These…these uncouth pastimes of yours are not worthy of a man of our blood. You only pursue them to thwart me, his father had said once in a moment of unbridled rage. Of course he had been referring as much to the women, another obsession that had come early. Alfonso even knows the moment it started: a certain fresco on the walls of the Palazzo Schifanoia, celebrating the arrival of spring where a couple of courtiers had their hands dug deep into women’s bodices. Twenty years on and he can still remember the strange stirrings it had caused in his body.
He, like many young noblemen, had done his apprenticeship with professionals. Such a relief it had been to be in their company: women with no airs or graces, just wide smiles and big welcoming bodies, handfuls of warm flesh spilling out of clothes, inviting him on voyages of discovery into secret passages, forgiving any roughness or overenthusiasm on his part. No courtesy necessary; nothing polite or breakable here.
His first marriage had been a disaster. It still pains him to think about it. Both of them had been barely fifteen, but the similarities had ended there. She had been a scrawny delicate thing, Anna Sforza, despite the weight of her family name. The wedding night had been excruciating, and from there things had gone from bad to worse. Eventually, after three years doing his unpleasant, increasingly sporadic duty she had got pregnant and given birth. She and the baby had been dead within days. As the court went into mourning he had been hard-pressed to feel anything at all, save a little pity at the waste of it all.
There was always going to be another wife, and he hadn’t cared much who it was. The scandals that whirled around Lucrezia Borgia did not interest him. There was even a certain satisfaction in watching his father being outmaneuvered. Meanwhile the ever-rising dowry suited him too. Not even his father could live forever, and Alfonso’s vision for the city’s new fortifications would cost money. In the end, he had decided that this one would do as well as any other. At least she was no shrinking virgin and would not suffer a fit of the vapors in the marriage bed.
As the wedding grew closer, he had ridden out to meet her because, despite himself, he had become curious about the “most evil woman in Italy.” Expecting little, he had been surprised. He had known early that he felt no great physical attraction toward her, but he had been struck by her confidence. Anna Sforza had taken years just to look him in the eye. This woman sat up straight and answered back. And not just with him. When Isabella had sailed into town like a warship in full rigging, her guns loaded with sarcasm and snobbery, Lucrezia had held her own. It was something he had never mastered.
The bedding had gone well, and aware of the eyes of the world upon them, he had been rigorous in his attentions. Nor had it been any hardship; at times he had actually enjoyed himself. At this rate an heir would be easy.
What impressed him most was how she took on his father. It still brings a smile to his face as he remembers it. When the business of her allowance had come up, he had steered well clear; he could think of nothing more distasteful than a row over money with his father. But instead of giving up, she had fought him on her own. And with such tenacity. On one occasion she had held a dinner for the whole court, an excuse to show off her status. Every piece of gold plate, or majolica, every silver fork and spoon, every goblet and wine decanter had been given to her by a pope, a king or a cardinal. I am not a nobody, the table said, and you would be ill advised to treat me as such. Of course his father had not given way; the more attacked, the more stubborn he became. But you could see the display had shaken him a little. Alfonso had almost congratulated her.
And then there was the afternoon when she had come to the foundry to tell him her news. My God, he had felt such triumph. See! I am as potent as you, he had wanted to spit in his father’s face. Why don’t you let go now and leave it to me? In his exhilaration he had not taken account of her indisposition. A woman sick in early pregnancy was normal enough and she had made light of it, writing regularly, dutiful news from court with a touch of wifely affection. His replies—poetry has never been his forte—were short and crisp. Still, their correspondence has made him feel like a married man. Not such an uncomfortable state after all.
The news that she was seriously ill disturbed him enough to cut short his journey and head homeward. He knows the rapaciousness of Ferrara’s summer fever, has seen it scythe down women sturdier than she. As the miles pass, he finds himself worrying about what he will find. He, who lives almost entirely in the practical present, has started playing with ideas of a future, when he is a player in the politics of Italy with a wife who knows how to manage a court and a brother-in-law with whom he can talk guns rather than gallantry. No, he may not have wanted her in the first place, but by God, he does not want her to die now.
“Lady Lucrezia’s brother, the Duke Valentine, is here,” they tell him as soon as he arrives; first the guards, then the servants, then the doctors, their black robes flapping like wings.
“We could not stop him, Your Excellency. He was most insistent.”
“And my wife?”
“She is…she seems a little better.”
He hears their laughter before he enters the room. Lucrezia is sitting up, big eyes in a ghostly face, the duke lying, lounging, at the foot of the bed. It is a scene of such intimacy that he cannot tell if he feels outrage or envy. Such affection between himself and his imperious sister Isabella is impossible to imagine.
Her smile grows wider at the sight of him. To have another man arrive still dusty from his journey shows a level of concern that is warming after so much loneliness and conflict. She extends her hand in welcome, and he kisses it, holding it for longer than simple courtesy. Cesare, who at first does not move, now gets up, and the two men face each other.
With no time to prepare for the moment, it must go according to instinct.
In private, there is no man Alfonso’s father reviles more than Cesare Borgia: this unscrupulous, ungodly, uncouth, whoring, warring bastard son of a Spanish interloper who uses Church money, defying even his own father in his ambitions.
