Sins of the House of Borgia (43 page)

“Lucrezia?”

“My name is…” and while I was debating which of my names to call myself, it dawned on me who he was. “Don Jofre,” I said.

He looked suspicious. “Who are you?” His right hand hovered over the hilt of his sword.

“I am a friend of your brother, Don Cesare.”

His eyes flicked over me, taking in my worn dress over which I still wore Beppo’s doublet, though more as a keepsake than because I needed it now the sun had reappeared, my undressed hair, Girolamo swaddled in my dirty shawl. “Another one,” he said wearily. “I wonder he had the energy left to govern his state he spent so much on getting bastards to populate it. Don’t waste my time, woman.”

He would have walked on but I stepped into his path. “I am here at the behest of the Duchess of Ferrara. Wait. Here.” I thrust my son into his arms and he waited, looking amazed and awkward with the baby balanced across his forearms, while I rummaged among my petticoats for madonna’s letter of recommendation. “You know her seal?” I asked as I took back Girolamo and handed it to him. He nodded, broke the seal, and read the letter.

“So what happened to you?” he asked when he had finished.

“It’s a long story. Where is Cesare?”

“Still in his apartments in the Vatican. Violante…I may call you that?” He touched my arm with his gloved fingertips. “He is still terribly ill. I am far from sure he will live.”

“Take me to him. I am a good nurse. He knows that. He will believe I can make him well.”

“Why?”

I told Don Jofre about Donna Lucrezia’s fever the previous summer, and what Ser Torella had said about me. He thought for a moment, then said, “My sister’s letter says you have family in Rome.”

“Yes.”

“Then go to them for tonight. I will tell Cesare you are here and send for you in the morning. He must not suffer anything unexpected. He is not strong enough. I will let you have one of my men to escort you, then I will know where you are to be found.”

Though tomorrow seemed impossibly far off, though nothing I had ever heard of Don Jofre led me to think him trustworthy, what he said made sense. His concern for his brother seemed genuine, even if it was prompted by a fear for his own skin should Cesare die. And he was not dead. Everything was still possible. I would see him tomorrow. He would get well. He would ensure the election of a friendly face to Saint Peter’s chair and we would all awake from the nightmare.

Don Jofre found me a mule and made a mounting step for me with his own hands. As his man at arms took the reins and led me away, he called after me, “My sister is a cunning little vixen, you know. Never underestimate her.” I scarcely heard him. My mind was filled with Cesare and tomorrow.

“Where do you want to go?” asked my escort as we turned into Saint Peter’s Square. I glanced at Santa Maria in Portico, which looked shabby and neglected, the window shutters sun-warped, the street door bereft of the smart footmen who had always stood there, overseeing our comings and goings with deep impassivity. Then, as I shifted my gaze across the square to the Vatican, something gleamed in the corner of my eye, the flat, bluish glint of broken glass reflecting the summer afternoon sky, and instead of the palace walls, its barred windows and guards in Cesare’s quartered red and gold, I saw a wooden stand decked with banners and packed with courtiers in all their finery. In the midst of it all sat the old pope, and I swear I could hear him laughing and his laughter did not sound as though it came from beyond the grave.

A little to his right a girl in an emerald green camorra struggled against the grip of a handsome man whose fingers dug into the flesh of her thigh as he held her down, imprinting bruises there she would keep for weeks. Though I did not notice her until she escaped the man’s clutches and fled, screaming, in the direction of the basilica. Even then I could not see her clearly. I had lost my magnifying spectacles, you see; they had fallen off as I ran and been trampled into the mud by my fellow competitors. I could not see she was my sister; I could not see the bruises left on her by Valentino.

“Mistress?” Don Jofre’s man was saying. “Where to?”

“Leave me. I have the mule; I can manage.”

“Don Jofre will want the mule back,” said the man doubtfully.

“I will send it. Please, let me go; I will be quite safe, and you will know I have arrived at my destination by the return of the mule. Tell Don Jofre I dismissed you. I’m sure he has too much on his plate to bother being angry with you about me.” He seemed to see the reason in this and turned back towards San Clemente. From the set of his shoulders, I would say he was as relieved to be rid of me as I of him.

