sophistication of her court and the gallantry with which she helped defend the city against an army led by Pope Julius II during the War of the League of Cambrai. She kept up her correspondence with Pietro Bembo for the rest of her life, and her intimate friendship with Francesco Gonzaga right up to his death in March 1519, three months before her own. Isabella outlived them both by twenty years.

Ferrante d’Este died in prison in 1540. He was sixty-three and had spent thirty-four years without a visit from a single member of his family. Giulio was released on the accession of Lucrezia’s grandson, Alfonso II. He was eighty-one years old and had spent fifty-three of those years locked up. History does not record whether Angela Borgia was then still living. She disappears from the historical record around the time of Cesare’s death, as does La Violante.

Both Giovanni and Girolamo Borgia remained at the court of Ferrara. Giovanni seems to have been an ineffectual man, tolerated by Alfonso d’Este out of affection for his wife. Girolamo married one of Alberto Pio’s daughters and was a popular figure, but was overshadowed in later life by his association with several mysterious deaths. Cesare’s daughters fared better. Camilla Borgia became abbess of the Convent of Corpus Domini and died there in 1573 with a reputation for saintliness and administrative ability. Luisa, through her second marriage to Philippe de Bourbon, founded the line of Counts of Bussett and Chalus which continues to this day. Luisa’s mother, Charlotte d’Albret, never remarried and lived the rest of her life in deep mourning for her husband.

Vannozza outlived all her Borgia children except Lucrezia, Jofre having died suddenly in Naples in 1517. Her funeral was attended by the entire court of the then pope Leo X who, as Giovanni de’ Medici, had been at university in Pisa with Cesare.

Michelotto da Corella is last heard of as a
condottiere
in the pay of Florence, a commission for which he was recommended by Niccolo Machiavelli, Florence’s ambassador to the court of Cesare Borgia. Cesare was famously Machiavelli’s model for chapter 7 of
The Prince,
on
New principalities acquired with the help of fortune and foreign arms.

The constraints of this novel and the particular issues I wanted to explore in it have obliged me to simplify drastically the political and military background, especially relating to Cesare’s invasion of Urbino and the Senigallia coup. My chosen viewpoint has also led to my underplaying the diplomatic skill and shrewdness of Pope Alexander VI, whose colourful personal life tends to have overshadowed the contribution he made to keeping foreign invaders out of Italy by consolidating the temporal power of the papacy. I have also conflated the two trips Cesare made to Ferrara during Lucrezia’s illness of late summer 1502. I have also taken a small liberty with the game of
calcio fiorentino
, a form of football that is first recorded in Florence in the sixteenth century, so a little later than the setting of this book. I think it very likely, however, that Italians have always played football!

For readers who want to delve further into the history of the Borgias, I cannot recommend too highly as a starting point Sarah Bradford’s elegant, insightful, and compassionate biographies of Cesare and Lucrezia,
Cesare Borgia, His Life and Times
and
Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due first and foremost to Emma Barnes and all at Snowbooks, to Shana Drehs and the team at Sourcebooks, and to Stephanie Thwaites. Love and gratitude, as always, to Mary Allen, Mary-Jane Cullen, and Sue Fletcher, to Bernardine Coverley and Ingrid Perrin, and to my fellow members of Writers Without Walls: Harriet Carter, Karen Cheung, Claire Hynes, Gary Kissick, Claire MacDonald, Michelle Remblance, Iain Robinson, and Barrie Sherwood. Great feeds, great feedback. Last but not least, love and thanks to Mark for sharing his life with the Borgias with such equanimity.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Sarah Bower has worked at an assortment of jobs, from call centres to market stalls. After many years working in the charitable sector, she became a professional writer and creative writing tutor after completing an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She lives in the country with her husband, two dogs, and a geriatric cat. She is the author of
The Needle in the Blood
.