Sins of the House of Borgia (47 page)

“Yes. I think he’s asleep. Perhaps the fever has broken.” I touched the back of my hand to his forehead. It felt cooler, less clammy. “Will you stay with him? I have to feed Girolamo.” I would not risk the wet nurse taking my place, not after witnessing the way Dorotea Carracciolo had been separated from her daughter. That was not going to happen to me.

“I will.” He smiled at me, the weathered skin crinkling around his currant eyes. What did this Lucia matter anyway? She was not here, I was.

“You’ve done well, girl.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

***

As it turned out, I did not return that day, or the next, for Girolamo developed a fever and I dared not leave him. On the third day, Monna Vannozza came in person to enquire after him and to ask if there was anything I needed.

“How is the duke, madama?” I asked, ignoring her request. I was the woman with the healing hands, was I not? What could I possibly need to treat my son? Besides, I was certain Girolamo’s hot cheeks and grizzling discontent were no more than his teeth coming through. Camilla’s nurse, who had brought up five children of her own and nursed three more, had given him a little bone ring to chew, which seemed to soothe him.

“He is sitting in a chair receiving a deputation from Cardinal Carafa,” she admitted. “I imagine they are discussing the election.” She looked about the packed room for somewhere to sit. The young priest who was attending her finally took the hint and carried a low, three-legged stool across the room, stumbling over bundles of clothing and tangles of bedding. She brushed at it vigorously with her hand before lowering herself and smoothing her skirts over her knees. It crossed my mind she must keep the inns she had bought in Rome with Pope Alexander’s money to a very high standard, and woe betide any maid who left a corner undusted or a bed unmade.

Girolamo turned his head towards his grandmother and levelled his dark, unblinking gaze on her. Did I imagine she shivered a little? A sharp breeze was banging the shutters and billowing among petticoats hanging from a wall hook near one of the slit windows.

“He ate two bowls of chicken broth with almond milk at breakfast, and tried to demand ham. Ser Torella said he feared it would be unwise,” she continued. “Violante, let me tell you something.” She leaned towards me, elbows resting on her knees, and spoke in a low voice so as not to be overheard by the priest. “I wish he had died in his infancy, as God surely intended. I wish he had not lived to disappoint all my hopes for him.”

I could not imagine a more terrible and unnatural thing for a mother to say, yet I heard it with something approaching relief because now I knew beyond doubt that she was mad, that whatever she thought of Donna Lucrezia and whatever they used to say about me in the synagogue in Toledo, we were neither of us witches. If Cesare had flattered the fates into doing his will, he had done it alone.

“I thought he might be pope too, one day, but oh no, he must have other ideas, ideas that were bound to bring him into conflict with his father eventually. And he has always needed Rodrigo’s protection, whatever he thinks.”

“Surely you cannot believe he was suited to the Church, madama?”

“He would have been safe there, safe from…her.”

“Really, Monna Vannozza, I cannot hear more of this. Your illustrious daughter has been kind and generous towards me. She is my godmother and it behoves me to turn my face from what you allege about her. Please…”

“Very well, I am going, but you are a stupid, naïve girl and you cannot see what is under your nose. The very walls of this place sweat it on wet days. Or perhaps you are merely wilful.” She swept out, almost colliding with Fatima, the swarthy girl who wore earrings made of cascades of tiny gold coins and whose sweat smelled of cumin. The young priest scurried after her, the back of his neck turning red in response to Fatima’s carmined lips and bare arms.

***

Later that day Michelotto sought me out in the scullery where I was washing Girolamo’s clothes. “He’s asking for you,” he told me, propped against the low, arched doorway, a flock of scudding clouds behind his head, steam billowing out where the land fell away in rock and scrub to the stream which fed the castle’s well.

“I can’t…” I straightened up from the stone sink, pushing damp strands of hair out of my eyes with a hand reddened and pruned as a laundress’s. “I’ll come as soon as I’ve finished here.”

