In fact, she has not slept well before this meeting, and now they are alone, it is hard to know what they should say, unless it is to talk more of love. So when he offers to show her the library he has brought with him from Venice, she accepts quickly.
“Aaagh!” As they enter the room something streaks across the tiled floor, running over her skirts before disappearing into the wainscot. She puts out a sudden hand toward him, then withdraws it equally fast.
“God’s blood…infernal mice! They are everywhere. Vandals!” He shakes his head. “They’ve already made a banquet of my copy of Aristotle’s Zoology, gnawed right through the leather into the index.”
“What? Mice eating a book on zoology? How fitting. Signor Bembo, your library needs a cat.”
“I am waiting on one from Venice. An Egyptian breed. Every printing press keeps them.”
“Which means there must be almost half as many Egyptian cats as there are days of the year,” she says, reminding him of that first meeting. “One hundred and fifty. Isn’t that what you told me? A man may collect an entire library simply by walking from the Rialto to San Marco.” And her voice deepens in slight mockery.
“Was I really so pompous?”
“Not at all. Only proud of a city that has the best of everything.”
“No,” he says, looking directly at her. “Not everything.”
She drops her eyes, and he busies himself with laying out some of his more precious volumes. A cloud of leather particles rides out from the half devoured spine as he opens the pages of Zoology.
“Think of me as your student,” she says earnestly. “For I know nothing about such things.”
“Ah, with these books you are always the pupil, however much you know. And Aristotle is the first and greatest teacher, in everything. Shells, fish, plants, animals, man; there is nothing that doesn’t interest him. A lifetime would not be enough to know him properly.”
How Lucrezia loves his enthusiasm. A scholar of the new learning, that was how Strozzi described him. Yet when he talks she’s struck by how all that is new these days seems to grow effortlessly from the old. This is how my court will be, she thinks, finding ways to encourage the marriage of old learning and new art.
“And then there is Dante.”
He is lost now in poetry. He could talk through sunset to sunrise on the beauty of the Tuscan vernacular; as a sculptor of words, he has chosen it as his material, malleable as molten metal, delicate as blown glass.
“There is simply no other way forward. Splintered into so many states and dialects, how else can Italy find the poetic voice she needs to talk to herself and the rest of the world? Yet two hundred years after Dante we are still…ah.” He stops himself laughing. “I am a victim of Venetian spices again. I have a reputation as a bore on this subject. Strozzi says if I talk for longer than twenty minutes without interruption I must be shackled to my bed and doused in cold water.”
“Well, I would not nurse you. I like the illness too much.”
How would she put them into words, the feelings she has when they are together? The way time jolts and stops; how everything seems brighter and she feels clever and kind, nervous and peaceful all at the same time.
“My lady.” He drops his head in almost coy gratitude.
“I mean it,” she says fiercely. “What is the point of being alive if it is not to make some difference in the world? If I were a man…oh.” She throws up her hands, covering her embarrassment by turning to another book, a bright leather cover and a silver lock shining with polish. “So, tell me, what is this?”
“Ah, this is the newest of them all. Petrarch’s sonnets. Straight from Aldus Manutius’s great press in Venice.”
The tang of leather and fresh ink rises into the air as he opens the volume to its title page. “Oh!” she says. “Oh, but your name is here too.”
“As Petrarch’s editor, no more,” he says with not entirely convincing modesty.
She turns the pages carefully, studying the lines, running her fingers along the print, as fine—finer perhaps—than the best calligraphy.
“Ah, Signor Bembo,” she whispers, “but this is too rich, even for the mice.”
Love. She has read the commentaries, knows the ways that doctors as well as poets chart the progress of this most exquisite disease: how it enters first as a dart through the eye, then moves into and through the blood, so that when the afflicted come too close to each other it can cause hot blushes and a rushing of the pulse, as if the beating heart is trying to break through the surface of the skin. In all of life there is no intoxication of sweetness to compare with it. Is that what is happening to me now? she thinks, as the two of them stand studying the words, his left hand splayed facedown next to hers on the pretext of holding the pages open.
As for Bembo, he knows its progress only too well, for he has lived as well as described every stage of it. After the sweetness comes the pain, as it travels from the heart into the gut and the entrails, taking up home like a parasite, destroying any peace in favor of lust and jealousy. Back in Venice he has a box full of letters—copies of his as well as hers—from a lover who barely a year ago had been suffering as much as he. His poetry had got richer with each step of the dance. Still, it is one thing to coax a young widow into leaving a ladder against a canal wall at night and quite another to even think of a married duchess’s bed, especially one belonging to the Este family. He will not turn Italy’s poetic destiny around if his taste for adventure destroys him. Yet how can he resist?
“You know, the first time I saw you, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact you had nearly died. And that our meeting might never have taken place.” He pauses. “It seemed inconceivable. But then I found myself wondering if it was that very closeness to death that made you so luminous. Ah, if I could put such an understanding into poetry…”
She closes her eyes. “I think you already have.”
“I should go home soon,” he says after a while. “I mean, between the mice and the cold, I would probably compose better there.”
