“I don’t understand. You’re telling us that Vitelli’s job is to stir up Arezzo. Which means Duke Valentine is going for Florence. Yet the orders to the rest of us are to be heading the opposite way? It’s a blind, right? So when do we make the move back?”
For a moment it seems that Michelotto will not even bother with a reply. He is already up from the table, fastening his cloak.
“I wouldn’t worry about such things now, my Lord of Fermo,” he says, larding the title with exaggerated courtesy. “Just keep that sword arm of yours loose and ready. Your next great battle may be against men who are armed.”
Oliverotto scowls but swallows the insult in silence.
In his seat at the end of the table, Vitelli can feel the stabbing in his leg subsiding a little. He stretches it out and rubs his fingers over his thigh.
Arezzo. And then Florence! It is amazing what good news can do for an ailing man.
CHAPTER 9
Spring comes fast to Ferrara that year. The fogs disperse and behind dozens of convent and palace walls orchards are in blossom, so that when the wind rises, the streets are showered with a confetti of petals. In the medieval quarter of the city, where the tradesmen and laborers live stacked like bales in a warehouse, braver souls are unstitching themselves from layers of winter serge and kicking out livestock from under tables and hearths to clear out the winter stink. Pigs, goats, chickens, geese tumble out of doors, rooting their way in search of fresh rubbish, fighting for space with horses and loaded carts in the narrow streets, which fan out from the wharfs that line the riverbanks. The trade may not be as rich as that of Venice, but there is enough to sustain a thriving economy, and with Duke Ercole’s expansion of the city, there is a demand for everything from bricks to braising pots. The stages and celebratory arches that marked the flamboyance of her marriage have long since been scavenged or dismantled, but when the sun comes out Ferrara can still put on a show to impress its new duchess.
It is a mutual seduction. Having settled herself, Lucrezia is eager to escape from the confines of the great palace and fortress. Duke Ercole and the main court are housed in the palace, but she and her husband have the privacy of their own apartments in the adjoining castle, its towers and battlements stark reminders of how the Este family had clawed its way to dominance by subduing any and all who opposed it. It still boasts the protection of a moat, in one direction stretching halfway to the city walls, in another bordering on the grandest of gardens with orchards, fountains and summerhouses, reached by a flotilla of little boats. The old duke stages naval pageants on this inner-city sea, with monsters rising from the deep and pirates jumping from the rigging of one galley to the next with firebrands in their teeth. Such violent pleasures there are to be had in peacetime.
Lucrezia’s and Alfonso’s suites are in separate towers, the refurbishment and decoration of her own directed by Ercole himself. There is a small garden overlooking the moat with potted orange trees and a most luxurious bath chamber, with a freestanding tub and marble seats for her ladies to rest on. The colors in all of the rooms are fierce: crocus yellows, wildest blues and fiery ocher reds. Her taste is for something more peaceful to the eye, but it would only offend to change the décor too fast.
As the weather grows warmer she uses it as an excuse to move outside. In Rome she was closeted within the Vatican district, the rest of the city too sprawling, too dirty, too dangerous to frequent without an armed guard. She had been barely seventeen when her brother Juan had been pulled from his horse at night and butchered like a market animal before his body was thrown into the Tiber. No, the streets of Rome had been no place for the daughter of the Pope.
But here everything is on her doorstep. For her first forays she and her ladies take her carriage. They follow a new route every day, and the Ferrara they discover is not one but many cities: to the south a labyrinth of alleys and timber warehouses blackened by centuries of trade, to the north the duke’s famed new town. Though not as perfect as the panel painting they had marveled at in Urbino, the buildings are finely proportioned with brightly painted façades that catch the sun, and in between them thoroughfares wide enough to waft away the smell of horse dung offer open views to the sky. If this is the future, how generous, how clean it is.
