“There are strategies to consider,” said Cesare, confirming Vicente’s worries, but the famous sister yawned ostentatiously and pulled at her brother’s tunic.
“Later for all that, later,” she said. “I’ve spent a good part of these hours behind curtained views. We’ve been on the road from Rome three days already. I need to stretch and to see something. Don Vicente, let me ask for your arm. I’m faint as a dowager who has taken Madeira at noon.” She looked about as faint as a lightning bolt. “Conduct a tour for me; show me some rural interest. Take me for a stroll. Show me something, anything. The views. The geese. Yes, show me the geese.”
“I can loan you the arm of Fra Ludovico,” said Vicente. Fra Ludovico looked terrified and began to busy himself with his sleeves.
“My father is the Pope of the universal Church,” said Lucrezia. “I have more spiritual companionship than I can bear. Leave Fra Ludovico to his hours. My brother can spare you for a while, Don Vicente. I insist, Cesare, I will have my exercise.”
“Very well; I’ll stay and pose questions of state to the de Nevada daughter,” said Cesare, pointing at Bianca and making her nervous.
Vicente had no choice but to be courteous. “A stroll, then,” he said to la Borgia, and to his daughter, “but you, come with me. The Duc de Valentinois has no interest in talking to an infant. He is only being kind.”
Bianca fled to her father’s side. “Oh, we are to be a walking nursery?” said Lucrezia. “Very well then. I ought to have brought my own babe, Rodrigo. He is four. Beware the cliff edge, my babe; a childish foot can make a misstep and the rocks below—you see them?—look sharp and unwelcoming.”
Bianca ran ahead of her father and the noblewoman. She was glad to be out of harm’s way, since harm seemed coiled in the military man left behind in the courtyard of Montefiore.
The path, this side of the bluff, sloped down in a gentle zigzag to some outbuildings: a croft, a lean-to for the shepherds; the diminished Lago Verde beside a vigorous and well-pruned olive orchard. The walls were littered with the leavings of goats, who liked to leap over any obstacle. And below, the bridge that Bianca was forbidden to cross.
Though she was prohibited from the world beyond the farm, she loved to hear the noise of village life scraping beyond her confines. As she fell asleep, on nights when the wind was still, she could sometimes hear tenants singing, joking, building their cooking fires and banking their sleeping fires, leaping up at threats real or imagined. They were safety to her, the vinemaster, the gooseboy, the shepherd, the ostler, the hunter, the smith, the girls who did floor washing and laundry, and the lads who organized the haying and cured the hams and pressed the olives and then cleaned the stones and pressed the grapes when they were ripe. Life on a farm was a universe in itself, but, since the cows had long since been moved out of the bier in the ground floor of Montefiore, Bianca felt she had only a distant relationship with the contadini who came and went to work, and who thrived on the farm’s yield.
“The news from Rome,” said Vicente after a time, to avert attention from the expressive pressure of la Borgia’s arm upon his.
“Oh, Rome,” said Lucrezia, “my brother will call it a circus of toadies, my father a nest of vipers. To a noblewoman it’s all private chambers. We women work by gossip and innuendo. A man is a cock in armor, a ridiculous proposition; a woman is a hen in veils. Less vivid to see but no less ridiculous to consider. But indulge my appetite for a view, Don Vicente. That long line of hills there—is that Cortona?”
“Nothing like Cortona,” said Vicente. “Nowhere near it.”
“Understanding how the land chooses to spread itself about isn’t my strength. What I long for is the sea. Can we glimpse it from here?”
“We can’t. We’re as inland as we can be, between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas.”
Above a crumbling bank by the side of the path Lucrezia found an old stone sill that had been set upon an ancient protruding root. It would make a good seat. She tried to lever herself up, but her gown kept catching on the fringe of smaller exposed roots. She pouted meaningfully, and Vicente, who didn’t care to touch her, obligingly came forward. He gripped her by the waist as if she were hardly lighter than his daughter, and he set her down. His hands stayed on her waist to secure her there.