Whoring, warring, blasting guns, defying his own father; there have been moments listening to such rants when Alfonso has felt a secret affinity with Cesare Borgia. After the taking of Urbino, the shock had been tempered with thrill and, yes, admiration.
And Cesare? Well, he is so heady with sleeplessness and swollen with the success of saving his sister that he behaves exactly as the mood takes him; civil, even relaxed toward this florid-faced fellow who, rumor has it, has built one of the best cannon foundries in Italy.
The handshake is firm. From palm to palm it moves to wrists and then into a slapping bodily embrace. They are, after all, family, and there will be a Borgia-Este dynasty before long.
A few awkward moments follow; stilted inquiries about her health and small talk about their comparative journeys and the state of the roads. Lucrezia doesn’t seem to mind; she sits back against her pillows, quiet, almost dreamy.
“Gentlemen,” she says after a while. “I am tired now and think I would do better to rest. Alfonso, perhaps you might show our dear brother something of the city. He must leave us soon and I am sure he would enjoy the battlements and your foundry, for I think you have interests in common.”
And because no one can gainsay her, these two fierce men meekly take their leave and go.
In their wake, her ladies flock in, followed by her doctors.
She leans back exhausted, then lays her hands on her stomach.
Now, she thinks. Just a small kick now. Please.
Eventually she falls asleep, so deeply that she does not even register the cannon fire.
CHAPTER 20
Cesare has not long ridden out of Ferrara when Duke Ercole arrives back from Milan, bursting with indignation at the latest Borgia diplomatic coup, so beside himself that as he launches into it no one—not even Alfonso—has the courage to tell him that his city has just played host to the monster who caused it all. Old men’s humor, like their bones, reacts badly to too many hours
in the saddle, and he must talk it out first.
Half of Italy had been gathered at the Castle of Pavia near Milan, all lobbying King Louis to take a stern line with this naked Borgia aggression, when without word or warning, His Majesty had absented himself from the gathering, returning three days later with the Borgia devil pup on his arm, the two of them laughing and joking together like long-lost brothers!
As his father explodes with fury, Alfonso is reliving Cesare Borgia’s contagious energy as they stood together over a simmering stew of copper and tin, his foundry workers eager spectators on the moment.
Meanwhile, in Pavia there had been consternation everywhere. When had he arrived? Whom had he traveled with? Where had he come from? All they knew was that he was made manifestly welcome. And suddenly everyone was falling over themselves to congratulate him on his victories. What else could they do? It was clear that behind closed doors a deal had already been done. The ousted Duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, was summoned and slunk out from the meeting ashen faced. Of course it leaked out soon enough: how in exchange for his dukedom, the Pope has offered to annul his marriage and make him a cardinal. A cardinal! Was the duke’s impotence really such common knowledge! The magnificence of the insult had taken everyone’s breath away. Meanwhile, Isabella’s husband, whose state had been harboring the poor man and who everyone knows is itching to stick a sword up the Borgia backside, was soon backslapping him in welcome and announcing the betrothal of his baby son, Federico, to the Borgia French baby daughter, Louisa.
“I tell you, there is no limit to this monster’s audacity, Alfonso. He is without manners or conscience, ungodly, unscrupulous, uncouth, warring…”
But Ercole is finally running out of steam.
“He embraced me so hard I could barely breathe, calling me his most beloved father-in-law, and then proceeding to grill me about the condition of his sister, as if I was personally responsible for her illness.” He splutters to a halt. “How is she now? Recovering, I hope.”
Alfonso sees her pale face against a mound of pillows. “The fever had peaked by the time I got back. The doctors say she is past the worst. Though there is something you should know, Father…”
—
“How dare he? How dare he? The devil take his insolence! Ha! We should have skewered him at the gates.”
Alfonso sits impassively as Ercole absorbs the news.
“How could he have got here so fast? He must have ridden with a witches’ wind behind him. I tell you, Satan himself is at home in that family.”
Alfonso has learned over the years that the angrier his father gets, the better it is if he distances himself from it. Still, if an old man could expire from an excess of outrage, this surely might be the moment. The thought shocks him less than it should, but one of the pleasures of being immune from court foibles is that you can feel a thing honestly without having to pretend that you don’t.
“And so then what happened? After he forced his way in? Don’t tell me you fraternized with him.”
“He is my wife’s brother. What else could I do?”
“And?” Ercole roars.
“He was most accommodating,” Alfonso answers calmly. “I gave him a tour of the battlements. He has a keen eye for matters of warfare.”
“We should pray he never has occasion to use the knowledge against us! At least you didn’t go whoring together,” Ercole says sourly. “Thank the Lord for the breaking of the fever. I am hoarse from the prayers I have uttered for her recovery. I tell you, my son, I have looked into the eye of the devil these last weeks, and Ferrara will be a lost cause if she dies on us. Why are you staring at me like that?”
