Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (18 page)

If plague did appear, I shuddered to think what would happen. The Jews would be blamed, of course, and the outcry against them would be horrific. It was not inconceivable that the entire ghetto would become their funeral pyre unless there was a pope willing to protect them.

Such thoughts were in my mind as I passed the line of people waiting in front of the apothecary shop. Sofia was inside, tending to a sick child. She joined me in the back room as soon as she could. I had brought the promised supplies and more. She acknowledged them but got straight to the point.

“We have bloody flux, dropsy, the ague, and I fear at least one case of influenza.”

That last brought me up short. The disease that causes chills, high fever, and fluid in the lungs had appeared in Florence a few years ago but had not remained there, making its way to Milan and
Rome. It tends to spread rapidly but also to die away quickly. Many stricken by it perish but most survive. Physicians attribute the disease to malignant astrological influences, hence its name. To me, that means they have no more idea of what causes it than they do any other disease.

“Dropsy takes too long to kill,” I said. The congestive edema of the tissues, particularly around the heart, does tend to be fatal but can take years to do its work, or so I understand from the very few authorized dissections that have taken place in the universities of Bologna, Padua, and Salerno. There have been others, too, unauthorized, but I will not speak of those.

“The ague and the bloody flux both have symptoms too similar to poisoning,” I went on. “If Innocent dies of either, Borgia’s involvement will be suspected immediately. As for the influenza . . .”

It did not mimic poison at all but unfortunately it seemed a disease of the phlegm rather than of the blood.

“I don’t think it will work,” I said, and told her why.

Sofia agreed. She drew me a little way off, far enough to be sure that Vittoro could not hear us. “Are you certain that you want to go through with this?” she asked.

I nodded quickly. “Time is running out, we must act now. I believe I have found a way to reach Innocent, but there is no point unless I have the means we seek.”

She hesitated a moment longer before nodding abruptly. Taking me by the arm, she led me over to a pallet set in a corner away from the other patients and surrounded by a curtain.

“See there,” she said.

I saw a man who may have been in his mid-twenties. It was difficult to be sure because he was so ill, but at any rate, he was young. His dark hair was matted to his head, his skin was flushed, and he
gave off a rank, sweetish odor. I knelt beside him and touched my hand to his forehead, pulling it back quickly when I felt his burning skin.

“What is wrong with him?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Sofia replied. Among the many aspects of her character that I was to come to value, her willingness to admit ignorance stands out as among the rarest.

She, too, bent down beside him and very gently moved away the blanket covering the man, enough to expose his arm. What I saw made me grimace.

His upper arm still showed that it had been heavily muscled, but much of the flesh was being eaten away by a black rot that appeared to be spreading, sending red streaks down the entire limb.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“His name is Joseph. Yesterday, he came here at his wife’s insistence. He had a cut to his arm, a week old or so. You can’t even see it now but it was there, clear enough. The skin all around was hard and hot to the touch. He had a fever and appeared disoriented. I convinced him to lie down and he has not risen since. His wife has gone home to tend their young children, but I have sent word for her to return soon, at least if she wishes to see him again while yet he lives.”

“Do you have any idea what is killing him?”

“I do not,” Sofia said. “His pulse became very rapid but has now weakened. The swelling itself spreads with the red lines that trace the path of blood in the limb. I have listened to his heart and it is weakening, too. His lungs are congested and he can no longer pass urine. He will be dead within a few hours.”

She sighed and sat back on her knees, looking at what had been a young and vigorous husband and father. “There is nothing I can do for him.”

“You think whatever is killing him has poisoned his blood?”

“I don’t know where else it could be.” She looked at me. “It is very fast, whatever is doing this, and it does not look anything like poison as we know it, does it?”

No, it did not. No poison that I knew of caused such symptoms. Moreover, I believed she was right that the disease was in his blood.

But I could not be sure.

And that brought me to what I had not wanted to think about but that, in the way of such things, had become uppermost in my mind.

