The Borgia Betrayal: A Novel (8 page)

“There has been a flurry of payments,” he murmured. Like any good custodian of his master’s wealth, it pained Renaldo to disperse it. Of late, he seemed to have suffered more than usual.

“To someone in particular?”

The steward shook his head. “A host of someones. Argus had fewer eyes than does our master.”

I smiled at the reference to the many-eyed guardian of Greek legend. But at the same time, I wondered whom Borgia was watching—and why.

“He had a visitor this morning,” Renaldo said. “Before he was even out of bed, one of his ‘eyes’ came to report. La Bella was disgruntled, so I heard. Word has it she is with child again.”

I had not known that and was grateful for the information, not to mention simply glad to hear it. La Bella had lost a baby the previous year and I held myself partly responsible, although I had managed at least to save her life.

“What was so urgent?”

Renaldo leaned a little closer. He spared a quick glance over his shoulder to make absolutely certain that we could not be overheard, then murmured, “Il Frateschi are in Rome.”

I restrained a shudder. The “Brotherhood,” as it was known, was a group of fanatical followers of the friar Girolamo Savonarola, the scourge of Florence who had appeared in that city three years before and had not stopped ranting since. According to reports Borgia received almost daily, the fiery Dominican’s sermons were attracting ever larger crowds drawn by his ravings against the rich and powerful, whom he blamed for every evil under the sun, and the Jews, who he claimed were allied with them. In particular, he decried the glory of the Medicis and their golden city where art and tolerance reigned supreme, calling it the Devil’s crucible. Their inability to silence him thus far only added to his aura of divine authority.

Most important, from my perspective, Savonarola and his
frateschi
were fierce enemies of everything to which we of Lux were devoted. Should they ever prevail—God and all the Saints forbid it—we would be the first to go to the stake.

“Surely they would not dare to come here.” Even as I spoke, I weighed the likelihood that I was wrong. If Savonarola believed that Borgia might truly be on the verge of being deposed, he might well want his followers to be as close as possible to the seat of papal power, the better to assure that one of their own would claim it.

And that would mean the end of everything—most particularly of any chance that the light of knowledge would lift humanity out of the mud in which we had been mired for so long. We would sink back into the darkness, possibly never to emerge again. For all his failings—and I was only beginning to suspect how vast those were—worldly, rapacious Borgia was our strongest bulwark against that.

Moreover, as much as Il Papa suspected that his rival della Rovere might be behind the attempts on his life, Il Frateschi could also be responsible. There was no telling how far such fanatics might go or what assistance they might acquire.

“Who knows what they dare?” Renaldo replied. “I know only that our master is beset by many challenges, some of his own making to be sure but others pure villainy by lesser men who would bring him down the better to prop themselves up.”

I could not have put it better myself. Truly, Borgia created many of his own difficulties, but his enemies were too often men who would see the world in ruins, if only so that they could harvest the wreckage.

“Then we must make sure they do not succeed, Master d’Marco.”

For all that he went about twitching like a nervous ferret, Renaldo had a spine. He straightened, looked into my eyes, and said, “Indeed we must, Donna Francesca. He depends on us.”

“Speaking of—” I dropped my voice another notch, causing the steward to lean closer. “Do you have any idea,” I asked, “where His Holiness has been going?”

“I’m not sure I follow you—”

“His secretaries have reported that there are times when he slips out of his office and effectively disappears.”

“La Bella—”

“He isn’t with her or anywhere else that can be discovered. You understand this is not good for his security.”

I trusted Renaldo understood that and more. It would not do for Borgia to be involved in anything that we, his faithful servants, did not know about. How then could we assure his comfort and well-being?

Not to mention our own.

“I will see what I can find out,” the steward assured me.

I just had time to assure him of my gratitude before a secretary appeared to summon the steward into the inner sanctum. He bustled off with a proper air of importance. I made my way more slowly back in the direction of the kitchens, where I continued my inspection of the newly arrived provisions. It was all well and good to contemplate how della Rovere could be poisoned, but with the circumstances so dire, I had to take greater care than ever before to assure that Borgia would not be.

