“You need to know whether the wheat is sewn in the fields yet, or the sow has had her spring litter? Or are you more interested in the status of Pope Julius the II’s campaign against Bologna? Or the latest fashions from the court of Louis XII of arrogant France?”
“I scarcely know what to ask,” she said. “Can you tell me of Montefiore?”
“I don’t know the place. I avoid towns and estates where I can, preferring to take my meal with the small farmholder and the vagabonds of the woods. But by the aroma of it, you eat more agreeably than most tenants. Where do you get your fulsome table, here in the middle of nowhere?”
Bianca de Nevada said, “Let me cut you from the heel of the joint, where the meat is cooked already, and spoon you some marrows and carrots and the like. I’ll pass you a plate through the window.” And so, in a minute, she did, and Lucrezia took the offering with a fine and sudden hunger. Primavera with all the produce of Montefiore, and the hunters and poachers and snarers at her disposal, hardly could prepare a meal as sumptuous as this. But Lucrezia couldn’t bother with food, however enticing.
“I can’t pay you for your kindness,” said Lucrezia. “What coin I collect is dedicated to relieving the suffering of the poor.”
“My needs are supplied,” said Bianca. “Your company is payment enough.”
“Let me hunt in my cloak for a token of my gratitude then,” said Lucrezia. “A monk is often thrust trinkets by blushing gentlewomen who confess the sins of their boudoirs to his holy ear. But we have no use of such finery, and they weigh down the hems of our garments as well as our souls. You have a face as beautiful as the evening; you will be ornamented as you deserve.”
Bianca cast her eye down, unused to compliments from men, even monks. She didn’t ask for the gift, and had not yet found words to decline it, when Lucrezia fastened her grip around the comb and raised it high.
“May it bring you much happiness,” she said and drove the ivory implement down into the back of the girl’s lowered head. She felt the tines scrape and then dig into the scalp, as fully as that stone had driven into the skull of the goose. Bianca de Nevada gasped and her hands fluttered like two doves in the gloaming. She fell against the casement of the window, then slumped back inside the cottage, lost in shadows. Lucrezia flung the plate of food, uneaten, in the window over the girl’s corpse, and made her way with haste back up the hill and toward Montefiore.
I am a girl who did little wrong
I am a girl who did little wrong.
I courted loneliness to be my lover.
I spoke in tongues to insensible rocks, pretending
Only I their natures could discover.
Each of us wishes more than the world can offer.
The hermit his coffin, the prince his princely coffer.
To thirst for solitude while the carnival rages
Is the curse of fools or the saintly goal of sages.
Neither a simpleton nor a saint, I suffer
The attentions of my coldly unvarying lover.
She wakes once more
THE DWARVES were around her, snuffling like colts.
“We leave you alone,” they said, more or less in one voice, “and provide you a window upon the wicked world, and your vanity betrays you. There is nothing but grief out there! Haven’t you learned this yet?”
She sat up and felt the back of her head, where blood had matted.
“Have you been to Arezzo and back?” she said. They shook their heads.
“The farther we got from you, the less sure we seemed of ourselves,” said Heartless sadly. “Your kind imagination of us—as individuals, with names, of all things—has begun to seem a kind of nourishment. Without your regard, our initiative was sapped.”
“You must get that mirror back and regard yourselves,” she told them. “Oh, my head hurts so.”
“It would have hurt you worse until it couldn’t hurt you further, had we not come back.” Heartless held out the ivory comb. Several of its tines had broken off, and among those that remained was a residue of blood and dried matter and threads of her raven black hair. “A serried rank of small poisoned stiletti,” he said.
Still, it was a beautiful thing, even with broken tines.
She steadied herself with a hand to her temple, and then said, “You are too kind, and too . . . too . . .” She wanted to say little, but that would have been repaying their kindness with rude honesty; she thought too incomplete, but that also seemed uncharitable. And too attentive was wrong. Without their attention, she would be dead.
