Study came easily to her. She spoke four languages well. Without much effort she could hear in the rhythm of foreign tongues a certain implied meaning, even when vocabulary and the nuances of grammar escaped her. For a child with spotty tutoring, she engaged in her own private trivium: not grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, the traditional roster of subjects, but glamour, intrigue, and power. She followed the affairs of the court of the Pope with closer attention than most bishops. Once, when the Pope was indisposed, she even had managed the affairs of the Church for a short while, until she was prohibited by cardinals from signing a papal document with the question “Ubi est penna vestra?”—meaning not only Where is your pen? but also Where is your penis?
But she’d enjoyed governing, when the time arrived to try it. She’d spent those few months in 1498, when she was scarcely eigh-teen, as governatrice of Spoleto. Five long months there, married to one man, Alfonso of Aragon, and in love with another who would no longer have her. She was pregnant with the child who would be named Rodrigo, after her father, and she was saddled with the other one, the mortal mistake in her arms, the one who cried piteously at night, who wouldn’t be thrown over the edge of the aqueduct, all because of the meddlesome de Nevada . . .
Adult as she could be by now, at the age of twenty-six, she sat before the mirror and studied her face within it. Had so much happened in such a short time? In seven years? Vicente de Nevada, having learned of her residency there, had made his way to Spoleto, on the Umbrian flank of the Apennines. He had gone to hear Mass at the duomo. He had ventured forward and caught Lucrezia at the conclusions of the Sacrament. She’d been praying in front of Fra Filippo Lippi’s fresco, in which the Virgin hovers in robes of white and gold before God the Patriarch, who sets a crown of surpassing glory upon her head. Lucrezia had been jealous, not of the Virgin’s beauty, but of her crown.
“I beg to speak with the Donna Borgia,” said Vicente, in Spanish, and from her impious thoughts she had been torn, for the consolation of hearing the family tongue.
De Nevada asked for the governatrice’s intercession with her brother Cesare. De Nevada had a motherless child, and his profession was agriculture; might Cesare, out of feeling for a fellow Iberian, secure the immigrant a position, perhaps even a small landholding?
“Put the child in an orphanage till she’s older, and send her to be a nun when she’s ready,” decreed Lucrezia. “Neither my brother nor I have property we hand out for the asking. If you need work, Cesare is always looking for condottieri. A mercenary earns good pay and can usually find a war to fight. Besides, I don’t oversee my brothers’ rare administrations of mercy.”
Something in de Nevada’s expression—his refusal to consider farming the child out—made her feel a modest pity, though. She invited him to visit her in the castle. That afternoon, from a rampart, she watched the father and daughter make their way up the slope and be admitted to the interior courtyard.
There, despite a chill in the air, Lucrezia greeted them. She had dismissed her retinue of attendants and chaperones, and her husband was off hunting for the day. To prove her own motherliness, and as a badge of respectability, she kept the Punishment on her hip. He was docile enough until it proved inconvenient—his usual way.
She had arranged a table to be set with Castilian lace, and platters of fresh fruit and decanters of wine were at the ready. Vicente had the young girl by the hand. The young Bianca.
The child must have been three years old or so. Good-looking in her way, considering how lumpy and irregular children’s faces could be. The dark hair, the skin so white. Pale eyes, the color of water, set wide, and cunningly large, the way children’s eyes so often seem. The child was preternaturally self-possessed. She didn’t join the other urchins playing chase and seek games among the arches. She didn’t interrupt her father, pull at his sleeves, nor did she whine or fuss. She stood with both feet planted, her little stomach a smooth shallow bowl beneath the pleats of her green-black tunic. And while she stood and watched, too well behaved for belief, Lucrezia’s own Punishment thrashed in her arms, threatening to unbalance her onto the cobbles, maybe endanger the child growing within her.
“Let me help you,” said Vicente, a capable father. She despised him for having the nerve to assist without leave. But he had a natural touch, and the squirming toddler settled, and she hated Vicente for that talent too.
