The Borgia Mistress: A Novel (30 page)

“It was. I found it the next day when I began to remember where I had gone.”

She looked surprised. “You remembered? That should not have been possible. The drug expunges all memory.” She thought for a moment. “Unless you’ve been taking something else that partly counteracted the effect.”

Sofia’s powder, perhaps? I still hungered for it, but after all the talk of Cathar drugs, I was determined to never take it again. Please God, I would remain strong in that conviction.

“You killed Magdalene,” I said.

She shrugged. “Do not tell me that you did not consider doing so yourself. Or that you did not think about killing Herrera. We are more alike than you wish to admit, Francesca.”

I looked at her, a young woman, a hired assassin who, for all of her fanaticism—or perhaps even because of it—I suspected was very good at her job. Had events worked out only slightly differently, she would have bested me. She had been shaped by an act of brutal oppression and violence that cast ripples down through the centuries into the present day and likely would continue to do so far into the future. But she would not see that. Her time was over.

Mine was not, and for that I was suddenly, overwhelmingly grateful. For all that I was not and likely never would be a normal woman, I saw the beauty of this world and I cherished it. Evil exists, it is real, but so is good. We are not alone in the dark.

“I have one more question.” To which I already knew the answer, yet I had to hear it. “You made up the stories about my mother, including the manner of her death?”

She shook her head. “I have no such gift for tale spinning. The intermediary told me what to say.”

That was not what I expected, yet it changed nothing. “But you have no reason to believe that any of it was true?”

“None at all.” She did not sound regretful, but then I had not expected her to do so. I had come to the realization while still in Tanners Lane that she had exploited my deepest longings to her own ends. All the same, it was hard to hear. I had to force myself to go on.

“We are nothing alike,” I said. “You put your faith in a vision that I will never accept. But you have kept your part of our bargain. I will keep mine.”

I was reaching for the pouch in which I kept the necessities of my profession when she surprised me. Smiling, the woman I knew as Mother Benedette said, “Thanks to you, I die knowing that the path to the world beyond this place of evil does exist. I want you to know that I am truly grateful for that. Now that I have acted to redeem my soul from Satan, I am free to follow that path at last. We will not meet again in this world, but be assured, I will look for you in the light.”

Before I could reply, she snapped the string holding the wooden beads of her rosary. Most fell to the floor along with the cross, but several remained in her hand.

Still smiling, looking directly at me, she placed them in her mouth and bit down hard.

Moments later, the Cathar assassin was dead.

30

My efforts to save Mother Benedette were futile, but I made a show of trying all the same for the sake of the guards. The rosary beads, as it turned out, contained ground paternoster peas. Left intact, the peas can pass through the body without causing it distress. But once the outer covering is punctured, they release one of the deadliest toxins known to man. In all likelihood, the “abbess” was dead before she hit the floor.

I stared at her in shock, trying to understand why she had waited to speak to me before ending her own life when she had the means to do so all along. Had she nurtured some hope of escape? Believing what she did, I could not think that she truly wanted anything so much as to die and be free of this world. But for that to happen, her death had to occur in the right way … an act to redeem her soul. Herrera would live; she had failed there. The Spanish alliance would remain. I would not be blamed for the deaths that had occurred and because of them be consigned to the flames. Borgia would endure.

Borgia. The answer came to me so suddenly that I cried out. She died believing that she had won and that ultimately I would know it. In her final act, she had sought to convince me of the rightness of her beliefs. And to compel me to follow the same path she had taken. Truly, she intended for us to meet again.

The full magnitude of my failure almost slammed me to my knees beside her. I only just managed to stay upright and stagger from the room, past the startled guards. I ran the distance back to Borgia’s apartments, my heart pounding and my breath coming in gasps.

Bursting into his private chamber, I caught him about to raise a goblet to his lips. At once, I cried out, “Do not!”

He stared at me over the rim. Without waiting for him to act, I closed the distance between us, seized the goblet from him, and threw it to the floor, where it shattered. Panting, hardly able to speak, I said, “You cannot eat or drink anything. No one can. You must send word … warn them all—”

The room was beginning to spin. I feared that I was about to faint and I might have done so had not Borgia had the presence of mind to lower me into a chair, bend me over, and tuck my head firmly between my knees.

“Breathe,” he ordered, holding me by the neck so that I had no choice but to obey. When he was finally satisfied that I was no longer about to lose consciousness, he allowed me to straighten up. “Stay where you are,” he directed as he went to the door and had a quick word with one of his secretaries. I saw the man pale before he rushed off to do the pontiff’s bidding.

“All right,” Borgia said as he returned to his seat facing me. “I have just now declared a general fast in gratitude to God for sparing Herrera’s life. No morsel of food or drop of drink will pass anyone’s lips until I say otherwise. Now tell me what this is about.”

“The Cathar is dead.” Before he could react, I said, “She took poison that was in her rosary beads. Paternoster peas … extremely deadly.”

“And?” he prompted.

“She had that rosary with her all this time, from when we first met. Don’t you see? I brought her into your household, took her around with me into the kitchens, everywhere as I did my work. If I was distracted for a moment, she could have poisoned anything I had inspected and I wouldn’t have realized it. I would have gone ahead and put it under seal without suspecting that anything was wrong. There could be poison lurking anywhere and none of us the wiser.”

“Do you have reason to believe she actually did that?” Borgia asked.

Loathe though I was to admit it, I nodded. “It is what I would have done. A final way to destroy you and bring ruin down on the Church, in case everything else went wrong.” And it would have worked if I, who so resisted the notion that the “abbess” and I were alike in any way, had not been able to realize her intent.

