“I would introduce you, but he is already on his way to Piombino, claims he has had enough of war. Such mad artists you Florentines breed. From the neck up he looks like an unwashed hermit, yet he goes everywhere dressed in velvet with his pouty young catamite trailing behind him.” The duke stares at Machiavelli. “I hear Florence is a city that specializes in sodomy.”
Niccolò offers a small shrug. Almost every man he knows could tell tales; it is a rite of passage as much as a predilection, but they are not here for tavern talk.
“Well, we’ve all played on the other side of the street in our time, eh?” Cesare says with a crude laugh. “I couldn’t care less where a man likes to put it. It’s his brain I’m interested in. And your da Vinci has so many ideas that he needs ten hands to draw them all. He’s got a scheme to connect the city of Cesena to the sea, and if it doesn’t fall to bits like his giant horse in Milan, he says he will build me a cannon that can fire more than one ball at a time. You’re lucky though. He remains a patriot. I asked him once what he would do if I set him the job of taking Florence. Know what he said? That the walls of his city were made of more than stone. Quoted some bit of poetry in the town square.”
“ ‘Kingdoms fall through luxury. Cities rise through virtue,’ ” Niccolò says quietly. He has no idea what is going on here, but he has little option except to follow. “It is engraved around Donatello’s statue of Judith slaying Holofernes. When it was taken from the Medici palace, they changed part of the wording to reflect the power of the people.”
“Is that so?” Cesare says, manifestly unimpressed by the information. “You Florentines do so like your art. Tell me, how goes the work on your giant David? Buonarroti still showering the city with marble dust, is he?”
Engineers, sculptors, poets, catamites. Every subject but the one that is everywhere.
Niccolò clears his throat. “My lord duke, I am sorry to hear the news of—”
“Urbino? Yes, yes. For a few days it will be on everyone’s lips, though there is nothing that could hurt me less. Like magpies, they have gone for the shiniest thing in sight. Yet all they have got is an empty palace on a hill. I had thought they might be cleverer than that.” He stops. “You don’t believe me? You think I am playing you, reeling you in because, faced with trouble, I need Florence more now?”
Such diamond-hard eyes he has, no hint of emotion behind them. “An alliance would help you, yes.” Niccolò pauses. No diplomat worth his salt should say everything that he is thinking. Yet he is dealing with a man who never does what anyone expects. “Nevertheless, my lord, I don’t doubt you in this. I think that to have damaged you, they should have gathered every man, horse and cannon that they had, to attack you here in Imola.”
“You don’t trust your own countryman’s new defense system?” the duke says lightly.
“I am sure it will be admirably strong, should it be finished in time. But they are only walls. And until more troops arrive…” He trails off with a small shrug of his shoulders.
“Ha! Signor Smile, you are wasted in the council chamber.” Cesare throws his head back and gives a hearty laugh. It is the first unguarded gesture Niccolò has ever seen him make. “So,” he goes on, “it seems we are looking through the same eyes. Tell me then, what would you do to take the sting out of these vipers’ tails?”
Niccolò says nothing.
“You carry a volume of Roman history in your pocket, which they say you read all the time. Doesn’t that help?”
“Not in this, my lord.” The definition of treachery is as loose as a poisoned man’s bowels, and advising the enemy would fall easily within it, though of course he has thought about it. “Your story has no parallels that I can see.”
The duke grunts. “Very well. Then answer me another question, if you have the balls. If I were to guarantee you that within ten, twelve days this city will be swarming with soldiers, would you tell your beloved Florence now to make a treaty with me?”
“My lord, your job is war, mine is diplomacy. I cannot ‘tell’ Florence anything,” he says, hoping his face does not give him away more than it already has. “I simply describe what is and make suggestions.”
“Hmm. Somehow I doubt very much that is all you do,” the duke says softly, decorating the compliment with a sly smile.
Politics and the art of seduction. If I were a woman, I would no doubt be at his feet now, Niccolò thinks, as he consciously straightens his back.
The moment passes.
“Ha! I believe you have grown taller since we first met,” Cesare says lightly. “It must be the company you keep. Well.” He waves his hand, as if to show it was all only fluff and banter. “Your honesty will do me well enough. Now if you will excuse me, I have a conspiracy to deal with.”
—
For another night the tapers burn till dawn in the war room. Though he has taken a few liberties with the speed at which soldiers can march, Cesare has not lied about Urbino. In his mind it is indeed simply a shiny bauble. He has taken it once and he can take it again. But the worry is that it will give this ragbag rabble a sense of victory, and they cannot be allowed to build on that.
He writes a series of dispatches. The longest one is to his father. It will not please him. But battles are not always won by fighting. And it is clear how they must proceed.
CHAPTER 24
The slow sweet healing of Lucrezia. Later it will bring her equal sorrow and pleasure, remembering her journey from death to life.
She has chosen well. Though Corpus Domini may not have its own levitating nun, there is no finer convent in all Ferrara: noblewomen with generous dowries fusing worship and life inside a marriage to Jesus Christ, in His own way a more tolerant husband than many a violent, bullying flesh-and-blood one who might have been their fate in the world outside.
