“No, please, Alfonso, stay! We can talk.”
He is already half dressed, fumbling at his buttons in cold fury.
“Talking is not what we are about here,” he says.
“Oh, but…Alfonso, I didn’t mean…I was much looking forward to your return,” she says fiercely, equally upset. “This is not how it should have been.”
But he is halfway out the door.
—
Her sobs have Catrinella up from her bed pallet by the door, barely bothering to knock before she throws herself into the room.
“What is it, my lady? What is it?”
“Oh, we are undone here.” She can barely speak inside her tears. What is wrong with her? Could it be that the struggle to expel that sad little corpse from her womb has somehow corrupted her very insides, so that she no longer has the capacity to make children at all? “Help me. Bring me paper and pen. And find a messenger. This must go at dawn.”
In the dispensary of Corpus Domini, the nun sits at her desk in the morning work hour, the letter in front of her.
Renewed tenderness, raw pain on contact. Is this another lesion inside the vaginal passage? How could this be? It is true she has no experience of labor and stillbirth, but she had made it her business to find out. Another wound now. It makes no sense.
She puts her head in her hands, as if in deep prayer.
Unless.
Unless this is a symptom of something else…
The world is full of things that it is not a dispensary nun’s business to know. And she has never been prone to gossip. But she would have to be deaf and dumb not to have heard stories of this plague that for years has been ravaging its way through Italy. And the court of Ferrara. When had it been? The death of the duke elect’s first wife in childbirth, yes? Four, no, five years ago at least. Every courtier had been in mourning, in attendance at the funeral. Except for one. Her husband. The story was the duke elect Alfonso had been too ill with a bout of fever to leave the palace. But the gossip that filtered in spoke of something more shocking: that he was suffering from an attack of the French pox and was too disfigured to be seen outside.
He was not the only one to be so afflicted. If seemed half the city was infected, including two of the duke’s younger sons. One of them, Ippolito d’Este, was a cardinal! The Church in Rome, people said, was full of it. The Pope’s own son had contracted it, his handsome face so eaten by pustules that he had taken to wearing a mask.
Officially, such things were never referred to inside the convent, except by way of their general prayers for the well-being of the Este family. If the plague was indeed God’s way of putting a mirror up to the corruption of the world, then He would surely show the most mercy to those who were prayed for hardest. With so many convents and churches in Ferrara, it seemed He had listened. The duke elect had recovered—though some said his hands still bore the marks of ravaged flesh—and eventually, like all gossip, it was superseded by other news.
But sitting now in front of Lucrezia’s letter, Sister Bonaventura is not so sure. The French pox. What does she know about this disease? Only that it had started in the south with the French army and that God had used fallen women as his weapons, so that everyone would know when a man had lain with them by the affliction written on his skin. But what about the women themselves? Those who harbor and carry it. They must suffer its horrors too, for they are at least as guilty as the men. What does it do to them? Pustules on their faces and bodies? Surely not. No man would sleep with such a disfigured woman. In which case what else might they suffer? And if it is so infectious, then why does it pass only one way? Had God decreed that men give it only to other fallen women? For how else had it moved so fast through the whole country? Or…or what might happen when those same men come home to their wives? No, it is inconceivable, surely…
Lesions inside the vaginal passage. She might work within her dispensary for a hundred years, but there will always be others outside who know more! Humility is a prized quality in a good convent, but it cannot always replace frustration. What about all those doctors at court who had treated the duchess? Wasn’t one of them the personal physician to Cesare Borgia himself?
She asks for an interview with the abbess. If she is right, she will need permission for a letter to leave the convent without coming under the scrutiny of the gate mistress, who must read and censor all correspondence.
The abbess listens calmly, the only sign of distress the way her fingers slip between one another as her hands sit entwined in her lap.
“I understand your concern, Sister Bonaventura, but what you ask is out of the question. For a dispensary nun inside a closed convent to write to a doctor in Rome? It cannot be done.”
“But—this doctor—he is also a priest.”
“That is neither here nor there. Such a communication asking such questions—well, it could only bring scandal down on the convent and the order.”
Sister Bonaventura sits staring at the rough weave of her habit, stained with dispensary work. What else had she expected? “The duchess needs our help, Mother Abbess.”
“Then we will do what we do best—and pray for her. My decision is clear, Sister. We will not refer to it again.” The mother abbess looks at her sternly. “Tell me—this letter, you have already written it?”
The older woman does not meet her eyes. She is not adept at lying.
“Do you have it with you?”
The abbess waits, putting out her hand for the offered package.
Once she is alone she reads the words, once, then twice. She sits for a moment in thought, then moves to her desk, drawing out a sheet of paper and an inkstand. It is a great privilege to be the chosen convent of the Duchess of Ferrara, but with privilege comes responsibility, and that is the business of the abbess, not a cloistered nun. That night she leads prayers for the ruling family: for their continued succession and the well-being of them all.
In his rooms in Rome, Torella unpacks the chest that contains his archive. Six years of research and correspondence across Italy and parts of Europe. If there is a response to the extraordinary missive he has just received, it will be here. But even before he starts he is confident that he will find nothing.
