Sins of the House of Borgia (73 page)

You follow love. Even if the path leads to shoddy compromises, secrets, and lies. Yet how can you follow it beyond the point where you cease to be the person to whom that love means something? What Mariam had never understood, living meekly in her servant’s room with its earth floor and poor furniture, was that love requires you to be true to yourself first.

E
PILOGUE

C
ACHIQUIN, ON THE
D
AY OF
A
TONEMENT, 5281

This morning my captors finally decided it was safe to unchain me. I have been fastened to the wall by my wrists and ankles since being brought here—five or six days, I think. I have kept myself from going mad with pain and inertia by thinking about the Christmas I spent at Cesena, when I was most alive, touring around the mountain villages incognito, wrestling and dancing and drinking too much of their fearsome spirit and fucking their plump women. I was happy, Lucia, just plain, heedless happy. You know why? Because no one knew who I was.

There is little more to tell now about the time and the ways in which I served Donna Lucrezia Borgia, the Duchess of Ferrara. My life since I left Italy is part of another story, one in which I am no one’s mother or daughter, servant or concubine or double, but just myself. It has no place in this tale of masks and pretences, so I will not tell it here.

***

A requiem Mass was sung for the most noble and illustrious Duke of Romagna and Valentinois, Seigneur of France, in the cathedral of Ferrara on a Wednesday in May. The Este family, preceded by their clergy and followed by their households, processed across the square in bright sunlight which already carried within itself the ferocity of summer. All wore deep mourning and black banners decked the house fronts; even old Borso and the cuckold Niccolo were swathed in black ribbons. The shops were shut and the bell tolled mournfully in Alberti’s campanile and a few townspeople stood about in resigned and sceptical silence. Had it not been for his sister’s deep distress, her scarred face and hands hidden by gloves and a thick veil, Cesare would have laughed his head off.

Donna Lucrezia had insisted his children attend the Mass, so Camilla was there with two sisters from Corpus Domini, her face a small, grave oval, her red hair hidden by a white novice’s veil. Don Alberto Pio and his wife had brought Girolamo in person rather than entrusting him to his tutors, and he sat between them on a bench, a perfectly solemn expression on his face as all the while he tickled Don Alberto’s elder daughter and she squirmed beside him in an agony of mirth. I had made sure of a place for myself where I could watch him and reflect, not on his father, who was my past, but on the future which would begin the moment this service ended and we emerged once more into the light.

As soon as madonna had told me Girolamo would be coming to Ferrara for the Mass I had laid my plans. I had discovered Gideon’s whereabouts from Fidelma and had written to him, though I doubted he would receive my letter before my son and I reached the shores of New Spain ourselves. I had booked passage from Venice anonymously, through agents of my family’s business. I had sent on what little luggage I proposed to take with me into my new life, and had arranged post horses for a speedy journey to Venice. All this had been done without drawing the least suspicion; not for nothing had I been Valentino’s mistress. All that now remained was to watch for the opportunity to take possession of my son and get him away from Ferrara before anyone noticed he had gone. The Corte and castle were in the usual chaos caused by guests descending on us, jostling for space and precedence, losing themselves in our warren of rooms and passages. It was worse than ever now much of the Torre Leone was out of use and Duke Alfonso had given Don Giulio’s spacious palace to his favourite, Niccolo da Correggio. I had no doubt my opportunity would quickly present itself as long as I remained alert.

Just as the congregation fell silent to listen to Ippolito’s eulogy, Don Alberto’s daughter retaliated and kicked Girolamo’s shin. He let out a howl of pain and pulled her hair. As Ippolito cleared his throat and shuffled his papers, and the adults turned looks of varying amusement and disapproval on the two children, Don Alberto’s wife leaned across and reproved them gently. I saw her smile at her daughter and stroke Girolamo’s curls. He shuffled closer to her and laid his head against her side, his cheek fitted into the curve of her waist. She continued smoothing his hair and in seconds his eyes closed and he was asleep, a soft little moue of contentment playing about his mouth.

