Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (32 page)

“We can put a watch on Torquemada,” I suggested. “In case Morozzi goes to meet with him.”

Borgia nodded. “Vittoro has seen to that, but why would they need to meet now? When the child is found, Torquemada will hear about it at once. He will appear, probably claiming that God brought him here miraculously, and arouse the populace to attack the Jews.”

He sighed deeply and for just a moment, Il Cardinale looked old and tired, as though humanity’s infinite capacity for sin, combined with his own, had worn him down.

“Short of putting a guard on every Christian child in Rome and the surrounding area,” he said, “I’m not sure what we can do.”

In the years since, I have accepted that it is the darkness in my mind that allows me to see so clearly under certain circumstances. But Borgia knew that already.

Certainly, he showed no surprise when I said, “The fact is, if worse comes to worse, we don’t have to find the child. We just have to find the body before anyone else does.”

The Cardinal eyed me closely. “But you would like to find the child, surely, to prevent his murder?”

“Of course I would. Morozzi is the monster, not I. But if we cannot—”

“If we cannot—” Borgia sat for a moment, lost in thought. “If you were Morozzi, where would you stage such an event?”

“What do you mean?” If I were Morozzi? Was he drawing a comparison between us? Seeing both of us as beings comfortable with killing?

“The whole point would be the discovery of the body,” Borgia said. “It would need to be in such circumstances as to instantly point the finger of guilt at the Jews. Where would that be?”

I saw his point, however reluctantly. If we could deduce where the crime was likely to end, we might, with great luck, be able to stop it from taking place at all.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Near the ghetto perhaps?”

Borgia shook his head. “Too obvious. Romans are vastly more sophisticated than the rabble in La Guardia. They would wonder why the Jews would be at such pains to implicate themselves. No, it has to be somewhere else.”

“Where was the child supposedly killed in La Guardia?” I asked.

“On some mountainside. That doesn’t help us here.”

No, it did not, except . . . Rome was built on seven hills. There are more than a few steep inclines to be found in and around the city. Far too many to make any one the obvious setting for such an atrocity.

Despite my best efforts and the seriousness of the situation, I could not repress a yawn. Borgia looked at me chidingly.

“When did you sleep last?”

“Awhile ago, it doesn’t matter—”

“It does. Go and lie down. If anything happens, I will send word to you.”

I hesitated, reluctant to be banished to my room, where I was certain I would only toss and turn. But the Cardinal was not to be denied. He sent me on my way with a curt reminder that I would be of no use to him if I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

By way of compromise, I took off my shoes but kept my clothes
on and rested on top of the bed, not under the covers. For a while, I stared up at the ceiling, revisiting the events of the past few days. Doing so was hardly a recipe for sleep, and yet after awhile, I dozed, but so lightly that I was aware of being in a halfway state between consciousness and dreams.

True sleep eluded me. Morpheus is a capricious god; he comes easily to some and only with greatest difficulty to others. To lure him, it is best to pretend disinterest. Engage the mind in some pursuit unrelated to what is truly desired and allow no distraction from it. For me, nothing works so well as a walk through Rome.

My father was a great walker; he often took me with him on little trips of discovery around the city. I saw Rome through his eyes before I learned to see it through my own. It is not an idle boast to say that I can be set down in any quarter of the city and know where I am by sound and smell alone. On at least one occasion several years after the events related here, this ability saved my life. But I digress.

Courting sleep, I set off on an imaginary stroll, beginning at the palazzo and drifting eastward, past the ancient Servian Wall into the old city. In the distance, I saw the Quirinal, the hill from which the Sabine women were taken captive. My mother’s marriage chest, preserved by my father and still in my possession, is decorated with scenes of their abduction. Do not think that a strange choice for a bride. No less an authority than Livy tells us that, in return for accepting Roman husbands, the Sabine women were guaranteed rights any woman of today would be glad to claim.

