Six mules laden with silver and a Roman palace to go with them. That is what it had cost him to turn the final vote his way. Cheap at the price.
“But before you start, my son, make sure you remember to weep for me a little. Because, whatever you think now, nothing will be so easy when I am gone.”
He started to pull himself from the chair.
“Come, help me up, then pay obeisance and embrace me. Oh, I know, I know, you don’t like it, but believe me there will be a time when you will miss my smell.”
Cesare had entered that familiar embrace, and the Pope had clasped his arms around him and held him for so long that he had been forced to take a breath.
No, he wasn’t dead yet.
—
Arriving back in the Vatican after the hunt, Cesare finds the morning dispatches have arrived. Castel dell’Ovo, the last French stronghold within Naples, is close to falling. Which leaves only Gaeta. One set of fortress walls between him and the conquest of Tuscany. He can already feel the blood thumping in his head. Once he has wined and dined the new cardinals tonight—they pay him directly for their appointment. Why bother putting it into the papal coffers when it is coming to him anyway?—he will start dispatching his troops out of Rome, ready for the move against the French.
—
Alexander too cannot wait. It will bring him full circle to the days when he arrived in Italy and his beloved Spain held the south, while across the Alps, family factions in France were still at one another’s throats in search of a unified crown. Two French invasions have done nothing but spread discord and violence. And now he, Alexander VI, will go down in history as the pope who threw them out. Not once, but twice.
He is up and dressed in his silk ceremonial undergarments. He will wait till the last minute to put on the heavy robes: the inauguration of cardinals is a lengthy business, and he will die a slow death in this heat.
He says his morning prayers in the Sistine Chapel, for its great space stays cool long into the day. He enters on the arm of his chaplain to a commotion. Sometime in the night a cat had sneaked in through one of the doors and managed to hide herself at the back under the altar table, where she has given birth to a litter of kittens, and the guards are trying to get her out, their angry voices alternating with hissing and mewling from under the gold cloth.
Alexander stands and watches as a heavyset man emerges with scratched arms and two tiny balls of blind fur half crushed in his hands.
“Don’t manhandle them, you oaf. They are all God’s creatures,” he says loudly. “Here, here, give them to me.”
They fit in the palm of one hand, curling and squirming as they fumble for the teat. He is reminded of the squalling little bundle Giulia had put into his arms a few months before, when he visited her after the birth. Another boy who likes to yell at his father, he had laughed. Another son to swell the Borgia army. Cesare can argue all he wants, but he, Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI, is still the head of this family. You only had to look at Giulia, pale and languid in her cloak of golden hair, to know that. What other seventy-two-year-old man in Rome has such a lovely mistress? He had jiggled his new son up and down a bit, but the angry bee sound had got on his nerves and he had handed him back soon enough.
He pushes a gentle finger into the animals’ damp skin. “Such a thirst for life they have when they are young, eh? Our Holy Mother Church offers sanctuary to everything and everyone,” he says, rising to his St. Francis moment. “Let them be. I shall enjoy hearing their cries as I pray this morning. Here—put them back with their mother and don’t hold them too tight.”
The guards stare at him, but do as they are told. Better to humor him and get rid of them later. He will never remember.
He turns away into the body of the great chapel. It never fails to raise his spirits staring up into its majestic vaulted ceiling. This is his hunting moment, a sense of power and beauty combined. By the end of today there will be nine new cardinals ready to take their places in the chapel’s pews. Out of thirty-six men who, making up at least a third, will owe their appointments directly to the Borgias. Though how far that sense of duty will survive when it comes to the next conclave is always a question.
Sweet Mary, what wouldn’t he give to be there? As long as you don’t mind the food and the smell of the latrines, it is the most marvelous entertainment a man can have. He can see it already: the lines of wooden cells on either side of the chapel, their construction so hurried that a man can lose a dozen threads of a robe rubbing against the splintered boards. There will be many more compartments this time, which will make for less open space for mingling. Five times he has done it, and each time he was in his element. Though never more so than eleven years ago, when he could see, almost feel, the tide moving under his command.
My God, it had been hot then too. He sees himself walking down the marble corridor in the middle, passing each of the doors counting off the votes, the abacus in his head adding up the cost of victory while high above him a hundred gold stars stared down from the vaulted ceiling into the nave. If you give this to me, God, he had said, I vow that I will keep Italy safe and bring peace to the warring families of Rome. He had not gone into detail about what he might do for his own family. God ever would know what was in his heart.
And he has not done badly! The Orsini, always the worst of the troublemakers, have been humbled, and another two, three years at most will see it all fall into place: the French will be pushed out of Italy, Cesare’s unifying papal state will stretch from the Mediterranean coast to the Adriatic, there will be a brace of boy children in Ferrara securing Lucrezia’s place, with her first son, Rodrigo, and Giulia’s offspring coming up behind. That is the Borgia future, should the good Lord be willing to grant him just a little more time. No, he might be old, and a little loose in the tongue, but he is far from finished.
Behind him he hears the soft mewling of kittens.
Young life saved by an old man. He decides to take it as God’s answer to his prayers.