But she likes the old center best. On the journey from Rome, Stilts had often talked of how Ferrara was a city of music, and he was right. The main piazza in front of the cathedral is so close that from her terrace she can hear the voices of the blind troubadours, singing epic tales of courtly love leavened with rough humor. The best of them—they seem almost a fraternity—accompany themselves on viols, with boys on pipe and drum to emphasize the more dramatic moments. The boys also provide the eyes of the act, since with so much going on it is hard for a blind man to hear whether the clinking records coins going into the hat or being taken out.
Then there are the markets. Few traders ever found their way into the Vatican enclave, but here in Ferrara, God and commerce go hand in hand. An arcade of shops runs along the whole side of the cathedral: drapers, metal merchants, bookbinders, silversmiths, apothecaries, their presence as old as the church itself. In the mornings they are joined by dozens of carts and stalls. The first time Lucrezia and her ladies venture out they are in the company of her majordomo and a few guards, their heads covered and baskets on their arms, rich young women playing at shopping. Stilts is dubious, but she cajoles: what harm can it do? And they have been closeted for so long. There is a whole section of the square reserved for fishmongers, rows of wooden barrels, the water churning and spitting with silvered bodies: pike, lampreys, trench, carp and of course river eels swarming like snakes. The sellers thrust hands as tough as barnacled hulls into the frenzy, pulling out two or three at a time, slapping them down on the block and chopping off their heads with a single thwack, which sends sprays of bloody water everywhere. The ladies squeal with delighted disgust, and soon a crowd gathers. It is fun only until the crush starts to panic the guards.
Next day Lucrezia has to send out a purse to compensate those with spoiled produce or broken noses. But the story is everywhere within hours and the gifts flood in: a duchess who is in love with her city is rewarded by a city that wants even more to fall in love with her. It is not only sentiment. This pretty lady may arrive caked in scandal, but her very bastard status means Ferrara is now favored by the Pope. In the violent chaos of Italy, that fact alone means citizens can hold their heads a little higher.
She attends court evenings in the loveliest of the old palaces, Schifanoia, the word itself a play on the expulsion of boredom. Inside the great salon, the seasons of the year unfold through a dazzling set of frescoes, the dead Duke Borso d’Este sitting in state surrounded by admiring women, a benign presence despite the fleshy nose and double chins. She will need such painters of her own now, but the men who created this wondrous world are all dead, and when she asks it is clear there are no rising stars in the city. She must look elsewhere. Meanwhile, she is invited to visit the university. Ferrara boasts one of the oldest medical schools in Europe, and a few weeks before, when the weather was still bone-crushingly cold, there had been a dissection of an executed criminal in one of the churches. Her own physician had asked leave to attend. He keeps the secrets of the corpse to himself but returns filled with wonder at the school’s botanical garden, where they are growing hundreds of medicinal plants, including a few brought back from the new world. It would, of course, be their honor to show her around.
“Here, my lady, crush these flowers, good for digestion…”
“Put this to your nose: it is a well-known remedy for headaches…”
“Taste the sweetness in these seeds, their oil is excellent for troubled nerves.”
Before she leaves they present her with a leather wallet, each pouch filled with a different concoction, including, one says with a quiet blush, “something to aid conception and ease the pain of partum.”
Conception. The business of a male heir is on everyone?
??s mind. Certainly she and Alfonso are hard at work on it. The rhythm of their coupling reflects the wedding night. On the chosen evenings—not all, but at least three, sometimes four times a week—Alfonso sends his servant a few hours before to make his intention clear, and Lucrezia, after being sure to take the herbs mixed in warm wine, retires to bed, curtains drawn and candles extinguished.
When he comes in he may mumble a greeting, or simply take off his clothes and start. His usual way is to bury his face in her neck, then move his scaly hands over her breasts and down her body until, when he is ready, he climbs on top of her. At times it is fast, at others it takes longer, and during these moments he will moan and shout, so it is unclear if he is in the throes of desire or just impatient. Once or twice she has found her own voice catching in her throat as an unexpected pulse of pleasure starts to build inside her, and at such moments she holds on to him tightly to encourage him to take her with him as he climbs. Everyone knows that children are more readily conceived when both voices sing out together. But not all men know how to listen at the same time as they perform, and if husbands and wives do not talk to each other, then how can such things be promoted? Still, there have been a few instances, when there is a touch of pleasure in the duty, that she has almost been sorry their music does not last longer.
