Sins of the House of Borgia (50 page)

“What do you think, Jofre?” he asked finally.

“Me?” Jofre’s cheeks turned as pale as they had been scarlet. “Well, I…”

“Cardinal Piccolomini is a scholar,” I said quickly. I remembered him as a frail, serious man who had taken an interest in my conversion because my father’s agents had on occasion negotiated for him in the purchase of rare polyglot Bibles. “I do not think he will be concerned to change things on the temporal side as long as they run smoothly. I believe he will reinstate you, your grace.”

Cesare looked relieved; I might almost have imagined grateful. “Yes. And his uncle, Pius II, was indebted to my father for his election and preferred him in many things. What name will he take?”

“Pius also,” said Jofre.

“Good, good. Then I will write and remind him that he can emulate his uncle in more practical ways than merely by taking his name. How did the vote go?”

Jofre clicked his fingers impatiently at the messenger, who produced a letter from his satchel and handed it to Jofre. Jofre broke the seal and scanned the contents. “Della Rovere came out ahead on the first ballot.” Cesare snarled. Jofre hurried on. “So D’Amboise and Ascanio Sforza joined forces on the second to propose Piccolomini.”

“Then Agapito made a felicitous blend of my directions and his own initiative and advised them well,” said Cesare. “No one can object to Piccolomini. He has no political interests, no family looking for advancement. But we need to act fast. My enemies will be whispering in his ear in no time, trying to persuade him I threw them out of their vicariates illegally. I must make sure of his heart before others gain sway over it.”

“He’s not in good health either, by all accounts,” added Jofre happily. The possible implications of a short papacy held no threats for him if Cesare had rediscovered his characteristic decisiveness. “He suffers terribly with the gout.”

“Then,” said Cesare, picking his way cautiously through his words, “he will look sympathetically on my own predicament. Come, Jofre, give me your arm, there is much to be done.” Jofre helped him to his feet, but he set off ahead of his brother at an energetic limp which reminded me of his father. Then suddenly he stopped, so abruptly Jofre had to take a smart step aside to avoid colliding with him. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said to me, fishing in a pocket concealed among the quilted panels of his doublet. “Here.” He tossed me a small box, and nodded his appreciation as I managed to catch it in my one free hand. It was the gold and enamel pill box given him by Ser Torella for his lozenges against the pox. “I noticed…a little scarring when you…” He sought for discreet words to use in front of his brother and the messenger from Rome, but finished by resorting to a vague gesture of his cupped hands in front of his chest. “You must be sure to guard my son’s health.”

Don Jofre sniggered and shifted slightly away from me. He’d be poxed himself, I thought, a furious blush coming to my cheeks, if that Neapolitan whore he was married to ever deigned to share his bed.

“But do you not have need of them?” I asked Cesare.

“Oh, I am cured. The French disease cannot live alongside the tertian fever. Torella tells me they make poor neighbours and the tertian fever always drives the other out. Take them, and I will have Torella make you more.”

“Thank you,” I said, though gratitude was not what I felt.

***

The new pope quickly confirmed Cesare in all his titles, but balked, it seemed, at granting permission for him to return to Rome. He regretted he could not guarantee the duke’s safety, and would never forgive himself if he thought his actions had put his holy predecessor’s beloved son at risk.

“Yet I am hardly safe here,” raved Cesare, sending the lesser kitchen staff running for cover. He was showing Giovanni how to kill a crayfish, and it was the man who had brought the crayfish, one of a dozen in a barrel of water from the lake at Bracciano, who had told him of the rumour that Guidobaldo of Urbino was trying to raise an army to march on Nepi. He stabbed his knife into the crayfish’s head then turned the creature deftly through the angle of Pythagoras until the knife blade was aligned with the middle of its back. Its claws waved feebly. Giovanni watched with his mouth open and eyes as round as chestnuts. “You have to be quick, you see, or you’ll make a mess of it.”

“Maybe you should go to Romagna,” I said, picking up on his double meaning.

He brought the knife down through the back of the fish. “There,” he said to Giovanni, “you clean it. Stomach and any dark bits from the tail. That would be the coward’s way,” he answered me.

“Or the way of common sense. Build up your powerbase there again, then go to Rome.”

“Women understand nothing. No, Giovanni, that’s the roe. You’re going to have to learn the difference, boy, or you’ll never get far with your wooing.” He looked at me and chuckled, and something seemed to melt just below my ribs, and I loved his cool head and the way he could always make me laugh, and I knew I was not going to leave him.