When they are not at prayer, the nuns spend their time embroidering collars and altar cloths, tending gardens, teaching young girls in their care or being taught themselves by a choirmistress who trains songbird voices out of the most unlikely mouths. At court, women can only sing at private functions; professional performance belongs to men. Yet here they make up a choir whose beauty—and reputation—has its church filled on every feast day and festival.
And now they have been awarded the highest accolade of all: nursing their new duchess back to health.
The day Lucrezia and her ladies arrive, the nuns form a cordon of welcome, their voices arching like garlands of flowers in the air above her. If they are shocked by how thin she is, how gray her skin, how dull and dead her eyes, it doesn’t affect the verve of their greeting. Among them, senior nuns who hold posts of special responsibility in the kitchen, the choir and the infirmary are already honing their strategies of recovery.
—
Mouthful by mouthful…
The first weeks are filled with the repair of her body.
She is almost despairing when the first serving plates are set in front of her: poached calves’ kidneys, dove breasts in white wine and pears baked in sweet liquor. The kitchen mistress has permission to order in special produce to tempt a half starved duchess back into health.
“But it is too much. I cannot eat it.” Lucrezia groans, tired by the very sight of it.
At table with her, her ladies say nothing, sitting with their unused spoons by their loaded plates.
“What?” She looks up at them. “Why are you waiting? I will have something later.”
But they will have none of it. They are bringing their own skills to bear on their beloved mistress’s care: most notably cunning. If their duchess does not eat, then neither will they.
The first meal goes back untouched.
By the second day they are close to salivating from the smells rising from the veal in sweet sauce and the slow-baked river eels with capers glistening in their own juice.
The standoff continues.
“Oh, I cannot bear this,” the duchess says at last with a petulant sigh. She stabs her silver fork into
a piece of veal, puts it in her mouth and chews stubbornly, like a child forced into obedience. Just for a second her eyes close as she registers the release of the juniper berries within the sauce. She reopens them onto four faces, smiling broadly. The fast is over.
—
The next flank of attack comes from the dispensary. Two days in and a small wiry woman of uncertain age, skin worn and crinkled like parchment left out in a storm, arrives in her guest cell.
“Lady Duchess, I am Sister Bonaventura, and I have charge of the convent dispensary. I have made up some remedies which may be of help to you. Though I have no experience of labor and stillbirth, I have treated the attrition of summer fever, and I know the vagaries of women’s monthly flow and the irritations and tenderness that can affect the secret passage to the womb.”
Her penetrating pale blue eyes are as disconcerting as the directness of her speech.
“You are most kind,” Lucrezia says coolly. “But I have been cared for by the best of doctors before I arrived here.”
“That may be so. But you are not healed yet,” the nun says bluntly.
“I think I am the best judge of that,” Lucrezia retorts, taking refuge in haughtiness. “I am simply tired.”
“Food will help. But you need to sleep better. You suffer from nightmares, yes?”
“What do you know of my dreams?” Her sharpness is laced with fear, because it is true; her nightmares are terrible. The worst is the one when she wakes unable to breathe, struggling to give birth to a monster, half animal, half human, whose small, snarling body breaks into bloody bits as it falls to the floor at her feet.
The nun remains unmoved by her tone. “It is my task to care for all manner of distress, and God aids me to see things that others may not.” She is not without her own cunning, this seasoned healer. Processing to chapel in the middle of the night for the service of Matins, she has heard the duchess’s voice crying out from the guesthouse cloisters.
She slips her hands into the voluminous folds of her habit and, like some market sorceress, extracts first one, then two glass vials of liquid and a majolica pot, sealed tight with a wooden lid.
“The paler fluid is tonic for the body and best taken before food in the morning. The dark color is for the night. Eight drops in a little wine, half an hourglass before you lie down. And the ointment is for application to the inside of your vaginal passage—to help heal any fissures or tenderness that might have come with the force of the labor.”
Lucrezia stares at her. None of the doctor crows have ever talked to her so directly about such things. But after the nun leaves, the light of those pale washed blue eyes and an aura of kindness remain. She finds herself wondering how many young women enter Corpus Domini against their will, and how they might need more than the rhythm of convent life to help them adjust. She picks up the sleeping draft and holds it to the light. The liquid is a deep amber color, rich like well-fermented ale. Distillation. Not a skill many noblewomen might aspire to in the world outside.
—
There is no pulse. I am dead.
How these words have haunted Lucrezia these last weeks. There have been moments, often at the worst times in the night, when they have felt more real than the world around her. As if she has been unable to summon up the will or the energy to move beyond them.
But here, now, it might be possible to let them go. On her desk sits a finely worked silver crucifix, brought from her own chapel. She knows this body well: ribbed chest and sinewed arms straining off the nails; a man who understands suffering, who has sacrificed himself for mankind. If she did not die, then it can only be because God wanted her alive. And how can anyone gainsay His will?
That night, after prayers that last longer than the words, she swallows the amber liquid, growing drowsy as the evening service of Compline sends out tender shoots of song into the cloisters and beyond. The sleep that follows is long, deep and undisturbed by terror.
