“Are you the mad priest or the quiet sage today? Be the coherent one, if you can; I have to hear someone making some sense.”
Fra Ludovico seemed less interested in conversing with Vicente than in governing the flame and making sure sediment didn’t scorch on the bottom of the pot and ruin the batch. But he said, “Sit, sit, my friend,” and Vicente squatted, upwind of the drift of vapors.
“I left you in charge,” he began.
“You didn’t leave me in charge,” said Fra Ludovico. “In charge of la Borgia? I can’t even get up on a donkey anymore without a ladder, a hoist, and a week of fasting. The notion of asking me to govern a Borgia! But I did my part nonetheless, you know.”
“Yes. You played the part of a blithering fool. What for?”
“A canny disguise. So I might be considered harmless, and not need to be disposed of. So I might protect my position and protect your daughter.”
“But you didn’t protect her.”
“I did what I could. If you’re going to blame me for the way things happen in human affairs, you’re wasting your breath. Have a drink instead. It isn’t ready but it’ll burn your tongue and stop your nonsense.”
Vicente asked Fra Ludovico for more information about the disappearance of Bianca. He wanted a more certain sense of when the disaster had happened. The old priest—for by now he was old—shook his head and tried to remember. “It was close to the time that Primavera’s grandson disappeared,” he said at last. “And she will know exactly when that was. She will know,” he added, “though she won’t say, of course. She can’t.”
“But how many years ago? Your cheek has gone hoary, and I can’t escape the sad eyes of Primavera. I gather I’ve been away about a decade, but when in that span of years did Bianca disappear? And what prompted it?”
“I measure time by the seasons of the Church,” began Fra Ludovico, “and every year begins anew, with Advent; it’s the same year, over and over, indistinguishable one from another—”
“I’ll turn you out on your fat old behind, you pious fool—”
“About six years, more or less.”
This was clearer but hardly a comfort. “But why? What happened? How had she changed?”
“She changed only as every child changes, no more, no less. I appreciate your sorrow, but you must understand: Had I seen signs that she intended to flee I would have intercepted her. She was still docile enough, still a timid child in her way. Well, you’d never let her meander—”
Vicente gave him a look. “I’ll say what I will,” said the priest. “I blame you no more than I blame myself, Don Vicente; facts are as they are. You rarely took her as far as the village.”
“She was a child.”
“And she grew up while you were gone. Or began to, anyway.”
“Was she threatened here? Soldiers sniffing around?”
“We enjoyed the customary blight of daily life. We delighted in tedium.”
Vicente could sit no longer. He strode back and forth, stroking his beard. “Have you blessed what you can of her spirit? In the event she has died? Have you performed the offices of the dead?”
“She was blameless,” said Fra Ludovico. “About that you can rest assured. I’m no theologian, Don Vicente, but I can’t bring myself to worry for the state of her soul in the afterlife. She was too pure a child to need serious pardoning.” He stirred more vigorously. “Besides, I used to note that you didn’t take much stock in my feeble efforts.”
“Who are you to deny a child spiritual benefit because her father is a doubter?” Vicente overturned the pot, scalding the priest’s bare toes. Fra Ludovico yipped in pain and irritation. “Are you a pope, to determine who deserves forgiveness for their sins? You have no right to deny my child sanctity. You have no way to see into her heart.”
“You’ve been changed by your adventures, I see. I suppose I might as well get used to it. Now look. I have my convictions. Maybe they are born of a little too much liqueur in the colder days, but they are convictions just the same. And I don’t sense that Bianca has departed this life.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing more than what I’ve already said. No hunting dogs have found her body in the woods. Villagers, whose gossip and conjecture often signifies, have been as mystified as we at Montefiore are. Primavera insisted on augury after augury, trying to learn the truth, and she could read no sign of Bianca’s demise in any entrails. That was when the old sow could still speak, of course, though her tongue became detached shortly thereafter.”
“For blasphemy?”