Alfonso has no idea that he is staring. But he knows what he is thinking: it is something that Cesare Borgia had said to him later as they were walking the battlements together, assessing the range of the guns and discussing new turning mechanisms to make them more effective against the power of light artillery. How the two of them, he and Alfonso, were men of young blood filled with the heat of action and how when death came to their fathers, as it must soon for they were both old, they would be the ones to lead their states into a glorious future.
It would be best not to mention that now. It seems there is a bit of the courtier in Alfonso d’Este after all.
Outside, there is a sudden commotion. The door opens after urgent knocks that do not wait for a response and a servant stands red faced and stammering.
“I am…I am sent by the duke’s physician, Signor Castello. The lady Lucrezia has gone into labor.”
When she had woken that morning, her skin had been cool to the touch. No fever at all. “I am cured,” she said to herself, slipping her hands over her stomach, and as if her thought had been spoken out loud, Catrinella was already by her bedside, smiling, eager to welcome her back into the world.
“I shall get up today. Tell them to make ready a chair for me,” she announced, but as she pulled herself up onto the pillows, she had felt a throbbing inside her head and deep into her back. Her ladies brought warm water to wash away the sweat of so much sleep, and when they uncovered her, Catrinella noticed with alarm that her joints were swollen: wrists and ankles thickened as if they were pumped with water.
She had closed her eyes, but almost immediately the throbbing in her back returned, intensified, pressing down on her bowels.
“I have to get up. Let me up!” she shouted, throwing off the bedclothes, pushing everyone away from her as she rose, for she knew that if she didn’t she would soil herself. But as soon as her feet touched the floor, she was falling, both hands clutching at the base of her spine as if someone had stuck a dagger into the back of her pelvis.
Angela was already screaming her way out of the room, colliding with the doctors, roused from the daybeds that had been installed downstairs for them to rest when they were not wanted.
Ferrara’s own man, Francesco Castello, is not sprightly enough to run, but it doesn’t matter. He knew better than anyone what was happening now and that nothing good could come of it. All one could hope was that it did not take too long.
He was almost relieved when he found her clutching at a blood-soaked shift around her legs. As he helped her back onto the bed, she held on to him, eyes wide with terror. “I cannot lose the baby. Don’t let him die, you hear me. Don’t let him die.”
“You are not to worry, madam,” he said gently. “God will take care of everything. You must look to yourself now, we have work to do here.”
Work. Sweat. Effort. Endurance. Labor: women’s business, the pleasures of the flesh wiped out by the pain. However many times he witnesses it, Castello remains in awe of the cruel poetry of the punishment of Eve. The former duchess Eleonora, in other ways the perfect lady, had been such a screamer that half the palace had gone about their business with their fingers in their ears. But this young woman has a different kind of grit in her. The terror and importance of the work she must do now give her an energy of will that her body doesn’t have. She has delivered one live child already and retains a subterranean memory of her own muscle power. This thing inside her—for it is no longer her son—will be expelled, and she must help as best she can.
It takes from early afternoon to the coming of the night, the pulsing snake band of pain squeezing ever tighter, leaving less time to recover or even to breathe properly between contractions. And then finally, on an endless groan and tearing push, it is all over. The doctors, who have computed the pregnancy insofar as it is possible, estimate the lady Lucrezia is twenty-five or twenty-six weeks with child. Quite how long the baby has been dead they do not know, but inside the pulpy mess that they gather up and swiftly carry away so that she is saved the sight, there is a fetus developed enough for a doctor to divine its sex. It falls to Castello to do the job. The duchess elect has given birth to an ill-formed baby girl.
She does not ask and they do not tell her. It does not matter. When a baby is expelled too soon, the risk of childbed fever is high. The only thing that
matters is that she stay alive. Given how weak she is, her life or death is not a wager many people would take willingly.
They clean her up as best they can so that Alfonso, who has been waiting a few rooms away, can come to her bedside.
The swelling is fading, and her face though pale is serene, almost virginal; her agony has washed away Eve’s sin. Or perhaps it is simply exhaustion.
“I am sorry,” she whispers.
His huge scaly hand envelops her small one. “It is nothing,” he says gruffly. Uncomfortable with such closeness, he finds it hard to know how to behave. “As soon as you are well we will get on with making more, an army of boys.”
It is the most intimate thing he has ever said to her. But her eyes are already closed.
“Did she hear me?”
Behind him the doctors murmur reassuringly.
“Everything is all right, yes? I mean she will get better now,” he says as they usher him out of the room.
Castello makes a gentle wave of his hand, open to whatever interpretation the watcher might chose to give it.
“She must not die. If she dies…”
He does not finish the sentence.
—
“If she dies…” In Rome, the Pope sits in his bedroom, the dispatch still in his hands, tears dropping onto the page and smudging the ink. The Ferrarese ambassador, pulled early from his bed, stands nearby, his mouth twitching with the effort of appearing confident. The air is thick with old man’s sweat, which has soaked into the folds of sheets. The herb pomades dangling from the ceiling do little to disguise it.
“I tell you if my daughter dies…”
“That will not happen, Your Holiness. Five doctors are at her bedside constantly. Every church and convent in the city is saying prayers for her recovery. The well-being of the lady Lucrezia is as dear to our duke’s heart as was his own wife, Eleonora.”