“We are likely to have only one chance,” I said.

Sofia pressed her lips together tightly. In that simple gesture I knew she had been thinking along the same path.

“It will be difficult enough to get close to Innocent even once,” I said, for I was trying to convince myself as much as her. Looking again at the suffering young man, I said softly, “We must be sure.”

There was only one way we possibly could be.

“You want to do what?” David ben Eliezer said a short time later after Sofia had sent for him. Understandably enough, she did not think the decision could be entirely hers. We were meeting in the back room, keeping our voices very low to avoid any chance of being overheard.

“We have to test it,” I said. The very idea sickened me but I saw no alternative. “We have to be sure that this man’s blood really carries a disease powerful enough to kill. If it does not, there is no point for us to go forward, not with the risk so high.”

“Test it on an animal? That’s what you mean?”

I shook my head. “We know that there are diseases that affect humans without touching animals, and the reverse is also true. It has to be tested on a person.”

“Are you volunteering?” he asked.

I understood that I was hearing his justifiable horror at what I proposed, but I could not indulge it.

“I will take it into Castel Sant’Angelo. I will find a way to substitute it for the blood the Pope drinks. I cannot do that if I am already dead.”

Sofia laid a hand on his arm. Quietly, she said, “It is not easy for any of us to speak of this. I can hardly bear to think of it. But we have known all along that there would be a high price for what we must do.”

“Not this,” David said. “We never thought of anything like this.”

He was right, of course. However much I feared for my own soul, the Jews were only trying to save their lives. Surely God would understand that and forgive them.

But now I was asking them to kill someone who had done no harm, a true innocent.

“I will test it,” David said. His eyes were dark pools, so pale had he gone. “This was all my idea to begin with. I can’t ask anyone else to take such a risk.”

“And we cannot afford to lose you,” Sofia said. She looked at him as kindly as a mother would. “Who else will be our lion, David. Who else will protect us?”

His eyes glistened, as I was surprised to realize did my own. Before he could argue further, I said, “There is no point testing it on someone who is young and healthy since the Pope is neither. He is old and frail. It should be tried on someone in the same condition.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” David said. “The old must be protected, too.”

A dark weight bore down on me. I understood how he felt, indeed I approved wholeheartedly of his sentiment. But I also knew
that in the world as it truly is, rather than as we wish it to be, it can be necessary to do terrible things. Sometimes there is no good choice. We can only do what is least bad.

Even so, I had to wonder what sort of person I was whose kinder impulses could be sealed off behind such cold practicality.

“We cannot ask anyone to do this,” Sofia said, “without explaining it fully.”

There was risk in that, of course. Even the suggestion of such a thing could spark an outcry. If the rabbis and merchants found out what we were doing, they would certainly move to stop us.

“Do you . . . have someone in mind?” I asked tentatively.

David flinched and looked away but Sofia met my gaze. Slowly, she nodded.

The old woman lay on a pallet in the back room, where she had been moved from the front of the shop. Despite the warmth of the day, she was covered with a blanket that, beneath a layer of grime, looked spun from the finest lamb’s wool. Her gray hair was spread out beneath her. Although her cheeks and eyes were sunken, and her skin crisscrossed by a web of fine lines, I could see that she had once been beautiful.

“Rebecca,” Sofia said softly, kneeling beside the woman and holding her hand.

The eyelids fluttered and slowly opened.

“Do you remember what we were talking about?” Sofia asked. She spoke in Catalan, a language I understood because it was the private family language of the Borgia, who had been Los Boryas in Spain. The Romans had never let them forget their Spanish origins, and so they clung to them out of defiant pride.

When the old woman nodded, Sofia said, “This is Francesca. She will help us.”

“I didn’t dream it?” Rebecca asked. Her voice was so faint and weak that I had to bend closer to hear her, but as she spoke, she seemed to gain strength. “What you told me . . . it is real?”

Sofia had talked with her for a time in private. I do not know what was said between them but I was glad that the task of explaining what was needed had not been mine.