To this day I cannot say for certain what happened to me that afternoon in Saint Peter’s Square. Looking back, I am inclined to think it was simply the trick of a mind exhausted by travel and ill health. At the time, however, that memory of recognising Eli racing with the other Jews, scrabbling in the mud for his broken lenses, that strange sense of being him rather than myself, seemed to be telling me to go home, just as I was, with my son and a mule. Tonight I would sit at my father’s table. I would wash and change, and light the candles as if I had never been away. My family would embrace me and call me Esther, and I would lie in my old bed and I would soothe my child to sleep with stories of all my names.

Discarding the planchette with which Don Jofre had provided me, I got astride the mule and kicked it into a smart trot. There is a clock inside me which rings a bell in my brain about an hour before sunset. It is a Jewish thing, a need to be indoors before the rising of the evening star which marks the beginning of Shabbat. Some men stopped me on the Sant’Angelo bridge, but let me pass after I showed them Donna Lucrezia’s seal, and from then on my short journey was uneventful. I passed a few people on the road, but they hurried by, closed in on themselves, shoulders hunched and eyes fixed on the little patch of ground just in front of their feet.

Ambassadors and
avvisi
write in apocalyptic terms about society breaking apart whenever there are riots about the price of bread or more plague deaths than there were last year or the Turk begins to rattle his sabre in our ear. But this, I thought, as the blue shadows lengthened across the Tiber and my mule’s hooves struck small, sharp echoes from the blind walls of shops and houses, was how it truly showed itself, in this fragmentation, each man withdrawn into his own shell, looking no further than a foot’s length into the future.

The Jewish quarter looked shabbier than I remembered it, the streets meaner, the dogs thinner. I became aware of people turning to stare at me, and could almost entertain the illusion that I was as fine as the red leather harness on my mule. As long as I kept looking ahead, as long as my chapped hands and broken nails were out of my line of vision, as long as I avoided thinking about the holes in my shoes and the frayed hem of my skirt. I had to detour around a collapsed building which had completely blocked Via di Sant’Ambrogio, so by the time I dismounted and knocked on the street door of my father’s house it was almost dark and the evening star showed very bright in the alley of purple sky between the roofs.

The door looked unkempt. Some of the timbers were splintered, almost as if an axe had been taken to them, though halfheartedly. The
mezuzah
my mother and I had carried from Toledo was still fastened to the doorframe, but at a crazy angle and swinging slightly in the breeze which had arisen with the sunset. I reached up to straighten it, though I could not really see what I was doing. No lamps appeared to be lit in the courtyard. I knocked a second time and was rewarded with the whisper of soft shoes on the courtyard tiles and a shrieking of unoiled hinges which made the mule waggle its ears in distress as the wicket was opened from within.

“I’m sorry,” said an old woman’s voice, “I can’t lift the bar; it’s that bent. You’ll have to come in by this door.”

“Mariam!” She was more bent than I remembered her, and fatter, and the light of her torch found out the pleats and creases of flesh around her eyes and mouth without mercy. For the second time that day I was confronted by someone who looked as though she had seen a ghost. “Mariam, don’t you know me? It’s Esther.” My voice sounded thin and wheedling, like that of a complaining child.

“You can’t stay here,” she said, darting a glance over her shoulder.

“What?”

Before she had a chance to explain herself I heard Eli’s voice from across the courtyard. “Who is it, Mariam?” He sounded both fearful and resigned, as though he had plenty of evening visitors and none of them welcome. Where was my father? Mariam appeared at a loss for a reply. I stepped past her into our courtyard, clutching my sleeping baby before me like a shield.

“Good God,” said Eli, then muttered a quick prayer to ask forgiveness of the Lord for calling Him by name. “I am astonished you have the nerve to come here.”

“What do you mean? Where is Papa?” Mary’s welcome at the inn at Bethlehem might have been warmer than this.

“As if you didn’t know,” thundered Eli, his ear locks quivering, his open mouth an angry gash among the black curls of his beard. Ear locks? When had he started to wear those? Papa always kept his beard and sideburns neatly trimmed.

“I don’t know,” I said. My voice shook. Eli’s coldness, and then this sudden rage, had frightened me.