“If she’d been subject to that punishment for blasphemy, she’d have been mute since she was three.” He continued. “Maybe Bianca escaped over the hills to Ravenna. Maybe she found a little convent somewhere and offered herself to Christ. In any case, I’ve more to do than say the Mass of the Dead for a healthy young girl who lights out on her own.”
Vicente hugged his elbows. “You didn’t go after her.”
“Maybe she went after you,” said Fra Ludovico, scowling at the hickory bark and sanguine berry slopped on the ground. “She was growing up, you know; she couldn’t help it. You can’t fix a child in time.”
“If I find her corpse, or hear word of her death, you will bless her spirit?”
“I bless her spirit daily. I’ll bless yours too, if you take to wandering the woods and fields looking for evidence. And I’ll not say the Mass of the Dead until I know one or the other of you have died.”
Vicente had to smile despite himself—weakly, affectionately. “You’re as superstitious as Primavera, in your own way,” he said.
“Now that’s blasphemy.”
Vicente wandered through the airy chapel and out into the stable yard. The gooseboy was settling his flock behind their brambly hedge, and fixing what passed for a gate with a twist of moldy rope.
“You never know which goose you will lose and which goose you will find,” he was muttering to himself.
“Fidelio,” said Vicente. “Fidelio, is it? Or Paolo? I can’t remember.”
“Michelotto. Everyone seems to want to know today.”
“In your wanderings, lad, have you come across anyone who could tell me the whereabouts of Bianca? Your friend from those years back—you must remember her? With the skin so fair, and the black, black hair—”
The gooseboy twisted his face as if trying to remember. He opened his mouth to speak, but another voice cut through the air first, calling him away from Vicente. Lucrezia Borgia stood at a window, her beautiful hair falling to one side, an ivory comb in her hand. “Michelotto,” she called. “Michelotto, my boy. It’s time to brush my hair. Come and give your poor mother some attention.”
The gooseboy shrugged at Vicente and raised his eyebrows, and went to do as he was told.
Vicente made his way at last to the kitchen. He found Primavera squatting upon a stool in the middle of the floor, sifting through a bowl of lentils. When she came upon an occasional stone, it went skipping out the door into the lettuces.
He didn’t know what he was after, nor could he bear to plague the old nonna with questions when she had no way to answer. But he sat down on a bench along the wall, and she put aside her work and looked at him with eyes gone nearly glassy with milky film. She reached out and held his hands. She squeezed them again and again, as if there was a signal in the pattern of her grasp, but he could read it no better than he could read the comments of clouds scrawled against the sky.
An ivory comb, my dear
THE PREMONITION in the mirror was accurate. The girl was alive. Any day she might come forward to stake her claim on the future and tell the truth about what had happened.
“You’re certain it was she?” said Lucrezia.
Michelotto had his hands on her head, playing with her hair, plaiting it. She slapped his wrist and said, “You odd thing, listen to me! How could you know it was she?”
By the time the answer to Vicente’s question about the whereabouts of B
ianca had surfaced in the gooseboy’s brain, he was no longer speaking to Vicente but to his mother. She got the benefit of the information instead. Michelotto, though, couldn’t remember how the conversation had come up, nor what proof he had to offer her that Bianca still lived. “There was a house,” he finally said, “not as far away as all that, but one I never saw before.”
“Could you find it again?”
“If it wanted to be found, I suppose.”
She was gripped with a desire to smash his skull with a heft of marble. He lived to mock her all her days, but he was the one person she couldn’t be seen to kill. He was too thoroughly a Borgia. Would she had managed it when he was a toddler, would she had been able to throw him off the aqueduct at Spoleto! But Michelotto was her son and nephew both. In the years following the death of her father, her brother, and her son Rodrigo, and with the collapse of the romance of her marriage, she had come to cling to Michelotto, despite all his fancifulness. And she had begun to feel fond of him. Because she could expect nothing of the Punishment—not even that he bear the family name—she had found a way to love him without stint or mercy.