“Yes, yes, I see that.”
“Unless…unless I came to court. Strozzi’s townhouse, he assures me, is most comfortable.”
“Yes, and Duke Ercole, I know, would be pleased to see you.”
“And you, Lady Duchess?” he says softly. “Would it please you?”
“Me?” She laughs. “Oh, how can you ask? I would have you stay.”
And her answer is so honest that his hand cannot help but inch toward hers, and just for a second, she does not move away.
CHAPTER 32
In Rome, revenge is the fashion of the season.
Who would be an Orsini now? As well as the cardinal, half a dozen other archbishops and Church bureaucrats from the family have been visited by the Papal Guards. So much plunder is taken from their houses that Burchard has to assign special rooms in Borgia Tower to store it all.
Alexander cannot hide his exuberance. How long has he waited for this moment? This is not simply the punishment for leading a conspiracy against the Holy See, though God knows that alone would deserve it. This is the settling of a lifetime of scores: the opening of the passes of Rome to an invading army; the writing of poisoned letters about the Pope and his family; and the cruelest blow of all, the frenzy of stab wounds in the body of his favorite son. Exactly which one of the Orsini family had been holding the dagger doesn’t matter. They are all guilty as hell, and he will shed no tears for any of them. Christendom will be a safer place without them.
But not everybody is celebrating so openly.
There are those, even a few of the Pope’s more faithful followers, for whom this bloodletting inside the Church is an uncomfortable state of affairs.
“What? You believe that we are overjoyed to have a cardinal of our Holy Mother Church sitting inside a prison cell?” he says when a few brave colleagues pluck up the courage to plead for clemency on Orsini’s behalf. “Would we prefer it not to be the case? Of course we would. But bef
ore your soft hearts melt your brains, we would remind you that this man and his family rose in open rebellion against the papacy. What is taking place here is justice; no more, no less.”
“One would think I had taken an ax and chopped the man’s head off myself,” he says tetchily to Burchard later. “He is a traitor, pure and simple, and deserves to be in prison.”
“I think the fear, Your Holiness, is that he will die there, given his weakened lungs and the fetid air.”
“What? That air that comes from a river filled with animal carcasses, you mean? The same river where they dumped the body of my son, as if he too were a dead dog. When the cardinal breathes in let him remember that.”
Burchard does not pursue the matter. He of all people remembers the days after Juan’s death, when the Pope was so stricken with grief that all who heard him had feared for his sanity.
Nevertheless, he too is affected by the shame this infighting brings upon the Church. It is not every day a cardinal rots away in the Pope’s own jail. In the antechambers of the Borgia apartments the envoys and ambassadors cannot keep the smiles off their faces. Their diplomatic profiles rise and fall with the levels of scandal their dispatches contain.
The weather remains brutal, and inside Castel Sant’Angelo, Cardinal Orsini’s condition deteriorates.
Burchard makes a further attempt. “Your Holiness, if I may?”
“Well, you always do even if I would prefer you wouldn’t,” Alexander says good-naturedly.
“The cardinal’s mother has asked me to intercede on her behalf, that she be allowed to send provisions to her son. She is concerned that what he is being given to eat—”
“Is what? Poisoning him? I would not waste the cost of the venom on such a man. Talk to the jailers. He is fed what everyone else is fed.”
“Still, Your Holiness, it is not what he is used to. She has asked leave to pay—”
“How much?”
“Two thousand ducats to deliver meals to the jail.”
“Hmmn. We shall certainly consider it.”
“And…”
“And?”
“There is a further member of the Orsini household. Another woman.”
“What—you mean his mistress?”
Burchard shrugs. It seems impossible that he doesn’t know about these things, but it is his life’s work to pretend thus.
“What does she want?”
“An audience with Your Holiness.” He pauses. “She has been waiting for some hours.”
“Well, send her in.”
—
She stands in front of him: raven haired with a full figure and a face that would once have had men drooling. Nowhere near as lovely as his own Vannozza or the delicate Giulia Farnese, he thinks, but then everyone has grown older and she and Cardinal Orsini have had a comfortable arrangement for years now.
She sinks to her knees in front of him. Was she a courtesan once? He cannot remember. If I was a less scrupulous man…he thinks.
He lifts her up and shows her to a chair close to the papal throne.
“My dear.” He pats her knee. “What can I do for you?”
Her eyes are brimming with tears. “I have brought you a present, Holy Father.”
“A present?”
From between her cleavage she withdraws a bunched velvet cloth, which, unwrapped, reveals a single pearl the size of a quail’s egg, alive with luster and light.
“Ah, what a remarkable jewel.”
“Priceless,” she says huskily.
“You know what they say about pearls, my dear? That they grow from dewdrops which fall when the shell opens to God’s early morning majesty. The purer the dew, the purer the pearl. In heaven, each of the twelve gates is carved from a single one.”
He studies it again, the view of her breasts in the background. Nature has so many ways to make a lovely woman lovelier. “I am sure it looks most beautiful when you wear it. I believe the cardinal bought this for you a few years ago, yes?”
She nods modestly.
