The Borgia Mistress: A Novel (13 page)

“Were you with my mother when she died?”

The day was overcast; the church dimly lit. I could not be sure, but I thought the abbess paled. She rose hastily. “I was in Anzio. Forgive me, I cannot tarry. I’m expected back at the convent. Please, enjoy the
torrone.
”

Gazing down at me, she asked, “Can we meet tomorrow? I should be able to get away for longer then.”

I hesitated, surprised by the abruptness of her departure. “Yes, of course.” With a nod to the basket, I added, “Thank you for this. I’m sure it is delicious.”

“Enjoy it.” With a hasty smile, Mother Benedette departed.

Shortly, I did the same. After a day of unsettling encounters, I was glad to retire to my chambers, where I resumed my investigations into the cantharidin. Soon it would need to be tested. As I said, my father had procured stray animals for such a purpose, but I had convinced him that it was better to try new poisons on humans. The thought horrified him at first, especially coming from a child, but quickly enough he saw the sense of it. Better a swift death by poison than a far longer, more drawn out execution according to the hideous methods so favored by courts and bloodthirsty crowds alike. I take it as a sad commentary on our age that when my father, and then I in turn, appeared in the dank, subterranean cells that housed the condemned, we were greeted as saviors rather than as the monsters the more fortunate of this world would call us.

I showed myself at dinner that evening in the great hall, but did not linger. As soon as I decently could, I returned to my rooms and made use of the powder. In the last moments before sleep claimed me, I thought of my other self, the woman I imagined I would have been if fate had not made me what I was. That woman, hurrying about her blessedly normal life, turned to glance at me over her shoulder and smiled.

I braced myself, expecting the image to turn, as it had in my waking vision of my mother, into a nightmare of blood and terror. But instead I found myself looking up through soft shadows at the face of a woman who was singing quietly:

Firefly, firefly, yellow and bright,
Bridle the filly under your light,
The child of my heart is ready to ride,
Firefly, firefly, fly by her side.
The child of her heart. A child who was safe, secure, loved.

How could I know what that felt like when I had never been that child? Had never known my mother’s touch, her voice, the comfort of her presence?

Yet I remembered her all the same.

In the still hours of the night, I left the bed, threw on a robe, and went to sit by the window. Cracking the shutter open, I gazed out at the sere autumn garden wreathed in darkness. Dawn was hours off. In the distance, I could see the torches that burned all night, providing illumination for the guards who patrolled constantly. There were more of them than usual and soon their numbers would grow further, but their presence gave me no comfort. When the real enemy came—as I was certain that it would—it would be from the shadows, in some way I could not yet see. I could not afford to be distracted, especially not by old pain and old yearnings that had no place in the present dangerous day.

And yet, despite my best intentions, one question loomed uppermost in my mind: How—and when—had my mother died?

13

In the morning, I sipped warm cider and nibbled on the
torrone
I had remembered belatedly. Sweet and melting on my tongue, it was as delicious as the
panetto,
but my appetite was still lacking. I put it down after a few bites and dressed hurriedly. Though the rain had eased, there were reports of flooding to the north, making me hope that the road to Assisi would not reopen before I had a chance to learn all I could from Mother Benedette.

Renaldo caught up with me as I crossed the hall. “Have you heard?”

A sharp pain stirred behind my eyes. Determined to ignore it, I said, “Apparently not. Tell me.”

“Sforza is being packed off to Pesaro. Supposedly it’s because his presence can no longer be spared there, but in fact it’s because he and Cesare came to blows last night. The Spaniard, Herrera, had to separate them.”

“What were they fighting about?”

“I probably shouldn’t say, but”—he leaned closer—“it had to do with Donna Lucrezia and…” A look of disgust flitted across the steward’s face.

I sighed. “That again. Sforza is a fool.”

“No one has ever accused him of being anything else. But where does this leave His Holiness? The Sforzas helped to put Borgia in power and would help to keep him there, but now…”

“He grows more isolated,” I agreed. “And more dependent than ever on the Spanish.”

“Even as the assassin is out there somewhere waiting to work his mischief.” He paused for a moment, then asked, “Has your friend learned anything?”

“Not that he has said. I will have to speak with him.” The headache was growing worse. I shut my eyes for a moment, opening them again to discover that the light in the hall seemed overly bright, even glaring.

“Has it stopped raining?” I asked.

“What? No, it’s never going to stop. We should all be building arks.”

I tried to laugh, but the effort hurt too much.

“Vittoro is calling up more men, I hear,” Renaldo said.

“You hear everything.” I only partly meant to flatter him. He had an uncanny talent for ferreting out useful information amid the daily chatter.

