Sins of the House of Borgia (23 page)

Now it was Angela’s turn to laugh, her voice sounding stronger, I thought, than it had in many weeks. “Ah, I see,” she said, her tone as warm as the sun on my back. “What’s he done this time, then, that cousin of mine? Invaded Florence?”

I heard scuffling, effortful grunts from the two men and a quickly curtailed shriek from Angela, but I dared not look out from my hiding place. This talk had gone too far for my eavesdropping to be construed as accidental or innocent.

“What do you know?” demanded Ippolito. “What has he told you?”

“Take your hands off her,” shouted Giulio.

“Nothing,” said Angela. “You’re more of a fool than I gave you credit for if you believe Cesare confides in me. He’s as close with his thinking as a Jew with his purse.”

I winced.

“You see?” mocked Ippolito. “She likes a bit of rough handling. It merely serves to taper her wit.”

A sharp smack followed by a silence which lasted just a little too long. I clamped my hand over the dog’s nose to quiet his whimpering.

“Dammit, that’s a tooth,” said Ippolito, slurring his words like an old man who has suffered a seizure.

“Oh Giulio, now how will you play your lute for me. Look at your knuckles. You must let me bathe them.”

“Ask our new duchess, Ippolito; she has more letters from her brother than she does from ours. He must say something of his plans in them, for what else has he in his life but this hunger to devour Italy?”

“You think he would move while Alfonso and our brother-in-law Gonzaga are at the French court? You’re a fool. He depends on Louis for half his army and the money to pay them with.”

“Even if Alfonso and Francesco have Louis’s ear, they say Valentino is prepared to tickle more persuasive parts.”

“Oh really, what nonsense. My late cousin Juan, possibly, but not Cesare.”

“Do they?” persisted Ippolito, taking no notice of Angela’s defence of Cesare’s virtue. “And who are they? Ferrante’s kitchen maids?”

Like a plump, fur-coated trout, Fonsi twisted out of my arms and flopped to the ground, galloping as fast as his stubby legs would carry him towards Angela and Giulio. There was nothing for it but to follow him and hope they did not realise I had heard the entire exchange. Angela crouched to pet the dog, but looked up at me. Though her eyes were shadowed by the broad brim of her sun hat, I could tell immediately, from a slight deepening of the lines bracketing her mouth which had developed since her illness, that she knew I had heard everything.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “For the Jew joke,” she elaborated, seeing my frown of incomprehension.

I stooped to retrieve the dog. In the moment when her face and mine were as close as the brim of her hat would allow, I asked, “Why should that offend me?” I straightened up, to see Giulio glowering at me, cradling his bruised knuckles in the palm of his other hand.

“She must have heard everything,” he said to his brother, who came up beside him rubbing his jaw, which was already so swollen it had pulled his neat beard out of shape. Blood from his mouth made a splash of darker red against the scarlet breast of his soutane. Walking straight past Giulio without a glance, Ippolito put himself so close to me I could smell the blood on his breath.

“Are you Valentino’s spy, girl?” His words came slurred as a drunk’s from his misshapen mouth. Afraid he would lay hands on me, I clutched Fonsi in front of me like a shield; if nothing else, his teeth were sharp and his temperament possessive. On cue, the little dog gave a high-pitched snarl, a sound like rice rattling into a metal dish, and I saw laughter welling in Ippolito’s dark eyes. His lips twitched; he winced and turned from me. “Be assured I shall be watching you from now on. And if you were thinking of getting word to him, remember how easy it is for a messenger to miss his way among our marshes. You would do well to remind your mistress the same. Giulio, the boat will leave in ten minutes. Be there.”

I turned towards the house but Giulio, taking no notice of his brother’s command, brought a hard hand down on my shoulder and twisted me around to face him. Fonsi fell into a frenzy of yapping. Angela took him from me, stroking his head and making cooing sounds over him until he quietened and nestled, snuffling in her arms.

“Is it true?”