“I can see everything,” said his guest. “Goats and geese, hills and meadows, vines and laborers, the gooseboy and the gamekeeper. It does my heart good.” She sighed, and Vicente, who found her canny and alarming, relaxed a little. Though so often after an effect—and who wasn’t?—she had a reservoir of genuine feeling, it seemed.
“Cesare would give you the news from Rome in one manner,” she said, continuing the conversation from before, “and I another. You know his motto—Aut Caesar, aut nihil—either Caesar or nothing. Well, I tire of it. He has his game to run, and I mine. The old pepper can’t keep on forever, you know, and when he goes, the fight to succeed him will be intense.”
Vicente raised an eyebrow.
“My father,” she said curtly. “My dear father. The most roundly defamed Bishop of Rome in the history of our holy Church. You know what lies the Orsini spread about him? The infessura. It’s no secret that people credit the so-called infans Romanus as being the fruit of a monstrous union between my father and me. And the august Bishop of Rome allows such nonsense to circulate. He believes it unnerves his enemies to think him capable of such wickedness. He doesn’t think of the cost to my reputation.”
“I can have no opinion about such matters; I’m a country farmer—”
“The things they report. Simony and nepotism the least of it. They whisper about whores taken on the floors of the ducal apartments. Whores stripped of their clothes and required to pick up chestnuts with their nether lips, while bishops make ready the available crozier for penetration.”
“My child is present,” said Vicente desperately. “She is a young girl, and even more innocent than most.”
Lucrezia breathed in and out in sudden anger, and muttered, almost under her breath, “They weren’t chestnuts, anyway, they were jewels.” But it wasn’t clear to Vicente whether she was jesting or not.
“The truth,” she went on, “the truth, dear sir, is that I’m a young woman, and these times frighten me. Do you remember a few years back, when a monster was dug up from the mud of the banks of the Tiber? It was huge and deformed; it had the head of a woman and its behind was bearded. The peasants of Rome went mad for fear that God was signaling the end of civilization. At the close of the third set of five hundred years since Gesù’s birth. But I think civilization isn’t ending, just changing. And the power to change it belongs in the hands of the mighty.”
She held out her hand, a pretty delicate thing, pale as pounded leather.
“I don’t know why you are speaking to me of this,” said Vicente.
“I like to speak in the language of my father,” she said simply. “Cesare prefers the Italian tongue as spoken in Rome, and I hear more of sacred Latin than my ears can bear. At home we sang to ourselves as we spoke, in that tone of Spanish that evokes blood oranges and tenor lutes. You give me a greater pleasure than you realize. You provide for me a comprehending ear for this secret familiar tongue we share.”
Vicente nodded, indicating he saw it as a duty and an honor both.
After a long pause, she said, “He will not be the lord of all Italy if he does not concentrate his attentions. He must dismiss the distractions from his mind. You will have to help him in that. It is what I ask on his behalf, before he asks it.”
“I am happy to provide the succor of my home for a rest and a respite, a distraction from the campaigns,” he said.
She studied the workings of the farm before her. “How are the geese?” she asked. “I trust the boy saves them from the foxes in the hills?”
“The boy does well enough,” said Vicente. “A goose does not ask much of life, after all.”
“No,” she admitted. “Those who ask much are more li
kely disappointed. We should all be as simple as the goose.”
“Well, the boy is good to them,” said Vicente softly.
“There’s merit in that, I suppose,” she replied.
Under the twists of thornbank
where I took my rest, I heard them speak. The coquettish wife and the widower. I heard them go on, about the puling exercises of the Holy Father, the gonfalonier of Florence, the vengeful evicted Medici, the breakaway state of Pisa, the interest of Spain and France in the Kingdom of Naples, the security of Venice, Il Moro of Milan. They talked in large concentric circles, as if any of it mattered: as if Cesare Borgia, Duc de Valentinois, has the power to sink roots in Romagna. Like other mortals, he’ll die before Romagna knows he has been born.