She didn’t finish her sentence. They helped her to her feet. Across the room—and didn’t the venison smell wonderful! Where had that come from?—she saw the silvery fog in the wall, the oval through which she had once seen Montefiore. She walked over to it and put up her hand to her head, and held the ivory comb gingerly in place, taking care not to scrape her scalp with it.
She didn’t know if it was herself she was seeing. The reflection was imprecise, varnished with mist; but there was a woman’s face therein, and as its lips moved, so Bianca moved hers, as if under a spell. “Mirror, mirror,” she said. “What is to become of us?”
“What is to become of you, if you don’t take care?” complained Gimpy.
“We won’t be here forever to guide your every step,” snapped Deaf-to-the-World.
“As if we have nothing better to do,” added MuteMuteMute.
“We have nothing better to do, damn the fact,” observed Bitter, “but that still doesn’t mean we want to do it.”
“We will be here forever,” said Heartless. “That’s the truth of it. But you, dear Bianca . . .”
He didn’t finish his sentence, just stood looking at her fondly.
“You must take the mirror back,” said Bianca. “What are you waiting for? You want to be human enough, you have to learn to steal. What was the first act of disobedience but a theft? Let me come with you, I’ll lead you as a band of rogues. The robber queen! I like the notion.”
“It isn’t safe for you yet,” said Nextday.
“You’re less than men,” she said. “How do you know what’s safe for me?”
They had protected her and she had shamed them. Bitter made a rude gesture before the others could stop him. “We’ll go as far as the bridge anyway,” said Nextday decisively. “We’ll look to see what we can.”
“I ask your pardon for my crude remarks,” she said, but they paid no attention to her.
A bodice, my darling
SO THE mirror revealed that the girl had survived, and the comb clasped to her temple lent a further beauty against her black hair.
Lucrezia discharged her lady-in-waiting and took to the dressing room herself. With abandon she rooted through trunks and leathern satchels and the armadio in the corner until she located what she was seeking. There had been a masquerade at New Year’s, in January of 1503, when the guests and revelers all cavorted behind masques shaped crudely like human genitals. She had found the affair sumptuously corrupt, and had kept several of the masks for their comic or aphrodisiacal effect. She dug up the most objectionable and, making sure the door to the hallway was shut and bolted, she affixed the creation to her head by means of a pair of leather straps.
It looked crude and terrifying, and she was satisfied. If her turn as a holy fool had not worked, let her make more of a mockery of things.
She could hardly sleep that night, in anticipation, and she arose long before dawn. Even Vicente, who slept poorly, could be heard through the door still moaning in his dreams. She took a torch from the stable. A horse stamped and whinnied—then nothing but silence. She left the house behind in green moonlight.
How long had Cesare been dead?—three years, four, and her father only a year or more than that? Since then she had turned into a monster—look at her, a fiend sneaking through the fields beyond Montefiore with a lecherous disguise hidden under the skirt of her tunic. She felt the very blood in her heels pound, and she had to run along the road,
the papier-mâché genitals hidden under her apron slapping her again and again in the groin, mocking her failure as a mother, her loss as a sister.
This time it was early morning when she came to the cottage. As before, an enticing aroma suffused the mysterious clearing, something of eggs and cheese, onions and herbs, and the nutty snap of breakfast ale. How could there be eggs and cheese here, without the cackle of hens or the barracking opinions of a goat?
Extinguishing her torch in a ditch, she paused behind a stand of hawthorne. It had blushed into fuller leaf since her last visit and gave her enough protection to listen for the sound of voices. And, to be sure, she was wise to wait, for she heard a clamor of unfinished male voices. Then, ridiculously, the bottom half of the severed door opened, and out came creatures that she hesitated to call dwarves, though what else could they be?
Lucrezia Borgia had dwarves in her court at Ferrara. Dwarves were a mischievous and important presence in royal society, serving as confidantes, jesters, aides-de-camp, and chaperones. Generally they possessed expressions of profound gravity, whatever their social station or native intelligence; there was something dignified about how their solid, full-size heads sat without remorse or apology upon bodies that had to work harder than most to manage an outsize world. The tendency of dwarf legs to bow, of dwarf hands to be clumsy at small work—managing broth in a soup spoon, the hilarity!—oh, oh, that was a common enough cause of low humor. But even the cheeriest and most self-deprecating dwarf, capering like an imp, couldn’t shuck off a self-possession, which left audiences somewhat uneasy, even while holding their sides from the pain of laughter.
