The language of their public behavior has developed its own private translation—a certain gesture, a posy of spring flowers hanging from her belt, a new outfit, each casual meeting—can be read in another way…
It seems each day to increase my fire, you cunningly devise some fresh incitement, such as that band which encircled your glowing brow today…
The words come with the verse, but everything now is subterfuge; poems are dedicated to nobody, and the letters that accompany them are unsigned. They are even addressed to someone else. But underneath the veil of anonymity, what license they take.
Dear FF,
…If you do these things, because feeling some warmth yourself, you like to see another burn, then I shall not deny that for each spark of yours untold Etnas are raging in my breast….Let love wreak just revenge for me if upon your brow you are not the same as you are in your heart.
Glowing brows and raging Etnas: the images ignite an excitement to rival his physical presence.
Let love wreak just revenge for me if upon your brow you are not the same as you are in your heart. Perhaps she should show some favor to someone else, just to watch his eyes burn, for she is already alert to the ways he enjoys piquing the pleasure. She goes through her wardrobe in her mind, wondering what she might wear when they next meet. A little doubt, a little jealousy, the suggestion that one loves more than the other? It can only make the fever hotter.
Of course it is wonderful. She is more alive than she had been for years. And yet…yet it is not without stress: this wild brightness, the stretched nerves between communications, how when the words do arrive they caress and tease at the same time. Sometimes she wonders if this is a taste of the pain that he writes of, how love turns to obsession. Certainly these days she thinks of little else.
And there is something more. Because at certain moments, even as the joy threatens to overwhelm her, she is assaulted by sudden painful memory. It is so long ago now—a convent garden on the outskirts of Rome; a gauche and flighty young woman (for that is how she sees herself) paddling palms and trading a few kisses with a messenger in her brother’s service, a handsome young man in love with love. The dalliance had been so innocent, so forgivable in such a bloody world. But not for Cesare. The young man had ended up in the Tiber, his throat slit open on the blade of her brother’s jealousy. And she had swallowed her fury along with her sobs and turned her face to a second marriage, which had brought even worse suffering. No, the truth is love has been a dangerous guest in Lucrezia’s life, and she is not so completely in its thrall that she does not appreciate its perils.
The person in her household who understands most clearly of all is the one who knows least of such turmoil of the heart: Catrinella.
Since the arrival of all this poetry, the girl’s position has changed. In the past when an evening stretched out before them, Lucrezia might have called her in to talk or play a board game before her husband visited or she settled down for sleep. But now Catrinella is excluded. Instead, she lies on her pallet outside the door, watching the ribbon of candlelight that tells her that rather than sleeping her mistress is reading: newly delivered private letters and a brick-heavy manuscript all about love. She knows this is its subject because it is her business to check that the candles in the room are properly extinguished, and more than once she has had to lift the pages off the bed when Lucrezia has fallen asleep. As she would have fallen asleep too, because when she tried to read the words—she has learned her letters well over the years—they are as knotted as old wood in a fire grate. Yet her mistress cannot seem to get enough of them. Or of the man who writes them.
Of course, a servant to the bedchamber is not schooled in the art of chivalric poetry. Nor is it her place to sit with the higher-class ladies-in-waiting as they gasp and giggle over the wonders of life, love and poetry. But she doesn’t need to hear all they say to see that underneath her mistress’s brightness she is not entirely happy. And the fault lies with this handsome, strutting poet, who uses pretty words to cover up the usual male stew of lust and leer.
It is late spring when one evening a messenger from Alfonso arrives to say that he has been held up on other business and will not be visiting that night after all. Catrinella uses it as an excuse to gather her skirts and her courage and interrupt whatever may be going on behind her mistress’s door.
In the glow of the oil lamp Lucrezia is, for once, not reading but sitting staring out into the room.
“Held up on business,” she repeats quietly when Catrinella delivers the news. “Yes, of course.”
Recently she has gone out of her way to include Alfonso more directly in her court celebrations: music that calls for him to perform, dances that favor the athletic rather than the elegant. It is not just deceit. Lucrezia is not the only wife to have lain with her husband and imagined another man’s body making love to her. It was not something she intended, but when it happened it had been so powerful that she could not help it happening again. Could such a thing really be a sin if it makes the coupling less barren? Mutual pleasure is, after all, one of the sparks of conception. And conception is what this marriage is about.
The second time it happened Alfonso had paid her the compliment of falling asleep afterward, the heavy plank of his arm pinning her body to the bed. As she had waited quietly for the right moment to shift herself, her mind had drifted to heliotropes and radiances and a dozen other weightless images of love. Such poetry seems—well, almost too refined to capture the fleshiness of copulation, the sour tang of men’s and women’s dark places. Does a great poet make love differently? She thinks of Sister Lucia and her bony, moaning recitations of joy. It is well known that being loved by God is the most sublime union of all. That, after all, is where Bembo’s poem will end.
“Are you all right, my lady?” Catrinella is closer now. “You look flushed.”
“It must be the rouge on my cheeks,” she says flatly, lifting her hand to wipe it off, for she will not need it now.
