Spring is on its way in Florence, and in the Palazzo della Signoria the secretaries and scribes have slipped the catches and opened the windows.
Niccolò has been back at his desk for months. The weeks following the taking of Sinigaglia had seen him wedged in a saddle scribbling dispatches as the army thundered across the Apennines into Tuscany, the remaining Orsini traitors garroted en route. It had taken till the end of January before he was granted permission to return, Florence finally convinced that a treaty with the duke was preferable to being next on the list of Cesare’s conquests. They had replaced him with a more senior diplomat (better name, better clothes, though less perceptive) to negotiate the details. But by then he had been so eager to get home that he had chosen not to mind. Four months and twenty-one days he had been away. His wife was breathing dragon smoke, the council wanted a full written report by yesterday and there was an army of friends waiting to buy him a jug if they could be first to hear the stories of bloody carcasses and meat cleavers in the snow.
But Biagio now, as then, is up for the deeper conversation.
“And you were right. The council should have listened to you earlier. But you know how they are. Everything has to be discussed and weighed up ten times. Also there was a feeling that you were…well—”
“Unreliable. Or to quote your letter, You are an asshole if you think they will make a treaty with your Valentine.”
“And an asshole you were if that’s what you thought!” Biagio laughs. “I was just keeping you informed, defending your back! Anyway, you have to admit that you did occasionally sound rather…partial.”
“Partial? What is the point of having an envoy on the ground if not to gauge what’s really going on? If Rome had had someone across the Alps, the senate might have known that Hannibal was more than another barbarian with a few elephants at his back. I wrote what I thought. I still think it. We have not seen a man like him in our time.”
“Well, no one is arguing with you on that anymore. So, what happens next?”
“We talk over food. I gave Marietta my word we wouldn’t be late.”
“I meant politics, not supper!” Biagio roars, enjoying the unusual sensation of being faster than someone who is always ahead. “You know what they’re really saying about you, Il Macchia? That the man with the busiest prick in the Palazzo della Signoria has fallen in love with his own wife and God help every other husband in the city.”
Niccolò puts up hands as if to ward off such a contagious disease.
“Though in this, as in everything else, I am your defender.” He continues the conversation as they cross the bridge to the south side of the city. “I tell them: Cesare Borgia was no tougher an adversary than Marietta Machiavelli when her temper is up. My God, remember the day you returned and I saw you off with the bolt of silk and the hair comb that you’d made me buy so you had something to give her? If you want my opinion, you should forget history. Write a tract on how to handle angry wives instead. You could make a fortune from that.”
Niccolò is laughing now too. She’d been storing up her fury like one of Florence’s flash summer storms, all lightning and deafening thunder. He had even thought of dropping in on an old mistress off the Ponte alle Grazie, except she too would expect a gift after so long. In the end he had gone home, because however violent the weather there, he had missed his wife and had felt a powerful need to sleep in his own bed.
It had taken a while to get into the house.
“The reason you say you don’t recognize your own husband’s voice is that he’s been in the saddle for three days running and has a river of dust down his throat,” he had yelled back. “Open the door, woman, or I’ll break it down.”
Yet once he was in, stepping over the chests of books that were waiting by the front door, presumably to try to evict him, he had found her sitting with a sprig of winter blossom in her curled hair and enough perfume newly applied that he could smell it from the door. A woman who has taken such care to look her best as she gets ready to throw her husband out of his own house? My God, what is the point of being a diplomat if one can’t read mixed messages and make sense of them? It was all he could do not to smile.
He had thrown his pack on the ground and without a word, walked up to her chair and kissed her. And when she had opened her mouth to start talking, he had put his hand over it and said, fiercely (for to laugh now would have been the end of his career as a politician):
“Before you say a word, I have been supping with the devil for four months. I’ve seen men sliced in half, others with faces like purple bursting figs from the garrote, and I’ve had my fill of anger and violence. I am safe. I am home and I am tired. And if that’s not good enough for you then I will walk out and find someone who will offer me a sweeter greeting. And I will give to them the bolt of red silk and the tortoiseshell hair comb that I have carried over half of Italy in my saddlebag for you.”
—
Three months on and she is pregnant and singing her way to the sick bowl. Following a marauding duke had its uses.
That night, he and Biagio eat fresh broad beans with seasoned pecorino cheese and new red wine—Tuscan fare marking the coming of spring. Then, when the servant has cleared the food away, Marietta settles herself quietly near the empty grate, her sewing in her lap, while the two men talk business over honey cakes and lemon liquor. These first weeks of pregnancy have left her tired and she will almost certainly fall asleep, but she likes the sound of their voices, the feeling of a house open to her husband’s friends. Whatever her life is to bring, Marietta Machiavelli is a happy woman now.
“So? What’s the talk of the council tomorrow? Your idea of a citizen militia is dead, right? You know what they say about taking horses to water. I thought using the fall of Constantinople as an example was a masterstroke. Much better than your usual old Roman comparisons.”
