Wolves in Winter (28 page)

‘The night you took the Rocca, sir. I gave you that.’

‘You were not dressed as a maid.’

‘My lady insisted. She thought I might escape, but I would not leave her.’

‘Pity.’

His hand strayed at my throat now, the leather tracing the length of my collarbone. I felt my breath still inside my chest, the frantic pumping of my heart slowing, slowing, until all the blood
in my body seemed to flow where his fingers travelled, red as a comet’s tail.

‘You are a maid, then.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘As I said, a pity. I had thought of that boy. But you will do.’

My neck was held in his palm, he turned me until my back was against him and I clutched at the chair to keep myself from falling. I felt the silk of the blue dress rising against my thighs.
There was nothing to protect me. His mouth was warm against my skin.

‘Yes. You will do very well.’

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
HAT NUBBY-BONED LITTLE CLERK WHO HAD COME TO
Forli to treat for an alliance with Florence told me that he had warned the
Countess. The best fortress in the world, he told her, was nothing without loyalty. No stronghold could withstand the force of a people’s hatred. Caterina had learned this, that the respect
and love she believed her people to bear for her was no more than craven fear. The cruelties her vengeance had inflicted on Forli when her husbands had been murdered had never been forgotten, and
when the moment came for the people to forgive her, that forgiveness was withheld, and the gates of Imola and Forli were opened to Valentino. She believed that her Sforza sword and her Sforza will
were stronger than fortune, but she could not hold the Rocca. It burned because love and loyalty were nothing to her against her pride. Perhaps I should have warned him too, Machiavelli, that he
would have dealings with Valentino, and that in the end princes lost the love of their people because they did not see us as people at all.

So when everything else was taken from Caterina, her lovers and her children, her titles and her jewels, her home and her state, she laid me out for Valentino as casually as a gambler throwing
down a card in a tavern. She took my love and my loyalty to her and she used them as she would, caring nothing for me, seeing only the slave who existed to serve her. I saw all this as I stumbled
back along the passages of the Palazzo Numai. I saw it as I clutched my blue gown around me to stanch the ruby of blood that slid between my thighs. She had known exactly how it would come out.

I remembered the scandalised reports we had heard from her spies in Rome about Valentino’s debaucheries, how his banquets were served by naked courtesans, how he had taken his own sister
to his bed, how as his power increased he became ever more shameless about his tastes and ever more voracious in his desires. I thought of the love charms we had brewed at the Rocca, of the noises
I had heard from her bedroom at night. Had the door been left ajar, even then, to goad me or to teach me? Her body was her last weapon, and when she saw it would no longer serve, she made use of
me. She had seen so far ahead, and I, fool, had followed her blindly. The boy’s clothes, the presentation of the ruby, the bungled pouring of the philtre, all this she had seen and planned,
and it came out as she wished it. She thought that good little Mora, poor half-finished thing, would serve in her place, because she knew, as I did not, that sometimes more pleasure can be found in
the broken will of ugliness than the willing submission of even great beauty. But Caterina, unlike me, was not accustomed to losing. I was glad now that I had not told her the worst of
Adara’s treachery. She did not know that her little slave had spent the last weeks of her childhood in a brothel. She knew nothing of my dreams of the man in black. I had thought, in those
frenzied moments before the battle for Ravaldino began, that we were alike, she and I; but now I saw that the call I had felt through the shadows of my blood was the call of his coming.

I did not cry. I had no more tears for Caterina. My lady was lost to me. When I saw how she planned to use and discard me, to barter me for her freedom, all my love and hope and trust were
sliced away, swift as a butcher’s knife on the throat of a screaming pig. It was a child’s plan, hers; she had not the measure of her man. But I did, now. And I saw as clear as my lost
dreams how I would destroy her.

