Sins of the House of Borgia (61 page)

“Good, but I will go further. I will postulate that Ser d’Arzenta intends us to see the violin as hewn from the wood of the laurel, which symbolises Daphne’s chastity. And Cupid’s blindness enjoins me to concentrate on what my other senses tell me, to rely not upon what I can see, but upon what I hear. My husband tells me he is chaste and all is well with Ferrara. And that is what I must believe.”

“He gives you the secret of marital harmony, madonna.”

She laughed. “You see how clever he is. His work has inspired such discussion I had almost forgotten why I sent for you. Fidelma, you may leave us. Seek out your brother and tell him we are pleased, and he can go ahead and cast twelve medals in gold for the twelve months of my husband’s reign, and thirty—no, let us say twenty-nine—in silver. Sancho will arrange payment with him if he will come to his office tomorrow.”

As Fidelma left, I became aware from a sudden draft and a change in the light that the door to the main part of the room, on the other side of the screen, had opened. Some muttered conversation reached our ears, and a scuffling of feet, as though someone were being pushed or dragged across the threshold. Then a high-pitched cry of, “Shan’t,” followed by rapid thuds on the sprung dance floor. Footsteps, light and rapid. A child’s steps. Pressing myself against the screen I called, “Girolamo!” Then realised the runner was a little girl, then was unsure. After all, Girolamo was still several years away from being breeched or having his hair cut. Red ringlets, a hot temper, and a dislike for authority, it might equally well be Camilla as Girolamo, or any other child born to Cesare.

“Shhh,” commanded madonna. “Do not let them know we are here.”

All the children had entered the room now, with a bevy of weary-looking nursemaids and a travel-stained man bearing a hobby horse, an armful of dolls, and a hoop and stick. Giovanni, I noticed, had grown taller and thinner, though his resemblance to Donna Lucrezia and their father remained strong. Turning my attention to the other two, I realised, in a whirl of guilt and panic, that I could hardly tell one from the other as they danced about in front of the man with the toys and tugged at his sleeves to release his burden. Both wore woollen gowns, plain but of fine quality, and soft caps pulled well over their heads to ward off the cold, both had long, unruly red hair.

“Girolamo?” But they were making too much noise to hear me. One of them grabbed a doll, which the other immediately wanted, and a tug of war ensued. Inevitably, the doll’s head was sundered from its body and the child holding the head lost its balance and sat down abruptly. The other gave a crow of triumph, waving the decapitated body in the air, and trotted a lap of honour around the room, showing a glimpse of stout legs in wool stockings. To add to the mayhem, Fonsi, who had had his nose pressed to the trellis throughout, now escaped underneath it and flounced, yapping, in among the children. The child holding the doll’s head glanced towards the trellis and, though he was unaware of it, for a second our eyes met. His were very dark, with an old, cool spirit in their depths I knew very well. Then he turned his attention to the dog, and tossed it the doll’s head. That was Girolamo.

“Madonna, please may I go to my son?”

“No, Violante.” She placed a restraining hand on my arm. “Best not to.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, a sense of dread trickling into my veins, not certain I wanted to understand.

“I wanted to give you this opportunity to see he is well, but I will not be giving him back into your care. He is to go to Carpi under the tutelage of Don Alberto Pio. Don Alberto is of good standing and has some talented men in his household. He can ensure Girolamo grows up with all the accomplishments proper to his station.”

“But…”

“There can be no argument. Were you married, it might be different, but you were unlucky there and we must ride our luck, as my brother would no doubt be the first to tell you.”

“I am willing to marry, madonna. When have I ever said I was not?”

She gave me a sad smile. “There is a gulf between willingness and ability that I cannot afford to bridge. I would have to pay any man a high price for you, and I simply do not have it. Pope Julius sequestered everything of Cesar’s, you know. You will be able to see your son. I will make sure he is brought to Ferrara sometimes. But you must promise not to make yourself known to him.” After a pause she went on, “This is Cesar’s will also, Violante.”