“Actually, he’s summoned you.” Michelotto sounded almost apologetic. It was a measure of how everything had changed.

“But…”

“Well he’s hardly looking his best either.”

I unwound the sheet I had wrapped around myself to protect my dress and followed him.

Cesare was seated in a high-backed chair facing the window of his bed chamber. The governor’s apartments had proper windows, partially glazed and overlooking a small garden and the muddle of roofs, terracotta and moss yellow, of the town of Nepi at the foot of the hill. The oblique honey glow of the autumn sun fell on the back of Cesare’s right hand where it rested on the arm of his chair, on the powder burn and a gleam of red gold hair and the sapphire in his wedding ring. The ring was loose and had slipped up towards his knuckle. A small table was drawn up beside the chair, piled with documents whose seals hung from their ribbons like clusters of strange fruit, crimson and purple, yew green and gold, one in Donna Lucrezia’s favourite shade of deep mulberry brown.

I crossed the room and dropped a curtsey, aware that Michelotto had withdrawn, closing the door behind him.

“Well, Violante, should I change your name? Should I call you Panaceia, perhaps, or Egeria? They tell me you saved my life.”

“I think only He who gives life and takes it away could do that, my lord, and I would not presume to say I was His instrument. You are strong, and you have been well cared for.”

“Oh for God’s sake let’s not have any of this my lording and sparring. Are we not a little beyond that? Did you bring the boy with you? I should like to see him. My mother says he is the very spit of me.”

Did she indeed? “Now I see you are well enough I will bring him. I was not sure…you never replied to my letter.”

I felt him willing me to look at him, the way some lepers do when you pass them in the street with your face averted and a kerchief held to your nose and, as with the lepers, I could not.

“Letter?” He sounded puzzled.

“I wrote, to tell you I was pregnant. Perhaps it never reached you. I sent…a verse by Pietro Bembo.”

Silence. I felt utterly foolish. How many girls, I wondered, had written, or paid a scribe to write, or dreamed of writing, such a letter to a man like Cesare? What right had I to think he would remember mine?

“Oh yes,” he said slowly, then cleared his throat, pleated folds of the loose brocaded gown he was wearing between his fingers, smoothed its sable cuffs. “The verse is not by Bembo.” As if he knew how I had come by it, as if he had found me out. “You should not have sent it. That is why I did not reply.”

I stared at his hands, opened my mouth to ask why not, saw his fingers curl suddenly into white-knuckled fists, grasping the fabric of his gown as though he would tear it. The words died on my tongue. “I’m sorry,” I whispered and tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry.

Then he raised his hands in a gesture of dismissal, palms facing out. Pushing me away. “No matter. It’s all water under the bridge now. I should like to see my son.”

“Now?”

“Why? Do you think me too ugly? Are you afraid I’ll frighten him?” He gave a harsh laugh. “I notice you will not look at me when not so long since you couldn’t take your great moonstruck eyes off me.”

I stared at my ruined shoes. Perhaps I was infected by Monna Vannozza’s strange superstitions, but somehow I felt this shrunken, haggard figure, almost swallowed by the high, dark chair in which he was sitting, was not Cesare at all. And if I looked at his face I would know this; I could no longer pretend otherwise, and all my dreams and memories would flee before his dead man’s stare.

“So you are a latterday Delilah. I am weak, my head is shaved, and you will run to your Philistines.”

“And at the moment, my lord, I think you are lame in both feet.” For the joints of his feet and ankles, resting on a footstool, were as swollen as his wrists and hands.

“I cannot follow you.”

“Only if I go very slowly.”

“I am in no mood for punning.” Truth to tell, nor was I.

“Pardon. In Jewish legend, Samson is lame.”

“Makes you wonder what she saw in him, doesn’t it?” He turned the joke on himself like a torch.