He had not been present at the symposium on the new pox that had been held in Ferrara in the spring of 1497 (his own patient Cesare Borgia had yet to be infected), but he has heard stories about the Ferrarese court. And of course he had noticed Alfonso’s hands; he is an expert on the many ways a man’s skin can erupt, leaving irreverent stigmata over the worst-affected areas, areas that, like the disease itself, can change from man to man.
But having studied him as carefully as he could, he is convinced that the duke elect’s scars are old but irritated by his work in the foundry, for in every other way he had been a robust, healthy figure. He must be one of those who has naturally thrown off the disease without further damage. Because, as Torella knows better than anyone, its progress does so change from man to man.
From man to man. It is a phrase he has used often in his treatise.
But those same words now take on a different meaning.
…Having treated our guest in the convent after her illness, my dispensary sister, a most humble and holy sister, intent on finding God’s remedies in nature, finds herself in need of advice that only you can give….I beg your leave to ask these questions on her behalf…
Rereading them, he wishes again the earth might swallow him up.
Over the years he and all the other doctors have exchanged notes and experiences, they have studied only men. Of course they have discussed women. But in the abstract, as the carriers who must be controlled: the need to close public brothels, to banish prostitutes from the streets, out of reach of men. He has written such advice on public policy himself. But it has never occurred to him to seek these women out or examine them. Ever since Eve’s original sin in paradise, God has used women as the instruments of temptation that man must—but so often fails—to resist. It is the
corrupt humors of Eve’s most licentious daughters that are the problem now. If these daughters fall victim to their own foulness, it’s not something that has concerned him. For they are not—well, they are not women like the duchess.
Mother Abbess, from my considerable work on this disease I can assure you this is not the cause of this patient’s distress, which can only be, in some way or another, a further result of the stillbirth she suffered.
He thinks back to those fretful days and nights when there were so many doctors jostling for position, many of them more experienced in women’s matters than he. He had been caught between the opinion of Duke Ercole’s physician, an expert on fever and pregnancy, and the more subtle diagnosis of the Pope’s own doctor, the Bishop of Venosa, who had seen the duchess’s distress more in terms of an imbalance of her humors.
“The lady Lucrezia has always been a most emotional creature,” the bishop had confided in Torella one day as they sat, fanning away the Ferrarese heat and waiting for the next crisis. “Susceptible to moods and exaggerated feelings. Regular bleeding would do as much as all his stomach poultices.”
Moods and exaggerated feelings. They run in the family. He remembers his vigil at her bedside as the stillbirth fever raged. How she had woken and turned to him. Don’t worry. There is no pulse. I am dead.
There had been such clarity in her fevered confusion.
The patient has been through a testing time, and such trauma can have an effect on spirit as well as body: she may well be experiencing nervous strain, which might explain such “symptoms” emerging now, when she must return to the “duties” you speak of. In such cases, the best redress is further bleeding to rebalance her humors.
Yes, yes, that will do it.
Of course he is right. For if he is not, then his whole treatise must be reconsidered. And then what would it say? That all around Europe women of royal or noble birth, educated in virginity and fidelity, might find themselves suffering internal pustules because their husbands had impregnated them with their sin? Imagine the chaos such information would cause if it leaked out, as it must. It simply cannot be done.
He signs his name, dusts the ink with sand and is about to seal the dispatch when he quickly picks up the quill again.
I reiterate: I have come across no evidence to support such fears. However, given the thirst for knowledge that your humble sister displays, I would offer a few thoughts on the remedies that I with God’s grace have gleaned from nature and the ways I have applied them most successfully on the patients it has been my privilege to heal…
It is usual for him, as a medical scholar, to archive any letter he receives, along with a copy of his own answer, for posterity. This time, however, he takes no copy, and the page from the convent of Corpus Domini is consigned to the flames.
Four days later, Sister Bonaventura is called to the abbess’s cell and given permission to order certain things from outside her herb garden. She knows something already about the properties of mercury. It is a harsh medicine, and applied to such a delicate place it will need to be tempered and diluted with a dozen other unguents that she already trusts but that she must now test out carefully.
Honored Duchess, she writes, be certain that I will have something to send to you within a few weeks, and during that time my prayers will work as hard as my hands.
Fortunately, the duchess has the comfort of poetry to sustain her.
CHAPTER 35
Inside the Vatican, with the orgy of revenge now over, Alexander finds himself enervated, almost lazy. He takes to spending time in the garden outside his apartments. The orange trees, shipped from Valencia a decade ago, are mature now and about to burst into flower. It’s a moment he longs for every year, and in preparation he has his papal chair brought out so that he might see a few ambassadors and envoys there, though, more often than not, when the time comes he is slumped downward, head on his chest, apparently sleeping soundly. He can stay like this for hours: like a great snake lying in the sun, digesting a prey that has been too big for him. It is as if, having swallowed half of the Orsini family, they are lodged in the distended papal belly.
