Sins of the House of Borgia (49 page)

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Two days of cold and rain were followed by a last, soft breath of summer. Grape picking began on the terraces below the castle, and in the castle’s own orchard we were all suddenly busy gathering pears and early apples and fat, golden apricots that basked against walls as warm as flesh. After the storms, and an apathy induced by low cloud and grey light and smoking fires, we were imbued with a sense of urgency, a sense we could not stay here forever.

In Rome the conclave had begun to elect a successor to Cesare’s father and among those anxiously awaiting its outcome were no doubt many of the men dispossessed by Cesare in his conquest of the Romagna. Yet as we cleaned and bottled the fruit, we women and children laughing and singing and gossiping around the great trestle table in the kitchen, with its knife scars and the smooth dents made by years of kneading, we knew we were also at the centre of something here. A web of information spun out from Nepi and back again, embassies arriving daily, sometimes hourly, from all over Italy and beyond, messengers coming and going, sometimes in Cesare’s livery and bearing sealed letters, sometimes anonymously dressed and carrying nothing.

I thought he had forgotten Girolamo, and for now I was content to leave it that way because I knew when I saw him again I would have to find out the truth about Lucia and I was not sure I had the courage for it. Despite Monna Vannozza’s hostility, I enjoyed special status among the women in the castle as the mother of the duke’s son. They treated me as if I were, indeed, his mistress, and I was content to prolong the make-believe. Perhaps, if we all pretended hard enough, it would, somehow, become true. So, when I unexpectedly found myself face to face with him in the garden, my heart did something complicated which had as much to do with dread as desire.

“You see, Violante,” he said, waving an ebony cane in my direction, “I defy the riddle of the Sphinx by walking on three legs at midday.” Clearly his joints were still plaguing him, though he had put on a little flesh and had some colour in his cheeks, and his smile, fringed by the rough regrowth of his beard, had the fierce merriment of a pirate’s. I had come outside to find somewhere peaceful to feed Girolamo, to rest my back against warm stones after hours stooped over the kitchen table. He was accompanied by a whole retinue of people. His secretary, Agapito, recently returned from Rome, and Torella, conferred together as they walked like a pair of black crows. One small page was almost hidden behind a pile of cushions while another staggered beneath a load of books and a guitar. A demure girl with bony wrists balanced a wine jug and goblet on a tray while managing to keep a long-handled fan tucked beneath one arm.

I curtseyed. “I am glad to see you on your feet, my lord.”

“I am feeling a good deal stronger. Come and sit with me. Introduce me to your son.”

A daybed had been set up for him in a lemon grove overlooking terraces of olive trees knotted like dark fists against the red earth. The leaves of the lemon trees gleamed against a creamy blue sky, though we were too high up here for good lemons and the fruit was still green, its scent acerbic and cleansing. We waited while his servants arranged the bed with cushions and blankets. Girolamo began to grizzle. I tried to soothe him, stroking his downy head and whispering to him, but I was tense, anxious Cesare would lose patience with a crying baby and dismiss us, and my hungry son could smell milk.

“I shall sing to him,” said Cesare, and cleared his throat. He tried a few words of some nursery song but quickly gave up. “I cannot. My voice is weak since my illness.”

“It will recover. You sing pleasantly, my lord, as I recall.”

“Well more pleasantly than that child of yours at any rate. No, two behind my back, boy,” he snapped at the page arranging the cushions. “And put the wine there, where I can reach it,” he added, exchanging a look with the demure girl which I wished I had not seen.

“I’m sorry. He’s hungry,” I said.

“Then feed him.”

I felt myself beginning to blush.

“Here. If I sit a little further back, there is room for you at the end of the bed. What is it? You think I have never seen a mother nursing a baby before? By God’s merciful ears, woman, stop up his mouth before he deafens me.” He said this as though he was rather proud of the fact that Girolamo was capable of deafening him. “The rest of you, leave us. Master Agapito, prepare the letters we were speaking of and bring them here to me for signature.”

