Wolves in Winter (23 page)

The pestilence had withdrawn, but the Rocca received reports that a few cases still endured at the convent. I had never visited the hospital before, and I was glad of the lamp bracketed to the
wall of the lobby. I was gladder that the nun who attended the ward was sleeping on her chair, her face obscured by a cushion that smelt as though it was stuffed with sweet herbs. The long room was
cool and clean smelling. None of the wooden truckle beds were occupied, though. I passed through, and gingerly opened the door at the end, peering into the dispensary and a small chapel until I
found a second door giving onto the courtyard. I moved slowly over the packed earth, towards a low, light-coloured building. I could smell the fresh lime on its walls and I paused at the door,
half-hoping it would be locked, but it gave easily and I stepped into the mortuary. I told myself I was lucky, for those who die of plague are buried immediately, and the poor creature here must
have gone after twilight, gaining an extra, useless night above the earth. I had a candle and a tinder-box, but I was afraid to strike it, less for my fear of discovery than for what I knew I must
see.

The corpse lay shrouded in coarse linen on a table at the end of the room. I had a horrid fear that as I approached a crabbed dead hand would shoot out to grab me, but I forced myself forward
and held the light to the bound face. The dead look dead immediately, not calm and sleeping like effigies on tombs, but dead merely, irretrievable. The face drawn in and collapsed, the lolling
mouth secured with linen bands, the perceptible reek of deep, deep rot. As though a few mutterings and scrapings of holy statues could raise them! I stared at the sexless face with its
coin-shuttered eyes for a few moments to calm myself. Then I began work. Using an old pair of gloves, I drew two thin cloths of fine blue water silk from my bag and turned the body onto its side,
unfastening the tapes at the neck of the shroud, glad that my fingers did not have to make contact with the cold flesh. A man, from the shrivelled muscles of the back and flat torso, though the
skin was so covered with congealed buboes it was barely possible to tell. Carefully, I rubbed the cloth over the gaping blisters, surprised to see that they still released fluid pus, pushing the
silk into the wounds until it was thoroughly soiled. Using the space left by the body, I spread a packet of letters with my lady’s seal on the table, and wrapped them tightly in the cloths,
squeezed the roll into a cane tube of the sort used by couriers to protect their messages, then broke the end from my candle, heated it and sealed the tube with tallow. The gloves I would burn as
soon as I came to a quiet place on the road. I wished I could ask for his name, so that if my plan worked my lady could reward the poor man’s family, but all I could do was mutter a prayer
over him before I slipped out again and made for Forli.

I told myself that I was an instrument, that as a slave I was not responsible, but the idea had been mine, formed in those weeks in the
farmacia
when I prepared the medicines against the
plague as Caterina had taught me, and tried to consider how it could pass so quickly between the sufferers. I knew what would come to me if I were found, that nothing would await me but fire at
best, but I was unafraid. The church had taken my papa, the hounds of God had driven Maestro Ficino from Florence. And the church turned on its own, on Savonarola, on Caterina who had once been a
princess at the court of Rome. I had spared barely a thought for God since I had left Toledo. I had never questioned whether I believed. It seemed to me that the priests with their flummeries of
incense and incantations were as misguided as my poor master in his search for alchemist’s gold, as poor Margherita’s eager buyers, anxious to twist their fate with a useless charm.
There, on the road to Forli with the soft autumn darkness all about me, I knew that if I believed in anything at all it was the dark gods of my long ago ancestors who had my allegiance; the spirits
of the northern forests who recognised and rejoiced in the savagery of death. That was all the power I would ever need. I felt cold then, as cold as my green eyes, as cold and cruel as the Mura who
played with shadows in the half-world of my dreams.

My plan did not work. My lady had the walls of the park pulled down, the orchards beheaded and the beautiful, delicate green pavilion dismantled. The Florentines temporised, the carts rolled
through the streets of Forli towards the Rocca, the overseers went out to the farms for supplies. Florence declared neutrality, my lady inventoried her goods and looked over the armoury, her
captains drilled the garrison and the weeks went by with no news, or too much. Valentino was moving on the Romagna with his Swiss mercenaries and Gascon gunners, Ottaviano left for Imola and the
leaves fell. In Rome the Pope lived. I was certain that when his greedy Borgia hands unwrapped the letters of submission wrapped in those poisoned cloths the boils would appear on his body as black
as his heart, but the Forlivese were always a stupid and a cowardly people, and my lady’s messenger to the Vatican, Tommasino, confided my scheme to another servant. His secret was barely
whispered before the pair found themselves in Sant’Angelo, and His Holiness’s Spanish torturers had it out of them before the canister was even unsealed.