These small men who departed from the cottage in the woods were a different breed of dwarf, from a different race, perhaps, though what little she could see of their faces suggested they were swarthy, bearded, compact, like dwarves. It was something else; it was that the shortened torsos and small legs were proportioned differently—neither better nor worse, just differently. These dwarves—six, seven, eight, she lost count—seemed more like children still forming their milk teeth. Their rib cages were not barrels but slender butter churns. They talked with one another in a language she couldn’t make out—it seemed to be a Romish language, full of slanting vowels and surprising stops and starts. But the small men were gone soon, traipsing away from her, and the clearing took on a fresher bloom, as if they swept away with them the last miasma of night.
She removed her apron and affixed her indecent headdress. Then she hurried to the door and pounded upon the closed upper half. Her legs were swathed in leggings, like the tight, flattering crimson apparel that Florentine youths wore, making codpieces a boast, an escutcheon, rounding buttocks to seem as fervent and inviting as a courtesan’s cleavage. She could stand like a man—hadn’t she admired enough men in her time, and learned their pendulums by heart?—and she had an airy tunic to disguise her breasts, which anyway were bound flat in lengths of cotton.
The girl called, “You’ve forgotten something, how kind to knock, but I’m just here with my meal—” and came to the door, expecting a returning dwarf. She must have seen the male legs, for her sentence stopped, but then she was drawn by courage or curiosity to swing open the top half of the door, and she stood face-to-face with the obscene reveler.
Lucrezia Borgia marveled at how musical a girl’s scream could sound. She tossed her head like a horse as it nickers, and the thread-haired scrotum and the half-erect member (cheesecloth wrapped around a length of toweling) flopped menacingly down over her nose.
The girl couldn’t speak and couldn’t breathe. Lucrezia advanced upon her into the room, and put her hand as roughly upon the girl’s waist as she could manage. She pushed Bianca against a post in the middle of the room, and flipped the girl’s long apron up, as if intending to forage between the girl’s legs. But instead she caught the corners of the apron and pulled them back around the post, and she ducked behind and tied the corners together, so the girl was caught, at least momentarily, tied like Saint Sebastian at the pillar, and in nearly as lusciously fainting a state.
Lucrezia wheeled about again. Her eyes in this cottage worked poorly; was it the mask, or did the light bleed improperly from the lamps? She found she could make out little of the furnishings. There was nothing with which to attack the girl—no poker from the fireplace, no conveniently clawed kitchen implement. Only a few carved stone tables, or were they sarcophagi?—and a statue of someone very like Proserpina in a sitting position, munificently holding out an apple.
The woman turned back and looked at Bianca. The tightened apron around the girl’s rib cage had pushed up her small breasts and made them prominent. With a roar Lucrezia pushed her masqued face against the girl, rubbing, and the girl sagged against the post, which now looked like a stalagmite in some cave.
Lucrezia didn’t want to leave with the job incomplete this time, but she thought she heard a sound. A sound, surely? The tramp of small feet? Were those creatures coming back? She wouldn’t be caught here by a tribe of midgets. Or was that the roar of time in her ears, had she been here longer than she ought? The girl’s pale skin was whiter than before—was it cadaverous! Perhaps. Lucrezia fled, praying it might be so.
Two bites from the Apple
BUT THE mirror wouldn’t let her alone. Try as she might, shroud it in black lace from Seville, blow out the candles in the room, close her eyes—the mirror still gripped her. At last she could take no more, and she positioned herself in front of its harsh eye, and demanded the truth of it.
