Wolves in Winter (22 page)

With the spring, Il Moro’s ambassador, Signor Orfeo, arrived in Forli. Despite a season’s worth of pleading, no troops had been sent from Lombardy, and as the Countess hissed
furiously at the nervous Milanese when they dined together for the first time, her uncle appeared to believe that she could defend her affinity with words.

‘Will your master’s pretty phrases hold my walls against the French?’ she demanded furiously. ‘Will his assurances feed my men and buy my powder when Valentino calls out
the Romagna? And my uncle is a fool if he believes that this
beast
he unleashed on Italy will not turn upon him once more. Do you hear me, a fool!’

Signor Orfeo stared at his plate, his eyes shifting anxiously in the candlelight. It was true that all Italy was speaking of Cesare Il Valentino. Louis of France was determined to claim his
rights to Milan through the Visconti heritage he shared with Caterina – and, they said, to reclaim the Kingdom of Naples, which Charles VIII had briefly held when he came over the mountains
and destroyed the Medici. The key which would unlock Italy this time was Valentino, the second son of the Pope, married to a French princess in return for the annulment of the French king’s
own marriage, and promised the might of France to make himself Duke of the Romagna.

‘I am sure there is no cause for alarm as yet, my lady,’ Orfeo replied smoothly.

‘Alarm? Alarm? Then what do you make of the fact that the Borgia in Rome has declared my right to Forli forfeit and transferred it to Valentino? That when I sent my legate to the Vatican
offering to pay the tribute I owe, and God alone knows where I can find three thousand fiorini, he was not even admitted into the presence! Get out, Signor Orfeo! Get out and ride to my uncle and
tell him that he is lost, as I am lost, unless he acts now.’

Signor Orfeo did not look especially discomfited. Indeed as he rose to his feet he fixed Caterina with a lecherous stare, his eyes hovering on the ruby between her breasts.

‘Naturally, I am disappointed, Countess. I had hoped to enjoy rather more of your famous . . . hospitality.’

There was a sharp retort as Caterina flashed out her hand and slapped his face. He staggered a little, bewildered, reaching for his cheekbone, which was dripping blood where her ring had caught
it. Some drops spattered the pale flesh of her neck. Then, with a smirk on his face, he made a bow and retired, closing the door of the sala softly behind him.

For a moment the Countess stood transfixed, as still as an icon, until her body rippled as though beneath a wave and she sank to her knees beneath the weight of it, her shoulders heaving. I
could hear her murmuring through clenched teeth, ‘I will not, I will not,’ so I went to her and touched her and tried to raise her up. But her body was too much for my slightness, so
instead I stooped, and for the first time I rocked her in my arms while she wept out the torrent of grief and rage. As I pressed her against me, I wept too, for everything that had been taken from
me, and everything I would never have, for my papa and Toledo, for Cecco and Giovanni, for the life that stretched so tenuously before me, until we collapsed, exhausted, our faces pale and
smeary.

‘Come, my lady,’ I whispered. ‘I will mix something to help you sleep tonight.’

She took my hand and held it a moment, soft in her own, and briefly I could see the girl she had been: young and frightened like me, motherless, sent amongst strangers. Then her spine
straightened and she pulled herself to her feet.

‘Thank you, Mora. This – this weakness has passed, as it must. I am better now.’

‘At least you had it,’ I murmured under my breath.

‘What?’

‘Love, Countess. You had love and you have your children.’

I feared I had been impertinent, made too much of the moment, but her face was ruefully kind.

‘Yes. From the stars to the cemetery, no? I had it. You are a good girl, Mora. And I will take care of you, as Giovanni’s gift to me.’