Ippolito began to speak, and in his elegant, meaningless phrases, in the silence of listening but not hearing, in which his audience wondered how long he was likely to go on and what they would be having for dinner after the service, I heard my heart crack. It sounded loud to me, as loud as breaking ice or burning glass, so I thought it best to leave the cathedral before it broke completely and distracted the congregation. Or woke my child. I did not mean to run. I knew it was disrespectful but less so, surely, than splintering in pieces in front of the great ladies and gentlemen, the scholars and merchants, all the assembled ranks of society to which I did not belong, had never belonged, though Girolamo did. Donna Lucrezia had made sure of it.

***

I sailed from Venice with nothing in my mind but a swirl of broken memories cast off from the sinking ship of my heart. For several days I lay sick of the sea, tortured by the perfume of oranges and the blind gaze of the Madonna of Strangers, by cages that turned into food baskets, black flesh and white bread, white bones silted in black mud, dark eyes and white teeth and red rivers of hair. I think I hoped to die.

But Death is perverse; he rarely comes when you court him. I recovered; I found my sea legs and began to set my mind to how I would live, a woman alone in the raw, new world whose very newness made everything possible. It had no rules; it had not yet learned its limitations. When we put in at the Azores on the voyage out, one of our junior officers received word his wife had given birth to their first child. He wanted to send her a letter but was not sufficiently schooled in writing to be able to express himself as he wished. He asked if I could help him; the only other women on board were the captain’s wife, whom he dared not approach, and the women who lived below decks and did laundry and other services for the crew, though not of the kind that extended to writing letters to their wives. His sentiments, he felt, were too delicate to share with another man.

I helped him. I found in myself a certain skill in ordering and articulating other people’s feelings, and one way or another, I knew a lot about letters and the power of written words. By the time we docked in Villa Rica, I had already acquired quite a reputation among my shipmates. I took a room in a bustling house, part tavern, part rooming house, part brothel, just back from the city’s main square, and with the money I had left after paying a month’s rent I bought quills and pen-knives, a sand caster, a quantity of ink, and some clean parchments. My landlady’s brother made me a sign, a flamboyant quill painted on a piece of silvery driftwood, and hung it in a mesquite tree that shaded the patch of red dust she had fenced off and called her terrace. There I sat, mornings and evenings, at a rickety table propped up with stones, writing other people’s letters for money. My landlady took her tithe and blossomed in the aura of respectability I conferred on her house like the strange, bright, blowsy flowers that grew in the bush all around us. As she learned what little I was prepared to divulge about my past, she had her brother add a rough approximation of the arms of Este to my sign.

I dare say that is how Gideon found me. Queues formed quickly. Sometimes I would have several clients waiting for me as I set out my tools in the benign, deceitful light of early morning, in the sharp, blue shade of the mesquite. They would ask me to fashion requests for money or news from home, marriage proposals, accounts of successes or setbacks, letters full of passion or frozen with rejection. Light fell on my clients’ lives the way it fell through the tavern’s palm roof, in spots and slices, surrounded by shadow. I wrote prayers on small parchments to be left, tightly rolled, in the crevasses of holy rocks or church doors which had cracked in the hot, salty air. I wrote in Spanish or Latin or Italian or French with equal ease, as though the freedom of the new world had unfettered my tongue.

Best of all, though, were my love letters. I acquired some fame for my ability to mould the inarticulate urges of people in love into elegant, passionate phrases. Of course, many of those phrases were not my own.
I have wept so much I look like a man with snow blindness. I beg you to kiss my eyes, to soothe them one last time with the balm of your lips
. If the phrase had been my own, I doubt I would have remembered it. As I added the final flourish to the tail of the “s,” I looked up and smiled. Because I knew the man who had wept away the night at Nepi had had no one to kiss his eyes, and I hoped the young lover standing in front of me, with his future glowing in his ruddy cheeks, would fare better. My client bowed to me and there, behind him, towering over his short, sturdy frame was Gideon, dressed like an Indian in a white cotton tunic with a parrot-bright woven belt. I waited while my client put his mark on the letter and handed over his money. Gideon watched as I set aside the tithe and pocketed the rest.