*

That first night, she was all gentleness and sympathy. She sent away the maid and lifted the blue gown from me with her own hands. She sponged the blood from my back and thighs
as tenderly as if she were my mother, and my heart was raw that the softness of her attention, which just an hour ago would have made me rejoice in the certainty that my love was returned, was now
merely the last act of a shameful masquerade. But she mistook my tears for those of any maid who has lost her maidenhead, and held me to her breast and soothed me, and took me to sleep in her bed,
where I was sure to lie as calm as a child who has sobbed its grief into dreams. She was even a little ashamed, as Adara had been shamed, that she had sold me. When Valentino’s man came for
me after supper the next day, she held me tightly to her and whispered that I had to be brave, that if I could endure I should save us both. And I answered my lady stoutly that she need not fear
for my courage and that I should see us both safe, for had I not promised that I should never leave her? The next night, she suggested that perhaps I might wear my boy’s breeches when I was
summoned, and the next she rouged my lips as eager as a bawd. And then I followed the man to Valentino’s chamber, where the fire was banked high, and waited for the soft click of the closing
door.

It was never love, what happened between us. Even I was not so starved as to mistake the slaking of his hunger for that. It seemed that all my life, since I left my papa’s house in Toledo,
I had been waiting and dissembling. First in the kitchens of the Medici palazzo, then in the porch with poor Margherita, in Maestro Ficino’s study, in the
farmacia
at the Rocca. I had
protected myself by becoming what people believed me to be, by performing the role they believed themselves to have chosen for me – and it had brought me to this. This was my fate, this is
what I was cursed to become. I did not mourn for myself any longer, instead I felt at last that I knew what I was and I would no longer be ashamed of it. So I set myself to study what Valentino
wanted of me, and whilst I made certain to keep fearful and modest before Caterina, I cannot deny that it gave me pleasure.

For he was lovely, Cesare, as beautiful as all the stories had claimed, as purely and cleanly made as that snow statue I had seen once in a Florentine courtyard. The skin of his face and neck
was tan from his season’s campaigning, but the flesh beneath his collar was pale as milk. He liked me to bite him, to draw a thin skein of blood down his chest and follow it with my tongue.
There could be sweetness in pain, he showed me, even as his flesh tore at mine and I turned my mouth to fill it with the leather of his gauntlet to keep myself from crying out, even as his pleasure
flowed into my wounds. He left me a virgin, though that too I kept from Caterina. How could he leave me anything else? Those few days, I was drunk with him, drunk with his scent in my mouth and the
echoing throb of his touch on all the secret places of my body, and though I feared him still, it was soothing to make myself his creature, to feel that, at last, I was where I belonged. Under his
hands, I no longer felt ugly. The copper smoothness of my slight body and the slenderness of my thighs were no longer a source of shame. He desired me. And as I watched Caterina, the lines in her
face, the slackness of her childbearing belly, I felt a stab of ugly jealous pride that it was I and not she who he took to his bed.

When I woke in the mornings, stunned from the black sleep into which I always fell after I left him, I could believe that I was in a labyrinth, a nightmarish harem from some Eastern tale. I had
to trick my way out or feel the softness of a silk sack enclose me before I was thrown helpless into the dark waters forever. I knew that I must not lose my head. Caterina had allowed her passion
for her low-born husband to drive her to the vengeance and her state had paid the price. I was determined not to do the same. I had only days to turn his caprice for me to account.

I should make a whore of her as she had made of me. It was not difficult to leave a few of her possessions in his rooms for the servants to find and allow kitchen gossip to do the rest. Soon
they were saying in the palazzo that the Countess had not defended her virtue so well as her fortress, that it was she, not I, who had succumbed to Cesare’s lust. What else would they believe
of a woman who had been so notoriously free with her lovers? I was a nothing, merely her odd-looking slave. No one would suspect that the soon-to-be Duke of the Romagna might indulge himself with a
freak when he had one of the most famous beauties of Italy in his power. I thought that the French might not be so gallant in their protection of her if they thought her shamed, and I was
right.

