Sins of the House of Borgia (62 page)

“Can I do anything?” he asked, with laughter in his voice. I turned away from him. I should not have come. I should have gone straight to Donna Lucrezia.

“I found this,” I said, at last laying hold of a corner of the letter and drawing it out of the neck of my gown. As I handed it to him I was aware how warm it was to the touch, and how the vellum had bent to the shape of my body. Holding it in one of the shafts of light, fading now and more oblique as evening drew on, he scanned the letter quickly, his mouth tightening and a frown scoring itself between his brows as he did so.

“Where did you find it?”

“It fell out of one of Giulio’s books. I didn’t mean…it’s just that…” But how could I explain? This was not the time to tell him my story.

“You would have done better to put it straight back.”

“But if Giulio is planning to…” I could not bring myself to say it. “And Ferrante. They must be stopped. Don Francesco is clearly using them, perhaps because of madonna, perhaps on account of some new argument he has with the duke. And if they are caught, do you think he will protect them?”

“They are his brothers-in-law also,” he said, but he did not sound convinced. “But anyway, what has this to do with me?”

“I remembered what you said on the boat. About being Donna Isabella’s spy. I know it was said lightly, but all the same, if you have her ear, you could tip her off and she could tell Don Francesco and…”

“She’d be more likely to go straight to the duke or the cardinal. And she’d want proof; she’d want to know how I came by it.”

I had not thought of that. I wondered if I had thought of anything, except that the man with the fowls had reminded me of Gideon with his Hanukkah goose.

“Why not go to Donna Lucrezia? She clearly favours you, and she strikes me as the kind of woman who would be adept at smoothing over a feud.”

“She has been ill. I did not wish to upset her.”

“Well perhaps you could blame the messenger, this…” He scanned the letter to remind himself of the name. “…Pio. Just say you’re sure he got the wrong end of the stick but…”

“No!” I shrieked.

Gideon looked momentarily alarmed, but then an expression of understanding spread over his features. “Aha,” he said. “So you do have a sweetheart. I knew it.”

“No...no, you have it all wrong, Gideon. I have no sweetheart but…I would not wish to impugn Don Alberto falsely.” My explanation was lame, but how could I begin to justify my concern for Don Alberto’s good name? I suddenly, passionately did not want Gideon to know I was the cast off mistress of the disgraced Valentino, the mother of a son I was not thought competent to raise. I wished he could melt me down in his furnace as he might a poorly cast ornament and turn me into something new. I struggled, I blinked, I swallowed and gritted my teeth but I could not prevent the sobs that overwhelmed me.

Gideon pushed himself up from the workbench and gathered me into his arms. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “whatever I’ve said or done I didn’t mean to. I’m really, really sorry.”

He must, I thought, be a similar height to Cesare, because his collarbone pressed against my temple in just the same way as Cesare’s used to, but the fabric next to my cheek was homespun, not velvet, and spattered with wax. He smelled of woodsmoke and wool and rough wine, not the dark and dangerous seductiveness of jasmine and other men’s fears. A good man, I thought, with a mixture of disappointment and relief.

“It’s all right,” I said, lifting my face free of the folds of his tunic. I sniffed. He pulled a threadbare kerchief from his sleeve and offered it to me. I blew my nose and he laughed.

“Now you have a golden nose,” he said, which made me laugh too.

“Tell me, do you get your clothes laundered for free, so long as the laundress can pan the washing water for gold?”

“They are queuing up to wash my shirts. Can’t you tell?”

I plucked at the crumpled sleeve of his shirt which had, I supposed, once been white. Beneath it his arm was warm, its muscles hard and sinewy. Standing on tiptoe, I placed a kiss on his wide mouth with its lopsided smile. He started back with a baffled expression, making me feel ashamed.

“I should go,” I said. “You’re right, I should simply go to Donna Lucrezia and let her sort it out.” Our conversation had gone far enough, perhaps too far; I did not want to risk any further mention of Don Alberto Pio. I turned to leave.