Afterward, they lie together while he catches his breath, and occasionally they may fumble their way toward a little conversation.
“How do you find your apartments?” he had asked after the fifth or was it the sixth visit, as if they were strangers swapping courtesies in a crowded room. “The orange trees for the terrace were grown in a hot room in the botanical gardens.”
She too has done her best. “You have been away from court for over a week, my lord. Your contribution on the viol is much missed.”
“I am busy with engineers from Bologna.”
Once, she asked him outright if he would like to stay longer, maybe partake of some refreshment.
“I am sorry. I have work to do.”
“It’s very late.”
“When we are smelting, the furnace burns whatever the hour.”
It is true. His workshop, set far in the back of the gardens on the other side of the castle moat, is often lit long into the night. But when he leaves her that evening he makes a strange little noise with his tongue and says, “Good night, Lucrezia. I hope you rest well.”
—
If there is no passion there is also no cruelty. Indeed, he can be almost solicitous. A couple of mornings they have gone hunting together in the forest around the country villa of Belriguardo, accompanied by the duke’s prized leopards, animals of sinewy majesty brought from the Indies that slide through the undergrowth oblivious to their lack of camouflage, moving faster, when they sense their prey, than the fastest of the hounds. Alfonso is a fine huntsman, fearless and strong, and she is a good rider. On the first occasion they had traveled for miles inside a gray lake of mist, which rose above the horses’ flanks, and he had asked if she was dressed warmly enough, for the Ferrarese fog could get into your bones, he said in a way that made it feel as if he genuinely cared that she should be well. She had ridden like a courtly Diana that morning, out in front of him at least twice, and when he caught up she could see from his face that he was impressed, though of course he said nothing.
Sometimes she wonders if it is shyness that besets him. Or something arising from his blatant antagonism toward the duke. As a much-loved sister and daughter, she is an expert at making peace between father and errant sons, but the one time she intervenes, suggesting he might attend a certain ceremony to please Ercole, his scowl makes him look just like his father.
She knows it is not just the duke or the pull of his precious foundry that keeps her husband away from court. There are also the women. He could have his pick of court ladies—everyone knows his father’s mistress had been his wife’s lady-in-waiting—but even in this he goes out of his way to do what the duke does not, and takes his custom to the whorehouses in the old part of the town. They say he likes his women round and loud, like his cannons, though with tighter holes, and that he comes and goes as he pleases with no affectations or commitment. And that such lack of courtesy suits him.
But though the images are crude, the reality is not so bad.
“These puttane are nobodies.” Angela, who is a duck to water in the murky seas of court gossip, has become the spokeswoman of her ladies. “Gross whores with no power or status, while the whole court knows that he regularly comes to your bed.”
Angela is eager to put a good gloss on it, yet in essence Lucrezia knows she is right. No woman, be she duchess or dressmaker, can expect a husband to be faithful, and when it comes to marriages of power, who would want the daily shame of sharing the banquet table or the concert chamber with some gloating rival from the court? Whatever his appetite, Alfonso shows her more consideration, if not more honor, than other men might.
How she loves her ladies. Along with her confessor they are her greatest confidantes. They are also her responsibility. On the journey from Rome these starling chatterboxes, each and every one unmarried, had tasted the excitement of young men sniffing around them, and they are blossoming under the attention of new admirers.