She no longer knew, nor even cared to question, whether the shapes revealed therein were phantasms of her mind or whether there was a magic at work. She wiped the spittle from her chin—she was chewing her own lips from rage and frustration—and saw the dwarves reviving the young woman once again. They loosened the makeshift bodice formed by the tied apron. They settled her upon the floor and rubbed her wrists with oil of lemon flowers. She could smell the tang of coastal fruit through the looking glass, and she gashed her wrist against the side of the ornate frame, wanting to beat the offending scene out of the bowed mirror. But the mirror would have none of it; it showed her Bianca de Nevada until it was through. It showed how young she became, when refreshed by the dwarves; how the color stole back into her cheeks, and her anthracite hair bloomed more luxurious than ever, and her limbs, flexing for circulation, the more perfect and admirable than ever. And her life more hers than ever.
Lucrezia watched as the dwarves presented the girl with a small leather sack drawn closed with a cord. The girl opened it and a splash of water flowered in her lap. She withdrew a handful of coins, which she set aside, in a bowl held up by a reclining statue. Lucrezia felt a scalding of gorge in her gullet.
So she fell back, at last, to the tradition perfected by her ancestors. What a library of recipes they’d amassed—poisons that had killed cardinals and princes, dukes and their wives, inconvenient lovers overstaying their welcome.
When Cesare had abducted Caterina Sforza at Forlì, he’d wrested from her the secrets of her signal achievement, a veleno attermine, which promised perfect sleep. But Lucrezia Borgia would improve upon this unfailingly reliable decoction. She’d assure her own ascendancy while dooming the durable child to death at last. She’d use the last Apple brought from Agion Oros, use it for her redemption and Bianca’s downfall at the same time. The same fruit that killed Bianca would give Lucrezia mastery unfathomable. Perhaps even the wisdom to adjust the mistakes of time, to correct the past.
She had seen what a bite of the Apple had done to the stone-faced beast. A mere slice of it had given the creature a mouth, an upright posture, the talent to pass through stone. What might it do for a person more magnificently human than most?
The mirror, maddening one minute, was helpful the next. Lucrezia began to realize that it alerted her when the dwarves were ready to leave. They would begin to appear in garb more clearly like human garments. They constructed a clumsy box with wheels and shafts, and practiced hauling it about.
They were on a campaign of some sort. What were they up to? No mind, never mind; enough that they were gone.
She couldn’t guess the colloquy the dwarves engaged in: whether to behave as their kind didn’t behave, to leave behind the morally neutral state of their natures and commit a more human act. Lucrezia didn’t associate the stone dog to whom she’d offered the Apple and the dwarves who had gone on to eat the rest of it. She was an unwitting Eve. But now they were on their own. They would take the mirror, without permission, and damn the cost. They wanted to keep Bianca safe.
She wouldn’t be a crone this time, nor play the role of a waggish courtier. She would face the child in finery. She had Primavera wring the juice from ten lemons and work it into her fair hair. If Bianca, stars glowing in the highlights of her midnight hair, would preen as Hecate, Lucrezia would pounce as Aurora. She sat on the top step of the flight above the loggia, turning her tresses in the strengthening sun. Summer would be here before long; she would reign as the goddess of dawn. The peacocks screamed at the competition; she threw her head back and answered them.
The time came at last. She plucked the Apple from the silver stem—the second of the reported three, the third said by Vicente to be hidden in the treasury of the Doge.
The Apple sat in a bronze dish like something pagan. Had Lucrezia a more fanciful mind she would have supposed it to be humming at a level just below the threshold of the human ear to comprehend. But fancy was for servants and infants, and poison was the real work at hand. She set about with the tools of her trade to re-create, in the darkest way she could, al-iksir.
Roots of mandrake, a knife with a handle made from human pelvis carved into obscene figures, a mortar and pestle for the mashing of savorless mushrooms, a drop of Fra Ludovico’s communion wine for perversion, an alembic, a small fire underneath it in which she fed scraps of human hair, bits of the girl’s old childhood garments, a letter from María Inés to Vicente, feathers of geese, and a live mouse she’d caught by overturning a water bucket. (The mouse escaped with a singed tail.) But the crucial ingredient of choice was quicksilver, crushed and refined in a crucible, then reduced into a more docile and transparent state through the private alchemy for which her family was known.