Now I looked at him, drawn by the sudden return of his old, wry humour, echoes of a time when I did not know I was happy, caught up in the marriage fever at Santa Maria in Portico. The bones of his face were sharp as knives and sometimes, even now, when I am tired, I close my eyes and feel the scars he left there on the undersides of my eyelids. The look he returned me was that of a brave child, determined, uncertain of the future, scared, and defiant. With each unmasking, each layer of glamour stripped away, I seemed to understand him less.

“Sit down, Violante,” he said. I found a stool and dragged it into the window embrasure where his chair had been placed. I sat down and waited. He fiddled with his ring, smoothed his cuffs, and said, finally, “The children are important to me.”

“Of course they are. You must have heirs.”

“True, but that’s not what I meant.” He paused, as though he was unsure what he meant, then began again. “When Juan was made gonfalonier, my father commissioned a new setting of the
Beatus Vir
for the service. After Juan died, and the honour fell to me, he had the same piece performed at my investiture. And now he’s dead and I could never make him love me enough; I was always just Juan’s substitute. Less good looking, less charming, less easy to love. I didn’t matter enough to have new music written for me. The things I was better at—strategy, tactics, politics, government, diplomacy—they only mattered in my father’s mind, not in his heart. He never sent for me when he knew he was dying. All the time I lay sick, just one floor above him, and he never sent to find out how I was. I couldn’t make a place for myself in his heart and now it’s too late. He’s gone. Dust. Do you see?” Stone words, too perfectly sculpted.

Something inside me clenched, made a hard knot in my belly. “Do you know why I’m here, Cesare?”

He shook his head. “I hadn’t thought about it, to be honest.”

“Donna Lucrezia sent me back to my father. Because of Girolamo.”

“Girolamo? That is the boy’s name?”

“Girolamo Giulio Cesare. Don Giulio d’Este is his godfather.”

“Good. Giulio is an honest man. So why are you not at your father’s house?”

“Because when I arrived there I found my father had died, and my brother would not receive me. Because of you.”

“Me?”

“My father suffered a seizure after your men came to…” I paused, breathed, tried to steady my voice, “…collect taxes, as I believe they put it. They even took the
menorah
we brought from Spain, my mother and I. To pay for your soldiers. I travelled through the Romagna to get to Rome, of course. I saw soldiers, though I tried to keep out of their way. They were not behaving like men who had been well paid, Cesare.”

“It’s artillery that costs,” he commented sulkily.

“Shut up and listen to me. I wanted to kill you. Then a good woman reminded me that love matters more than duty. Though as far as I know, she has done her duty all her life so I don’t know where this wisdom came from. So I have brought you your son. He is your only son, and we must think about him now. There will be time enough to mourn our fathers later.” My heart had set up such a tattoo in my chest I was afraid I would faint. My sight blurred and my head felt like a bladder full of air; I half expected it to lift from my shoulders and float out of the open window.

“What do you think it would be best to do for him?” he asked. He spoke with tenderness, almost humility, but he could not disarm me that easily.

“You’re asking me? You are the great Valentino, the victor of Senigallia, the…”

“Spare me your sarcasm, woman. It does rather take the shine off your last pretty speech. I could hand him a fistful of titles but frankly, keeping him alive, keeping all this…” He waved his arm at the window, the room, the castle. His sleeve caught the pile of parchments and scattered them over the floor, “…circus going is my top priority at the moment. How many people do you suppose are here? What are they all to eat come winter? I have nothing but what Michelotto managed to seize before the buzzards started flocking round the Vatican, and that little I must use to keep Della Rovere’s arse off Saint Peter’s throne or I am finished. I can scarcely get out of this chair, let alone ride at the head of an army. You know, I had thought of everything. Everything, Violante, except that when my father died I would also be laid low with the fever.

“And now I am so tired. Sometimes I feel as though I have a dark daemon clinging to my shoulders like the Princess Sherezade’s old man of the sea, and he wraps his legs and arms around me so tight I can scarcely breathe, let alone move, or think, or do anything.”

I am sick,
he had written.
Sickness smoulders in me like fire at the heart of a damp haystack; it ticks in the night like a death clock in the rafters.
Now I understood.