Borgia sat back and regarded me solemnly. “Very well; we will send to the town for such supplies as are available. That, at least, will make us popular with the townspeople. When you have recovered, you can begin re-inspecting anything that hasn’t spoiled in the meantime.”

“You are being remarkably calm about this,” I said. “We both know that I put my need to learn about myself above my responsibility to protect you.” It was the simple truth. I saw nothing to be gained by trying to evade it, nor did I expect him to allow me to do so even for a moment.

Truly, it was a night for surprises.

Borgia smiled faintly. “Yet here I am, alive and well. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because I—”

“Told the truth just now, admitted your error. Did not try to save yourself at my expense. You could have, you know. Only you and the ‘abbess’ knew what took place between you. You could have claimed that she died from poison that you gave her.”

The look His Holiness sent me suggested that he had suspected me of being prepared to do exactly that. He may even have counted on it to further conceal how close he had come to disaster.

And yet I had to say, “I have failed you in every way. Mother Benedette did not know who hired her. We are no closer to discovering who tried to kill you than we were before.”

“That is unfortunate,” Borgia said. “But I wonder, what did she tell you about your mother?”

“That doesn’t matter. It was all lies.”

“That she spun?”

“No, she was given a story to tell me.”

“And that story was…?”

Seeing that he would not relent, I related it as quickly and succinctly as I could manage. All I wanted was to put it behind me and go on with my confession, but Borgia seemed inclined to do otherwise; he listened with great care. When I finished, he said, “But that is all true. That really is what happened to your mother, and to you.”

I stared at him in bewilderment. “How could you know that?”

“Did you think that I would hire your father for such a vital position in my household without investigating him thoroughly first? No, I knew what had happened, and after he had been with me for a while, we spoke of it.”

My hands clasped the arms of the chair in which he had put me. I held on tightly as the world threatened once again to whirl away. “I don’t understand. Who else knew the truth?”

Borgia looked pleased that I had the wit to ask the question. “Who else indeed?”

When I continued to stare at him in blank confusion, he said, “Your mother was born and raised in Milan. She died in a small village not far from that city, still well within the lands of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. He would have had no difficulty finding out the truth.”

“He is behind this? The Sforzas are?”

“Ironic, isn’t it? All this time, I’ve been blaming della Rovere.” The difficulty of giving up his justification for contriving to murder his great rival weighed heavily on him. He sighed deeply. “No wonder my esteemed son-in-law went out of his way to give such grave offense that I had no choice but to banish him from here. He must have been warned that this was not an opportune time to be in my vicinity.”

“And now?” I asked. What would happen to Lucrezia and her not-quite husband? What price would Borgia exact in order to protect his papacy and his grand vision of his own immortality?

“And now,” he said as his good humor returned, “thanks to you, I know who among those who call themselves my friends are in fact my enemies. That will be quite useful.”

“Even so, I failed—”

“And I know something that I didn’t even so much as suspect before now. The Cathars really are a threat. We will have to be alert to them in the future.”

Staring at him, I saw his satisfaction in the present victory but also his avid appetite for the fight ahead. Truly, he was a man who thrived on the struggle for power in this world, no matter that it brought pain and death to others.

Slowly, I said, “The Cathars believe that you serve not God but Satan. Indeed, you are the head of his church on Earth. Killing you and setting the Church on the path to its own destruction would be the supreme act of redemption. Whoever did it would be assured of being liberated from this world forever.”

Mother Benedette died smiling. I would never forget that.

“What do you believe, Francesca?”

What indeed? That if the Cathar “abbess” had succeeded in doing what she was hired to do and shattering the alliance, Borgia might have been forced to give up his grandiose vision for
la famiglia
and make peace with his rivals in order to survive? Or that he might simply have been undone and another man put in his place? In either case, war might have been averted.

It would not be now. As much as I still wanted to believe otherwise, that hard truth could not be avoided. War was coming as surely as the sun was rising behind Il Papa, a bloodred sun threatening to drown the world. And I had helped to bring it about.

That was what the abbess had wanted all along. The Church torn apart, at war with itself and with the most powerful Christian monarchs. What could hope to survive such a cataclysm?

*   *   *

I had time to ponder that question several days later as, His Holiness having pronounced himself satisfied with the fortifications at Viterbo, we set out to return to Rome. Cesare rode beside me along most of the route. In the hours we had spent together beside Herrera’s bed, we had become closer in a way neither of us needed to speak about but which I think we both understood. He knew most, though not all, of what had happened with the Cathar “abbess,” and he knew, better than any other, my fears. We disagreed on only one point.

“War,” Cesare pronounced, “is not evil. Tragic, yes, especially for those who suffer because of it. But properly undertaken, it can be a force for good.”

“War,” I countered, “is the absence of peace, just as Augustine said that evil is the absence of good. Both are the fault of man, not God.”

As I spoke, we crested the last hill. Below, Rome glinted in the sun. The rain had stopped and a fair wind was blowing, carrying the stink of the city to welcome us. The Tiber had returned to its banks and the plague had once again abated. The markets looked full, the streets bustling. Somewhere among them were dear friends, even those like Rocco with changed lives. As my own had been changed during my sojourn in the countryside. I returned to the city the same woman who had left it yet also someone else. A woman who knew her past.

Cesare gave a shout just then and surged his mount down the slope. I followed but more slowly. Over his shoulder, he called to me, “Don’t worry so much about what is coming, Francesca. Seize what is now!”

Perhaps it was his smile that emboldened me. Or perhaps I simply knew that he was right. I took a breath, set my heels to the chestnut mare, and rushed to meet the endless, unfolding moment.