I said I would take her necklace, to clean it while she rested. I helped her into her nightgown and brought her a dish of camomile tisane, laced with dried comfrey, which had her breathing calm
and regular in a few minutes. Then I went to her chest and took out one of her muslin petticoats and slit a thin swatch of fabric from the hem. I rolled it around the necklace until the few spots
of blood from the ambassador’s face were absorbed. Then I went to the image of the Virgin in its alcove in her bedchamber and quietly, slowly scraped a little of the gold leaf onto the cloth,
then I wound it round tight like a ring. I pushed my truckle bed a little away from the wall and into the space I tilted my candle, carefully tracing out a pentagram with the wax. I put my sewing
knife to the pad of my thumb and squeezed out a drop of my own blood, crossing the cooling wax with a ‘V’. I put my charm inside and there it was, hidden, an amulet against what was
coming to Forli. And then I sat and stared at the wall until my eyes slipped closed of their own accord and I was too tired to dream.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
HE LAST SUMMER OF THE CENTURY WAS HOTTER
than anyone had ever known. The sun sliced through the thick air like a dagger,
turning the trees and the fields a dull bronze, and with the heat, the plague came to Forli. Ever swift and practical when her own was under threat, the Countess was busy, relieved to have a
distraction from her mourning and the seemingly endless wait for news of the French, doing all she could to protect the people from the pestilence. The city gates were closed and the town divided
into sectors, each supervised by doctors she had summoned from Cesena and Faenza. The afflicted were separated from their families, transported on carts to the convent of San Mercuriale outside the
city walls to be cared for by an order of poor nuns. If their relatives chose to accompany them, they could not return for a month. Plague homes were destroyed, and while the sickness raged, no one
was allowed to pass in or out of the city. Thus the Countess kept her people safe, and though they grumbled foolishly at her strictures, there were fewer deaths in Forli than anywhere else the
plague had invaded in those torrid months.

I was occupied in the
farmacia
, mixing cures under the Countess’s direction and noting them in her book of receipts. I brewed fennel-root tea, to clear the skin of the fat purple
buboes that exploded on the bodies of the sick. I ground red coral to keep their hearts beating strongly. The powdered waste of a dog, dried first in the sunlight, then boiled in broth of meat we
found excellent in bringing down fever, though it was hard to persuade patients to swallow the stinking soup. Caterina had all her tapestries and curtains rolled away and the Rocca scrubbed out
daily and scented with lavender and rosemary. This way we were not afraid that the sickness would take us. Strangely, it was a happy time – we were busy, side by side amongst the clean flasks
and the sharp scent of herbs, and I was proud that the Countess trusted me with her powders and the pen. Wearing unbleached linen gowns that had been boiled in lye I thought we looked like sisters,
or nuns, maybe, working quietly together. For a few weeks, until the disease died down, we were insulated from the world, untroubled by the summer storm that was waiting to break over Italy.

Yet when finally the gates were opened, I thought again of my dreams, of the Borgia sun blazing over the fields of the Romagna, for the messages that awaited Caterina had only one subject,
Valentino. The French king had had his papal decree, so that he might divorce and take to wife his own brother’s widow. No longer a prince of the church, Cesare was now Duke of Valentinois,
and his father had had the letters of congratulation from King Louis read aloud in the streets of Rome, though the students of Paris had rioted at the ignominy of the match. Now the French were
preparing once more to cross the Alps, to take the Sforza dukedom from Il Moro, and Valentino was to command them. Already the Countess’s uncle, the Sforza cardinal, had fled Rome, whilst the
Neapolitan prince who had been persuaded to marry Lucrezia Borgia had abandoned his pregnant bride, since the Pope had surrendered the cause of Naples to become the court chaplain of the
French.

From all over Italy, the Countess’s couriers poured out news of Valentino. No Italian, they said, but a Spaniard, a black eyed, black haired, barbarian Spaniard. He was handsome, claimed
the Venetian ambassador, the most beautiful young man. His face was scarred and spoiled with the Spanish pox, said the Mantuan envoy. He was a coward who hid behind his father’s cassock, he
was a great soldier who fought bulls on horseback. He was a lecher who had naked courtesans dance for his pleasure in the very shadow of St Peter’s, he was worse than a lecher, having eyes
only for his beautiful sister Lucrezia, his lover had been a Turkish prince. He dressed so magnificently that even his warhorse wore a red silk cloak, adorned with gold roses worked thick as a
man’s finger, the collar he had worn to meet King Louis was a blaze of diamonds worth thirty thousand ducats, he travelled with five hundred servants. It seemed that as soon as one looked for
Valentino he vanished, as supple and tricky as a wolf, but one thing was certain, and that was he was coming.