This didn’t keep her from wanting, on a regular basis, to brain him.
“We will walk,” she said, “this very day, we will walk for a while, and you will suggest a path to take. This way, that way? Whichever way you think best. Just give me a moment”—she was thinking quickly—“that I might ready myself. Put up my hair.” She held the ivory comb in one hand and considered the various recipes at her disposal. “Go downstairs now, Michelotto, and speak to no one. Wait for me on the steps and I’ll be with you in a trice.”
Michelotto did as he was told. He sat on the bottom step of the outside staircase and played with a kitten as, nearby, Vicente cut himself a staff. Michelotto watched the wheezing man begin, with effort, to scale down the steepest slope behind Montefiore. He couldn’t guess why Vicente would be risking the integrity of his limbs in such an exercise. He didn’t bother to guess.
Vicente thought: Perhaps Bianca had gone sleepwalking and fell from a window, and her corpse has laid buried in undergrowth at the foot of the bluff? Or perhaps she was pushed by hands accustomed to murder? In any case, one had to start looking somewhere.
The comb was a lovely Spanish piece that had belonged to some courtesan of her father’s—perhaps her own mother, for that matter. It was carved with an expressive burst of orange blossoms. The rack of pins curved inward for better purchase. It wasn’t difficult to coat the tines with a lethal substance that dried quickly and would liquefy again when it came in contact with blood. Now: how to disguise herself. She thought at last of the vestibule of the chapel, where Fra Ludovico hung old garments for use while gardening. She found a cloak and draped it close upon her face, pushing her own hair back so its luxuriance and color wouldn’t give her away. Then she smeared her face with soot from the inside of the fireplace, and surveyed herself in the mirror over the mantel. She looked agreeably like Primavera’s older sister.
The sun was bowling down the sky, and the yard clear of laborers but for Michelotto, who took a bad start when he saw the old hag coming down the steps. “Shhh, my boy, it’s a masquerade game!” she cawed, trying out an appropriate voice. “As when we wear metal casques at carnival, nothing more.”
“You terrify me. I don’t like a masquerade.”
“Oh, I’ll let you wander home alone then, when you have shown me what I need to see.”
She wasn’t sure the light would last, nor that Michelotto would be able to find a path at all, daylight or not. But he had the idea to bring a goose along and give it instructions. The goose seemed disinclined to assist in the exercise. But after a good swift kick in her downy behind, she focused her attentions and began to waddle down the road.
Lucrezia found something liberating in the disguise she’d taken on, and she enjoyed hobbling and sighing as if she were really a healthily farting old dame instead of a lithe and beautiful thirty-two. Michelotto kept a good distance from her.
Across the bridge and along a ways, and before long the goose left the track.
“Is this the way?” asked Lucrezia.
“She thinks it is,” said Michelotto.
“What do you remember of where you were?”
“I can’t say for sure that we were here. Or that we weren’t.”
“You sweet cunning idiot. I’ll have Primavera bake you your own private tart if you lead me correctly.”
“An apple tart?”
She glared at him. “A goose tart, of course. Are we still true?”
“Are we?” he asked her.
The goose paused. The gloom was thickening in the underbrush, and a wind twitched the canopy of leaves high above. “There’s the pool in which we found the goose,” said Michelotto at last, unhappily, honestly, for he wasn’t quite capable of guile. “Look, she heads for it. The house was just up that slope and around the copse of trees with white leaves.”
“Very well,” said Lucrezia. “Now you may take your ladygoose home. I will proceed alone.”
“You’ll get lost coming back,” he said. “The dark is falling.”
“I see in the dark,” she answered. Her eyes swam with a silvery light; Michelotto couldn’t tell if she had bewitched herself or if it was merely a trick of the dusk. “Now off with you, friend, and leave me to my work. I intend to pay a social call.”
“I would like to see her again,” he ventured.
“If you would like to see anything again,” she answered, “I suggest you heed my advice. Good-bye.”