They exchanged a few remarks about life in Iberia, in Italy, about the weather and the church services in Spoleto. She asked why he had left his homeland in the first place. That might have been all. But Vicente had touched Lucrezia somehow, in some way she didn’t know—perhaps as a speaker of Spanish he reminded her of her brother, whose company she missed so? It was hard to say. And when the weather grew sharply colder, and a sudden squall fell like white nets around them, she found herself extending the hospitality of the castle to this newcomer. Spend a few nights, she had said; make your beds here. Until the snow lets up, at least. Little hope, really, of my finding you a foothold of property, but I can find you a bed and a meal.
That night, before Alfonso had approached her chamber to take his due as a husband, the Punishment squalled worse than ever. The wet nurses couldn’t calm him down, and she wouldn’t let them take him away for fear they would kill him before she had a chance. She would rather do the job herself so she could ensure that blame fell safely elsewhere. She’d thought it through often enough, hadn’t she? And here was de Nevada, a man of no apparent connections, presenting himself as a likely candidate. Fortune smiled on her, for once! She could accuse him and imprison him before morning, and no one would come forward to speak on his behalf.
Long after midnight, she wrapped a bunting around the sleeping child’s mouth to muffle any sudden cries, and she carried him down the steps of the courtyard and exited the palace by a side door. (She had seen that the guard would be deeply asleep thanks to a helpful powder in his evening ale.) She made her way across the brow of the mount, to where the bridge, stepping in Gothic arches on top of a Roman aqueduct, began its lofty walk from the castle, across the gorge carved out by the Tessino River, to the monastery on Monte Luco, the far side of the valley.
Even in the scatter of snow, her step was swift but sure, for she had taken the air and the views from the bridge many times before. It was guarded at the far end, she knew. But the near end was desolate. Not even a viper could swarm up the steep legs of the arches.
She went to where she judged the halfway point must be. She lay down the Punishment to unwrap him, to send him naked to his Maker, and good riddance—when, a whisper on snow, she heard a footstep or two coming from the direction of the castle, though no one could have seen her leave.
She turned and peered. A mist had come up on the valley’s western slope. If her pursuer was hidden from her, she must also still be hidden from him.
She hadn’t bargained at working hastily. Perverse to the last, the child chose this moment to wake. He kept writhing as she leaned against the edge of the rampart and readied herself to pitch the weight mightily, to clear the wide ledge in an arc and ensure fatality. She couldn’t get a firm enough footing. Damn. He seemed to have an animal’s instinct for what was happening.
Perhaps she would have to bash his head in first to reduce his form to dead weight. She gasped with the effort and drew her son back, prepared to batter the wall with his skull—and then the sound of nearer footsteps, a whisper becoming a rhythm through the rising mist.
It was Vicente. The one figured to stand as a culprit was interfering instead. He was aghast. He threw himself between her swinging arm and the wall, so the baby thumped hideously, but not damagingly, against his chest. “Are you mad?” hissed Vicente. “My lady Lucrezia.”
She slumped against the far wall with the back of her hand against her mouth. “Who are you? Where am I?” she quavered, working for time in which to gather her thoughts.
“You don’t know what you are doing,” he said. “Come, take my arm, and I’ll walk you to
safety.”
It wasn’t hard to appear besotted with sleep, for she was dizzy with fright. If anyone were to learn what she had been about to do . . . Even for a Borgia, the slaughter of a child was extreme. By the time they had reached the castle side of the aqueduct, however, she’d prepared a defense and a strategy.
“I’m slow to wake,” she said. “I suffer from fits of sleepwalking. It’s all as a dream, a horrid dream. Do me the honor of keeping my fretful condition a matter private between us. How lucky you were to come wake me and avert disaster.”
He saw her in the morning. At a table in the solar, he sat down with the young woman and her husband as they broke their fast. His little girl sat on his lap. The Punishment had been sequestered far enough away so his morning screams couldn’t be heard.