“Wait,” he said, putting a hand on my arm. I stiffened; the fleeting bond forged by my tears was broken now, and his familiarity was unseemly. He withdrew his hand as though from a fire. “Do you fish?”

“What?” His question was so bizarre I turned back to face him, to see what might have prompted him to ask it.

“Fishing,” he said again, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. Which, of course, it was, in some people’s worlds. “Come fishing with me on Sunday.”

“I have to go to Mass on Sunday.”

“Not all day, surely.”

“Twice.”

“Good, then you can come.”

“I doubt madonna would permit it.” Though even as I said this, I knew madonna would not mind. I would make some formal excuse, plead illness perhaps, to explain my absence from the day’s round of needlework and readings from the lives of the saints, and she would wish me a speedy recovery. We would both know the other was lying and that, though she liked me, and sometimes confided in me, as I no longer had any currency in her marriage market, I was free to do as I pleased.

“She wants to see the finished medals. I will bring them tomorrow and we can persuade her together.”

“Why fishing? A lady would usually expect an invitation to admire a garden or listen to music.”

“So fishing will be something new and original for you. I’ll wager Ser Pio doesn’t take you fishing, or I would if I were a betting man.”

“I scarcely know Don Alberto Pio, honestly.”

Gideon gave a sceptical snort. “Now,” he said, “go, before it’s dark. I will see you tomorrow. And good luck.”

“Good luck?”

“With the letter.”

I had almost forgotten it. I had been thinking about fish.

As I turned out of the alley towards the Corte, a figure emerged from the shadow of the arcade and stepped in front of me. With his cap pulled over his eyes and his cape swathing the bottom half of his face, I did not immediately recognise Ferrante.

“Violante.”

I flinched. My hand flew involuntarily to my breast where I had replaced the letter.

“It’s me, Ferrante. Nothing to fear.” Lowering his cloak, he revealed an ironic smile which did nothing to dispel the anxiety in his eyes. “I will escort you back.”

“That is most courteous of you.” My skin prickled with sweat; perhaps the ink would run and Don Francesco’s dangerous words would become no more than a black smear on my skin. Ferrante offered me his arm. I took it.

“Thank you for helping Giulio. He has so little confidence and you have been very kind to him.”

“I count myself his friend.”

“In all company?”

“I would like to think so.”

“Then you should return to him what you have taken.”

“Me? I have taken nothing.” My voice sounded forced and unnatural. I felt the pressure of the letter like a stone on my chest.

“Oh well, perhaps I was mistaken.” His tone was light, conversational, but he pulled his elbow in to his side, trapping my hand against his ribs. “As you profess yourself to be Giulio’s friend, doubtless there is nothing to worry about.”

“I hope not, Ferrante, I really do.”

We had almost reached the Corte by this time, but at the gate Ferrante steered me away and we continued walking along the palace wall. Dusk thickened in the piazza and the crowds of evening shoppers thinned out as the merchants put up their shutters and prepared to count their money. Ferrante and I, shrouded in the half-light, might have been the only people in the world, and it crossed my mind to wonder if he intended to kill me, to slip his knife between my ribs or snap my neck. The thought calmed me, because, if that was his intention, there was nothing I could do about it. Like all the Este brothers, Ferrante was a big man.

He stopped then and turned to face me as though he had come to some decision. I thought of Gideon and wondered how long he would wait for me on Sunday before giving up. I wondered about pain, and praying, and whether, in any deep recess of his heart, Girolamo would ever remember me.

“You could join us,” said Ferrante. Interpreting my dazed silence as permission to continue, he said, “help us get access to Alfonso and Ippolito and we will give you your son back.”

My heart lurched. “How?”

“Once they are…out of the way, I will be duke. We could marry. I would have to have a wife, I suppose, for form’s sake, and what better for me than a woman who already has a son? I would make Girolamo my heir. He could be the next Duke of Ferrara, think of it.”