“I expected to hear from you,” he said, placing the letter I had sent him from Ferrara on my table, “then someone told me there was a public letter writer in Villa Rica who was a woman. Something to see, I thought. Have you noticed yet how you can come all the way to a brand new world and it’s still dominated by the same repetitive round as the old? Me hoping and you giving me the slip?”

I was disappointed. This did not sound like the man who had written to me about the importance of waiting with an open heart. “My plans didn’t work out,” I told him.

He drew up a stool and sat down in front of me so I could not help but look at his face. Though he smiled and his eyes were warm, it was a tired warmth, an old flame. The backs of his hands were cross-hatched with burns in various stages of healing. “I waited a month for you at Ostia,” he said, resting his elbows on the table, “after word started to get about that Valentino was dead. I thought that might change your mind.” An Indian woman in Spanish dress, her broad face frilled by an elaborate mantilla, started to shuffle her feet and sigh impatiently over Gideon’s shoulder.

“Closed till the twenty-third hour,” I said, “until the sun is over there.” I pointed to the bell tower of the Church of the True Cross. The woman left, muttering in her own language, something which made Gideon laugh.

“You understand their language, then.”

“So might you if you tried. She speaks the language of the Totonac people. I live in Cachiquin now, where they come from.”

“And what did she call me?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I shrugged. I had been working since dawn. My eyes smarted and my shoulders were sore from the hours hunched over other people’s desires. I wanted to eat, then sleep away the heat of the afternoon without dreaming. I was in no mood for games.

“So I was right, anyway,” said Gideon.

“Right?”

“Valentino died and you came here. In the end. Is your son with you?”

I shook my head. I feared the sad taste of Girolamo’s name in my mouth. Gideon reached across the table and covered my hand with his scarred, bony paw. “Let me take you somewhere to eat.”

“I can eat here. It’s free.”

“I have money,” he said. “Quite a bit, actually.” Seeing me raise my eyes at his dress, his Indian tunic and the battered straw hat which lay in his lap, he added, “I dress for the weather. Had I been sure I’d be meeting you today I’d have tidied myself up a bit.”

I noticed he was no longer wearing the gold ornament he had shown me the day he took me fishing. “Something’s changed, Gideon. Where is your neck chain? What has happened?”

He shrugged. “I discovered old values and new worlds don’t mix.”

He took me to a place near the docks which was rough and cheap but famed for its fish stew and the good wine the proprietor managed to liberate from the warehouse next door, which belonged to a Genoese who had made a fortune in vanilla. Gideon told me he too cultivated and traded the spice in a small way, though he made most of his living fabricating and repairing the wire racks on which the slender black pods were spread to dry.

“Hence the burns,” I said.

“Hence the burns. When I first got here, I thought goldsmithing would be easy. After all, this land is quite literally paved, or at least veined, with gold and silver. But the Indians believe gold is a sacred metal. Only their priests are allowed to work it, or their goldsmiths are priests. I’ve never quite worked out which way round it is. And I…don’t like the way the Spanish have gone about things.” For a moment his expression was clouded with a sullen anger. “I took off my charm and melted it down. It ended up as part of some meaningless nonsense I made for a sailor’s sweetheart. The amount of blood that’s been shed here over gold doesn’t make it precious; it makes it shameful.” Then he brightened. “Vanilla is much better because you can’t really cultivate it, just hope the vines will grow up the trees you happen to own. Xanat says God only gives the black flowers to people with true hearts.”

“That’s nice. Who’s Xanat?” He did not have to reply; I could tell from the shifty look in his eyes, the way he swallowed as though the answer he had prepared was best not spoken.

“Ah,” I said. “And does she have a true heart?”

“We rub along,” he said.

***

The next day he came back and waited again at the end of my line of clients, clutching his old hat to his chest.