“No, no, let me.” The girl leans over to gently dab her skin. As she does so, she notices a line of tears welling up in her mistress’s eyes. Perhaps Alfonso has seen through her deceit. Or perhaps his ladies please him even more. To be so loved and so unloved at the same time is taking its toll.
“Oh, my lady!”
“It is nothing. Nothing,” Lucrezia says harshly.
“I think you are not well. We should leave for the country. The weather is turning fast and you will be better out of the heat of town.”
“Nonsense. There is no sign of the fever yet.”
“Except for the one that you are suffering,” the girl mutters under her breath.
Lucrezia turns to look at her. “You are wrong, Catrinella,” she says gently. “I have no fever.”
“Well, that’s not what Angela and the rest of them are saying.” And the words tumble out now. “They talk about how you are burning up with it. Nobody speaks of anything else these days.”
“Oh.” Lucrezia laughs. “Oh no, fire and fever are just images from the poetry we are reading.”
“Poetry!” she says as if it were a lump of excrement, and her stern little face does not budge an inch. “Poetry. And is this Laura poetry too?”
“Laura?”
“Yes. They talk all the time about you and Laura, and another woman too—Beatrice.”
“Ah—Laura and Beatrice.” And despite her sudden melancholy, Lucrezia is charmed by the misunderstanding. “They are both women whom great poets fell in love with and about whom they wrote the most marvelous verse.”
“What? Better than the stuff that the Venetian is writing about you?”
“Catrinella—”
“All I can say is I hope it makes more sense than the bits I’ve read. Because…because everyone in the kitchen and laundry is gossiping about the comings and goings of poets and duchesses.”
“What?” Lucrezia stiffens a little. “What do they say?”
The girl shrugs. She had not mean
t to let it slip. “Nothing really. They’re like a leaking pump, always needing something to drip on about.”
“You know better than to listen to such gossip. This is court business we are talking about. Poets like Ercole Strozzi and Pietro Bembo are a valuable—necessary—adornment for any duchess’s household.”
Catrinella falls silent for a second, but she has been anxious on her mistress’s behalf for too long, and now it comes bursting out. “That’s as may be, I am sure. But it fits well enough with what they thought when you arrived. You didn’t have to listen to it, my lady, but I was down there all the time and they never stopped teasing me. Telling me how the Este family didn’t like fast women and that you wouldn’t last long. But when I asked what they meant they said they couldn’t tell a pagan like me because black faces didn’t understand and everyone knew you were a sinner and a harlot.”
“Oh, Catrinella,” she says, pulling the girl toward her. “You should have told me.”
How old is she now? Barely fifteen. She is such a fighter, it is easy to forget how the color of her skin might make life cruel for her.
“What did you say to them?”
“I smiled at them—like this—”
She breaks away, grinning wildly, her bared teeth like a run of jagged bright blades. “And then I bit one of them. Quite hard. Well, that’s the kind of thing pagans do, isn’t it? They left me alone after that.”
Lucrezia cannot help but laugh. It is a joy to see a spirit so unfettered.
“Well, if you ever hear anything, anything said against me again, you tell them that their duchess is building a court that will make Ferrara the envy of all of Italy. And that if even a scrap of such gossip reaches me they will be out on the streets suffering deeper bites than you can ever inflict.”
They sit together for a while, until Catrinella, reassured, breaks away. She settles her mistress, fussing over the covers and the mosquito lamps, before taking her leave.
But at the door she turns again, as if just struck by something.
“This Laura and Beatrice who they gossip about. Were they married to other men too?”
“Yes, yes, they were. But there was no hint of scandal attached to them either. On the contrary, they inspired Petrarch and Dante to turn their love higher, toward God. Which is what our poet, Pietro Bembo, is also writing about. So you see—for a lady to be the muse for such a man brings only good into the world.”
“And what happened to them?”
“Laura and Beatrice? They both died young, alas.”
“And the poets?”
“Oh, the poets became very famous.”
Catrinella gives off a clucking noise, for as far as she is concerned this is not at all a satisfactory ending.
It is at this moment that Isabella d’Este—and her considerable wardrobe—arrives in Ferrara for a visit.
CHAPTER 38
For Cesare the sweetest time to be on the streets of Rome is just before dawn.
Having worked through the night, he and his men ride across Ponte Sant’Angelo, through the built-up hub that lies cradled in the crook of the bend in the Tiber, out into the scrubland and wilderness that laps all around. The Colosseum is still shrouded in darkness, its monumental mass more a presence than a sight, but as they pass the Forum a stain in the eastern sky silhouettes a run of columns so that for that moment they do not look like ruins at all but rather the outline of a great city about to come to life with the daylight. Cesare has little time for flights of fantasy, yet this miracle he never fails to notice, for it brings home the sheer scale of Imperial Rome. A city built on and for triumph. His own victory parades have paid homage to it. He has even ridden in a chariot followed by a hundred men-at-arms wearing the name of Caesar emblazoned across their chests. The crowds love it—who would not want to live at the center of an empire?—but the taking of a few city-states could only ever be a shadow of an era when the power was imperial and the right leader could have both people and government at his feet. Even at his most arrogant, Cesare knows he is a man born in the wrong time.