I had feared Caterina would be angry at my failure, but when the courier came with the news that the Countess of Forli’s attempt to assassinate the Pope was the talk of Rome, she merely
smiled a little grimly and said that there would be no quarter for her, then. Abandoned by Florence, knowing that the Rocca could never hold out against the force of those legendary French guns,
Caterina was nonetheless happy. Her Sforza blood was up, and she appeared as lithe and straight as a goddess as she strode the boundaries of the
cittadella
, with a breastplate strapped over
her fine gowns and a hawk on her gloved wrist.

‘If I must perish,’ she said, ‘then let me die like a man.’

Despite her fighting words and the rigour with which she oversaw the preparations, there was a sense of girlish anticipation to her, as though she longed for Valentino’s coming. I noticed
that while she worked all day, even hauling supplies down from the carts in her own arms as an example to the men, she nevertheless washed her hair in lemon juice and combed it out each night, and
that beneath her gauntlets, her hands were moist and fragrant with the rosewater lotion I prepared for them.

Imola fell to Valentino at the end of November. The French guns breached the walls of the citadel, and though the
castellano
held out for a week (as well he might, since my lady had his
wife and children safely hostages at Forli) his resistance was, as she said contemptuously, more a matter of mere good manners than of honour. From the walls of the Rocca, we watched what seemed
the whole of the Romagna in flight, the road crowded with carts and weary figures carrying bundles or children, trudging pathetically south. I pitied them in my heart, these poor people who paused
to pray in roadside shrines as though the Church herself was not the author of their misery, but my lady felt only disgust for those who fled. Nevertheless, she set me to packing the goods from the
inventory that she wished to send to Florence for safety, her silver basins and ivory boxes, great chests of linens and fabrics, her walnut bed and her gold and pearl crucifixes. She seemed to find
satisfaction in the idea that though Valentino might kill her, he would not have those Borgia hands on her precious mirrors, her tapestries or even her gilded sewing scissors. Sadly, I bundled up
my own books and instruments and added them to the cart.

What hurt her most was sending her youngest boy away. Since his father’s death he had been known as Giovanni, for the Countess’s secret, lost husband. At a year old, he disdained to
crawl and clutched his way determinedly round his nursery, toppling the chairs and bawling furiously if the nurse tried to keep him still. I cried as I packed his little clothes into a trunk, with
another case of medicines from the dispensary. He seemed so tiny, so fragile in his innocent cheerfulness that I could hardly bear to think of him sobbing for his mother who might never come to him
again. He was to go to his uncle’s house at Florence, where he would be safe, and I drilled the girl into remembering what must be done if he should fall ill. I stitched a charm into the
breast of his gown, his name inside a pentagram. As I worked the cambric with my tiniest stitches I thought of that other charm, gathering dust beneath my bed, and I knew as sure as the future is
contained like an insect in amber, that it too was useless.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

U
NTIL IMOLA, THE COUNTESS HAD BELIEVED
herself beloved by her people. Had she not fought for them, fed them, sheltered them
from disease? She chose to forget that she had also slaughtered them, made beasts of them, that she had never been one of their own, and that her pride – her cursed Sforza pride – had
refused the Pope’s alliance when it was offered and brought Valentino down upon them. When Imola surrendered, she saw they were no longer to be trusted.

In early December, she met with the councillors of the city, who advised her to flee. Why could she not do as the King of Naples had done, as her own uncle of Milan had once done, and leave the
city, sparing the citizens the horrors of war, and wait until Valentino had passed through the Romagna before coming to an agreement? She could save herself, they argued, and she could save them.
The Borgia Pope was old, and the effects of his dissipations would soon tell on him. It could not be long before he died. Of natural causes, they delicately implied. But Caterina would have none of
this. If she had to sacrifice herself, she declared, she would do so. She was prepared to fight until the end.