I was more interested in the beast pulled from the mud of the Tiber. How had the Tiber conspired to lose her grip on one of its own sinews? What keeps a river in its banks but the spirits of the drowned, the titans and Nereids, whose time has passed, and who in shame and righteous humility cover themselves with their watery blanket?
What did it say about the movement of time, about what was about to happen, that I could understand the hummingbird spin of human voices?
I might have gone back to my brothers then and there. But I let them stay where they were, and waited to learn what next I could learn. I followed the distinguished woman and the hilltop farmer when they left the spectacle of geese and pond and millworks. I emerged, more a shadow of a rock than a rock itself, and accompanied them unawares. I was there when Donna Borgia saw the looking glass for the first time.
The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective. Even a bowed mirror works primarily by engaging the eyes, and she who centers herself in its surface is unlikely to notice anyone in the background who lacks a certain status, distinction. Or height. Like a dwarf, for instance. Or a young child.
What lies in the mirror
THIS IS a lovely looking glass,” I said to Don Vicente. “It’s only as lovely as what it reflects,” he answered, though his courtliness was studied and heavy.
With more care to amuse, he continued, “We found it in a shallow end of the lake you pass on your way up the hill. How it got there is a mystery, but it can’t have been there long; there is nothing warped or rotted about it.”
“Clearly it must be a mirror from the workshop of the devil,” I said. “Does it have a message for us?”
“Fra Ludovico won’t even come in this room,” said Don Vicente. “He is even more superstitious than his old crony and foe, the cook.”
“Looking glass, what do you see?” I murmured. My neck was as white as the swans of Castelfiore and I breathed deeply, to cause the exposed area of my clavicle to lift and promote my breasts. “Do you see the corrupted heart of a sinner or the soul of a saint in the making?”
“I suppose it only sees what you show it,” said Don Vicente.
“Shall I show it more?”
He didn’t look at me. He looked in the mirror instead. “Who is the fairest of all?” he whispered. Did he mean to compare the pair of us, the Lucrezia who stood in the mirror and the Lucrezia who stood before it? A mirrored image has no cologne to seduce; is purer for that. While I had dabbed myself with attar of Persian roses.
He drew in his breath, and I knew that the work I had managed poorly in the farmyard was conducted better before a looking glass.
“My sister,” said Cesare at the door, in admiration. “Will you never learn to govern your clothing?”
Prince Dschem’s secret
SUPPER WAS put out by Primavera and her helpers, and the better of the wine casks tapped, and tapers lit. Fra Ludovico was requested first to pray and then to sing, and then to shut up and go away.
At length, Primavera and the staff were excused too. When they tarried in the antechamber giggling and picking over scraps, Cesare took it upon himself to yell them down the stairs. He waited until he heard the door slam shut. “Go bolt it,” he said to his host. When that was done, Cesare refilled his goblet with wine and said, “We’re here on a mission. Let my sister explain the matter while I dine. Then I’ll make a proposal.”
Lucrezia made a face and pretended to yawn, though Vicente could see she was crucially involved. “Do I talk, dear brother, about the peninsular wars? About your ambitions for a duchy in Italy? About what you’ve done right, and what you’ve failed to manage yet?”
“Don’t fiddle with me. You know your task. Talk about the Turk, Lucrezia.”
I will offer succor, thought Vicente. This is my table, my food, my wine. This is what is wanted, the distraction. I’ll listen as a host ought.
La Borgia took a sip of her watered wine. “I don’t know what you follow of the workings of the world,” she said to Vicente. “You’re a farmer; you’re occupied with your own patria, your house of Montefiore. How much do you notice of the condottieri that pass within your sight? You’re no fool, and the view from Montefiore is generous. But your concerns are of the farm, not of the state.”
“That’s true enough,” he said, “a farm is all I can manage.”
“It takes a strong man to deal with the scheming Sforzas of Milan, the Medici struggling for Florence, the Doge of the Serene Republic of Venice, the Orsini and the Colonna and the d’Este clans, to say nothing of us blameless Borgias.” She laughed; she liked the game of chess as played by principalities. “While you’ve been breeding your pigs and clearing your land, we’ve struggled with the ambitious French King as he headed to annex the Kingdom of Naples. Oh, Don Vicente, the alliances shift by the week. The murders are epidemic. Mercy, the men who are declared dead before they have been diagnosed with illness! The reputations we lose between lunch and dinner.”