When they all sit together in the afternoons, sewing and discussing the business of fashion—as necessary to the vibrancy of court as music or poetry—the drama of flirtations is the chief entertainment. Angela, in particular, tasting life and love together for the first time, is dizzy with it all. One afternoon a few weeks before, Lucrezia had come upon her and the duke’s illegitimate son, Don Giulio, nibbling at each other in a secluded corner. It had sent a shiver through her, recalling a moment many years before when she had found her brother Cesare with his hands up her sister-in-law Sancia’s skirts. She had been such an innocent then. Still, her ladies are in her care and she must look to their moral welfare. Don Giulio is not the only bee buzzing round the honey. The old duke, when he hears of the dalliance, is most displeased and orders him not to visit so often. Angela pines and whines. “Don’t worry.” Lucrezia laughs. “If his intentions are honorable…” But everyone knows they are not. That is what makes them so exciting. A good court needs dalliances to give it spice, and the women’s chatter and exuberance are everywhere.
But their meetings are not always so joyful.
Because the fact is that not all her ladies are still with her. Some have been sent back to Rome.
No. While she may not be unhappy, Lucrezia’s life is not without conflict.
Her problem is her father-in-law.
CHAPTER 10
The doctor opens the door of the great hinged barrel and Cesare staggers out in a cloud of pungent-smelling steam, his naked body shiny with sweat. He sits heavily on the seat, taking gulps of fresh air. Torella, his priest’s collar rising from his black robes, takes a cloth and dries his patient’s upper torso, carefully studying the muscled forearms and the solid chest: alongside old ridges of dagger wounds are dozens of scarlet notches incised into the skin, like badly healed burn marks.
“Well?”
“Very good, my lord. Very good. There is no discharge and the skin is firm. Is there any sensitivity to the touch?” He presses his finger on a notch near the duke’s nipple. The duke lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
The door bursts open and half a dozen men fall into the room, naked blades already out.
“I am tortured by a mad surgeon,” he yells, then bursts out laughing as he waves them out. “You should see yourself, Torella. You’re as white as the Madonna’s breast. No, it doesn’t hurt.” He pushes down onto his own skin, turning the blotches pale, then watching as the color seeps back again. “In fact I think I could do with a little more feeling,” he says, thinking of Fiammetta’s fingers running over him.
“You have had no further outbreaks of pustules?” Torella is regaining his composure.
“No,” he says, reaching for his clothes.
“Excellent. That s
hows the toxic humors have been driven out by the steam.”
“I still sweat like a pig at night sometimes. I wake up swimming in my own lake.”
“I believe that is a good sign. If there should be any further buildup of malicious humors, they are finding their own way to expel themselves,” he says, mumbling a little with the last words to gloss over what might be construed as a contradiction of reasoning.
“Hmm. What about my face?”
“The scars are no longer angry, my lord,” Torella says, staring hard at the rash of pockmarks across Cesare’s cheeks and forehead. “And…and the beard is a most healthy growth, which is not always the case on damaged skin.”
“Is that it, man?”
What more can he say? Before the pox, Cesare Borgia’s beauty had been almost unbearable: the splendor of fine bones under the soft kid leather of boyish skin. No women—or men—could take their eyes off him. The illegitimate son of a pope: what wonder that corruption should look so lovely. It had almost been a relief when he opened his mouth and a brash, ambitious young man was revealed, too self-absorbed to appreciate what he had been given. As a priest, Gaspare Torella has sometimes worried about the poison of vanity, but among the sack of sins this young man will take to his grave, that one weighs less now. “You are a soldier, my lord. You need to see these as wounds from another kind of war. One that has been fought within your own body. There are many who do not survive it.”
“Don’t worry.” Cesare smiles. His teeth are unexpectedly white. When he chooses to wear his black velvet mask for public appearances, the contrast is dramatic. Exactly as he would have it. “You have done a good job. You may leave us now. Michelotto and I have business.”
“My lord.” Torella hesitates. “I…I have a favor to beg of you.” He takes a breath. “I have written a short treatise on my work on this new plague, which I hope to distribute around the universities of Europe. I would like to dedicate it to you, as my employer and patron. I believe that it will be of import in the future of medicine.”