The steward preened a little but quickly turned serious again. “I suspect that he is concerned about the loyalty of the garrison. If they were to throw their support to one of Borgia’s rivals—say della Rovere—we could be murdered in our beds.”

Though he spoke matter-of-factly, the threat was real. Any hint of weakness on Borgia’s part invited catastrophe.

I nodded, but his words seemed to come from a distance. Shadows were moving along the inside walls of the palazzo. Peering more closely, I saw the dark shapes resolve into the forms of armed men coming with speed and stealth.

I turned, I believe with the intention of alerting Renaldo to what was happening, but before I could do so, the scene exploded. Without warning, the palazzo was under attack. Screams rent the air, fire burst forth, death and devastation were everywhere.

Nor did the horror stop there. A thick, red mist rose before my eyes. Through it, I saw a world soaked in blood, bodies writhing across a landscape of utter bleakness, and above it all, immense carrion crows, their beaks gleaming, swooping down from a black, lightning-torn sky.

I gasped, or perhaps I screamed; I really can’t say. The gruesome vision spun wildly, taking me with it. I fell a great distance in the instant before consciousness left me.

When I was again myself, I was seated on a bench a little distance away from where I had been standing. Renaldo hovered over me, shielding me from view. I could smell the damp wool of his cloak and the hint of sausage from his breakfast. My senses remained uncomfortably heightened, but at least the pain behind my eyes had lessened.

“Francesca, are you all right?” His voice was low, yet I heard the dread in it all the same. He was my friend; I had to remind myself of that. He had seen me in extremis before and yet he did not shun me.

“I…” Belatedly, I realized that I was clutching his hand as though it could somehow anchor me to the world. “I am getting worse.”

My greatest fear was coming to pass, and I could not even keep myself from voicing it. Since I had left Rome, and been separated from all that was familiar, the darkness within me had grown, taking on even more of its own life, to the peril of my soul. Despite Sofia’s powder, the nightmare was more intense and more frequent. I had begun to sense danger everywhere, even going so far as to not dismiss the notion that David might be an enemy. David! With whom I had shared danger and death, and whom I had every reason to trust absolutely. As though that were not enough, my encounter with Mother Benedette and the thoughts she prompted regarding my mother’s death further fed my demons.

Renaldo’s attempt at a smile, no doubt meant to be reassuring, fell far short of the mark. He tried a different approach. “Your … infirmity does not seem to worry our master. His confidence in you is undiminished.”

“He sees what he wants to see.” That had not always been the case. Much of Borgia’s success as a prince of the Church had come from his ability to rise above his own desires and view circumstances with ruthless objectivity. But since achieving the papacy, his vision of
la famiglia
spawning a dynasty of popes and kings absorbed him to the exclusion of all else. Juan on the throne of Naples was only the beginning. If Il Papa had his way, Cesare would follow him onto the Throne of Saint Peter, to be followed in turn by his own heirs. They would be Borgia’s legacy … and his immortality.

Perhaps emboldened by the intimacy of the moment, Renaldo asked, “Is it true that he believes you are a seer?”

I grimaced. Of all the aspects of my relationship with Borgia, I found that the most troubling. Through the pain that was finally ebbing behind my eyes, I said, “His Holiness has alluded to the possibility.” However, he retained for himself the right to determine which of my visions were a true glimpse of the future and which were merely the disordered workings of my troubled mind. I had no such luxury.

“You do not want what I see to be the future.” The very thought made me shudder.

No doubt Renaldo was tempted to ask what it was that I saw, but he thought better of it. Instead, he said, “Whatever you see does not have to come to pass. After all, we possess free will, among the greatest of the Almighty’s gifts, second only to life itself.”

To look at him, you would have thought the steward cared for nothing other than the healthiness of his accounts, both those he kept for Borgia and the plump ledgers in which he recorded his own growing wealth. But he had interests beyond the pecuniary, even extending into the realm of theology and natural philosophy.

“What are you suggesting?” I asked.

“If Il Papa is right about you, is it not possible for us to alter our behavior in order to avoid at least the worst of what you see?”

Since my father’s death and my assumption of his position in Borgia’s household, I had been forced to confront what seemed the likelihood that I was damned or possessed or both. In that case, I could expect to spend all of eternity suffering the grotesque torments described so vividly by Dante in his masterful
Divina Commedia,
a work to which I was drawn again and again with unhealthy fascination. Inevitably, I had wondered if I did not deserve all that and worse, because not even the fear of it could persuade me to give up my dark ways. But never had I thought that my “infirmity,” as Renaldo so delicately put it, might actually be useful.

Hesitantly, I said, “What I … see is not very specific.”