It was late afternoon when I finished. Weary as I was, I considered returning to my apartment for some much needed rest. But my conscience pricked, reminding me that while I lack the instinct for friendship that some enjoy, I make up for it with diligence. Duties too long neglected commanded my attention. With them in mind, I made my way to the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico.

7

Lucrezia sat among a nest of jeweled brocade, shimmering velvet, cloth-of-gold, and spun silver, like a glorious bird of paradise in her natural habitat.

She was crying. Her complexion, normally likened to alabaster tinged with rose, was mottled and tear-streaked. Her golden hair, usually arranged in ringlets around her heart-shaped face, was uncombed and in disarray. Her expression, indeed the entire disposition of her slender form, bespoke acute misery.

Her ladies hovered nearby in various degrees of anxiousness and ennui. Borgia had decreed that as the daughter of the reigning pope, Lucrezia must be properly attended. The great families had proved reluctant to offer up their daughters, widows, nieces, and so on for such service, but the second tier of social climbers and eager merchant clans had been happy to oblige. So far as I could gather, between them they had not mustered a single female who was useful in even a minor domestic crisis.

“He hates me!” Lucrezia cried when she saw me. “I cannot bear it! How can he be so cruel, especially just now when he knows how anxious I am?”

I did not attempt to answer but knelt in the shambles of exquisite fabrics and hugged her. She cried all the harder for several minutes as I patted her back and murmured soothingly.

“There, there,” I said, or something to that effect.

If all this strikes you as strange given my nature, let me say that the Pope’s daughter and I had known each other since I was an artless girl of nine years and she little more than a babe. Despite the difference in our social status, we had been drawn together in the shared experience of being only daughters of powerful men who, each in his own way, instilled fear in most people while showing us what we wanted to believe was only love and care. That was a bond that not even the greatest exigencies of our lives ever managed to break.

At length, her distress gave way to small, hiccupping sobs that fell finally into silence. She straightened a little and stared at me, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed.

In a whisper filled with bewildered despair, she said, “How
can
he? Only tell me that.”

A letter, its red wax seal broken, lay on the floor beside her. I picked it up with one hand and, after a quick glance, crumpled it away into the pocket of my underdress. The few lines I had read angered me greatly, but I was not about to reveal that.

“For pity’s sake,” I said as lightly as I could manage, “surely you know how Cesare can be? Your brother is as feckless as the fickle wind, blowing hot as Hades until he blows himself out.”

And in the process scorching all those foolish enough to care about his good opinion.

“He says that I am a traitor for marrying where our father says I must! He says I will rue the day I set eyes on Giovanni Sforza! He calls him a weakling, a drone, and a sodomist!”

My eyebrows rose at that last part for it was the first I had heard that the Lord of Pesaro liked boys. Indeed, I suspected Cesare had made the slander up out of whole cloth. But as to the rest … there was something to that.

“He even calls him a bastard,” Lucrezia concluded, a little more calmly. “Has it escaped his notice that so are we?”

“Cesare only notices what suits him,” I said, and summoned a smile. Gently, I wiped her tears away with my fingertips, then stood and held out a hand.

“Come now, you will make yourself ill. And look what you’ve done to all this lovely cloth. Your maids will be forever smoothing out the wrinkles and dabbing up the water spots.”

She rose and, glancing down at the mess she had made, had the grace to look abashed. “It was foolish of me—”

My point made, I moved to soothe her. “Anyone in your position would be upset. But you must understand, Cesare is a man—” In fact, he was a few months short of eighteen and, in my eyes at least, still very much a boy for all that he had risen to the occasion the previous year when I most needed his help. Apparently, he could not manage to do the same for his sister.

“—and men,” I went on, “have no understanding of what it means to be a bride.”

Neither did I, having done my utmost while my father was alive to convince him that I was unfit for matrimony. Not that I don’t appreciate men; as I have already revealed, I have a weakness for certain of them. But I value my independence above all else, in large part because it is only by keeping some distance between myself and others that I can hope to conceal the darkness within me, that which leads me to my peculiar trade.

