The Borgia Mistress: A Novel (26 page)

I could only stagger on with no sense of where I was going or what I would see next until I came to a square I recognized all too well. I looked up at the Basilica di Santa Maria and trembled. In the center of the square, overlooked by the ancient church, a stake had been driven into the ground and kindling piled around it. A girl was tied to the stake.

She was very young, small, blond, and utterly terrified. I knew her only too well even though I had seen her just once months before in the city of the underworld beneath Rome. No, that was not true; I had seen her a second time. Or at least all that was left of her. The charred skin and bared bone, the flesh from which smoke still rose, after she was burned in a warning to me of what would happen if I could not defeat the evil that surrounded us all.

“No!”

Did I scream or did she? It did not matter; I could not move. The girl turned her head, staring at me with all her desperate longing to live stamped clear on her young face.

A man approached wearing the black robe of a Dominican priest. The hounds of God, they are called, because they hunt the supposedly faithless. He held a burning torch in one hand. With the other, he pulled back the hood of his habit, looked at me, and laughed. Horror filled me, the sickening revulsion of knowing what is about to happen and being utterly unable to prevent it. Without shifting his gaze to the girl he was about to condemn to a gruesome death, he touched the torch to the kindling. At once the fire caught.

It spread with fierce intensity, reaching the girl’s slender feet and legs in mere moments. She screamed—oh, how she screamed!—on and on and on as I stood helpless and sobbing, unable to look away. The flames licked up her legs, over her arms; her thin white gown flared up and dissolved into her skin. Her hair caught, and for a moment, her head was wreathed in a halo of flame.

The priest threw the torch into the fire, ripped off his robe, and began to cavort, dancing round and round the screaming girl’s funeral bier. In the raging glow of the fire, his great horned shadow was cast clear across the piazza to flow up and over the basilica, engulfing it in the very essence of evil.

Off in the distance, a wolf howled. The sound pierced even the intensity of my anguish. The city, the tortured girl, my own terror, all fell away, crumbling into dust. Instead of standing in the heart of Rome, I stood in the midst of a vast wasteland stretching out in all directions toward a horizon where lightning flashed and distant thunder rolled. Scattered across it, I saw the remains of what might have been great buildings or even entire cities. Nothing was left of them save for death.

A figure came toward me out of the smoky gloom. Strangely, I found that I had no further desire to flee. Until then, I had not realized how much courage can be found in despair. With seemingly nothing left to lose, and nowhere to go, I awaited what was to come with unexpected calm. What was I about to face? A demon, perhaps? Death itself? Or something beyond even the limits of my imagination?

The figure resolved into a child, a little girl of maybe six years of age. She had auburn hair that hung below her shoulders and a smattering of freckles across her nose. In appearance, she resembled me and something more. A child I might have had, perhaps? The infant I had seen in my lap in front of Rocco’s shop, now grown into a beloved daughter?

“You aren’t afraid,” she said. “That’s good.”

Looking down at her, I resisted the urge to touch her hair, the curve of her cheek, to convince myself that she existed, that she was real, in some sense at least. She was not; I had to cling to the certainty of that or I would lose my reason altogether.

Yet I could not simply ignore her. “Why is it good?” I asked.

“Because that is why you have come this far. Many never make it beyond the barrier of their own regrets.”

“Is that what I saw? My regrets?” Such a mild word for so much horror.

The child shrugged. “You could not save your mother or your father. The girl died in your place and you could not prevent that. You could not have the life you wanted as a wife and a mother. But you know all this already.”

And did not need to be reminded of it. I answered her sharply. “Then tell me something that I do not know.”

She thought for a moment, frowning, then said, “You have to cross the wilderness to reach what lies beyond.”

The wasteland stalked by death and despair that I had already glimpsed. “Why would I wish to do that?”

As though surprised that I should ask, she replied, “Because of what you will find on the other side.”

I looked then and saw, on the far edge of the void, a faint shimmer of light. It stretched across the entire horizon, hinting at something vast and mighty just beyond the range of my vision.

“What is that?” I asked.

The child did not respond directly but spoke carefully, as though instructing one far younger than herself. “Imagine that you are wearing a veil such as widows don to conceal their grief and despair. You have always worn it; it is all you know. You see through it, but only darkly. But now imagine that there is a tiny tear in the veil. Through it you glimpse a light unlike any you have ever perceived before. What do you do?”

“I take off the veil. Truly, I would never wear such a thing.”

She smiled. “Not if you had a choice, but to see only darkly and through the veil of your own perception is the essence of the human condition. The very fact that you see even a glimmer of light makes you one among the few who glimpse what really exists.”