I tried to think of it, but my mind seemed to be a whirl of dust in which shapes and possibilities loomed but never became clear. Then, to my astonishment, Girolamo’s father came to my rescue. I thought how he had taken my son from me, how he and Donna Lucrezia had packed him off to Carpi as though he were no more than a gift of carriage mules or sugared
cedri.
If I agreed to Ferrante’s proposal, I was surely no better. I, too, would be using Girolamo for my own ends.
You follow love,
said Mariam, and sometimes it takes you in the opposite direction to the one on the signpost.

“No, Ferrante, I’m not getting involved.”

“Do you have the letter?”

“I’ve told you, I’m not getting involved, and you and Giulio should stop now before any more harm is done. You merely add a bruise to a wound.”

Abruptly Ferrante dropped my arm and slumped against the wall beneath one of the Corte’s high, barred street windows. “God I’m tired of this,” he said. “I don’t want to be duke. Can you imagine it? I just wanted to help Giulio and now…well, the whole thing is out of hand.”

“Go away for a while. Go to the baths at Porretta. They have entertainments to your taste there, do they not?”

“I never cease to be amazed by you, Violante. How would a young lady like you know what goes on at Porretta?”

“Don Francesco has spoken of it.”

“In front of ladies?”

“For the duchess’s…elucidation.”

He sniggered. “I tell you, Violante, you and I would make an altogether more upright duke and duchess than Alfonso and his lady, one all day in the whorehouse and the other being titillated by stories from the baths at Porretta.”

“Never speak of it again, Ferrante. Go away, and tell Giulio to go too.” I turned and walked away from him.

“What will you do?” I heard him call after me, but pretended I had not.

***

Donna Lucrezia was silent for a long time while she read the letter, then turned back the page and read it again. Though she was pale, I did not fear for her health because at the same time her features settled into an expression of shrewd and determined calculation, one of those expressions that thinned and honed her face until it reminded me of her brother’s.

“Leave us,” she commanded her ladies. Angela hesitated. “You too,” said madonna, and Angela slammed down her hand of cards on the table. She cast me a venomous glance over her shoulder as she left.

“Look out of the window,” madonna ordered me. “Look for open shutters anywhere in hearing distance and make sure no one is on the moat. They were dredging earlier.” The moat was dredged every spring to keep its depth constant and the water clean so it did not smell too much in the hot weather; every spring my heart remembered the shuttered, blank-eyed mask Cesare had turned on me as he stepped on to the ravelin and emptied Ser Torella’s basin, and I feared the discovery of the dead child’s tiny bones. An irrational conceit; how many bones had sunk into the silt of the moat over the years, what was there to distinguish hers from those of a dead pet or the remains of a meal cast out from the kitchens?

“You must tell me everything you know about this,” said madonna as I drew the shutters close behind me as a precaution, though I had not spotted any evidence of spies. But spies are everywhere in courts; they are the essence of courts as wood is the essence of a tree and without them courts would be something different.

I told her how I had discovered the letter, and about the time I had visited Giulio and found Alberto Pio in his company, and as much else as I could think of, although I did not mention my visit to Gideon d’Arzenta. And I did not mention my conversation with Ferrante.

“Well Pio is easy to deal with,” she said as I completed my account. “Find a slave and have him sent for.” Although Girolamo had been dispatched to Carpi with his nurse, a valet and a gaggle of tutors, Don Alberto had remained in Ferrara; his reasons were now obvious. “Then go and fetch my brother’s letters. You know where I keep them.” She unfastened the key to her bureau from her girdle and handed it to me. I think she had always believed it would comfort me to know where the letters were; sometimes I wondered if she intended me to read them, though I never did.

By the time I had returned with the leather case, so slim you would never notice it beneath the bureau’s false bottom unless you knew it was there, Don Alberto was standing before madonna looking a little like a rabbit caught in a bright light. Don Francesco’s letter lay on her card table, tossed casually among the discarded hands of
cacho
and heaps of small coins
.
Every time she glanced at it, she pulled Don Alberto’s gaze in the same direction, towards his own name inscribed there as if on a warrant.