“I hope you slept well,” said Lucrezia’s hapless husband.
“Only so-so,” answered Vicente, studying the bread in his hands. “I had much on my mind and kept turning. I’m scarcely sure what I should do next. Donna Borgia,” he continued, looking her in the eyes, “I await your advice.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Lucrezia hastily, “about your predicament. I believe with a little attention, Cesare or I may yet be able to find you a small estate, conferrable upon certain conditions.”
“I thought you considered that impossible,” said Alfonso de Bisceglie, surprised at his wife.
“I couldn’t sleep either, and I put my mind to the task.” Her answer was brisk and the topic of conversation changed.
Thus had Vicente come into possession of Montefiore, after Lucrezia, privately, had had the previous owner smothered, to ensure the premises were available for new occupants.
Learning from her panic, Lucrezia had dismissed the Punishment from her life thoroughly as she had dismissed herself from her mother’s. In due course, she had given birth to Rodrigo, of more honorable lineage, of better disposition and capabilities than the Punishment. To protect him she had him raised far from herself too. There was reason, in his legitimacy, to worry about his prospects, and she wouldn’t see him besmirched by too close an association with her.
She looked at the mirror as these days, seven years past, reframed themselves. It was almost as if she could see the hills around Spoleto, dotted with ilex, lulled by the morose remarks of sheep. The palm trees, the threads of waterfall on the far slope of the canyon . . . She had never been able to guess why Vicente de Nevada had been awake and clever or bold enough to follow his royal hostess out of a dark guarded castle and across a mist-shrouded bridge. He had been certain enough of himself to leave his little girl behind, dozing under her blankets. And she had not been screaming through the night, with the pains of teething, of colic, of general disapproval of the world.
That same good little girl, now swaying her boyish hips at Cesare.
The Duchessa couldn’t bear what she had seen. Cesare was as good as dying—Lucrezia was no fool—and still the lecherous bastard had found the girl child alluring. Her own brother, the tenderest swift soldier ever to enter her bed—groping at a child. In a seizure of ire she gripped her stomacher and tore it. Good that he had bullied the priest off somewhere—probably to a local church with a real roof, so Cesare could take the sacrament in some sort of comfort. He enjoyed the penance almost as much as the sin. It didn’t matter where he had gone. He had left her, that much was clear. He was gone for good.
Sweeping up in a tempest of silks and ermine, before she knew what she was about, she pitched herself toward the door.
“Primavera,” she commanded. “Where are you? Someone, get that old cow up here. Isn’t it true that she has a grandson who is a hunter? Primavera. He will come and have an audience with me, as soon as he can wash the blood off his hands. Primavera. Does no one listen when I call?”
Primavera was out at the well, rinsing Bianca’s face. She heard Lucrezia Borgia bellow. Primavera’s lips set more firmly together. When, at last, she heeded the summons and stood to obey, her ankles shook.
Interview with an assassin
YOU appreciate the reward?” She looked down at the soft purse of coins in her hands and shifted it gently back and forth, to make the musical remark of the money within more alluring. He wasn’t used to being in the house, at least not farther than the kitchen. He stood as if before a magistrate and looked her in the eye. “Enough to ask about the service required.”
“Take the child from the house, deep into the woods, far beyond where anyone might find her.”
“There are woods enough to lose a child in.”
“I want her more than lost. I want her life.”
“The woods will take her life.”
“I want you to take her life.”
“She has seriously offended.”
“It’s not your place to ask why. Nor are you to find yourself capable of remembering this interview. You are a hunter. Wait until night has begun to fall, and take her life however you must.”
“You trust a lot to a man you don’t know.”
“You have an aged grandmother in my employ. You will want her to see her final days in comfort, not—otherwise.”
“I’ve no one else but an aged grandmother. My father and his brother were both killed in the bombardment of Forlì, and my mother died of grief soon thereafter.”
“What is your name?”
“I’m the hunter.”
“What does your grandmother call you?”
“Obedient.”