But he is not always asleep. Sometimes he is caught in daydreams. The arrival of the orange blossom is intoxicating, its fierce tangy sweetness so different from the taste of the fruit that will follow. Such different nutrients: one coursing through the nose, the other exploding onto the tongue. Another of God’s miracles, as humble as it is magnificent. He loves this moment, for it reminds him painfully of Spain and his homeland. There had been orange trees in Xàtiva when he was a child, but he had not been overwhelmed by them until the year he moved to Valencia, into his uncle the bishop’s palace, where the courtyard garden had been full of them.
Valencia. No city charms like the one in which a boy reaches his manhood. And for all the bombast and hyperbole about the wonders of Rome, it was Valencia that had made Rodrigo Borgia what he is: a churchman in love with women, wealth, orange blossom and the taste of sardines.
With his eyes closed he could be there now again: blinding summer sun suffused through the alabaster windows, shops overflowing with silk and silver work, the rising smells of grilled meat and fish, new buildings and dark alleys—all rich pickings for a country boy from a good family. Over the years he has had his choice of some of the loveliest women in Rome, beguiled by their plucked smooth skin, their pale complexions and streams of golden hair, but the first real smell of a woman’s bush, the dirty earthiness of it, the juice of desire—all this he associates with tangled black hair, sprouting armpits, sallow skin and a mocking laugh. Little boy from the bishop’s palace—how you have grown. A few coins in my hand and I will show you how to grow even bigger.
How could anything so marvelous be offensive to God? That is what he had thought afterward, and indeed has done ever since. Of course he had gone to confession (he’d not yet been picked out for the Church), but how could he be truly penitent? The seeds of addiction had been sown, and not even the prospect of hell could stop him. With each succeeding sin, absolution had got easier.
Ah, those first women in Valencia. Though Giulia was the greatest prize a man could have, the only one who had really come close, who had the smell of the earth mixed in her perfume, was Vannozza. No wonder their children are so marvelous. Hair tumbling over those lovely ripe breasts as she sat washing his feet when he returned from days of Church business. His very own Mary Magdalene. That was their joke. And such a laugh she had: like the peal of a church bell, as if her whole body was inside it. Oh yes, Vannozza would have made a splendid Spanish whore. He feels almost young again thinking about her.
“Your Holiness, Your Holiness?”
He is alert at once. “What? No need to shout, man. I am not sleeping, simply sitting with my eyes closed.”
“The Spanish ambassador begs an audience as soon as possible. He brings urgent news from Naples. And Duke Valentine asks to visit you straight afterward.”
From his rooms on the upper floor of the Borgia apartments, Cesare has been observing his father’s reverie in semidisgust. These recent weeks have seen a sharp deterioration in their relationship. Whatever pleasure he had got from the crushing of the rebels at Sinigaglia, for Cesare it had soon been over. He’d been sending a message about the past to the future, to make sure such betrayal never happened again. The Orsini, old hands at politics, would get it fast enough. The ailing cardinal had deserved to die—he’d known the risks when he put his name to the conspiracy—but his public humiliation and the Pope’s conspicuous gloating were, to Cesare’s mind, excessive. As he had marched his army toward Rome, they had crossed swords over it yet again, with Alexander sending daily letters demanding that Cesare besiege and take every one of the Orsini fortresses to the north of the city, as if he wouldn’t stop till the family had been wiped off the face of the earth. Cesare had ignored him. Over the last months, he has grown adept at listening to his father only when he says something the duke wants to hear.
“We hav
e much to celebrate, but I must say, you have become a law unto yourself these last months.” The Pope had greeted his return with ill-concealed rage. “God Himself knows how many dispatches I have sent you throughout this campaign. Yet all I got was thunderous silence.”
“I told you what you needed to know, Father. Rome is a sieve when it comes to gossip. And secrecy was vital.”
“What? You are saying I have a loose tongue?”
“No.” Though of course that was exactly what he meant. “I am saying the more information that was on the move, the more risk there was of interception and the discovery of our plans.”
“Bah! In which case there was no such danger when it came to the Orsini fortresses. By then we were at open war with the family. I tell you, your refusal to attack them made me look like a fool.”
“You would have looked more the fool if we’d failed to take them. This business with the Orsini is a weakness, not a strength. And we have more important things to do than to waste time besieging castles that could have held out for months.”
“What? What is more important than the punishment of the men who killed Juan?”
Juan! The murder of precious Juan! In the end it always came to this.
“Jesu Cristus, Father! Juan has been dead for six years. How long will you stay weeping at his grave?”
“How dare you!” the Pope yelled back. “You will not blaspheme in my presence or speak to me in that tone. Not now, nor ever again, do you understand?”
By now there had been half a dozen Vatican officials hovering outside the door in fascinated horror, trying to decipher the lava flow of Catalan. While Cesare had been away, the Pope had grumbled and raged enough, but no one has talked back to him like this, either in volume or with this fury. In the weeks since Cesare’s return a few of the smarter diplomats have started speculating on how the balance of power is changing in this most remarkable of partnerships, whether perhaps the Pope is growing frightened of his own son.