CHAPTER 5
It is a ghostly procession. To arrive in time the barges must travel through the night, compensating for the sluggish river with a dozen harnessed horses on the bank led by men with lamps on poles to light their way. At a prearranged point a flare is set off to mark their progress. Somewhere in the darkness ahead an answering plume of white smoke rises. Inside the city walls, court musicians are being shaken awake and the soldiers on the battlements change watch to make room for the artillery commanders.
Lucrezia, who has slept only fitfully, lies waiting for the day. The pipe and twitter of river birds on the edge of dawn is interrupted by a fanfare of distant trumpets. Eager for her first view of her new home, she leaves her ladies sleeping and makes her way alone out onto the deck, where she is swallowed up at once inside a clinging fog, the only relief in a sea of gray the glow of the lamps pulsing like fireflies on the bank.
“Ah, madam, madam.” The top half of the tall Ferrarese envoy looms down at her out of the gloom. “Such a shame. I feared as much. She has waited for you so long that she is grown coy at showing herself,” he says, his face so far above his feet that it gives the impression of a turret emerging from the mist. “Still, those of us who love her find a special beauty in these gauzy winter veils in which she wraps herself.”
Lucrezia smiles at his choice of language: how men do love to see the guiles of women in everything. But there is no mistaking the feeling behind his words. “You are most fond of your city, Signor Pozzi. How long have you been here watching and waiting?”
“Since before dawn. I had hoped to show you…well…no matter. We are getting closer all the time. The fog will burn off soon enough and then you will see her for yourself.”
ROOOMB. A reverberating boom coming from nowhere and everywhere at once shatters the misty silence
“There it is! The sound of your husband’s cannons announcing our progress. Hear the richness of that sound. Two meters long the barrels. Designed by him and cast in his foundry. The Este guns. He will be on the battlements commanding the gunners himself this morning—all in your honor. Such a welcome is prepared for you.”
She imagines her husband-to-be, tall and swarthy, wrapped in fog, holding out tapers in his gloved hands. But the tapers turn to ribs of meat in her imagination as she sees again the purple skin of his fingers. The cannon fire is followed by a further fanfare of trumpets and horns. Tell me, she wants to say, what is wrong with my husband’s hands?
The horses whinny fretfully in the fog and an invisible gull screeches overhead. The boat slides along, gray river meeting gray air with little to tell between them. She feels a sudden melancholy lapping around her. A scrap of verse plays at the edge of her mind:
I come to ferry you hence across the tide
to endless night, fierce fires and crushing cold.
What mad thoughts for a woman on her way to her wedding. This will not do at all.
“May I ask you a question, Signor Pozzi?” she says forcefully.
“Of course, madam, anything.”
“I was wondering…about my husband’s first wife, Anna Sforza.”
“Anna Sforza?” His face is obscured by swirls of fog.
“Yes. What was she like? How did they get on?” The diplomatic tightrope between Rome and Ferrara is strung taut under their feet. “She died in childbirth, yes? Did my husband mourn her very much?”
“The whole of Ferrara mourned her. She was a fine woman. Fine.” He pauses as if he too must test the tension in the rope before he takes the next step. “Though she suffered from a somewhat ‘delicate’ disposition. She and the duke elect…well, one might say that they were not natural companions.”
“I see.” She stares into the fog. The silence grows around them.
“Is anything wrong, madam?”
“No,” she says brightly. “Nothing at all, though I have some concerns that my chosen outfit may not be suitable. Cream silk sewn with pearls on such a day: it would not do for me to disappear inside…this cold soup.”
He laughs, manifestly relieved at the change of subject. “It will have long since burned off. You have my word as a native of Ferrara. Though even if it didn’t you would shine through it. Of that I am sure. You bring your own sun with you.”
“Ah, Signor Pozzi. You are a man of honeyed words, even for a diplomat.”
“That does not mean they are untruthful, my lady,” he says quietly.
He peers down at this slender girl with her soft blue eyes and creamy skin, the slight pout to her cupid bow lips. Not a beauty, perhaps, but pretty by anyone’s standards, made prettier by the flash of her smile. It would appear that she is, after all, nervous. It barely seems possible. It has been a fraught assignment, shepherding this troupe of confident, entitled young women halfway across Italy. But it has had its compensations: not least the pleasure of watching her win over all manner of powerful men whose noses have been bent out of joint by the Borgia rampages. No, a second Anna Sforza she is certainly not. They say her brother had the same easy charisma once, before the acid of ambition burned it off like a layer of skin. In Rome now people spit on the ground when they hear his name, though only if they are in safe company. Yet this slip of a Borgia girl has had men’s mouths puckering into a quite different shape. He has seen her exhausted, rigid with boredom, infuriated by insults whispered behind her back, yet her natural charm, mixed with an equal natural cunning, has never failed her. She would make an admirable diplomat. Part of him would like to tell her that, to suggest that she will find it a useful combination when she enters the bear pit of Este family politics. Well, she will find out soon enough.