With a flurry of bows his retinue departed, melted away among the lemon trees as though they had never been there, as though the tree sprites had arranged this bower for us, with its cedar-scented cushions, the books in their jewelled bindings, the silver wine jug, the slender-waisted Spanish guitar leaning beside the bed.

Cesare watched me with almost the same hungry intensity as Girolamo as I unfastened my bodice and put my son to my breast, and I knew what he was concealing by the self-conscious way he took a book from the pile beside him and opened it in his lap. But all he said was, “My sister’s clothes suit you.”

“Thank you.” I gave him a smile, yet the look he returned me seemed curiously full of pain. I reached out and touched his foot, and perhaps because of the warmth of his skin through the fine stocking, or because of the scent of lemons, or a bird singing somewhere as if it was spring, or the delicious sensation of my baby’s mouth tugging at my nipple, instead of asking him about Lucia and the cut dancing shoes, I said, “I still love you.” Almost as though he had told me he was no longer fit to be loved, with his disintegrating state, his wasted body and flayed skin and the way his skull showed so white and bony when he pulled off his cap and raked his fingers through the stubble of dark red hair.

And once the words were out, it was as though all the words that had been knotted up so tight inside me began to unravel, and I could not stop. “Let me stay with you. I wouldn’t ask much, just to see you sometimes. We could have more sons. I’d be discreet; I’d never embarrass you or your wife. I’d marry myself, if that’s what you wanted, someone older, and respectable. I wouldn’t expect you to be faithful, or even to love me, particularly. But I’d like to sleep the night with you sometimes, and wake up next to you in the morning. All I want is to be allowed to love you or I might…I don’t know…stop breathing or something.”

Girolamo’s mouth slackened around my nipple, his eyes closed, and he began a sweet, soft snoring. Instead of covering myself, I turned towards Cesare, offering him my body, my breasts no longer the shallow pads of rebellious flesh he had caressed in his sister’s orange garden but swollen with purpose, the nipples tender and erect under the teasing touch of the breeze. I was as beautiful as Helen, or as Eve when Adam’s eyes were first filled with her. The memory of Cesare’s touch illuminated my skin; I felt the warm weight of his belly on mine, the sharpness of hip against hip, the sweet pain of him inside me, his tongue in my mouth tasting of rosemary as though it were all as real as it had been then.

For a moment he was still; everything was still except my heart banging in my chest and the light dancing among the lemon leaves. Then he whispered, “No,” and held up his hands to ward me off. “Do you really think this is what she had in mind, the woman who did her duty but spoke to you of love?” His eyes held mine with the fastidiousness of a monk.

He learned to listen, his mother had said, to the click of a beetle crossing a paving stone, to the thin screech of my shame crawling across my skin. I turned my back on him, hunched over my nakedness as I attempted to rearrange my clothing, but my hands were shaking so badly I fumbled all the hooks and laces. “Forgive me.”

“Give me the child,” said Cesare, not without kindness. He imagined, I suppose, that it was his forgiveness I was asking.

I turned just far enough for him to be able to take Girolamo from me, but I kept my face averted. “I usually…”

“I will unwrap him,” Cesare announced. “I wish to be sure his limbs are straight.”

“…unwrap him,” I finished, and the coincidence made us laugh. “Shall I do it?”

“I can manage.”

This I doubted, and watched anxiously as he pulled one of the cushions from behind his back, smoothed it over his lap, and lay the baby on it, then began to unwind his swaddling clothes. He completed the task with great assurance, and never a murmur from Girolamo who kept his eyes fixed on his father’s face then, free of his bindings, gave a little shriek of delight and pissed all over the cushion.

“Oh no.”

“It’s all right, he has a true aim. He managed to miss my clothes and his,” said Cesare, lifting Girolamo’s testicles with the tip of his finger then running a hand down his legs as if testing the soundness of a horse. “Nothing like a good piss in the open air, eh, Girolamo?”

“You are very patient with him, my lord.”

“Oh well, there were always a lot of babies around. You get used to it.”

“It is not the way in which you are generally seen, my lord, as a great patriarch.”