The steward was not to be dissuaded. Helping me to my feet, he said, “The pronouncements of the Oracle of Delphi were open to broad interpretation, yet they were taken very seriously. And what about more recently? Saint Catherine of Sienna’s visions brought the papacy back to Rome. Not to forget that poor French girl, Joan. Such a shame what happened to her.”

The same Church that had allowed the Maid of Orleans to be burned had recognized her, once she was safely dead, as a martyr. There was even talk that she might be canonized someday.

“Surely you don’t mean to compare me to such holy women?” Despite everything, I could not help but be amused. Perhaps that was Renaldo’s intent.

“I am only saying that you might consider that there could be some benefit from whatever it is that you are experiencing.”

I was still mulling that over when we parted a short time later. It seemed unlikely that Renaldo could be right, yet the temptation to believe otherwise was too great for me to resist entirely.

Even so, I did not dwell on it very long. The hour was fast approaching when I intended to seek Mother Benedette again. I crossed the piazza against a damp wind, my cloak drawn tightly around me. Finding the church nearly empty, I took my seat across from the altar to Saint Clare and waited what was probably no more than a few minutes but what seemed an interminable time. I had almost decided that the abbess was not coming, and that I would have to seek her out at the convent where she had told me she was staying, when the heavy wooden door to the church creaked open and she appeared. For a moment, illuminated by the dreary day behind her and the pale gray light filtering through the clerestory windows, she looked grim and anxious. The skirt of her undyed wool habit flapped around her legs as she hastened down the central nave. When she saw me, a smile of relief flitted across her face.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting. I hope you haven’t been here long?”

“Just a few minutes.” I slid aside to make room for her on the stone bench. “You needn’t have hurried.”

She sat, took a breath to steady herself, and folded her hands in her lap. They were slender, white and well-formed, the nails neatly clipped and lightly buffed. More the hands of a gentlewoman than were my own, which bore the stains and scars of my profession.

“I am so used to being occupied day and night with the business of the abbey,” she said. “Here I have scant idea what to do with myself. My mind wonders in all directions. Were it not for the bells summoning us to prayer, I would lose track of time entirely.”

Before I could suggest that it was no bad thing for her to have a rest, she went on quickly, “The last time we met, I left you with unseemly haste. If you will allow, I would like to make amends.”

“There is no need—”

“Please. Otherwise, I cannot help but think that I have forfeited all right to your friendship.” From a pouch secured to her belt, the abbess withdrew a small book about the size of her palm and held it out to me. “This was your mother’s. I would like you to have it.”

I hesitated, unsure how to respond. For my mother to have owned a book at all was a surprise. For it to suddenly appear before me was almost more than I could comprehend.

At Mother Benedette’s urging, I took the volume bound in dark brown leather and turned it over carefully. Pale gold writing was inscribed on the spine, but a sudden blur of moisture in my eyes made it impossible for me to read the words.

“What is this?”

“A psalter, containing the Book of Psalms and various canticles from the Old and New Testaments. Your mother received it on her thirteenth birthday. It was her most cherished possession.”

“She was devout?” I had not considered that possibility.

“Not particularly, but she loved to read, and the very idea of books fascinated her.”

I, too, had a fascination with the written word, but my taste tended more toward treatises on alchemy, poisons, and the like. I had a small number of items that had belonged to my mother—her bridal chest with its carved scene of the Sabine women; her locket. But a book that she had held and treasured, that had occupied her mind and stirred her imagination … Holding the smooth, well-worn volume, my hands trembled.

Gathering my courage, I asked, “How did you come to have this?”

In the back of my mind was the half-formed hope that she would tell me some pleasant story, that my mother had given her the psalter as a reminder of their friendship when the abbess entered the convent. Instead, she looked at me sadly. “Your father brought it to me afterward.”

Afterward.
Such a wealth of meaning in that word. After the world shatters, all the pieces flying apart, never to be put right again. After the shroud of grief descends, trapping the hapless survivors in a cruel mimicry of life shorn of light or hope.

“After my mother died?”

Mother Benedette’s brow furrowed. “Perhaps I should not have brought it. Believe me when I say that the last thing I want is to cause you any more pain.”

My grip on the book tightened, as though I feared irrationally that she might try to take it back. Lights danced in the corners of my eyes. Fireflies.

“I want to know the truth about what happened to her.”

The abbess stiffened. I heard the sharp inhalation of her breath. “Francesca…”

“I must know!” The harshness of my voice was grating. For a moment I was a child again, lying in a bed in a house I could not remember, unable to speak, scarcely able to move, adrift in a sea of echoing silence from which I never wanted to emerge.

“Knowledge, once given, can never be withdrawn,” the abbess said quietly. “Eve learned that to her sorrow.”

The anger, already building in me in anticipation of what I might learn, turned in her direction. “Does that make you the serpent?” I asked.