The guest quarters of Corpus Domini are grouped around a lacy stone cloister. The scale is intimate, almost tender, and the young stone pine tree in the middle of the courtyard offers a canopy of shade and, at this time of year, gives off a heady aroma of resin. In the silence of the long afternoons while the nuns work and attend services, Lucrezia and her ladies sit with their needlework for company. She has set herself the task of embroidering a surplice for her brother-in-law Cardinal Ippolito, a deliberately challenging design of a silver chalice formed from looping long stitch, with the host rising up from it, sending out showers of dense cross-stitched red and gold stars. She has always been a most accomplished needlewoman and has forgotten the peace that grows from the simple repetition of needle and thread moving in and out of the embroidery hoop. As the afternoon sun moves slanting golden strips across the flagstones, there are moments when she thinks that she would never like to leave.
Meanwhile, she is also experimenting with the tapestry of song. The beauty and complexity of the way the nuns weave their voices together fascinates her, and she asks permission for the choirmistress to give lessons to her ladies. She is also being instructed herself. Court gossip flows easily through the parlor; visiting hours are generous; mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, all bring nasty tidbits in exchange for convent biscuits and lace collars that the nuns produce and send out with pride. Everyone knows the stories of the wedding festivities: how the duchess’s dancing eclipsed all, but how it was Isabella d’Este who took the palm for her skill with lute and voice. Of course, they love their duke’s own daughter. But she has lived in Mantua for over a decade and is busy endowing convents of her own there. Their new duchess has resoundingly won their hearts and loyalty (the waiting list for new novices has doubled since she arrived). When she has daughters of her own, what everlasting honor it would bring Corpus Domini if one of them might enter its cloisters rather than any other.
The abbess gives the choirmistress dispensation to overlay sacred words onto some of the court’s popular music, along with the Psalms, which she has already set so prettily to her own compositions. The two women work together each afternoon, and Lucrezia starts to appreciate the freedom that comes when a woman is encouraged to fill her lungs and open her mouth, finding a voice richer than she ever dreamed she might own.
Note by note, stitch by stitch, day by day, a stronger, more vibrant Duchess of Ferrara is emerging.
CHAPTER 25
Alexander has heard morning mass and is in relatively good humor when Cesare’s letter arrives.
I know this will go against the grain, Father, but…
It reads as if his son is standing next to him, hectoring.
This conspiracy is like a badly patched roof in winter. All it needs is a few slates ripped off and the whole thing will collapse in on itself. You must approach Cardinal Orsini and make your peace with him. Tell him our quarrel is not with him, but the rebels in our pay and that already they are squirming on the hook. Tell him that Bologna is already in secret negotiations with me based on a promise of nonaggression between us, and that as soon as this is made public the others will come crawling. Flatter, dissemble, lie, promise whatever you need to convince him. Swallow your pride and do this thing, Father, and I promise you will have his and every other one of their heads on pikes later. But say nothing to anyone. Nothing at all.
The Pope reads the letter a number of times, becoming more and more agitated. In recent weeks the tone of their dispatches has been changing; things told as much discussed, less asking and more demanding. Sweet Mother of God, who does his son think he is talking to? He, who was already a veteran of politics when the boy was still peeing in his bathwater.
He slams the paper down on his lap.
“Not bad news I hope, Holy Father?” Burchard asks politely.
Alexander stares at him. How he would like to tell him what he feels. For as long as he can remember he has had family around him with whom he could talk freely. Age as well as habit have made him a man used to having license to say what he thinks.
>
He reads one last time. It is the tone that annoys him most. But if he puts that aside, then the assessment of the conspiracy is solid enough. He has thought as much himself over the last few weeks. As for taking revenge? Well, he has waited long enough to skewer the Orsini. A little longer will not spoil the pleasure. He throws the pages into the fire, watching their edges catch, running a comb of flame through the parchment until it crumbles. Posterity will not hear the disrespect inside the words. When they are celebrating it will matter less who wrote what to whom.
He calls for his secretary.
“It is a letter to the Cardinal of Santa Maria in Dominica. Are you ready?”
—
Two days later, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini is ushered into the Hall of the Saints, where two empty chairs are set by the fire and a flagon of wine is warming. He sits, his eye drawn to a clever trompe l’oeil on the left-hand wall, a painted fake shelf on which a painted fake papal crown, sumptuous and jeweled, sits precariously balanced, waiting to be picked up by anyone whose fingers itch enough for power. Pinturicchio is a confident artist, but he would not take such liberties unless directly instructed. The Borgias are a jumped-up band of foreign interlopers with little breeding or history behind them. But they are far from stupid. He would do well to remember that now.
He too has done his fair share of raging at impotence these last weeks: this “secret” alliance on which he has risked so much has been leaking like a sieve from the moment the ink was dry on the paper. And their trump card—the speed of an attack—is already compromised. No sooner had Vitelli and his men left for Urbino than the squabbling had begun. The latest from Bologna is that Baglioni is refusing to cede or share command with anyone, so that the force that is gathered has yet to move, consuming its way through the goodwill of the district where it is billeted. The incompetence, perversely, has given the Pope a greater admiration for the very men he would like to see dead at his feet.