“How attractive to see a woman pursue ladylike pleasures,” said Cesare over a hank of pork. “Get to the Turk.”
“We’re a practical family when we’re in public,” said Lucrezia. “We’re known for our sensible alliances and our deft way with poison. Is it a reputation we don’t deserve? No one takes the time to refute it. Gossip serves its own purposes.
“Beyond our shores on many sides live the Moor, as you may know. And the Caliphs to the east are the wisest and shrewdest among them. There is a king, the son of Mahomet II, named Bayezid. Do you know of him?”
Vicente shook his head. Lucrezia was correct in her assessment of his concerns. After his evacuation from Spain and his wanderings, his had learned to be a local heart.
“When Mahomet II died, Bayezid succeeded to the throne. Bayezid had a younger brother named Dschem, who even as a lad without whiskers cut a fine figure. Prince Dschem possessed his own appetite for power. He objected to his brother’s rule and was duly crushed, but he escaped to Rhodes. There, the canny Governor-Knight handed him over to my father’s predecessor in the Holy See, and when my father was elevated to the Papacy he took charge of the Prince.”
“As a prisoner of war?” asked Vicente.
“As a prominent houseguest who was too amusing to be allowed to return home,” interpolated Cesare.
“The Sultan Bayezid wanted his brother barred from Constantinople,” said Lucrezia. “Sensibly enough. If the brother remained in Rome as a hostage of sorts, the Sultan could be expected to postpone mounting an attack against the West—after all, his brother might be endangered. And the Sultan even sent Innocent II the spear of the centurion Longinus—the very spear that pierced the body of Gesù Cristo—as a gesture of homage regarding Rome’s power and beliefs.”
“This was all to prevent the West from mounting another crusade for the reconquering of Jerusalem,” said Cesare. “But you drag it out so, Lucrezia.”
“You’ve given me my task; I’ll tell it as I like. Anyway, make your dinner last, it’s better for your bowels,” she said. “Seven years back—1495, it was, I think—Charles VIII of France came into Rome on his way to Naples and then, it was said, on to the Holy Land. My father tried to hold him back,
but Rome is ungovernable at the best of times, and the Pope and Cesare were forced to retreat to the Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“Rape and plunder and extortion, murder and mayhem,” said Cesare. “Quite a party. It was fun.”
“But a section of the wall of the castle collapsed, and Alexander VI had to negotiate his way to safety—and to restore the Papacy, of course, too.”
“He sold me to Charles, that devil,” said Cesare through a mouthful of goose breast. He spoke without irritation, indeed with some respect.
“Charles had the upper hand,” said Lucrezia soothingly. “That day anyway. He left Rome with Cesare as a hostage and with Prince Dschem. The Prince would serve to protect Charles—what Ottoman army would attack Charles if he had the Sultan’s own brother in custody?”
“You said the Sultan didn’t care for his brother.”
“Dschem was worth more alive than dead; he helped neutralize the warmongers. It was a convenient equation for everyone. At any rate, Charles’s army passed unimpeded through the Papal States, as agreed. There were nineteen carts lugging trunks of treasures, and a retinue of Turkish onlookers, and Cesare.”
Cesare began to snort through his nose with laughter, remembering.
Lucrezia explained. “Oh, the King of France was bested, though. All it took was a bribe, not even a large one; and two of the carts were allowed to disappear and return to Rome, and only later was it discovered that the seventeen remaining carts were heaped with nothing but mud and stone.”
“I escaped a few days later,” said Cesare. He belched with gusto and held his side. “I had a good laugh with His Holiness when I got back to Rome.”
“What matters is Prince Dschem,” said Lucrezia. “He knew that the prison of my father’s household had been a protection for him, and life would become rough for him now. Maybe some Turkish seer told him how little time he had left.”