Niccolò shrugs. These last few months he has been showering the gonfaloniere’s desk with detailed, finely argued briefs drawing on everything that he’s learned, the most radical idea being the creation of a standing army to take the place of mercenaries. The problem was always going to be money as much as vision. No government wants to raise taxes to pay for something they hope they will not need. But need it they will, that he knows. And while they had refused him, an idea once seeded and watered now has time to grow. For the moment though, the more pressing question, as ever, is what is going on in the duke’s head.
Biagio spears a piece of pecorino with his knife. “It doesn’t make sense. He’s got half of Italy waiting on his next move, yet he’s sitting in Rome running a court and rowing with his father.”
He waits. If his boss doesn’t have an answer, then who does?
A father who also happens to be the Pope. When Niccolò replays his conversations with Cesare (he holds many word perfect in his mind), it always strikes him how little mention of Alexander there had been. Of course young men would prefer not to be beholden, but…
“I think he is occupied with Church business. If the Pope is growing older faster now, as the reports say, then the duke has to have influence over whoever succeeds him. And for that he needs—”
“A lot more cardinals loyal to the Borgias.” Marietta is still busy with her darning as she mutters the words under her breath.
“You are talking in your sleep, my dear,” Niccolò says loudly. “Go to bed!”
There is barely a woman in Florence who could—or would—dare to talk politics openly, and if he indulges her sometimes—as he does when she pesters him—it is with the knowledge that she will not show him up to others. She gives a big yawn and ducks her head closer to her cloth, the smile shared by her and her stitches. Biagio, who has his back to her, seems not to have heard. But then he is a loyal friend.
A man in love with his wife. Ha! Niccolò clears his throat loudly.
“The appointment of new cardinals will give him votes in conclave, and the money they pay will go straight into his war chest. The Pope has ju
st created eighty new posts to be sold off inside the curia at seven hundred and sixty ducats apiece.” He pauses, as if daring Marietta to come up with the mathematics.
“And when all that’s done, then he’ll go for Arezzo, Pienza, all the other cities in Tuscany? And the French be damned, is that it?”
Niccolò smiles. “Come on, Biagio. The French are damning themselves. You’ve read the dispatches coming out of Naples. The Spanish are bringing in troops by the shipload. Louis has waited too long to invade. The few fortresses the French still control could soon be in trouble. All this time he’s been humoring the Borgias because he needs the Pope’s support and the duke’s army when he marches south. But what if the Spanish start marching north instead and the Pope switches allegiances? Then Cesare Borgia could walk into Tuscany with a Spanish alliance behind him.”
Biagio shakes his head: he has a desk laden with half digested reports, yet this man who has read everything knows the future as well as the past. In the silence that follows, Marietta’s gentle snoring marks a return to the status quo of marriage.
When his guest has gone, Niccolò wakes her gently and she rises almost automatically, taking her sewing and moving like a sleepwalker to the bedroom. Then he goes into his study and gets out a sheaf of papers from his chest.
He is writing—when there is time—an account of the conspiracy of Sinigaglia, filling out the details of the things he did not, could not, know at the time. Livy sits on his shoulder, refining his prose, nurturing elegance but always careful to let the drama speak for itself. Two of the rebels—Vitellozzo and da Fermo—had died that night, strangled as they sat tied back-to-back in their chairs. The others had left the city as prisoners, to be executed later as the army moved through Tuscany, their bodies on show one morning with ropes dug deep into their necks. In both cases the talk was of how they had begged for their lives, each man blaming the other for their treachery. Their cowardice completes the story, but then how else would the victor choose to tell it?
Niccolò does, however, have one piece of firsthand evidence. That first morning after the taking of Sinigaglia he had gone out in a freezing dawn to try to find a rider to take his dispatch. The town had been subdued—even plunderers have to sleep sometime—and he had been on the streets talking to whomever he could find when the duke himself had ridden by with men-at-arms, overseeing the enforcement of calm. He had been effusive in his greeting, as if he was meeting a long-lost friend.
“You see how it has come to pass, Signor Smile!” he had said, waving his hands around him. “This is what I nearly told you that night when you and your bishop sat with me in Urbino. I said then that I would bring down all these petty thugs and tyrants who are ruining the country. All I needed was the opportunity. I knew already then that it would be given to me. There is not a man in Italy who does not think we are better without them. True or false?”
Ah, the making of history. Biagio is right: he is beginning to miss it.
CHAPTER 34
Fortune: the serendipitous collision of time, place and person, the unfolding of opportunity, the seizing of the moment.
It is impossible to know what might have happened if Alfonso d’Este had arrived back in Ferrara earlier. If, for instance, he had cut short his pilgrimage and come back before Lucrezia returned to court. It would have been a fine gesture: the man who had escorted her to the convent gates all the weeks before, now bringing her home.
But any journey that moves into winter is a precarious business. As the weather grew foul, it had offered him a chance to poke his nose into yet more fortresses, since all these campaigns and conspiracies were accelerating defense innovation and rebuilding. And with his brother-in-law’s fortunes riding high, it made sense for him to deepen his knowledge of such things; that way any meeting they have in the future will be equally enriching to them both. It is Alfonso’s fate to be a man wise about war but ignorant about women. Or at least ignorant about the one in his life that he doesn’t have to pay for.