“I remember now. I was interested in it too, for its size is prodigious. But he sneaked in on the negotiations and made a better offer.” Any other man would have stepped back or delivered it later as a gift; God’s blood, how many ways has this family delighted in undermining him? “He must be most fond of you, my dear.”
“I have kept it close to my heart for many years, Your Holiness.”
How he is enjoying himself. And why not? What time does he have for pleasure anymore? Giulia, now the size of an unmilked cow, has been sequestered for months, awaiting a birth that is not officially happening, for she does not have a husband, while he has been fighting all manner of vermin. A little flirtation will do him the world of good.
“Close to your heart,” he repeats. “Then it can only have grown more precious from its placing.”
“Your Holiness, please, it is yours now. Please take it.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t possibly—”
“Please, please.”
His smile does nothing to help her. She grabs hold of his right hand. “Your displeasure with the cardinal has his whole household in despair. I fear his mother will not survive the shame. We pray daily that you might find a way to be reconciled. Until then if…well, if we could care for him a little. Visit him perhaps, with salves for his chest, warm clothes, blankets.”
“My dear, if the man needs blankets he only has to say.”
But she is crying openly now, hot tears falling on his hand, which is pulled halfway to her breast. It seems as if her heart will break. Everyone in Rome knows how much the Pope hates to see a woman cry.
“Of course you may send him blankets. Though…though I think your own presence would excite him more than is good for an ailing man.”
Her skin is moist, soft. She is a pearl in herself. No doubt she would do anything that he desires. But at such a moment a man must abjure temptation. In fact he finds himself unexpectedly irritated just thinking about it, as if this might be a ruse to somehow undermine his enjoyment of victory. He retrieves his hand, pushing the pearl back into her own and closes her fingers over it.
I may be growing old, he thinks as he dismisses her, but I shall still outlive this wretched traitor.
—
The blankets and the food do little to counteract the damp, and in late February the cardinal himself makes a last desperate attempt.
“Ha! He offers us twenty-five thousand ducats to be freed from prison.” Alexander glances up from the letter. “My, but his writing has got very spindly. Perhaps it is the lack of natural light. It’s bribery, of course. Tell me, what would you do, Burchard?”
The Master of Ceremonies stands silent. What would you do, Burchard? In the past months the Pope has grown fond of this flourish of rhetoric, as if with his family gone, he needs someone with whom to discuss his decisions. Or rather to approve them. To his surprise, Burchard hears himself say,
“Clemency is a sacred quality in any man, Your Holiness.”
“Indeed.” Alexander nods sagely. He pulls forward a pen and paper, writes quickly, then lifts it up to waft the ink dry before reading it back.
“Be of good spirits and just look to your own health, my dear cardinal. All other matters we can address when you are well again. There! I think that will revive his spirit, don’t you?”
Two days later, Giovanni Battista Orsini is dead.
—
“In all honesty I cannot say I am sorry. But I did not cause this. God has shown Himself as displeased as I was. We have closed up his palazzo already, yes? Good. Then you had better attend to the funeral. It must be correctly orchestrated as befits his status.”
The Pope scans Burchard’s face and is surprised to note an unmistakable tremor passing over it. Is he upset? Or is it even a flash of anger that he sees?
“You seem disturbed, Johannes? Did you harbor some secret fondness for this man?”
But Burchard has regained control of his face now and says nothing.<
br />
“Well, one way or another someone must oversee the funeral. He was a cardinal after all. But—perhaps—since you are so busy with other matters…I will relieve you of that burden.”
He turns his attention back to his papers. Burchard, perceiving himself dismissed, backs out.
“Johannes.” The Pope’s voice stops him in his tracks. “I do nothing here that they would not have done to me. Indeed that they have not done already. I did not start these family wars, any more than I started the selling of papal offices. These things existed before me and will remain long after.”
Burchard stays silent. He is not yet dismissed.
“I understand that I am sometimes a challenge to you.” Death seems to have put the Pope in a reflective mood. “But would you rather have some grim straitlaced cleric who never moved out of line? I tell you, Johannes, if it had been Giuliano della Rovere in this chair, you would have had to endure his bad breath and cold fury. Would you really have preferred that? Better someone who smiles as well as rages, eh?”
—
That night Burchard leaves his rooms in the Vatican and goes out into Rome across the Ponte Sant’Angelo to his own modest house near the church of San Giuliano dei Fiamminghi. Sitting at his desk, he does not take long to write the diary entry:
Today Cardinal Giovanni Battista Orsini died in the Castel Sant’Angelo. May his soul rest in peace. The Pope commissioned my colleague Don Gutteri to look after the arrangements for the dead man’s funeral. And since I did not want to know more about the affair than I need, I did not attend the service or take part in any way in the proceedings.
He reads it back, then closes the book, fastens its locks and places it in the strongbox under his bed. Such is the climate of violence in Rome now that it would be better, for a while at least, to keep his thoughts off the page.
CHAPTER 33
“I think you’re missing it.”
“What? Bedbugs, saddle sores and a government that ignored everything I was telling it. How could a man miss such delights, Biagio?”