At the hunting lodge outside the southern gate, he is greeted by the clamor of his hounds—they know his smell and his voice and are already mad for the hunt. Together they head off into the forest with the insistent yelping of the dogs as they root and rustle in the undergrowth to pick up the scent. For a few hours he will be free from all concern. Diamonds of morning dew are everywhere. The world is newly made out here, the battle simple. Not every prey is taken: some outrun the dogs or go to earth too cleverly, but there is always the joy of the chase, the welding of thought and action. In the weeks after he had taken Urbino, the greatest celebrations had taken place on horseback as on his daily hunt he explored and mapped the boundaries of his new state. By the end, he had it all in his head: the passes, the roads, the contours of the land, each point of defensive vulnerability or stretch of open ground where he might muster troops for a battle—all these remembered.
They take two boars that morning, but he leaves the messy business of the kill to the dogs. In the Vatican his father will be rising and bathing, ready to put on ceremonial dress for the inauguration of nine new cardinals. He needs to be there too, for they are all his appointments, each man picked for his potential loyalty, even down to Bishop Soderini in Florence, who with his favored elevation will surely help keep the city neutral for a while, when Cesare takes the rest of Tuscany.
When…It is hard sometimes waiting on his own destiny.
By the time he gets home the latest dispatches from the Spanish army in the south should have arrived. The French are still hanging on, but the rope is fraying. Two fortresses alone remain: one to the east of Naples and the other at Gaeta. How long will it take them? Not more than a month, surely. But Cesare could do with it coming sooner; this uncertainty is starting to rattle everyone’s nerves.
A few weeks before in Milan, where the French army was gathering ready to march, their own envoy to the king had suddenly disappeared. How long had he been lining his purse playing both sides, leaking news of their secret negotiations with Spain to Louis? Such futile greed, for what corpse ever had need of money? It had taken Michelotto ten days to track him down and bring him back to Rome. Where else could it end but in the Tiber with a wire around his neck? How stupid can a man be? Still, the body had caused overcrowding in the Pope’s waiting room, and a further fiery exchange of words between father and son.
—
“He was a traitor, telling—and selling—our business to the French. You knew that as well as I did.”
“I am not disagreeing with the why, Cesare, but with the how. The man had fled to Corsica. Why not have him killed there? You harangue me for insisting on public revenge, yet you go out of your way to stage a theatrical execution. This feeding of the fish in the Tiber is a spectacle that always leads back to me, and I am weary of it.”
No more than I am weary of you, Cesare had thought coldly. At such times he can barely stand to be in the same room with his father, he seems so myopic and ill tempered. He has aged dramatically in the months they have been apart. He can no longer walk the length of the corridor without help. He sweats faster than he can mop it off, and he barely puts down his fork before his insides are erupting with rancid wind. Sometimes when Cesare looks at him it is as if he is already seeing a dead man, wondering when it will happen and how he will deal with whoever it is who stands in his place.
If asked, he would surely say he loves his father, yet he feels no shame or sorrow when such thoughts come to him, only a sense of impatience about all that must be achieved before the moment arrives. And when it does? That too he has planned in every detail: the clearing of the Vatican apartments, the troops needed to secure Castel Sant’Angelo as his fortified base, further men stationed outside Rome and the final makeup of the list of cardinals, the favors and threats to lobby the factions within the conclave that must follow.
“What? I am talking to myself now? I am grown invisible to my own son?
”
“I am sorry, Father. I was thinking.”
“About what?”
“About how cardinals behave in conclave.”
“Conclave! I am not dead yet!”
“Far from it, thank the Lord,” he murmurs with scant gratitude.
“Cardinals in conclave…Hmm, certainly it’s something you should know. How do they behave? Like animals, most of them—wolves or sheep—though it can change the minute the doors are bolted. Some, who claim they never wanted power, are suddenly rabid for it, while others find their fangs are blunt when it comes to the kill.”
As often happens, now he has the floor he is beginning to enjoy himself.
“Luckily there are always sheep, men up for sale as if they had inked the words on their foreheads. All you have to do is negotiate the price. Though, I fear you would be no good at it, Cesare. You know why? Because you don’t laugh enough. In my experience men who are selling themselves like it to be to someone who knows how to laugh. It makes them feel lighter, more at ease with their own corruption.”
“Except that my buying and selling will have to be done before the doors close, because I won’t be there.”
“No, no, that is true. You won’t.”
But then neither would Alexander be. How could such a thing be possible? The gravity of the thought stilled him for a moment.
“So?” Cesare prompted.
“So…so it will need more planning, though it’s not so hard. This latest batch should put close to a third of the conclave in your pocket, and we can appoint more next year. For the rest…” He took another leisurely sip of wine. It was not often that he got to be the one doing the teaching these days. “For the rest, you make friends with everyone and trust no one. And always promise more than you can give. Threats are all very well, but if you lose you cannot keep them, whereas if you win there will always be money to make up for what you give away.”