***

Pope Pius changed his mind quite quickly in fact, though for us, watching Cesare chafe at Nepi, the wait seemed interminable. He was our sun and moon, and his foul temper affected us all like a change in the weather. The autumn remained golden and fair, yet my bones ached with anxiety as though afflicted with a winter ague. I grew impatient with Girolamo, who was teething, and resentful of my attempts to wean him. His crying sliced me so thin I snapped at him then, full of remorse, weakened and let him have the breast. Monna Vannozza told me I should hand him over to Camilla’s nurse. She told me I had become addicted to my child the way some people grow dependant on poppy. I will not repeat the things I said to her in reply for they shame me.

Then one afternoon when I had been walking in the hills behind the castle, trying to soothe my nerves and distract my mind from my aching breasts, I met Don Jofre at the gate with a bundle of letters. He was always the first to greet the messengers who arrived almost daily from Rome or Ferrara or the court of France, ever hopeful of a letter from the errant Princess Sancia, ever destined for disappointment. But today a grin cracked his narrow face from side to side, revealing his three remaining canine teeth and the gap where the fourth used to be until he lost it in a fight.

“He’s done it at last,” shouted Jofre, waving a parchment which bore the papal seal. “Cesare’s persuaded the old goat to let us go home.”

“I wish you wouldn’t read my letters, little brother.” Cesare, naked to the waist and trailing an old, blunted broadsword in the rutted dust of the yard, spoke mildly but fixed Don Jofre with a stare as blank as a snake’s.

“I…I thought you were probably resting. I didn’t want you to be disturbed with anything unimportant.”

“I’ve been sparring with Michelotto. Got to get my strength up, now I’m to be gonfalonier again.” His chest still bore the scars of the ice bath, patches of dead white and puckered skin where no hair grew, as though the goblet I had once traced with my fingertips had been smashed and poorly mended. “Give me the letter, Jof.” Jofre handed it to him. He shook out the rolled parchment and skimmed it with his eyes, and a thin smile stretched his lips.

“He wrote and told old Piccolomini he was dying, you know,” Jofre told me. “Begged to be allowed to go home and die in peace. And the daft old sod believed him. Apparently he told the Ferrarese ambassador that he had never thought to feel any pity for the duke, but that he now found himself pitying him most deeply.” Jofre gave his irritating snigger.

“Hold your tongue, Jofre. You’re blathering nonsense like a girl.”

“His Holiness will be very surprised when he sees you, my lord,” I said. “Pleasantly surprised, I am sure.”

“Ah, but there are many ways to die, Violante.”

C
HAPTER 5

R
OME,
O
CTOBER 1503

I have been remembering the place we used to hide among the fruit canes, where I crushed the ladybird because I was sure I would never need its tiny store of luck.

And for every way of dying, there is a way to protect yourself from death.

Rome was full of Cesare’s enemies, vultures, he said, come to pick over his carcass and more dangerous than ever now they were condemned to go hungry. Once we had returned to the palace of San Clemente, Cesare rarely left it, and never after dark. The main gates remained locked and barricaded and despite objections from the Vatican, and all the major Roman families, a row of small cannon were ranged across the square outside, causing carters to have to take alternative routes through the cacophonous maze of the Borgo. Cesare had makeshift wooden firesteps slung up around his garden walls, which his guards accessed by means of rope ladders so the walls took on the aspect of the high sides of a ship ready for boarding. The towpath which ran between the palace grounds and the Tiber was patrolled by men with dogs, and several complaints were received from bargemen whose horses had been savaged. In the garden itself, he allowed his pet leopards free rein, and they were irritable after the journey from Nepi, bouncing over pitted roads on the back of a cart.

Cesare himself went armed at all times, even, said those who might or might not know, sleeping with his sword on his pillow. He began to wear a ring I had never seen before whose cameo setting formed the hinged lid to a tiny compartment which, it was rumoured, contained the legendary poison called cantarella. We used to laugh about cantarella, which was supposed to have been devised by Donna Lucrezia for disposing of her first husband, Giovanni Sforza.

“Well,” Cesare would say, punning on the poison’s name, “a milksop like Sforza might well be killed by a blow from a mushroom.” But now, thinking back, I could not recall he had ever actually denied its existence.

And looking at him, I wondered whether he kept it about him to use on his enemies or himself. The fine skin beneath his eyes had begun to resemble ink-stained parchment and his eyelids were pleated with weariness like those of a much older man. Lines like deep scars ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth. I doubt he slept, even when he did finally retire to bed as dawn was beginning to overpower the magic of candlelight and the city’s bells struck up the call to Prime. His imagination was too agile; even an unsheathed sword on his pillow and armed guards at his doors and windows could not ward off all the terrible possibilities that must have been whirling around his mind, the spectres of failure lurking in unlit corners, the loneliness, the temptation of death. I suppose there were women for the loneliness, but now I can see they would only have made it worse.