She urged me again, “What do you do?”

I knew what she wanted me to say, yet I begrudged her the answer all the same. Rather than providing it, I asked, “Are you one of the
perfecti
?”

“Do you think I am?”

I hesitated, but the truth was too obvious to be ignored. “Honestly, I think you are a creature conjured by my drugged mind. A figure seen in a dream, created by my own longing, who dissolves like mist upon awakening. You are no more substantial than that.”

Far from being offended, she merely smiled as though amused by my attempt to cling to reality in an unreal world.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

Was I? Not entirely; a part of me longed for her to be real. I looked again into the void that seemed to stretch beyond eternity. The light was there; I could see it, and it seemed to be growing brighter. Yet the journey to it would be difficult and dangerous. Beyond the howling of the wolves, I saw horned, hunched creatures skulking across the wasteland as though in search of prey.

“What happens if I cannot reach the other side?” I asked.

“You will return to the world you know.”

“The world of evil?”

“If you say so.”

“But I shouldn’t, should I? That is heresy.”

The child dragged a toe through the dust and shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that. I only know where the light is.” She turned as though to go but glanced at me over her shoulder. “You can follow me if you wish.” She moved a little away, and the void changed where she stepped. Near her feet, a path began to shimmer faintly.

I stared at it in unwilling fascination. How I longed to step out onto the gleaming ribbon of silver unfurling before me. To follow where it led across the void toward the light. But something held me back.

“You want to go, don’t you?” the child asked as she walked out onto the path.

“Of course I do! I long to escape the darkness inside me. It has warped my life, and it is terrifying! I struggle every day to contain it, and every day I fear that I will lose.”

She turned and looked at me. Staring at her, I saw for a moment not a little girl but a grown woman. A woman whose features I recognized, for I had seen them many times before, carved into stone high up on the capitals above the Basilica di Santa Maria in Rome, one more place where I had spilled blood. The face of our eternal mother.

“You fear the darkness,” she said. “Yet you wouldn’t expect to see the heavens in daylight, would you?”

I struggled to understand what she meant even as her voice began to fade. As though from a distance, I heard, “Fulfill your duty in the world, Francesca. Be the woman you are meant to be. The path will be here for you when you are ready.”

“How can I be sure?”

I spoke to emptiness. The child, the woman, the eternal mother were all gone. I was alone except for the wind howling in that empty and abandoned place.

26

On the far edge of my awareness, someone was calling to me.

“Francesca?”

Weight pressed down on my chest. I drew air into lungs that felt starved for it, and gasped.

“You are alive!” Mother Benedette exclaimed. “I wasn’t certain. For a moment, I thought—”

Slowly, I opened my eyes. I was still on the bed and still bound. The abbess was staring down at me. Her gaze was avid, her face flushed with eagerness.

“Did you see it?” she demanded. “The path. Did you see it?”

I swallowed with difficulty. My throat was very dry, an aftereffect of the elixir, I supposed. Hoarsely, I said, “Water.”

Impatiently, she held a glass to my lips long enough for me to take a few sips. My thirst was far from satisfied when she demanded again, “Did you see it?”

I looked up into her face and recognized there what I marveled that I had not understood from the beginning: the desperation of a woman who despite her greatest efforts had been denied the salvation she was convinced she deserved.

“You have never seen it, have you?” I said. “How many times have you tried?”

She flinched as though I had struck her, but she did not relent. “That doesn’t matter. My faith is absolute. You saw it, didn’t you?”

It occurred to me just then that there might be something wrong with Mother Benedette in addition to her fanaticism. Whatever religious significance she gave to the elixir notwithstanding, it was a powerful drug. Sofia had warned me repeatedly of what substances that merely bring sleep can do to the mind. How much more dangerous was a drug that had the ability to warp reality itself? How often could anyone take it without risking the loss of reason?

A tiny spark of pity for her stirred within me, prompting me to say, “I saw a path, but—”

At once, she clasped her hands and exclaimed, “I knew it! The One True God be praised!”

In the next instant, she turned to go.

“Wait! You can’t leave me like this!”

She looked surprised, as though she had already forgotten my presence. “I really can’t tarry. Herrera must be disposed of while you can still be blamed for it.” She smiled as though confident of my understanding.

“I will enjoy watching Borgia’s fall,” she said. “So much more satisfying than just killing him outright. But what follows will be even better. Without his voracious will to subdue them, the princes of Satan’s Church will have no one left to battle but each other. France, Spain, all the great families of Italy will join in. They will devour themselves alive. Don’t you agree?”