If I could, I would ask my mother what she hoped for in her marriage and whether she found the fulfillment of those hopes in the brief time she and my father were together. But she remains a faceless, voiceless shade who appears occasionally in my dreams only to vanish the moment I reach out to her.

My father is a different matter. In the dream where I shortly found myself, he walked beside me, a quiet presence at my elbow that I dared not turn to look at for fear that he, too, would disappear. Since his death, I had dreamed only of his murdered self, the battered and bloodied corpse I had wept over. It was sweet relief to feel what seemed to be his living presence. I would do nothing to disturb it.

We walked in silence past the Viminal, smallest of Rome’s hills and its least interesting, as far as the Esquiline that rises steeply over the remains of the Colosseum. It is home to the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, where my father and I often came to admire the interior and light a candle before the icon of the Virgin Mary, said to have been painted by Saint Luke himself. As I stared into it, the flickering candle flame swelled until it became the sun rising over the Capitoline.

“The highest of all Rome’s hills, its glory,” my father said. Palely as though light shone through it, his arm moved over all that lay before me. Beyond was the church of Santa Maria Aracoeli, atop the hill where it is said one of the ancient sibyls prophesized the coming of Christ.

I hung back, unwilling to mount the high wide steps leading up to the church. At their foot, condemned criminals are executed, it is said within sight of the Heaven they will not reach.

My father or perhaps his shade did not insist. We walked on, skirting the Caelian with its ancient ruins and moving south to the Palatine, where the infant twins Romulus and Remus were found, and where Rome had its beginnings. As in the way of dreams, we were suddenly elsewhere, atop the Aventine, where it is said Remus saw dire omens in the behavior of birds shortly before his brother killed him.

“Rome was founded in blood,” I heard my father say. “It had its beginning here but its stain is eternal.”

To the west, I saw the river, crimson beneath a drowning sun. I think I cried out although I cannot be sure. I was struggling to wake but some weight pulled me down, keeping me anchored in dreams.

“Do not be afraid, Francesca,” my father said, and I turned suddenly, seeing him before me not as a ghost but as a man. He looked entirely real and solid, dressed in his usual hose and tunic, just as I had seen him the last morning of his life, as though he was not about to walk out the door and be gone forever.

“Forgive me,” I said, but I doubt he heard me. The world in which he remained alive and well was dissolving. I was back in the world of my own making, following a path he had never wanted for me, one I believe he knew could lead only into darkness.

Sometime in the night, I must have awakened enough to cast off my clothes, but I have no memory of doing so. I slept fitfully, as if in a fever dream in which I saw the boys from the
cantoretti
hold out their scarred arms, as though to display stigmata, only for them to dissolve into the vision of Nando, holding a cross of glass that cracked as he offered it to me and drove bloody shards into his skin.

I woke shaking with cold although the day already promised to be hot. Woke to a banging at my door and Vittoro’s urgent voice calling my name.

The room smelled of vomit and fear. Tall windows facing the river were unshuttered, admitting enough of a breeze to stir the white curtains but not sufficient to lift the oppressive stench. A pale young maid waving a censer filled with smoldering sandalwood had little more success.

Far too many people had crowded into the room, most of them doing nothing of any use. But that is always the way at such times.

Lucrezia bent over the bed, trying to push away the Maltese pups that were crouched, whimpering, amid the tangled covers. She lurched back suddenly as La Bella bolted up, retched again into the basin held by another hapless maid, then fell back moaning against the sweat-soaked pillows.

The midwives hovered, despite there being nothing more for them to do. The black-robed physicians, who as with all their brethren
loathed being called in such cases, cast furtive glances toward the door and plotted their escape.

I stared at the evidence of my catastrophic failure and tried frantically to think of how I might salvage a life from it.

La Bella’s face was pale, her eyes deeply sunken, her breathing shallow and her pulse weak. She was conscious but not fully aware of what was happening to her, which I supposed was a mercy. I might have ascribed all that to any of numerous possible causes had not her limbs and torso borne the telltale evidence of red lesions.