Yet to the outside world he kept up the smiling mask of optimism. The builders who had erected the firesteps and checked for weak spots in the palace walls were kept on to resume the work of modernisation which had been abandoned on the death of his father. Wherever Cesare went, he was shadowed by his clerk of works cradling a stack of thumbed and dog-eared plans, trailing a flow of questions and observations about stable buildings with hypocausts, flushing systems for privies, windows for the library and whether or not a revolving studiolo could be constructed with mechanics to keep pace with the daily transit of the sun. The palace itself seemed to be infected with the same sense of shifting impermanence as the household it sheltered. You might walk into a room one day, only to find yourself teetering on the edge of a cliff of brick rubble the next. Walls appeared and disappeared and reappeared in new formations as though performing a strange, slow, dusty dance. Candelabra of Venetian glass hung from the ceilings in linen shrouds, like the chrysalises of giant moths. Figures in half-painted frescoes seemed in one light to have the energy of Adam struggling out of the mud, yet in another were ghosts fading back into the pale plaster. The house breathed fumes of quicklime, catching in our throats and making our eyes stream.

As the builders and painters and carpenters remodelled his palace, Cesare worked to rebuild his wasted body. He wrestled daily with the African giant he kept for the purpose and spent hours at target practice with bow and arquebus or fencing with his master-at-arms. He organised
calcio
matches among his guards and the men of the household, with himself as one team captain and Don Jofre, wheezing and grumbling and stopping frequently to drink from a flask of grappa, at the head of the other. Then he decided the players should toughen their feet by playing without shoes, because as soon as the new pope’s coronation had taken place they would be marching back to the Romagna under the banner of the papal gonfalonier. He had already dispatched Michelotto with an advance guard to Rocca Soriana.

What salves we had for cuts and blisters were quickly used up and every spare chemise or worn-out shirt had been torn into strips for bandages, and the master of horse was doubtful he could acquire enough mules or ox-carts to transport the lame north when the time came. Besides, what sort of army journeyed on carts with feet bound like the courtesans of Cathay? The men’s health also suffered from the amount of betting that went on, resulting in accusations of match fixing and fights which led to an array of cracked ribs and broken noses, and one man who almost died of a stab wound to the lung.

Eventually his serjeant-at-arms, with much muttering and head shaking about the duke’s state of mind, asked me if I could persuade Cesare to put a stop to the games as he, it seemed, could not. The one constant in the makeshift world enclosed by the high, blind walls of San Clemente was my strange non-relationship with Cesare, the circle of questions unasked and unanswered which to those outside it looked like a love affair.

“You speak to him; he’ll listen to you,” people said, and I wanted to believe them.

***

He was in his garden. I could not see him as I peered through the sunlit crack in one of the three doors opening from the ground floor salon on to the garden, but I knew he was there because of the number of men at arms standing watchfully among the statues and the topiary. He had many shadows, as though he needed them to prove his substance. I pushed the door cautiously a little wider, telling myself not to be stupid. If Cesare’s guards were unconcerned, the leopards must be safely chained for once. One of the men turned sharply as I stepped out under the cloisters, his hand shifting to the pommel of his sword. The hand was bandaged, I noticed, with dark stripes of blood soaking through.

“It’s Violante,” I said, hoping I spoke loud enough, for my throat was still dry at the prospect of the leopards.

“He’s in the rose garden,” the man replied, and looked as though he was going to say more but then thought better of it and turned away from me to watch in the direction of the kitchen garden with its wall of espaliered peach trees whose fruit lay for the most part rotten and crawling with wasps. Stepping cautiously to avoid the dung from the leopards, whose stink was sharp and persistent, I made my way to the rose garden.

Cesare was sitting on the ground, his back propped against the plinth of a marble bust of Cicero. A late mosquito perched on the orator’s noble forehead, and his blind eyes stared out over Cesare’s head, lips pressed together in stoic disapproval. As he might well have looked on the Caesar of his own day. Drawing closer, I saw the long, thin blade of a Biscayan knife hanging from Cesare’s fingers. It was dark with blood. His hands and his Flemish lace cuffs were caked with a rust of the stuff. I felt the breath leave my body as though I had been hit in the chest. I may even have staggered a little. I thought he was dead, that his daemon had returned and taken the Visayan knife and plunged it into his belly.

I could not move. Should I call the guards? Would they think I had murdered him? Had one of them done it? They were not all men who had been with us in Nepi. Those who had stayed behind might easily have been bought by their master’s enemies while his back was turned and his death from the fever expected daily. Footprints. I must hunt for footprints in the soil scattered with dead rose petals.