“He says he won’t come to the wedding,” Lucrezia said with a final sniff. I took it as a good sign that she lowered her voice. Now that the worst was over, her ladies were hovering closer. No doubt they hoped to pick up some indiscreet remark from either of us that they could bear off in triumph and bray to the world.

“Of course he will come,” I assured her. “We both know that he would never hurt you like that.”

“But what if he causes a scene?” she asked with sudden consternation. “What if he even …
attacks
Giovanni?”

The possibility was not as outlandish as it might seem. And not, whatever you may think, because there was anything unnatural in the love Cesare and Lucrezia had for each other. Yes, I know the evil things that have been said about them. I also know that they were both incapable of acting as they have been accused of doing.

Besides, I shared Cesare’s bed often enough to be certain that no thought of his sister lingered there.

“He may be tempted to do something unforgivable,” I admitted, equally softly. “But in the end, he will not dare to set himself against Il Papa.”

Clasping my hand, she drew us both out of the disheveled room and into the walled garden beyond. At the same time, she gestured the ladies to stay behind, to their visible disappointment.

We walked a little distance along one of the gravel paths set between beds overflowing with spicy carnations, heavy-blossomed geraniums, climbing passion flowers, and delicate pansies stretching toward the sun. The paths intersected at the center of the garden where a stone fountain topped by a naked cherub sprayed a fine mist of water filled with miniature rainbows.

“How I pray you are right,” Lucrezia said as we settled on a stone bench near the fountain.

“But you must know that Cesare is very unhappy with Papa. He is furious that it is our brother Juan and not himself who is made a duke, and promised an army to lead as well as a grand marriage. That is the life Cesare wants for himself, not the life our father plans for him.”

Borgia intended for his eldest son to become a cardinal, never mind that he had yet to take holy orders. In due course, he meant for Cesare to become pope, leader not only of Christendom but of a Borgia dynasty ruling a unified Italy in which the great families and the powerful city-states would be shackled to Saint Peter’s throne.

All this may seem now like no more than a fever dream but I assure you it was entirely real. Borgia—Il Papa—may have been the one man with the vision and will to conceive so vast a reordering of our world but no one with any sense discounted the possibility that he could succeed.

Except for Cesare, who, though he deferred to his father in public, seemed bound and determined to defy him everywhere else.

“Even so,” I said, “he will do nothing to spoil your wedding day.”

However impetuous Cesare could be, I was reasonably certain that he could control himself for a handful of hours. But as to what would happen after that … I preferred not to think.

Lucrezia seemed to be of like mind for she mustered a smile. “I am sure you are right. At any rate, I must stop worrying about Cesare and think of happier things.” She leaned closer, confidingly.

“I finally know the date upon which I will become a wife, if only in name.”

This truly was valuable news. The date for Lucrezia’s wedding to Giovanni Sforza had been debated for weeks. Bets had been placed on when the ceremony would take place, with a sizable number of side wagers being placed on the chances that the wedding would never occur at all.

I had refrained from speculating in this particular area but I was still interested to know the final outcome.

“When is it to be?”

“Cardinal Sforza’s astrologers have determined that the twelfth of next month is the most auspicious day.”

“Have they…?” That would not please Borgia, who had wanted the marriage to take place later, when he hoped to be in a better position to determine if he wanted it to take place at all. Further, he could not abide astrologers. Il Papa had difficulty enough accepting that our heavenly father had any say in his personal fortunes. The notion that the alignment of the stars at the moment of his birth somehow shaped his destiny offended him mightily.

Lucrezia nodded. She seemed genuinely pleased.

“Giovanni will arrive two days before then,” she said. “There will be great celebrations to welcome him—a Mass in Saint Peter’s, a feast, followed by horse racing and other games. Of course, absolutely everyone will be there except me but Papa has said that I can be on my balcony to glimpse my husband as he rides past.”