I did, which made me all the more frantic. “No! You can’t leave … we have to talk. Please.” Desperately, I added, “Don’t you want to know why I came back?”

But Mother Benedette shrugged that off as though it was of no interest whatsoever. “You are still mired in the physical world, trapped here by your longings—for love, vengeance, forgiveness, whatever. I was counting on that. Everything I saw in you told me that you were the one who could find the path but that you would not have the will to follow it. You would come back, and then I would finally know whether it existed or not. Praise God, you have erased all my doubts.”

“Do not be so quick to say that. There were no
perfecti
. To the contrary, I saw—”

“Stop! I have no wish to hear your lies.”

“I am telling you the truth! It wasn’t what you think. There is good to be done in this world, and that means it cannot be a place of unrelenting evil. The Cathars were wrong.”

But Mother Benedette was determined not to hear anything I had to tell her. Before I could even try to twist away, she grabbed hold of me, held the vial to my lips again, and forced more of the elixir down my throat, far more than she had given me the first time.

“The Devil has always tried to deny and destroy our beliefs,” she said. “But you, who have been privileged to see the path … It is intolerable that you should utter his lies!” She stepped back, looking at me without pity or mercy. “You will find the path again, Francesca, and this time you will follow it. If you do not, your mind will shatter and you will be trapped in madness all the rest of your days in this evil world.”

And with that she was gone, leaving me to face not my greatest regret but my greatest fear.

The moment I heard the door lock behind her, I sprang into frantic action. I could count on very little time before the elixir took effect again. If I could not free myself before then … I would not think of that.

Desperately, I pulled with all my strength on the bindings holding my arms to the bed. I had no hope of breaking them, but if I could only stretch one just enough to let me …

My shoulders were almost wrenched from their sockets before I finally succeeded. The fingers of my left hand brushed against my bodice. Burning pain surged down my arm, but I ignored it and continued until I was finally able to grasp the hilt of the knife that I always wore in the leather sheath near my heart.

Agonizing moments later, I was free of the bed. In the course of getting loose, I nicked myself several times. Blood flowed over my arms and onto the covers. For a horrible moment, the smell of it threatened to overwhelm me. Groaning, I lurched from the bed but was barely able to stand. Off in the distance, coming ever closer, I heard the wolves howling. Soon, too soon, I would be condemned to the wilderness, where my only choices would be death or the madness that had lurked deep in my mind for so long, only waiting to claim me at last.

Before it could, I found the last of my strength and managed to stagger across the room to where I had left the possessions I had brought back from the villa. In among them was the small wooden box in which I had packed a few essentials of my profession, including the substances that can, if given in time, prevent poisoning.

I will not dwell on what happened next except to say that it was both violent and unpleasant. Without knowing exactly how much of the elixir Mother Benedette had given me, except that it was a significant quantity, I could not take any chances. I purged the contents of my stomach until there was nothing left but dry heaves and a little bile.

Weak and disoriented as I was, I made to open the door, only to realize that Mother Benedette had locked it from the outside. For a moment, I considered trying to crawl out a window, but even if I were foolish enough to do so in my present state, there would be nowhere to go. I could let myself simply drop the single story to the ground below, but the distance was great enough that I was likely to be injured, possibly too much so to go on.

That left only one other possibility. Using thin metal probes from the tools I employed in my investigations, I slowly and with great difficulty managed to work the lock. By the time I had done so, I was bathed in sweat and my heart was pounding wildly. Throwing open the door at last, I hurried out.

The corridor beyond was empty—no chance of help. Still retching, wincing with every step, I kept going until I reached the stairs. At the top of them, I stopped, terrified that I would fall. Clutching the railing tightly, I ventured down slowly, painfully, step by step until finally I reached the bottom. A guard was stationed there. By the look on his face, he had been watching my struggle with bewilderment but not with any inclination to assist me. I stared at him, straightened my shoulders, and said, “I need help.”

At least that is what I think I said. My voice was little more than a rasp, and so startled was he by my appearance that I doubt he heard anything at all.

Anger flared in me, warring with despair. I would not be undone like this! By God I would not! I would be heard, I would be obeyed. I would prevail.

“I need help!”

He heard me then, for certain he did, for his face convulsed with fear. Even so, he still stood frozen.

Holy Mary and all the saints, was there no one who could aid me in this moment when all our fates hung in the balance?

“Francesca?”

I turned, scarcely daring to hope, and found myself face-to-face with Renaldo. The steward looked stunned at the sight of me.