“The threat to us is all too real,” she said. “I wish it were otherwise but it is not. I know that what we are asking of you is terrible—”

Rebecca lifted a blue-veined hand weakly. “All my family . . . my husband, my children, my beautiful little grandchildren . . . all gone—” Tears slipped down her worn cheeks.

“She came to us a week ago, brought in by people who found her in the street,” Sofia said to me. “She is from Lisbon. Her family was stopped as they were leaving the city. They were accused of trying to take money with them. I don’t know the details of what followed, but witnesses said that she was the only survivor.”

I was not surprised. Granted, their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella had decreed that the Jews could leave their realm alive, if they did so before the deadline that was now only a few weeks off. But they could not take anything of any real value with them—no coins, no gems, nothing that might help them continue their lives elsewhere. They were to leave as paupers with little more than the clothes on their backs.

Of course, many were managing to smuggle out wealth, but those unlucky enough to be caught by the rapacious
mercenarios
hired to patrol the ports and border towns rarely survived the encounter.

Deliberately, I turned my thoughts from what the elderly woman had suffered and concentrated on what had to be done.

“What is her condition?” I asked Sofia.

“She is malnourished and her heart is weak.”

I had expected her to say more and could not conceal my surprise. “But with proper care, she could live?”

“No,” Rebecca said suddenly. “No, please God, no! I cannot . . . I will not . . .” In her agitation she gripped my arm. “The God of Abraham and Isaac is a just God. He knows my suffering. He will not begrudge my release.”

“She has refused to eat or drink,” Sofia said quietly. “I have seen this before. Many of the old do it. There is no way to stop them.”

“Even so—” Face-to-face with the reality of what I insisted had to be done, I was overcome with doubts. The Spaniard, the medallion man, even Innocent were all a different matter. But there was a far cry between talking of testing a method of killing on an anonymous person and actually doing it to this frail old woman who already had suffered so much.

Rebecca’s hand tightened on my arm. Very clearly, so that I could not mistake her, she said, “Do not deny me the chance to keep others from the fate that has overtaken those I love.”

I had to get up and walk away then, out into the alley where I remained for several minutes until I had control of myself. When I came back in, I went to Vittoro.

“Go back to the palazzo,” I said. “If the Cardinal asks where I am, tell him I am pursuing his interests. He will not want to know anything more.”

Far from looking offended by my presuming to give him orders, Vittoro merely shrugged. “The Cardinal likes to know everything.”

“Not about this. If he is ever questioned, he will want to be able to say that he knew nothing.”

I had concluded that in deciding to set me against Innocent, Borgia acted with consummate cleverness. If the attempt on the Pope’s life went wrong and we were caught, the Cardinal could always say that I was deranged over the death of my father and had acted entirely at my own initiative. He might even claim that I was a secret Jew, out to destroy him as well as Innocent. That wouldn’t be enough to keep him in line for the papacy, but it would create sufficient doubt to save his power and prestige, not to mention his life. Mine, on the other hand, was entirely disposable.

“Is there anything else I should tell the Cardinal?” Vittoro asked.

I started to say no, thought better of it, and said, “Tell him
Alea iacta est.
”

Vittoro had not had the benefit of a classical education. He repeated the words three times to be sure he had them exactly. Then he was gone, leaving me in the charnel house of my memories.

I have always had an aversion to blood, don’t ask me why. Bleeding is supposed to be a remedy for all manner of illness, yet I have avoided it at all costs. Nor does my abhorrence stop there. The Mass has always been difficult for me. I can tolerate the bread that becomes flesh well enough but wine into blood . . . I cannot drink it, can hardly bear to let it touch my lips.

When I knelt beside my father’s corpse and bathed my hands in his blood, something in me changed irrevocably. Or perhaps I should say that something awoke. I had to kill twice, the Spaniard and, more important, the man whose throat I had slit, before I acknowledged what was happening to me. However, that made it no easier for me to watch as Sofia bled the dying Joseph.