When he does finally get back, he goes first to his father, making an appointment to dine with his wife afterward.
“You haven’t seen her yet? You have a surprise in store. Such a glow she has about her now. I must say she is a duchess indeed,” Ercole coos. “The wonders of living with nuns, eh? You’re a lucky man, my son.”
But Alfonso is one of nature’s exceptions when it comes to erotic fantasies about convents, and the hint of lust in his father’s voice disgusts him. He would like to get up and leave now, but there have been shifts in the political landscape since he has been away and matters of state must come first.
So it is late when he arrives in his wife’s bedchamber.
Business as usual in the Este marriage then.
Except not quite.
He has made an effort, bathed again to rid himself of any remaining grime of the road, had his beard and hair trimmed and anointed himself with perfumes.
Lucrezia is not yet in bed. Instead she sits by a fire, with the remains of a meal—now grown cold—in front of her. To pass the time and keep her mind calm she has been reading—well, what else but poetry?—but she puts the pages away carefully when his arrival is announced.
He apologizes for his lateness, and they sit together talking for a while, while the great bed in the corner dances under the light of the candles. His journey has been fruitful. He tells her of his thoughts on her brother’s triumph, how everyone says he will be master of Sinigaglia before the snow melts. His admiration is clear, and she listens intently, her cheeks rosy in the candlelight. She is evidently wonderfully recovered.
“My father tells me he’s approved your full allowance.”
“Yes, it was good of him.”
He grunts. Bloody hypocrite, he thinks. He wonders if he should tell her his part in it, but he is no better at paying compliments to himself.
Silence falls. The bed beckons. He has picked up a few tricks of love on the road: women who charged more than he was used to paying and were artful in the taking (or faking) of pleasure, as well as the giving of it. He would like to imagine the same thing could happen here tonight, but already he is not sure. It is not just him; there also seems to be something wrong with his wife. Certainly she is plump and lovely, but she is giving off an air of fragility that he finds most unnerving. And they still have all their clothes on.
Timing. How cruel it is on both sides.
While it is true that Lucrezia is interested in poetry now—is already half in love with the man who composes it—that is not the problem tonight. The problem tonight is that though she looks well, something unpleasant is happening inside her body again.
She sits opposite him, her heart pounding. What can she say? That in recent days she has felt a recurrence of the tenderness that she felt after the stillbirth; so much so that this afternoon, after she had bathed, she had decided to apply a little of the dispensary sister’s ointment. But as soon as she slipped her finger inside herself, she had felt a sharp pain, so sharp she had let out an involuntary cry. Is there an obstruction there, or has some fissure opened up again? Why? How? And how will it feel when it is more than her finger pushing inside her?
An army of boys, she thinks, glancing down at his rough hands as the conversation between them starts to fall away. As soon as you are well we will get on with making an army of boys. Those had been his words as she lay flirting with death. She had been too far gone to hear him, but her ladies have repeated it often enough since, for they find it romantic in a most manly kind of way.
It is time. He goes to relieve himself, and with the help of Catrinella she prepares herself for bed, choosing a new embroidered shift and slipping between the sheets.
“Put out the candles as you go,” she says as she dismisses her lady-in-waiting.
At least this way he will not be able to see the panic on her face.
“Your hands are cold,” she mutters with a little laugh when at the first touch she flinches slightly.
He gives
a grunting little sound as he rubs and blows upon them. He leans over and moves his lips to hers, kissing slowly, the novelty of little probes before he pushes farther in. For a moment it goes well. For a moment she is there with him.
He moves his lips down onto her neck, then to her breasts, taking a nipple gently between his teeth. Foreplay. That is the kind of thing some women like. (See how he has been thinking of her.) He hears her breathing coming faster now, registers it along with his own. But the minute his hands move lower, searching out her bushy pleat to test her moistness with a playful finger, as he has seen work on other women, her whole body freezes and she gives a half swallowed cry.
He pulls back so fast it feels as if he is the one who has been hurt.
For a moment they both lie in the darkness next to each other breathing heavily. He has made a considerable effort to imagine another scenario here, and he is angrier—or more disappointed—than he understands.
“You…you are healed, yes?” he growls, cross both that he cannot say it better and that she makes him say it at all.
“Yes—except…” And her voice is shaky. Oh, Sweet Mary, help me, she thinks. “Except it seems…in the last day or so—I have some new tenderness where the baby was dispelled. I did not realize it until…Oh, I am so sorry.”
And she is. So sorry.
But sorry is not a word that works for Alfonso d’Este in bed. Sorry was all he ever heard from his first wife. No. That’s not true: after a while she said nothing at all, just lay corpse rigid, fear rising off her like newly applied perfume. Duty between them had been an act of violence, and even in memory he hates her for it.
“Perhaps if we were careful,” she says hesitantly.
But careful does not work any better, God damn it. His prick now lies flaccid across his groin.
“We will leave it till another time,” he says coldly, pulling himself out of bed. “You will let me know when. I will send your ladies to you.”