The children are important to me,
he had said, and had proved it, had done me the courtesy of an entire night in his bed to prove it. The thought of resistence flashed across my mind and disintegrated, like a shooting star, but I could see very clearly in the ensuing darkness. Resisting their plans would only separate me further from my son; at least, if I abided by madonna’s terms, I would see him sometimes, and have news of him. I would know how he grew, and what he learned, when he passed through his childhood ailments, had his first pony, fell in love for the first time. I would know more about him than my own mother ever had the chance to know about me.
You follow love.
It is not a straight path, nor, perhaps, a very moral one.

***

I found myself increasingly drawn to Giulio. Although Angela moved back into our shared room and carried on as though nothing had changed since we had come to Ferrara four years ago, I could not confide in her my deepening sense of betrayal over Girolamo. Her daughter, still at Medelana in the care of her nurse, seemed to have made less of a mark on her mother’s heart than she had on her beautifully restored body. She would simply have told me that this was the way of things, that I had had my fun, paid the price, and it was time to move on. The festering air of nostalgia in Giulio’s apartments suited my inclinations better.

Even as Easter drew closer and the days lengthened, Giulio remained indoors, behind closed shutters, saying the light hurt his eyes. His rooms stayed in the grip of perpetual winter, though spring was advancing everywhere else. Sometimes I read to him and sometimes we would entertain ourselves by reciting from memory or singing together, though my musical accomplishments were very poor compared with his, and it was a relief to me when Ferrante was there, or the singer from Artigianova whom the duke favoured and had lent to his brother to hasten his recovery.

“A bloody singer,” said Giulio, with uncharacteristic ill grace, when Gian Cantore first arrived in his rooms, “and one I procured for him myself in the first place. What I need is money. Christ’s balls, I cannot even hunt for my own table any more nor see to sign a bill for the very cloth to make my eye patches. How am I to live?” He was exaggerating, of course, and the singer knew it as well as I did, and it took little more than a new
barzelletta
from Tromboncino to restore his equilibrium. Music could always cheer him because he did not need his eyes for it; on the contrary, he discovered his ear was truer, his fingers more responsive to the tremor of strings without the distraction of sight. He joked, once, bitterly, that if Angela were ever to return to him she would find his touch could give greater pleasure than before. At night, he had added, with all the candles snuffed. He apologised immediately for his coarseness and never mentioned her again. Often it fell to me to fill the silences, which I did by talking about Girolamo. Though we never spoke of Giulia, somehow I knew Giulio understood my pain and that listening to me helped to ease his own.

Shortly after Easter, Duke Alfonso left for a visit to Venice and made madonna governor in his absence. He sent word to Giulio that he should return to his own palace, as he wished the duchess, his wife, to occupy his rooms in the Corte while he was away, and the rooms in use by Giulio would be needed for her household. He garrisoned the castle with a levy of Swiss mercenaries, though there seemed to be no reason for it, which sent a frisson of unease through the court. It reminded me of San Clemente during my last days in Rome. Whenever I went into the castle, it sounded like San Clemente, full of the guttural rumblings of the Swiss, the clank of spurs and armour, the click of dice cups. It smelled like San Clemente too, of leather and grease and steel, stale wine and men’s sweat.

I believed this to be the source of my unease, until, while helping Giulio to settle himself back into his home, I dropped one of his books and a letter fell out from between its pages. I would not have looked at it, except that I saw the name of Alberto Pio written there, and could not resist. Giulio himself was in his garden with Ferrante; I could hear their voices through the open window, Giulio complaining about the light and Ferrante telling him he needed air and exercise and would have to get used to it.