And amidst the rumours and whispers another ambassador came to Forli. I was always at Caterina’s side now, though I was careful to look no more than her foreign slave when she received or
dined. I was part of the formal retinue of her state as Countess, an accessory, like a gown or a carefully, carelessly placed manuscript, designed to display her wealth or her knowledge. But when I
saw the knobby-headed little clerk from Florence, nervously twisting his cap in the Countess’s sala, I started and had to stop myself from grabbing at her skirts. I had seen him before, I had
dreamed him. In that white palace, floating high above the mountains, the bony planes of his face etched out in the light of a single candle while he spoke urgently to the masked man. Before I
heard the softly aspirated consonants of his Tuscan accent, I knew it was he. Machiavelli, his name was. I stood there as mute as I had been in the Medici kitchens, whilst another stone of
Caterina’s toppling fortress was wheedled out of place.

Ottaviano was no longer contracted to fight for Florence and Caterina had determined to send her men north to Milan to aid Ludovico Il Moro in the coming struggle against the French. The
Florentines wished to renew the contract, as they too would be threatened if Valentino broke the Milanese. But the Countess prevaricated.

‘I always like what the Florentines say,’ she told him, ‘as much as I dislike what they do.’

Thinking to secure her own defences, she offered to renew the
condotta
, on the condition that Florence promised in return to come to her aid should Forli be threatened. But the little
clerk was calm and stubborn and would not give his word, and after a week he went back empty handed.

So when the news reached Forli that Il Valentino was in Milan, and that his French troops had used the great mould of the statue of my lady’s grandfather for target practice, she and I
knew, at least, what was coming. It was to have been a wonder they said, cast by Maestro da Vinci, the great
condottiero
towering above his city on his warhorse; and now, in October of that
year 1499, it was reduced to so many pellets of clay. Caterina’s spies in Venice had sent word that the Borgia cardinal had appeared a month before, with a coded letter from Valentino to the
Signoria in which he informed them that he intended to have Imola, Forli and Pesaro. The Venetians tried to stall, claiming they would have to consult with King Louis, but no one believed that
Valentino moved without the consent of his new royal cousin. Even as the baked armour of Francesco Sforza shattered in his castle yard, a legate came from Rome to inform my lady that her rights to
her cities were forfeit to the Pope, as the census was not paid. It was a trick, they both knew it, as she had offered the money, but still the pretence of civility was maintained.

The Countess received the legate in the walled garden of the Paradiso, splendid in a crimson gown lined with silver and all that remained of her Riario jewels. I attended them, pouring sweet
wine into the green Venetian glasses she had brought from her wedding trip, and read the paper as calmly as though it were an inventory of grain from the
contada
.

‘You will tell His Holiness that I will have the honour of writing to him on this matter.’

‘Of course, Countess.’

‘And I beg the honour of remembering the health of His Holiness in my prayers.’

She kept her countenance until he was ushered away, then fell back in her seat, pallid, panting. Her hands squirmed in her lap like eels, the rings twisting bruises into her palms.

‘It has come then, Mora.’

‘You will write to Florence, Madonna?’

‘Of course, of course, though they will fail me. They will lie down like whores for the French as they did last time.’ She got to her feet impatiently. ‘The park must be razed.
At least we’ll be able to see that jumped-up bastard in his French feathers.’

‘Madonna, there may be something else to be tried.’

I did not contemplate the magnitude of what I thought to do. What mattered, the only thing that mattered to me, was saving Caterina. My dreams and their warnings had been proved useless over and
over, but my knowledge was real. I knew about sickness and how it worked, how it could creep into the blood, how it could move invisibly until it was too late. So that night, while my lady sat up
in the Rocca with her papers and her lists, I slipped down through the city to the walls, where the guards had been warned to let me pass. I took the road out from Forli, and after twenty minutes
walking in the moonlight, came to the convent where the plague victims had been sent to die. The bell was tolling Lauds as I reached the buildings, and I could see the pale gowns of the nuns as
they crossed to the chapel. I thought of Florence, and how my journeys through the city had always been marked by the chime of bells. For a moment I was afraid I should be discovered, that the nuns
would raise an alarm, but I waited until I heard the murmured drone of the office, then I closed my eyes and thought of the shadows. I should move like a shadow, like a wolf, like Valentino, and I
should not be found.