“That I am Duke Valentino’s spy? No, Giulio, it is not.” Until now I had been buoyed up on some spurious elation, flattered that Ippolito should imagine Cesare would trust me enough to spy for him. Now, as Giulio raised the possibility for examination, it was bitterly clear to me how absurd a suggestion it was. “He could invade Ferrara this afternoon and I most likely wouldn’t know until next week,” I added, feeling a tide of black bile spread through my body. The concern in Angela’s eyes, her Borgia eyes, made me feel worse.

“But you see his letters to the duchess?” he persisted.

“She sees as much of them as the rest of us,” snapped Angela. “She sees rolled vellum and a red seal dangling from a purple ribbon. What transpires between my lady and her brother is anybody’s guess.” I thought she was lying, but about what I had no idea, and I was grateful for her intervention, for making me look less of a fool. I nodded my agreement.

“Now we must see to your hand before it stiffens up completely.”

With some unworthy pun on stiffening extremities, Giulio allowed himself to be led away, leaving me to return to my needlework, an abandoned Fonsi trailing on my heels. As Angela and Giulio were swallowed up by the dense shade of the cloistered arcade running along outside the Sala del’ Elefante, the garden seemed suddenly, shockingly empty. Not even the creak of a wheelbarrow or the oiled snip of shears interrupted the heavy silence. There was no breeze to tickle the lake into laughter or set the chestnut whispering, no music from the birds roosting through the heat of the day. From this side of the house I could not even hear the racket from the kitchen as the day meal was prepared. I was sunk in a bright dungeon of heat, the sun hammering on my head and scalding my lungs as I breathed, the edges of my corset chafing under my arms where my sweat-soaked shift had bunched into a swab of wet linen.

I didn’t care if Cesare invaded Florence, or Milan, or Venice, or the Holy Roman Empire itself. I just wished he would get whatever he had planned over and done with and come here, and fill this dull Ferrarese court with jokes, intrigue, Spanish music, and all-night card games. I would personally climb that damned chestnut tree to pick its spiny fruit for a chance to watch him throw back his head and laugh at the sight of naked whores crawling among lamp stands in pursuit of it. Closing my eyes I could glimpse the point of his tongue caught between his white teeth, smell the perfume released by his hair as it tumbled down his back. Jasmine, olives, the salt air from Ostia when the wind blew from the west, and something secret and feral that was unique to him, the truth of him, perhaps. Or perhaps my famished memory suffering the delusions of hunger.

Well, my wish was granted, but, as is the case with all the best wishes, not in quite the way I had imagined when I made it.

***

Though we all retired to our rooms during the hottest part of the day, Angela did not join me in our chamber. She was, I suppose, giving Giulio’s bruised knuckles her undivided attention. It did not occur to me for one moment that Giulio might actually have taken up Ippolito’s instruction to return to the city; his status as the bastard of a much loved mistress made him a slippery eel to catch. By rights Fidelma should also have had her bed in our room, but whatever differences had emerged between Angela and I since we came to Ferrara, we were of exactly the same mind about Fidelma. She was humourless, pious, and not to be trusted. Any confidence shared with Fidelma would bounce off her like water off hot steel, to land heaven knew where and in what misconstruable fragments. We made sure there was no room for her in our chamber.

Was it Angela’s urgent whisper, her hand rattling my shoulder as though it were a stuck lock, that woke me? Or had I come to my senses seconds before, roused by the cacophony of screaming, cursing, breaking glass, and wood splintering.

“Violante. Wake up. I need your help with Lucrezia.”

“What’s happened?” My eyes felt swollen and gritty, my head full of furry mould that had leaked into my mouth.

“She’s had a letter from Cesare.”

My heart seemed to squeeze shut like a fist. “Is he dead?”

“Oh God give me strength. I said from
him, not about him.”

“Sorry, sorry.” I shook my head, rubbed my eyes. A torrent of Donna Lucrezia’s Catalan reached my ears from somewhere along the passage outside.

“He’s taken Urbino.”

“Urbino?”

“Exactly,” said Angela, utterly misinterpreting the shock I could not keep out of my voice. “He’s totally overstepped the mark. Guidobaldo’s a popular ruler. Good God, he was even Uncle Rodrigo’s Gonfalonier himself at one time. And his wife is Donna Isabella’s sister-in-law. Lucrezia’s raging. If we can’t do something to calm her, I’m afraid for the baby.”