The next crash of cannon fire startles with its proximity, and inside the answering trumpet fanfare there is new clarity of notes. As if it had been prearranged, the world around them begins to change. The solid air comes alive, thinning into smoke tendrils and then disintegrating, allowing a blood orange sun to break through. Soon the outline of a crenellated tower is visible, followed by one, no two spires, and then the fortress battlements of a city gate and long majestic curves of wall throwing protective arms around a jumble of emerging roofs and brick chimneys. And lacing around them, the course of the lazy, now sun-dappled river. She gasps. It seems the city has been there all the time, waiting for her mood to change so that, as promised, they might both show each other off to their best advantage.
“Ferrara, my lady,” he says with a flourish. “I think cream silk set off by your smile will do very well indeed.”
The choreography of the coming celebrations is elaborate and precise. And this, the first ceremony, the meeting with Duke Ercole himself, will take place outside the city.
The setting is a convent where his illegitimate daughter is a nun. A pale winter sun beckons Lucrezia off the barge. Her trumpeters, already disembarked, are in line, their horns high and ready. Behind her, her ladies and a throng of Spanish dancers and jesters jostle and laugh as they try to arrange themselves in formation. Nerves are everywhere. She hushes them with a look. The trumpeters let out their blast, and the convent doors are flung open to welcome them.
The procession makes its way in through the entrance, across two sets of cloisters and into a large open space, once a garden but now transformed into a forest glade. There are dozens of constructed arches, each one clad in such thick-cut foliage and fresh winter berries that even birds have become interested. The air is filled with the scent of crushed lavender scattered in her path, and at the end on a raised dais, flanked by tall, decorated columns, sits the duke himself. In all good myths before hero and heroine can be joined together there must be tests and trials. And before she beds the son, she must first woo his seventy-one-year-old father. She smiles. It is the kind of challenge she was made for.
She pauses under the first arch, her enchantment at the decorations around her plain for all to see. Then she starts to walk, head high, her pristine gilded shoes—the eighth pair—peeking out from a lake of silk, her eyes straight ahead.<
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It is clear even at this distance that Duke Ercole d’Este, like his son, is not an object of beauty. Age has shrunk him one way while expanding him the other and his chins have multiplied downward, leaving no room for his neck. He looks, she thinks, like a richly padded chair. As to his personality, the Borgia intelligence machine has already briefed her well.
This new father of hers has ruled Ferrara for over thirty years, and despite a fiery temper has been much loved, first by his people, for his name and the wars he fought when he was young, and second by the women he chose, though in his case he only ever wanted two: his wife, Eleonora of Aragon, and a mistress by whom he had a bastard daughter and son, the latter already more trouble than he is worth.
These days he sees himself as a man of peace. Or rather a man loath to spend money on things he doesn’t enjoy, and recently war has become a most expensive pastime. In its place he has elevated culture, building and God. He loves theater, with its spectacle and special effects, and his court is a honeypot for musicians and actors from all over Europe. His relationship with God is fertile too. The mad monk Savonarola, who brought Florence to her knees in more ways than one, was a son of Ferrara, and the duke is a follower of his brand of fiery unforgiving piety. But his greatest passion is for nuns. Not the everyday type (Ferrara is full of convents of well-bred women with nowhere else to go) but the spiritually chosen ones, young women—and they are usually young and of humble birth—so consumed by love of Christ that they have come to live on the sacrament of His body alone, some weeping blood from miraculous stigmata in their hands and feet and visited by Him through trances and visions. In a country caught in a vortex of invasion and turmoil, their faith has become a symbol of God’s grace in a graceless world and they are highly valued by the cities that house them.
Barely a year before, he had managed to extract—or more accurately steal—the sublimely holy Sister Lucia from a convent in Viterbo. In the midst of the Borgia-Este marriage negotiations, he had asked Lucrezia to intercede with the Pope to allow other nuns of the order to join her. When she wrote to tell him of her success, Ercole had been beside himself with gratitude. As she had known he would be. He is already building a whole new convent to house his prize. Expensive, of course, but how could it not be worth it? The dowry that she brings him will come in most useful. Could it be the thought of that dowry that is now warming his smile as she walks toward him?
Lucrezia, who in her time has charmed many a padded chair—the Vatican is full of old men who eat too much—lifts her skirts to climb the steps. And as she does so, half a dozen figures somersault down the leafy pillars, agile as monkeys, tossing handfuls of petals and leaves all around her. She laughs in delight, throwing her hands up in wonder to catch the rain of flowers, and her spontaneity brings a smile to everyone’s face.
Covered in petals she sinks into a deep curtsy in front of the duke, who is now grinning from ear to ear.
Oh yes, he thinks, his ambassadors have done a good job. If she is half as sweet under the skin, she will do nicely. He lifts her up, embracing her, then holding her at arm’s length, assessing her costume. The diamonds around her neck alone must be worth what—five hundred ducats? She will look even better wearing the Este rubies and sapphires across her chest, though they will always be only on loan: should she fail in her duty they will return to their rightful coffers.