As I stood transfixed by my indecision, Cesare turned his head and looked at me.

“Violante.” His tone was dull and disinterested, as though I were inevitable. I shook with relief. Unaware of how I came to be there, I found myself on my knees at his side, plucking at his sleeve with futile, shaky fingers.

“I thought you were dead. I came out to talk to you about the
calcio
and…Where did all the blood come from? Are you hurt? What happened?” Questions tumbling out of my mouth as inane as the braying of an ass.

“Tiresias.” He gestured with his chin towards a point in front of his feet. A heap of white fur and bloody flesh lay there, the soil around it stained crimson.

“Tiresias?” I repeated.

“He must have wandered out here, poor old boy. The leopards got him. There was nothing else for it by the time I found him. I had to…” He slid the knife across his throat, the blade almost grazing his beard. I looked at the dead dog, saw the cut, clean and beautiful, among the tatters of flesh and fur left by the leopards’ claws.

“You didn’t let him suffer. And he was very old.”

“Born the same month my father was made pope.” There was a catch in his voice, as though he was trying not to cry. His eyes, I noticed now, were bloodshot, but then, everybody’s were on account of the builders’ limekiln. “I should have had him drowned, but I thought a blind dog might make a good truffle hound. More acute sense of smell, you know? So I kept him. And he did.”

“You gave him a good life. The old pass. We live on. It’s the way of things.”

“Yes.” He sighed, and the new air in his lungs seemed to bring him to his senses. He wiped his knifeblade on his sleeve and leaned forward to return it to the sheath attached to the back of his belt, then examined his blood-caked hands and stained cuffs with an air of mild vexation. “I am going to Vespers with my mother this afternoon,” he said. “I had better change. I shall ask Bernardino to design him a tomb,” he added as he got to his feet and pulled me up after him, leaving tiny flakes of the old dog’s blood on my sleeve. “He’s in one of Bernardino’s paintings, you know, in the big fresco he did over the door in the Sala dei Santi, the one with me as the emperor and Lucrezia as Saint Catherine. Tiresias is at the feet of Juan’s horse, looking up at Juan adoringly, which only a blind dog would do.” He laughed. I responded with a cautious smile, never sure what Cesare’s feelings were towards his murdered brother.

He had taken to attending Mass regularly, most often in the company of his mother, in her family chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo, where Juan was buried. The
avvisi
opined that his own brush with death had sharpened his conscience; Cesare’s men tore them down from the Pasquino and set them alight in front of the crowds who gathered around the statue each day to discuss the latest gossip. It was impossible to know whether this was done at Cesare’s command, or without his knowledge.

One morning, as I was sitting in the garden with Girolamo, watching his efforts to roll himself over on to his front, I overheard raised voices coming from the house.

“But if I leave the gesso now it will dry and the whole wall will have to be re-plastered before I can start again.” I recognised the Mantuan accent of the little painter, Bernardino, summoned back to Rome by Monna Vannozza to decorate the walls of Cesare’s chapel.

“God’s work must come first.”

“Painting is God’s work. How else are your congregations to understand what you prattle on about in Latin if they have no pictures to look at?”

“Wonderful though your frescoes are, Ser Bernardino, you must admit that the duke’s desire to make confession is little short of miraculous.”

“I’d be careful what you say, priest.”

“And you want to be careful what you hear, painter, for you are not protected by the confessional and I dare say there are some in Rome who would go to very…creative lengths to find out what the duke might have to confess. A wall of spoiled gesso would be of less consequence to you than a set of smashed fingers.”

Then, with a string of triumphant gurgles, Girolamo finally flopped over on to his belly and lay beaming up at me, one cheek squashed against the blanket on which he lay, and by the time I returned my attention to the argument, the speakers had moved out of my hearing. But their words stayed with me, and the silences between them, and I could not help wondering how Cesare would break the silence, what he would choose to confess.

Certainly, in the coming days, he behaved like a man from whom a burden had been lifted, though privately I believed it was the resumption of a responsibility which had cheered him rather than being relieved of one. The new pope was crowned, and, as he had promised, he returned to Cesare the white lance of gonfalonier and captain general of his army. Though the Orsini and their partisans still prowled outside the Borgo like wolves around the edges of a fire, Cesare announced that he would give a party to celebrate, and to thank those who had supported him through his difficulties. The builders and decorators now worked around the clock, hammers pounding like massive heartbeats, new-laid marble floors flushed and shimmering with torchlight, dust everywhere, dulling the stars and choking the moon.