But, though I went through the motions of tightening my bodice, pushing my feet into my shoes, hurrying after Angela, my thoughts were all centred on myself and my curious experience in the palace garden at Urbino. Had I known all along? Should I have told what I knew? No one would have believed me. I would have been dismissed as Angela dismissed me, as a moonstruck girl, sick with unrequited passion. Besides, what would I have had to tell? A mere whispered nonsense, a wraith of perfume, a breath which might have been no more than the winter breeze.

We found Donna Lucrezia stalking the broad, arcaded walkway before the door to her private apartments. The sinking sun cast long bars of shadow which she crossed and re-crossed, a prisoner of the fury that shook her body as though it were possessed of a demon. Her hair hung in her eyes, her clothes were torn, the backs of her hands scored with bloody scratches. Her stockinged feet crunched heedlessly over shards of glass and pottery, splinters of wood from a broken stool whose leather upholstered seat now balanced precariously on the balustrade running along the open side of the passage.

“She is mad,” I muttered to Angela. “There is nothing we can do. We must fetch her doctor. Or a priest,” I added, feeling myself blush.

Angela shook her head. “We must just calm her down. Take her arm one side and I’ll take the other. If we can just get her to stand still long enough to listen to reason.”

I doubted mere reason could make any impression on her, but lunged towards madonna as her steps turned in my direction, in an attempt to grab hold of one of her flailing arms. Seeing me, she stopped dead in her tracks.

“You,” she growled, in the eerie voice of a fighting cat. She brought her arm down and pointed at me, jabbing at my chest with a finger whose nail was as ragged as a scullery maid’s. “Come with me.”

I looked at Angela. She shrugged. Terrified, I followed Donna Lucrezia into her apartments.

The rooms looked as though they had been sacked. Curtains had been torn down from the windows and lay strewn across the floor among clothes, jewels, and more broken glass and pottery. Bloody footprints marked everything like an angry skin rash.

“Do you know what he’s done?” she demanded, turning on me before I had any chance to close the door to the little antechamber into which I had followed her. Neither Catherinella nor any of the other servants was anywhere to be seen. I could hear Fonsi whimpering somewhere, but I could not see him and did not dare call out to him.

“N…no, madonna.” Why was she asking me? Did she know what had happened in Urbino, or was her question merely a rhetorical device?

She seemed not to have heard my reply. “He promised,” she went on, speaking now almost in a whisper, shaking her head with a terrible, weary sadness. Then, “You promised!” she shrieked, her gaze fixed on me so for a moment I was scouring my memory for some promise I had made and failed to fulfil, until I realised she did not see me at all.

“At Nepi. You promised, you swore you wouldn’t interfere.” She began pacing again, printing more blood spatters over the ones already drying on the torn curtains, clawing at her ears and tangled hair as though some foreign body were lodged in her head and she was trying to tear it out. Her fingers were soon bound as fast in long strands of pale hair as silk worms in their cocoons. I feared for her eyes. “Why won’t you leave me alone? Leave me, let me get on with it, I can do it. Trust me. Is it the boy? Is that why?”

At the mention of the boy she became suddenly calm. So, I realised with relief, she was not so deranged by the news from Urbino she had forgotten her responsibility to her unborn child. “It’s too soon,” she said, staring directly at me, hands folded over the rise of her belly.

“Are you in pain, madonna? Perhaps you should lie down.” Though if her bed chamber was in anything like the same mess as this, God alone knew where she could lie. “I will send for the physician.” I stepped forward and tried to take her arm, but she shook me free with a grunt of impatience.

Casting her eyes around the room as though she were seeing the chaos for the first time, she said, “I want you to see something.” She lifted a torn-down wall hanging to reveal the bureau where she kept her correspondence; balanced now on three good legs, it wobbled as the weight of the hanging was shifted from it and a half folded parchment slid to the floor. With an effort, Donna Lucrezia stooped to pick it up and handed it to me.