The letter was from Francesco Gonzaga, though not written in his own hand, which I would have recognised immediately. He thanked Giulio for his expressions of friendship and assured him his love for his brother-in-law and grief at his treatment were no less.
Don Alberto Pio,
he had written,
will have conveyed to you in person, I trust, my sympathies for the action you and Don Ferrante propose to avenge the misuse of Your Excellency’s person by the most reverend cardinal...
I dared not read on. What did it mean? It sounded to me like treason, for any revenge Giulio was proposing on Ippolito would be as much an attack on the duke himself, so close were they. Yet if they were planning revenge, how could Giulio and Ferrante and their associates be so inept as to commit themselves in writing? Perhaps it was just some joke after all, or an old letter, long past its relevance, tucked inside the book and forgotten. I looked at the book: some newly printed verses of Ariosto’s from which I had been reading to Giulio only days before. I looked at the letter again to see if it was dated; it had been written during Holy Week. Pushing the letter into my bodice, I called down to the men in the garden through the open window that I had to leave, as the duchess would be looking for me to help her dress for her evening audiences.

“Apparently a lady from Cento wishes to petition her to allow a tournament of ladies to take place in the Barco on Corpus Christi,” I told them, astonished at my own calmness.

“I hope she agrees,” Ferrante called back. “That would be a sight for sore eyes.” At which Giulio dug him in the ribs and they fell to scuffling like a couple of children. They had no inkling of what I had found nor what I intended to do with it.

What could I do with it? And how soon before Giulio realised it was missing and suspicion fell on me? I thought of taking it straight to Donna Lucrezia; she would do anything in her power to avert the distress of further discord between the brothers. But therein lay the difficulty. During her Holy Week retreat to the convent of Corpus Domini she had suffered a bout of tertian fever and was still weak. I feared a relapse if I showed her the letter. Walking back down the Via degli Angeli towards the Corte, however, I passed a man carrying bundles of trussed fowls suspended from a pole across his shoulder, and that gave me an idea.

After hearing the petition from the lady of Cento, which she declined, and others on the more usual matters of property disputes, marriage dispensations, pension claims, and requests for patronage, madonna went to rest and I was able to slip away. Donna Lucrezia’s influence had enabled Gideon to set himself up in the workshop of a popular silversmith who had his business under the arcades bordering the piazza, so I did not have far to go. The early evening was fine, and people were still spending enthusiastically after the privations of Lent, so the old town was thronged with shoppers and porters, fishmongers with the smell of the river clinging to their clothes,
campesini
with earth under their fingernails wheeling barrows of squashes still capped with their little yellow flowers. A swordsmith and a knife grinder were fighting a duel of words about the quality of their wares which almost deafened me as I ducked into a tiny alley beside the apothecary’s shop, where the scent of ground nutmeg mingled with the reek of pig. At the end of this, past the pigpen and a woodstore, and a rack of saltpans spread with drying olive pits, stood the silversmith’s workshop where I hoped to find Gideon.

As I entered, pushing aside the thick leather door curtain, I heard whistling, and bursts of tiny percussions from somebody working with small tools. No lamps were lit, but blades of light struck through the gloom from gaps in the plank walls and the roof, forming a bright grid in which motes of gold and silver dust drifted and turned with the draught. As my eyes adjusted, this prison of light seemed to dissolve and I caught sight of Gideon, stooped over the workbench, chipping away at something with a chisel no bigger than the tweezers I used to pluck madonna’s eyebrows. He had a magnifying lens in some kind of wire support strapped to his forehead and a plate of bread with slices of smoked eel lay untouched beside him. The food glittered with a dusting of gold powder. I cleared my throat, suddenly shy of interrupting him. He jerked upright, almost hitting his head on a roof beam. The lens bounced then slipped over one eye and would have fallen had he not thrust up a hand to catch it. Unravelling the leather strapping which had bound it to his head, he put the whole contraption down on the bench. The back of his hand, I noticed, also glinted gold, and gold scored the lines in his face when he smiled at me as though all the pores of his skin were filled with it.

“Ah,” he said, as though he had been expecting me.

“I need your help,” I told him, feeling it was important not to waste his time.

He rested his buttocks against the workbench and folded his arms. “I see. In what way can I help you?” He made no attempt to avert his gaze as I rummaged in my bodice for the letter which had slipped further inside my gown as I walked. As my hand brushed my breast, I had a sudden sense of his hand lying there, patterning my skin with gold dust, and a slow fire ignited in the pit of my stomach.