—
The guards wait till he has left, then dig out the little parcels of damp warm fur and drown them in the nearest water butt outside.
CHAPTER 39
Presents, embraces, compliments, a river of endearments…it is over a year since the two women met, and in that time the Borgias have taken everything in their path. Including Isabella’s own son in the promise of marriage.
“Oh, a most propitious union.” Her smile swallows up her eyes in creases of flesh. “Though, of course, little Federico is so very young yet and much can happen in the world. Meanwhile, I say again, my sweet sister-in-law, how overjoyed I am to see how well you look, doesn’t she, Alfonso?” she croons as the three of them sit together waiting for one of the duke’s interminable entertainments to begin.
“Such stories we heard in Mantua about the fever and your closeness to death. Yet here and now, you seem, well, more in a fever of joy, wouldn’t you agree, Alfonso? I have to ask—forgive me, both of you—but might it be that…”
She leaves a coy pause.
“No,” Lucrezia says, putting her husband out of his evident misery. “No, I am not with child. Not yet.”
“Well, it will happen soon enough. I am certain of that, aren’t you, Alfonso?” she says, squeezing his arm as in closest confidence. “Oh, don’t scowl so, dear brother. There is no one in Italy who doesn’t envy you such a…a highly regarded wife.”
They are excruciating, these evenings. Even if he and Lucrezia were madly in love he would still be surly as soon as Isabella comes near him. Lucrezia does her best, but his retreat is automatic; his eldest sister has been pecking at him ever since he can remember. It doesn’t help that the state of his wife’s womb is public business. The duke himself never fails to twist the knife in. “Your mother was already carrying your sister by this time in our marriage. I know, I know—but she has been well for months. This is politics not pleasure we’re talking about. What are you doing every night? Playing chess with her?”
He spends most of the next week sleeping in his foundry. My God, how he hates his family.
Lucrezia suffers a gentler interrogation from her own father. His letters are filled with yearning for another grandson. How is it between them? Does the duke elect still come regularly to her bed? She will remember how important it is not to turn a husband away.
Of course she does not turn him away. But court life still bores him. He has taken a dislike to the dandified crippled Strozzi, sniffing around women’s skirts like a randy dog, and has no time for poetry, which seems to him to epitomize the worst of courtier fakery. Does he have any idea what is going on? And if he did would he let himself care?
—
Isabella, however, has ideas about everything. She already knows about Bembo’s great composition on love and is keen to have him recite parts of it at a soiree of her own, together with music and singing. Of course, Lucrezia is invited. And of course she will not attend. She and Bembo had discussed the possibility of such a gathering before Isabella arrived.
“She collects poets as she collects statues. You had better be careful she does not pack you up in her chest and take you home.”
“And why would I go with her, when everything that is important in my life is here?” he had said, entwining his fingers with hers. Their hands have been lovers for a while now.
“Then you had better hide that fact with your life. I tell you, she is a bloodhound for scandal and would do anything to destroy me. I am serious, Pietro. She is a harridan. My brother calls her a jealous cow.”
She had paused, inviting him to decorate the attack with more subtle wordplay to show how much he values her over any other woman. But he who was usually so fast and fluent at this game had said nothing.
A cow perhaps, but also one of Italy’s greatest patrons, and even a love-struck poet must keep an eye on the future. It was the first time she had thought such a thing, and it sent a chill down her spine.
—
The morning of the concert she excuses herself with a bout of pollen fever. “I shall ruin everyone’s enjoyment by sneezing all the way through.” She laughs, having put some effort into blowing her nose for days so that it is red and inflamed. But that evening as she sits in her chamber with her ladies at their embroidery, through open windows every now and then she catches strains of music and laughter, as her needle stabs angrily into the taut linen.
The success of the event is on everyone’s lips, along with rumors that Bembo is thinking of setting more of the work to music given the magic that he and the visiting marchesa have made together. But in each other’s company, Isabella and Lucrezia do not refer to poetry much. Which is strange, since Isabella’s intelligence service—her ladies’ noses are known to reach round corners and through closed doors—must be well aware of the interest she has taken in the art form.
When Lucrezia is at her most nervous, she wonders if the absence of the subject is an attack in itself.
In the third week of the marchesa’s visit—thank God she will be leaving soon—the two women and their ladies spend the afternoon in the duchess’s apartments. Isabella is eagle-eyed for the changes Lucrezia has made. “These new colors are lovely. Lovely. I am sure my father didn’t mind. Your pleasure was upmost when he took such trouble over the original decorations before the marriage. What do they call this shade of ocher? It is almost puce, I think. I would look most sickly against its background, but it fits your pallor very well.”
Finally she stops talking. The silence grows. The windows are open. The orange blossom from the terrace garden overlooking the moat is fading as spring slips toward summer.
“Such a scent still! I am surprised you can bear it, with your nose as sensitive as it is.” Isabella smiles.
“The worst of the malady is past,” Lucrezia replies sweetly. “I received a remedy from the nuns of Corpus Domini.”
“Ah yes, Corpus Domini,” she says quietly. “My mother often visited it, such perfect cloisters. A fine convent, yes.”