No natural agent had caused them. I suspected tartar emetic, otherwise known as antimony. Either that or arsenic, for they mimic each other in symptoms. But neither alone would account for the swiftness of the miscarriage that had taken her child. For that I thought of tansy, a powerful abortifacient when given in the right form and dosage.

I had administered juice of emetine shortly after arriving, having had the sense to grab a vial of it on my way out of my room after learning from Vittoro what had befallen Borgia’s mistress. It may seem odd to use a potion designed to produce vomiting on one who is already doing so, but my instinct was to empty her stomach as quickly as possible. The results had been violent but, I hoped, sufficient.

The physicians clucked their tongues and shook their heads at my actions but said nothing. They were there because they dared not defy Madonna Adriana, who had summoned them and who stood off to one side, hands folded within the sleeves of her gown as though to avoid contamination. Attend they would—and present their bills for doing so—but none was about to say or do anything that might point the finger of responsibility in their direction when the death they all seemed to think was inevitable occurred.

Not so myself. In the face of such disaster, I had nothing left to lose.

“We must keep her propped up,” I told Lucrezia, who, I sensed, was my only ally in the room and quite possibly La Bella’s as well. “If she reclines too much, she will have even more trouble breathing,”

But that was the least of it. Had she vomited enough to expel as much of the poison as possible? Should I give more emetine or stop it and instead try to get liquids into her now before the lack of them became yet another threat to her survival? Had the midwives truly managed to staunch the bleeding or would she die from that before the poison could kill her?

The truth was that my knowledge of how to deal with the effects of poisoning was woefully inadequate. I knew how to prevent it from occurring, or so I had told myself in my vanity, and I knew how to inflict it. Apart from that, I was little better equipped than the physicians to save a victim of the poisoner’s art.

La Bella’s child—and the Cardinal’s—had paid for my mistake with its life. Now it remained to be seen if the eighteen-year-old woman writhing in agony before me would survive.

The tansy had done its work. It would leave her body and, if she lived, she had at least a chance of healing from its effects. The tartar emetic—or arsenic, possibly both combined—was another matter entirely. Everything depended on how much she had ingested, but I had no time just then to try to determine that.

“She must drink,” I said, making a decision to wait no longer. With luck, the liquid would flush her body and she would be able to expel the remainder of the poison before it harmed her further.

With Lucrezia’s help, I held a goblet to La Bella’s lips and trickled a little chamomile and peppermint tea into her mouth. Most of it dribbled out, but she managed to swallow just enough to let me hope that we had a chance. My heart all but stopped when she began to retch again, but despite several spasms, nothing more came up.

Throughout the remainder of that day, Lucrezia and I battled side by side. We alternately encouraged and forced La Bella to drink, cleaned up the inevitable results, kept her warm when violent chills struck her, and bathed her in cool water when she was fevered. No one else was willing to touch her, fearing to be stricken in turn. Maids brought a continual stream of fresh sheets, the physicians waited patiently for my efforts to fail, and Madonna Adriana remained where she was, ever watchful but silent.

Somewhere nearby, I was vaguely aware of prayers being offered and I knew that Vittoro was on watch but little else encroached on the all-encompassing struggle to save Giulia. She became that to me as the hours wore on—no longer the magnificent La Bella of song and story but only a young woman thrown into a treacherous situation not of her own making who had tried to manage as best she could. A woman who had depended on me to keep her safe.

By nightfall, I knew we had won, at least such victory as was possible under the circumstances. Giulia slept deeply, her breathing regular, her pulse improving, and her color returning. I thanked God for the youth and strength that I was sure had saved her as much as anything I had done. Lucrezia, by contrast, looked pale and drained. There were dark circles beneath her eyes and her lips were bloodied where she had bitten them in her anxiousness. I suspected that I looked worse. Certainly, I felt as though I had been beaten, every bone and muscle in my body being tense with pain.

But there was no time to think of that. I straightened from the bed, took one more look at Giulia to reassure myself that I was not wrong to believe that the worst was over, and turned my attention to Madonna Adriana.