“I was not head of my family until recently,” he replied quietly. Then he gave a brittle laugh and scrubbed at his chin with the knuckle of his free hand. “And now I really need it, my doctors have even deprived me of my patriarchal beard.”

“I think it was a little neater than Moses’. And it is growing again. By the time Girolamo has his front teeth, I’m sure your beard will be the envy of Italy.”

“Just my beard, you think? This election worries me, Violante. Della Rovere must be a contender and he is the one man whose wit I fear. And he will never be my ally. What he wants is too close to what I want.”

“Whoever is pope needs a good gonfalonier. There is none better than you.”

“But alas, I have shown my hand. Everyone knows my ambitions extend well beyond collecting the vicars’ taxes to fill Saint Peter’s coffers. Della Rovere would as soon put a scorpion in his shoe as give me an army. Besides, he’d probably rather do the job himself. Aside from Ippolito, he’s the only cardinal I know who is more comfortable in armour than scarlet silk.”

“Ippolito?” I could not conjure an image of Ippolito in armour.

“Don’t be deceived by his smooth manners. He loves the machinery of war as much as Alfonso; he’s just better at hiding it. Young men must dissemble to get on in the world.”

“As you dissemble with me?”

“I have dealt with you as straight as I know how.” He sounded hurt.

Girolamo whimpered.

“I think he may be getting cold. Give him to me and I’ll dress him.” Cesare handed him back to me, and as I dressed him, I bent over to kiss his forehead, breathing him in, his scent of sour milk and vanilla and linen dried over smoky fires. “Then who is Lucia?”

“She is no one, a figment.” His answer was too quick, too pat. He was not even attempting to disguise his lie. It made me angry to think I did not deserve even a pretence of truthfulness, a pantomime of puzzlement and casting about in his memory for the name of some half-forgotten paramour.

“A figment you called on in your delirium. I found the shoes, Cesare, hidden among Donna Lucrezia’s things. The soles were cut just the way you cut mine.”

Now he did look confused. “What?”

“You took my shoes, when you were in a fever, and cut the soles to ribbons. Like this.” I carved the air in front of me into diamonds with the edge of my palm. “And there is a pair in the wardrobe just the same, with Donna Lucrezia’s things.”

“Well I’m not surprised. It’s a trick of hers to stop her losing her footing when she dances. It helps the shoes to grip the floor. Surely you have seen others of hers cut that way, or are you such an inattentive lady in waiting?”

“But you…” Kissed me, I was going to say, but the words stuck on my tongue. If I spoke of his kiss, it would dissolve in the air the way perfume does, or morning mist in sunlight.

“No wonder she sent you away.”

“She didn’t send me away, she…”

“Yes?” He linked his hands across his belly and waited. What could I say? What was the point of saying anything as he already knew the answer? I rose. I was going to leave. I would take a horse and leave Nepi this very day. I would return to Rome and cast myself on Eli’s mercy, renounce my conversion, and never again set foot among Christians. Cesare might be thrown into the Tiber like his brother Juan, or be elected Holy Roman Emperor, it would make no difference to me. They could live and die as they pleased, him, his sister, his mother, Angela, all of them with their cold glitter and their fatal charm.

Suddenly there were footsteps running towards us, thudding along the packed sand path. A voice shouting for Cesare.

“Where are you, brother? It’s over.
Habemus Papam.
” Don Jofre, flushed and out of breath, wiping the sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand. A messenger, whose face was a mask of white dust, skidded to a halt behind him and bowed.

“Who is it?” asked Cesare. His tone was calm, but a tic started up in his left eye and his fingers tightened their grip on one another. I suppose it must only have been seconds before Don Jofre replied, yet I stared at Cesare’s hands and thought of all they knew, of how to excite pleasure or tighten a garota, coax a horse, write a sonnet or sign a warrant of execution, and it seemed as though hours had passed before Don Jofre said, “Piccolomini,” and I realised I had been holding my breath.

We all looked to Cesare, awaiting his reaction, but he hesitated, seemed uncertain.