Lucrezia stares at her. For the briefest moment her adversary seems—what?—almost vulnerable.
“I envy you growing up in a city as lovely as Ferrara,” she says generously, for she has thought about it. Sixteen. That’s how old Isabella was when she went in marriage to Mantua. Old enough for a rolling landscape of memories. “You must have missed it when you left.”
“Of course, I did.” Isabella looks at her strangely for a moment. Perhaps she is remembering the pain in her mother’s eyes, the stories of how she ordered her daughter’s rooms to be shuttered and closed up after she left, as if a death rather than a marriage had taken place.
How would it be if they could find a way to talk honestly to each other, to realize that some of the battles they fight as women and wives are not so very different? But it would take more than a wisp of memory to soften Isabella d’Este now. It’s not her fault. She has been trained since birth in the art of dynastic snobbery, and her hatred of the Borgias, in name and in person, is something she cannot let go of.
“But Mantua is a fine city too, and my mother visited me there. Such a marvelous woman she was; the greatest duchess Ferrara will ever have, without blemish of blood, thought or deed.”
Unlike you or your own courtesan mother, she does not need to add.
Oh, Cesare is right, Lucrezia thinks. You are a jealous cow.
“And her memory lives on still,” she says, nailing on a smile. “The duke, your father, is kind enough to say that when I am on the dance floor he is often reminded of her.”
Sweet Madonna, it is like being caught in a catfight, never knowing when the next claw will swipe. The scrapping stops for a moment as they regroup.
In the distance is the rumble of carts and the cries of the minstrels.
“Ah, such a din. It doesn’t bother you?”
“Not at all, I enjoy it: the sense of life going on outside.”
“Tell me. Do you ever hear anything else?”
“What kind of thing?”
Isabella moves her head a little. It is a gesture Lucrezia is beginning to recognize when trouble is afoot. “Your tower is above the run of the old dungeons. Such horrid places.” She shudders.
“There are no prisoners anymore. They were transferred before we moved in.”
“Of course. Still, terrible things happened there,” she says with a certain relish. She had everyone’s attention anyway, but she is good at the theater of timing. “One of the family’s greatest tragedies. You must have heard about it many times.”
“No. No, I don’t think I have.”
No one ever says anything bad about the Estes in her presence. They might have lived on a diet of roasted children for the last century and it would somehow have been turned into a triumph worthy of another fresco.
“What? You don’t know about the screaming duchess?” Isabella says, leaning in a little in the pretense that the words are just between the two of them.
Lucrezia shakes her head.
“I heard her only once. There was unrest in the city and my mother brought us children from the ducal palace into the fortress for protection. Oh, she was howling and weeping, it was an awful sound.”
“Who? Who was she?”
“Well, of course by then she had already been dead for half a century.” Isabella takes a breath. “Dear Sister, you really don’t know? About the wife of great duke Niccolò, my grandfather? Oh, it is the saddest, most shocking thing you could ever hear. She was his second wife—he had three, you know—a young woman, about your age. Parisina Malatesta was her name, from that scandalous family in Rimini. So clever of your brother to get rid of them in his great campaigns.”
Lucrezia has no idea what is going on here, but she knows she must protect herself. The fan of ladies has moved imperceptibly closer, though Isabella’s whisper remains loud enough for everyone to hear.
“The duke was a most energetic man, very fond of women. Not the first or the last in that respect, I think.??
? She laughs. “It is a trial the things some wives have to put up with, yes?” she says conspiratorially.
Her husband is in every bed but her own. Cesare’s words when Lucrezia was ill come back to her. Except what is unfolding here now has nothing to do with sisterly solidarity. “It seems some men give in to temptation more easily than others, yes,” she says, lifting herself up and looking directly into Isabella’s eyes.
“And some women too.” The answer snaps back, accompanied as ever by the fleshy smile. “Though I suppose one must have a little sympathy. For she must have grown—well, quite lonely.”
Ah. Here it comes, she thinks. Well, I am ready. Do your worst.
“However, there was one young man at court who understood and paid her kind attention. Handsome, courteous, quite a charmer by all accounts. And, well…” She lifts her hands as if to invite Lucrezia to continue.
But Lucrezia is remembering something now. A story whispered many months ago when she was negotiating her income, about how the duke had pardoned one of his best musicians, a man guilty of murdering his wife and her lover. And someone had mentioned how in Este history marital justice always favored the husband.
“Of course, in the end they could not help but give themselves away. When the duke found them together he went mad with rage. Because…” She pauses for maximum effect. “Not only was she, Parisina, his wife, but her young lover, Ugo, was his own son from another marriage!”
Lucrezia’s ladies draw in a combined breath.
“All night the duke raged, while in the dungeons she screamed and sobbed for mercy. At dawn, despite her pleading, they were both beheaded.”
“Oh, how terrible!” But even as she whispers the words Lucrezia is thinking of Catrinella’s descriptions of her first weeks working down in the laundry and the kitchens. The long dark corridors and the needling gossip. The Este family don’t like fast women. Had her tormentors also mentioned a screaming duchess?