“Fair enough. Do as I say. Bring me her heart carved from her chest.”
Ranuccio lifted his bearded chin.
“I don’t want her to survive, to call on relatives from across the sea to avenge her abandonment. Make good my request and you shall have this purse, and your silly grandmother shall sleep on her own straw pallet until the end of her days.” She threw the purse on the table. “Her natural days.”
He picked up the purse and weighed it in his hands and didn’t speak at first. It was as if he’d never come across coin before. They both heard the sound of his nonna’s voice calling the chickens in. It was an old voice, and the only one left he knew. He said, “I can hope to commit a murder and to eliminate a child. I can decide not to ask questions about your reasons.”
“Can you also manage to forget that we have ever discussed any of this?”
“Any of what?” he said, and smiled for the first time.
A walk in the woods
BIANCA HAD eaten already, but she sat in the kitchen helping Primavera prepare a meal for the Borgias. It felt safe there—well, safer than anywhere else. Primavera was scowling and cursing protectively. “What is that monstrous bitch up to, that your face is covered with blood?” she’d said.
There wasn’t anything to say, because Bianca could hardly describe what had happened, or why. “It was an accident,” she insisted.
“You were standing like a docile sweet orphan and a vase flew into your head by accident?”
“I’m not an orphan.”
“Of course not, and a vase isn’t a bird with silver wings either. The blood in your eyes, mercy. I should tell you about blood.”
“Please, Primavera, not that again. I know about that.”
Upstairs, Lucrezia had picked up a lute and tuned it. The familiar melody that skittered down the stairwell was lopsided, its syncopation the result, perhaps, of a snapped string not yet replaced. Primavera didn’t talk over the sound of the music. She supervised a joint of pork bound in strings, and took from a hook in the chimney stack a parcel of olives she’d been smoking. Sharply, her worry showing, she told Bianca to stir the white beans simmering in a pot suspended from a chain in the kitchen fireplace.
Bianca’s eyes were cleared of blood. She was glad to have something common to do—stir the beans—and already she felt better. She was afraid that the presence of blood was going to bring Primavera around to discussing her favorite topic, the imminent arrival of a young woman’s menses. Bianca was neither skittish of her female developmen
t nor eager for it. But Primavera, sensitive to her own desiccation, found no more enjoyable a topic than the rehearsal of what the monthly complaint was like. The cramps, the mess, the induction into a life of fecundity and danger.
Tonight Primavera restrained herself. She felt the atmosphere curdle and pause. The house had a musty air, as if an atmosphere of grief was leaching through the stones from an underground source. No obvious message in the beans or the clouds. Ranuccio had bought her a chicken and wrung its neck, and after she finished cutting it she’d spill its liver and see what mischief was afoot.
What was the source of the sour miasma? Had a rat died beneath the floor joists, and was it extruding its malodorous juices? Or was the spirit of the house’s previous owner making itself felt? When she wasn’t being a superstitious seer, Primavera was a realist. Her grasp, increasingly, was on the present. If the ghost of the former landlord was bent on causing their skin to crawl, he was doing it effectively, but he was still no more than a ghost, and in any contest, the quick overcrowded the dead in all geographies but the churchyard and the spiraling corridors of hell.
Or might it be a more recent arrival, the ghost of Vicente de Nevada himself? Perhaps, months ago and far away, he’d met his end and his ghost had taken its time returning to the family home.
Primavera knew it didn’t do to turn a blind eye on such things. She descended to the cold keep below the stairs to get a dip of oil. Intestines spilled in augury should then be cooked and eaten, for the sake of economy as well as spitting at the fates. Below steps, she heard a gasp from the kitchen. It took her a minute to turn—she’d put on a few pounds lately. She needed to step down a level or two and find room to negotiate her bulk on a flat bit of flooring rather than to risk twisting on a stair. By the time she returned to the kitchen, she saw the stool on which Bianca had been sitting, overturned in a clumsy way. The spoon for stirring the beans was on the floor.