He wouldn’t leave and she wouldn’t go on with him in tow. At last she stooped and found a small, sharp rock. With a steadiness of hand that surprised all three of them, she pitched the missile at the goose. It drove into the back of the goose’s head and a small flower of blood bloomed on the white scalp. She honked her irritation and rage and with an explosive clatter of her powerful wings she lifted out of the pool. “Your goose is gone,” said Lucrezia. “You are the gooseboy. So find her.”
Tending geese was his life. He knew no obligation more pressing. So Michelotto lit out after the goose. She was smart enough, Lucrezia observed, to head back in the direction of Montefiore, so there was no need to worry about Michelotto’s getting lost in the woods at night.
She followed the imprecise directions, and they proved precise enough. Before long she discovered a cottage in the woods, with a lit wick sitting in a stone basin of oil at the window. The cottage was improbable, and Lucrezia puzzled about it as she drew nearer. There were no fields, no byres for sheep or cows, no orchards nearby, no rutted track for the approach of a farm cart. The thing had grown up in the middle of the woods like a toadstool in the rain.
Yet there was glass in the window, real glass—small circlets and lozenges set in a grid of lead, and a splash of color here and there. A bit of shapely ferro battuto ornamenting the roofline in a festive scroll, that looked from here like the iron letters of a very foreign alphabet. A smell of roasting venison, with autumn gourds and onions, hung in the air. And then—she leaned forward to assess it—the sound of a lute being plucked in a desultory and unpracticed manner, as if someone had nothing else to do but try to make music while the meal finished cooking.
“A meal for a mendicant,” called Lucrezia in a small voice, to try it out, and then lowered her voice and roughened it up. “A meal for a wandering monk, who will bless this house.”
The music stopped. Lucrezia had reached the door, and she thumped on it. “There must be a good wife at home, preparing the evening meal. I beg for mercy.” She drew the shawl down upon her face so that nothing but her chin might show.
The door opened. Bianca de Nevada, exactly as word had had it.
Lucrezia flinched and flushed. Simple rage—that Bianca de Nevada should somehow have escaped the death sentence issued years earlier? Or rage supplanted by pleasure, that the girl lived still, to be killed again. Another chance. The Borgia blood quickened.
 
; And the cause? It would take an Ariosto to unravel the root of her guile. Any murder, even suicide—especially suicide, perhaps—is an attempt to stop the future from happening. Though Lucrezia Borgia knew herself to be as comfortable as a well-born woman could wish, with influence, romance, fame, and luxury, she couldn’t stop the future without Cesare from unrolling. Every day, every hour, both she and the world further adjusted to soldiering on without him. On the day that Cesare, secretly and in pain, had made his last assignation with his sister, at the mountain retreat of Montefiore, he had grown distracted by the beauty of Bianca de Nevada. He was leaving not just for Spain, but forever, but he left Lucrezia an hour or two earlier than he needed, by noticing Bianca.
Lucrezia couldn’t murder to bring Cesare back. She wasn’t Zeus, to cause Phaëthon to stop driving the chariot of bright Helios: she couldn’t halt the daily chariot of crushing light and rushing time. But she could murder to stop the innocent virago—the only seriously dangerous kind—from living and thriving when Cesare couldn’t.
“Mercy,” Lucrezia repeated.
“I’ve been alone such a long time,” said the girl child, in a voice of surprise at itself, a voice that leaned toward womanliness, “and now the world repopulates itself in my direction.”
“Forgive the world its intrusions, if you can,” said Lucrezia, husking her own voice in a masculine manner as best she could. “The wandering hermit such as I makes effort to avoid the snares of the devil, so often hooked and crooked into the words and doings of humankind. But even I become hungry, and I must eat if I am to pray for our salvation. You tempt me with aromas of dinner. May I come in and share a meal with you?”
“This isn’t my home, and I’ve no permission to welcome a guest,” said Bianca. “But I won’t turn you away hungry. I’ll give you a bite, and you can bring news of the world to me. Can you tell me much of the doings of the day?”