The Forlivese had no stomach for such talk. The Council gathered them in the piazza and reassured them that they had private word from Valentino that if the city should only submit as peacefully
as Imola had done, there would be no violence. They sent their leader, Niccolo Tornielli, to inform her of their decision. He came to the gatehouse, bareheaded, scrunching his cap into a miserable
rag, and told my lady that despite all her care and protection of them, the people of Forli would not rise for her. They were not prepared to close the gates against Valentino; they wished to be
absolved from their oath of allegiance to their Countess. He could not look my lady in the eye, but waited there, like an admonished child, stumbling over his words. My lady showed no anger, there
was no time for anger. She came close to him, so close that I knew he could feel the hiss of her breath cooling his skin.

‘You recall, do you not, Signor Tornielli, what happened here in Forli after my husband the Count was murdered?’

He nodded, still avoiding her gaze.

‘Then you may tell the people that I absolve them from their oath. They may ring the bells of San Mercuriale for Valentino, if they choose.’

For a second, relief spread across Tornielli’s countenance. ‘Thank you, Madonna’.

She leaned closer and her voice was cold as steel. ‘But tell them this also, that they had better go on their knees to Valentino now for mercy, for when I prevail, they shall see none from
me.’

Caterina had the cannon of the Rocca fired over the very heads of her treacherous citizens. They too were her enemies now. The Rocca was provisioned and ready, there was nothing left to do but
close the gates for good, shutting out those they had been built to protect. The people of Forli might do what they would, but for the Countess’s small court and her five hundred soldiers
there could be no resolution. She had bound us to go to the death.

The storms came on the day Il Valentino left Imola for Forli. The air until then had held some of the heat of that raging summer, sharp and bright, as warm as harvest time by noon; but that day,
the middle of the month, it thickened and grew sluggish, the sky obscured by a dingy veil of heavy cloud. My lady had been prepared for some time now, and this new stillness in the air, which gave
resonance to even the merest twitch of a leaf on the poor remaining trees in the barren parkland, tightened our anticipation to an unbearable degree. I recalled Florence in the months before Piero
fell, that sense of time constricting like a noose. Nothing moved, and yet the space around us was tense, pregnant.

The Countess paced the walls of the Rocca, her head bowed. The garrison sprawled amongst their idle weapons, playing round after round of listless dice, the brief clatter of bones on the parapet
like rats’ claws, scrabbling their way into our dulled and aching heads. Dinner was served in the sala, stripped of its fine cushions, not even a carpet on the table, but none of us could
eat. Our hands moved like separate creatures amongst the dishes whilst our senses were cast towards the windows, alert to nothing but the approach of a horse. I asked my lady’s permission to
leave the room, but she barely acknowledged me, waving her fingers to accede to my dismissal. I gathered my cloak about me and climbed to the top of the tower. The two waiting guards scrambled
swiftly to their feet when they saw me, their faces avid for news, but I shook my head and moved away from them, looking out behind the city to the hills.

I closed my eyes and listened, but though I watched there a long time, there was nothing. When I came to Forli, the wolves had sung me there through the nights. Beyond the frill of grey rock
which marked the heights, the country was empty. It had been too warm, I thought, they were not yet hungry enough to come near the plain. I told myself this, but part of me believed that they were
spreading, circling out to the high slopes, knowing what I could not. I propped my back against the wall, feeling the cold stone through my cloak against my spine and hunched my head on my knees.
No sound, silence enough to hear the passage of the clouds.

*

I am in the cathedral of Florence, huddled amidst a mass of bodies in the dim candlelight. My sight is blocked by the crow. Only by straining my head back can I sense the
vastness of the church under the dome. The faces of the men and poor old women who wait for Mass are sharp boned with fasting, for the friar has prescribed bread and water five days a week, that
God might divert the French beast to plumper pickings. As we move forward into the plain of the nave a skinny youth sways and staggers like a drunkard, clutching for an arm to break his fall, but
those around him turn away, as though to help him would taint them with his weakness. I think again that this is a mean city, crabbed and grasping, and that for all its magnificence there is no
charity in this church. I push forward and find a place close beneath the lectern. As he comes from the sacristy, a silence falls, so that in this huge place there is only the sound of the slap of
his sandaled feet on marble. His face is almost hidden beneath the black hood of his robe, but as he passes me I turn my eyes sideways to catch his beaky profile, his full lips incongruous in the
stern face.