“Ser Eli, perhaps…” began Mariam.

“You are forbidden to speak. What are you doing outside the women’s quarter anyway?”

Women’s quarter? What was going on here?

“There was no one else to answer the door.”

“It would have been better not to answer it.”

With an exasperated sigh, Mariam stumped off towards the kitchens, though the set of her shoulders was anything but acquiescent.

“Eli, what is going on here? Call my father. He will not shout at me this way.”

“Our father is dead, Esther. Will you pretend you did not know?”

The courtyard seemed to lurch beneath my feet like the deck of a ship. I staggered, or perhaps I only imagined I did, because no hand reached out to steady me. I tried to take a step towards Eli, but he held arm across his face as though to protect himself from me.

“I did not know,” I whispered, bowing to kiss my baby’s head, feeling my only comfort in the warmth of his skin beneath his bonnet. “When? How did it happen?”

“Look around you.” Eli flung out his arm. I looked at my surroundings. The fountain, I now saw, was clogged with broken bricks from its supporting basin, which looked as though a giant, angry child had taken a stick to it. Many of the courtyard tiles were cracked or splintered. Tethering rings had been torn from the walls, bringing down clumps of stucco. The wisteria around the door to the vestibule, which had been my father’s great pride, though still living, now lay on the ground, smashed trellis-work poking out from among clumps of foliage and gnarled branches. “This is your lover’s work,” said Eli, spitting out the word “lover” with utter contempt. “All Rome knows it, and all Rome knows why. And you have the gall to come here, pretending innocence, asking for our father. You disgust me.” His gaze flicked over the baby in my arms, his eyes behind their lenses hard as pebbles. “That is his, I suppose. Oh, don’t try to deny it. I saw you, you know, sitting with his hand on your knee. I do not need my eyeglasses for everything.”

I sensed other eyes watching me from the house, flitting between half-closed shutters, gleaming in the arched shadows of the arcade. I felt small and shabby and foolish. What could I say? That I had my lover’s child but not his confidence? I kept silent.

“Now get out. Go to him. Share his fate if you have a single loyal bone in your body. May the Judge of Men have pity on you for I cannot. I no longer have a sister.” He turned his back on me and was swallowed up in the dusk gathering beneath the porch, the skirt of his dark robe catching on a twisted finger of wisteria as he went inside and the door banged shut behind him. At a loss what to do next, I simply stood where I was. Despite Don Jofre’s warning, I supposed I must go to the Vatican. I had nowhere else. Donna Adriana might receive me, perhaps, but the palace of Santa Maria had appeared to be empty when I had passed it earlier in the day. Besides, Donna Adriana was married into the Orsini and had very likely decided it was wiser to throw in her lot with them than with her Borgia relatives now Alexander was dead and Cesare so desperately ill. I would have to go to Cesare, whatever the risk. He could not refuse Girolamo now. He needed a son. If he were to die, what use to him was an infant daughter in France? Night was falling fast. I must make haste.

“Miss Esther.”

“Mariam?” I found myself whispering also, straining my eyes to see where Mariam was hidden.

“This way. Towards the kitchens.”

As I approached the arch in the courtyard wall which led through to the kitchen block behind the house, a hand shot out and grabbed my arm. “Quickly,” said Mariam. “Come to my room. No one will think to look for you there.” I realised the truth of this with some shame; I had never been to Mariam’s room, had never even considered how and where, in the warren of buildings behind the main house, she lived. I resolved to do better, when Cesare was well again, and everything returned to normal, and he set Girolamo and I up in our own house in Rome.

Mariam half dragged me, stumbling along dark, unfamiliar paths, under a lintel so low even I had to duck to avoid hitting my head. While Mariam busied herself lighting a lamp, I stood listening to the roar of my blood in my ears and the comfortable rustle of roosting chickens somewhere nearby. A taper flared, then warm light spilled from a lantern with waxed paper shutters, revealing a homely room. The beaten earth floor was covered with a bright rag rug. Sturdy, well-polished stools flanked the hearth and a chest crudely painted with a pastoral scene of shepherds and shepherdesses doubled as a table in the centre of the room.