And then, I had to make Cesare believe in me, to need me. I needed to find what it was that made him afraid. For all of his splendour and magnificence, for all that glory seemed to follow him
like stardust in a comet’s tail, for all that men believed he moved so swift and silent as to be invisible, for all that his cruelty made him beloved for his mercy, I knew that Cesare was
fearful. His Spanish blood ran hot with superstition, with distrust at the magnitude of his fortune. I of all people knew well enough that Spaniards answered to older gods than the one who ruled in
Rome. He was careless with his papers, for why should he think an
esclava
could read? He received letters from the astrologers his father kept at the Vatican in defiance of his state, filled
with the kinds of occult signs and predictions I had not seen since my days with Maestro Ficino. If his sleep was fretful, he reported his dreams; he was as suspicious of omens as an old peasant
woman. They had played so high, he and his holy father, they believed that they could tame chance to their will, yet Cesare was shackled by the incomprehensibility of his future. Somewhere, he
believed that he would die alone, as poor and hunted as he had rendered so many others. Fate tormented him like a courtesan, and he followed her with all the desperate expectation of an apprentice
boy clutching at the robe of his first whore in a Trastevere
bagnio
. I had to make myself strong where he was weak, to convert chance to certainty, to convince him that I could conjure
Fortune as clear as a Venetian balance sheet. I could comfort him, I saw, when he woke sweating and shaking from the nightmares that plagued him, his handsome face turned to me drawn with pleading,
desperate to know if I could make his lady kind. But how? My sight was gone, if it had ever existed, and I could not risk a mistake. But in the way of the powerful, he was incurious. I existed to
serve his pleasure and that was all.

Caterina’s condition was not officially that of a prisoner, but a guest of the French king. She was permitted to read and write letters, to walk abroad, discreetly guarded, if she chose,
though the foul winter weather and the wreck of her city dissuaded her from that. I knew that she was afraid of being sent to France, that once Valentino had installed his Spanish garrison and
their governors in Forli he would move on to his planned conquests in the remainder of the Romagna. Her presence would be a hindrance in the field, she could too easily become the focus of
rebellion. Better send her north, to stitch away the rest of her life in a French castle, for the King of France would never release a Sforza while he planned to hold Milan.

So one morning, Caterina asked for a candle and held it to a letter.

‘It’s good to be a woman, Mora,’ she remarked as the heat of the flame brought out the characters crammed beneath the dispatch, which Valentino’s spies would already have
seen. Lemon juice, I thought rather contemptuously. Not sophisticated.

‘They think us such fools, you see. Incapable. It’s coming now, look.’

She read the message and turned to me, her eyes bright.

‘Oh, it is too cruel, and too wonderful. A month ago and my standard would still be flying over Ravaldino. My uncle has an army, twenty-five thousand men, and he will move on
Milan.’

I feigned to share her delight, my mind working desperately.

‘Is this known, yet, Madonna? Could Valentino know of it?’

‘My man writes from Chiavenna. They will not learn of it for several days.’

‘My lady, you wish to remain in Italy? To see your children and fight for your state?’

‘Of course. But there will be no need for fighting. My uncle will take Milan and Valentino will be forced north.’

‘Then it is wonderful indeed.’

She was so happy then that she embraced me, and I endured her touch with more disgust than I had ever felt at Cesare’s vicious caresses. She had trusted me, as once I had trusted her. Now,
though, I saw that she had given me all that I needed.

*

‘Monsieur le Duc will have peaches to his supper this evening.’

‘Peaches!’ screeched the cook. ‘And where am I to get peaches this season?’

‘I know not nor care not,’ I answered pertly, ‘bottled peaches is what he wishes. Find some.’

I left him, muttering about what you expected from the manners of a whore’s maid, and took a turn in the city. In the ravaged cathedral of San Mercuriale I found something that would serve
me and I buried it at the threshold of the palazzo, breaking my fingernails as I prised up a flag. Caterina was tense, pacing her room, sitting down occasionally to scribble at a letter, then up
and pacing again, looking to the window, alert for the prospect of news. The coded message from Chiavenna she would not find, since I had taken the trouble to burn it. Slaves had no use for
reading, after all.

‘Please, Madonna, be patient. You will exhaust yourself. All will be well, you’ll see.’

‘Of course. I should rest.’