Of course she had not been his choice. He had spent months in correspondence with the French king, telling him that he would rather die than graft this parvenu whore bastard daughter of a godless pope onto the great Este family tree. If His Majesty would only offer someone else…But though France might own the state of Milan, the king needed the Pope and his son’s army when he came to attack Naples, and so sadly no French bride was available. Ercole had no alternative but to give in. Four hundred thousand ducats and a reduction in papal taxation in perpetuity: the greatest dowry Italy has ever seen had been the sweetener. How many nuns and musicians can he buy with that?
He embraces her again. A little more flesh would be better perhaps, for his errant son does seem to like his women uncouthly large. But she will certainly do. It is five years since his first daughter-in-law expired with a dead baby stuck between her legs, and it’s time Alfonso stopped poking his rod into hot places and got on with the job of providing Ferrara with a son and future heir.
Outside the cannons roar and the acrobats twirl their way upward again.
Yes, Lucrezia Borgia will do well enough.
“Come, my dear daughter-in-law,” he says, loud enough for the world to hear. “Your family is waiting to welcome you.”
She takes the offered hand and drops her shoulders a little as they walk so she does not appear too tall beside him.
CHAPTER 6
“You saw me standing on the shoreline! You knew I was safe. I’ve been busy with my own affairs.”
The walls of the Pope’s chamber are frescoed with vibrant images of the saints, men and women who without a murmur, even under the most unimaginable of tortures, gave themselves up to God. It is, however, a good deal noisier in here now.
“What? Drying out your clothes in front of a courtesan’s fire? Don’t raise your eyes to me like that. I remind you, you were the one pushing so hard to get back to Rome. The Venetian ambassador had smoke rising out of his head. You should have been here to defend yourself. Did you really have to exhibit the man’s tongue and hand, so half of the city would see it?”
“The exhibition was the point, Father. You’re too soft on insults.”
“On the contrary—I am just keeping our enemies down to manageable proportions to make room for the next one,” Alexander grumbles, but the tone is more cheerful now. Whatever the wrangling, he is, as ever, delighted to see his handsome, triumphant son.
He reaches across the table, helping himself to bread and more fish, licking his fingers gleefully before pushing the plate toward Cesare.
“Don’t tell me you’re full already. A warrior must keep his strength up.”
“On what? Half grown fish?”
“Why not? Christ fed five thousand on a handful of them.”
“I doubt they were sardines.”
“Well, they should have been,” the Pope says, shoving a fat raw fillet into his mouth. Taste is memory, and whenever his teeth release the juice of the flesh marinated in honey and vinegar he is back in the bishop’s palace of Valencia, a hungry young man with everything to look forward to. “As I have told you many times they are the sweetest and most humble harvest of the sea. I have even initiated Burchard into their wonders. Imagine. A German eating raw sardines!”
But this is not an image Cesare cares to pursue. There are moments when his father’s relish for such things seems almost indecent.
“So, let us talk business,” Alexander says. “With Piombino secured, you are now the effective ruler of seven territories. If this season we add the cities of Camerino and Sinigaglia, both of which are under papal jurisdiction, then we have the firm foundations of a viable Borgia state. I have already drafted the bill of excommunication for the ruling families on the ground of nonpayment of papal dues.”
Cesare shrugs. “Camerino and Sinigaglia are barely worth the time it will take to march there,” he says bluntly. “I think given how far we have come we need a bigger target now. Something to show everyone that we mean business.”
“Such as?”
He shrugs. “Pisa or Arezzo.”
Alexander frowns. “The papacy has no direct claim on them. They are within Florence’s domain and she would be apoplectic with outrage.”
“Let her. She’s getting used to suffering vapors. If we were to move fast we might even get inside her own walls.”
“Florence? You want to take Florence now?” Alexander says, his mind now fully off the sardines. “What—you have become both Caesar and Alexander rolled into one?” And he laughs immoderately at the weakness of his own joke. “No. As long are we are allied to the French, it can’t b
e done. The city is under their protection.”
“You think King Louis gets rich on what Florence pays him? I tell you the time is ripe, Father. People need to see what we are capable of, and such a move would astonish everyone. The city’s in trouble. That raving monk Savonarola sucked all the life out of her and now she’s left with some feeble dream about bringing back a republic that never worked in the first place. She is up to her eyes in debt, with no standing militia to defend her and no mercenaries to call on.”
“Of course not. We have all the best ones on our payroll.”
“Exactly.” Cesare snorts in frustration. “And a number of them would happily shaft Florence for insults delivered in the past. Vitellozzo Vitelli can’t wait to turn his cannons on her walls. God knows we came close enough last year.”
“Yes. And you will remember very well why you backed off. Because while you were up there on your fine white horse, I was here defending your back against the French. Sweet Mary, Cesare, you think I do nothing while you’re out waving your sword around.” Alexander’s voice rises sharply to meet the fight. What more could a man want than to argue with his son about which glorious summit the family should scale next?
“My God, you should have heard the ambassador’s language. All strut and threat about how if you took one more step into lands protected by King Louis…”
Oh yes…no, no…I understand what His Majesty feels. I had no idea this is what the duke would do or I would have stopped him long before. Alexander has a penchant for playing every part when the story calls for it. When he returns I will see to it he is sternly reprimanded.
He lets out a theatrical sigh. “I am diplomatically black and blue from taking beatings on your behalf.”