“What has happened to you? Is that blood? Francesca?”

“Where is Herrera?”

Renaldo stared at me in bewilderment. I reached out, grabbed his robe, and held on with all my strength. “The Spaniard, where is he?”

“He and Cesare came back from hunting an hour or so ago. That’s all I know. But you—”

“We must find him!” I turned, looking in all directions, trying frantically to decide what to do.

“What has happened, Francesca? What is wrong?”

“Herrera is in mortal danger. The abbess means to kill him.”

Renaldo paled in shock. He grabbed my arm and stared at me as though I truly was mad. “Mother Benedette? That holy woman—”

“For pity’s sake, do not doubt me now! I speak the truth! We must find him before it is too late!”

A lesser friend, one who told himself that he had only my best interests at heart, would have stopped me. Help would have been summoned, I would have been shuffled away, and ruin would have fallen upon us all. But Renaldo, that man of dry numbers and ledgers, believed in the existence of free will and even, just possibly, of the ability of a woman haunted by dire visions to change the future.

“Quickly, then,” he said. Together we ran; not toward the Spaniard’s apartments, for I had no hope of anyone there heeding me, but toward Cesare’s. His valet opened the door. The man was a model of discretion—a necessity given his position—but even he looked surprised at the sight of me.

“Donna Francesca, is everything all right?”

“Is he here? Is he back yet?”

“Yes, but—”

Without waiting to hear more, I pushed past and hurried through the antechamber toward Cesare’s private chambers. His Eminence was lounging in his bath. Looking up from a document he was perusing, he frowned. “Is that blood on you?”

It was, but I had scarcely noticed, nor did I intend to waste any time acknowledging what could be dealt with later. “Get up. We have to find Herrera.”

Under normal circumstances, I would never have been so foolish as to give Cesare orders, but exhaustion and terror combined to make me reckless. I even went so far as to grab hold of his arm and try to haul him bodily from the tub.

I didn’t succeed, of course, but I did get his attention. “What’s wrong?” he asked as he stood, water sluicing off him. At once, his valet darted forward with a towel.

As succinctly as possible, I said, “Mother Benedette is a Cathar. She means to kill Herrera. We have to find them.”

In the midst of wrapping the towel around his waist, Cesare stopped and stared at me. “She’s a what? She means to do what?”

It was not like him to be so slow, but in all fairness, I was asking him to accept in an instant what it had taken me a good deal longer to recognize.

“A Cathar,” I repeated. Afraid that he would not understand, I went on hurriedly, “The Cathars were a sect that the Church deemed heretical and supposedly stamped out centuries ago, but—”

“I know who they were. Why do you think that the abbess is one of them and what do you mean, she is going to kill Herrera?”

My nerves, already shredded, were at the breaking point, but I strove to answer as calmly as I could. “She admitted it. She has an elixir that the Cathars believe enables them to see the path to the true god. She gave it to me and—Never mind, there is no time! We must find Herrera.”

“What has he to do with this?” Cesare asked as he accepted the clothes his valet held out. To my great relief, he began to dress. A taste for the habits of the war camp and the battlefield meant that he could ready himself far more swiftly than most. Even so, each moment was torture for me.

“She is the assassin sent by your father’s enemies to destroy the alliance.”

The danger had not come from David as I had worried, or from Cesare as I had feared. Mired in my own concerns, drugged by my own hand and hers, I had seen only a woman who claimed to be my mother’s friend and mine. What had she said? People will always believe what they want to believe. Of all my sins, just then I was more ashamed of that than any other.

“Please, we must go!”

Tucking his shirt into his breeches, he looked at me closely. “You truly believe this? A Cathar assassin sent to destroy the alliance for what … revenge after all these centuries?”

Despair filled me. If I could not convince him … “More than that; to set off a battle within Christendom itself, the cardinals pitted against each other, against you, with no one strong enough to win. France, Spain, the great families of Italy all choosing sides. It will be the Great Schism all over again, only this time the Church will not survive.”

When he continued to stare at me, I said, “I know that I sound mad, and perhaps I am. But this is real, and if we don’t act now…”

My shoulders sagged. I was asking him to trust me when the hard truth was that I could not fully trust myself.

“If we do act and you are wrong…” He did not finish, but there was no need. I understood full well that if I was in the grip of a delusion conjured by my drug-disordered mind, all the world was about to learn of it. The howling of the wolves would be as nothing compared to the baying of my enemies for me to be put away or worse. It did not escape my notice that I was risking everything in order to save Herrera. Truly, those whom the gods wish to amuse themselves with, they afflict with irony.