Blood & Beauty: A Novel of the Borgias

  ‘It is not your colour, black,’ the Pope says as the city moves into Carnival season. ‘Why don’t you add some gold or greens to your wardrobe now?’

  ‘I am still in mourning, Father.’

  She has come home to a court full of new fabrics and fashions. Sancia has taken to wearing a silvered voile headdress that brings out the drama of her colouring. ‘I do not think Alfonso would mind,’ she says defensively, before Lucrezia asks. ‘He loved clothes and loved to see women well dressed. We can remember him without having to look like nuns.’

  How would such a fashion suit her own hair? Lucrezia wonders. Is that such a terrible thing to be thinking? Nothing she can do will bring him back, and for a young woman of nineteen, six months is a long time to be buried in the past, however tender the pain.

  ‘Six months.’ Her father seems to read her thoughts. ‘It is long enough. You are a beautiful woman and when the Ferrarese ambassadors come to meet you, it would be good for you to look your best.’

  ‘The ambassadors? When will that be?’ she asks, for though she does not know it yet herself, the idea of Ferrara, with its poets and music and glittering court, is already germinating inside her.

  ‘When? Oh, when the duke has had a chance to think about it. I would not have it happen too soon, for then you would be gone from me and how could I bear that?’

  She remembers Cesare’s words and her two worst fears now collide: that she should abandon her love for Alfonso, and that deep down her father would prefer an alliance that will keep her in Rome for ever.

  ‘I know how important this union is to the family, Father,’ she says firmly. ‘And I will do whatever I can to bring it to pass.’

  ‘Ah! What joy it is to have my Lucrezia back again. Ercole’s son will be the most fortunate man in Italy. You met him once, you know. Years ago when he came to Rome to plead for a cardinal’s hat for his brother.’

  ‘I… I do not remember him at all.’

  ‘Well, you were very young. But I am sure you will like him well enough now. Everyone says he is a – a sturdy fellow.’

  She smiles gamely, but she does not allow herself to think of the man; only the distance between their two cities.

  Alexander, overjoyed at her renewed obedience, wraps her in his arms, so that the old smell of family is once again deep in her nostrils.

  Forgive me, Alfonso, she thinks, extracting herself gently from his grip, but there is no other way if I am to get out of here.

  As winter progresses, diplomacy stalls. What is needed is someone to push King Louis’s hand. Cesare, whose soldiers he will need if he is to take Naples, would happily oblige, only right at this moment Cesare has problems of his own: a set of city walls that will not fall down.

  It had all been going so well. Giovanni Sforza had fled long before Cesare had marched his army into Pesaro and no sooner had he taken up residence in the palace than the nearby city of Rimini offered itself up in his hands. Instead it had fallen to the little town of Faenza to take on this new Goliath, and its defiance teaches Cesare a valuable lesson in statecraft.

  Barely a few miles down the road from Forlì, where the Virago has been unseated as much by her own people as an invading army, Faenza is ruled by a sixteen-year-old boy in conjunction with the city council, and a fairer government you could not want for. So fair in fact that its young lord offers to surrender himself to save his city from destruction. But his citizens will not hear of it. As the artillery rolls up the citizens tighten their belts and stuff bits of wax into their ears to keep out the thunder of the cannons.

  The weather backs up their bravery. Weeks of torrential rains mean that the powder in the cannons doesn’t light, and then winter roars in, frost hardening the earth and making skating rinks of the mud paths in the camp. The soldiers fall if they move and freeze if they don’t. Cesare, sharing the vicissitudes of his men, and well aware that a successful army is one that is well taken care of, cuts his losses and calls off the siege, leaving a small force to block the supply route into the town.

  Though it is a setback, he is determined not to be set back by it. In his palace in Cesena he uses the winter months to bring in administrators, assess taxes and regulate new courts. Cannons can break down walls, but he needs to build bridges now. He throws a lavish Christmas dinner for the town councillors, and opens his home so that anyone and everyone might see how their new duke lives. He hosts jousts and games of strength in the piazza, and the word goes out around the villages near Cesena that Duke Valentino will take on anyone who thinks he might run faster or be able to wrestle him to the ground. To get one’s hands on one’s own lord, to feel the muscles of the state through grappling with his very body, is indeed a wonder. In every contest, he wins and they lose (however hard they try not to), but it is done with equal grace on both sides and an excellent time is had by all.

  ‘Is it to become an annual event?’ Ramirez de Lorqua, a Spanish captain and now the city’s governor, enquires as they sit down together when it is all over.

  ‘Perhaps. Why not?’

  ‘I… I think they will begin to take liberties. You are known as a great soldier. They expect you to keep your distance.’

  ‘I think it is better that I am known for doing what is not expected,’ Cesare says carefully. Lorqua has a reputation for severity, not always connected with justice. Among the many things he is doing with this enforced rest is to observe those who are ruling in his absence. How his father would approve. There are times when this brash young man has a surprisingly old head on his shoulders.

  When his guns begin firing on Faenza again in early spring, everyone – the French and the Ferrarese in particular – is watching intently.

  ‘My God, with troops like these I could take the whole of Italy,’ Cesare declares as he sees women standing side by side with men on the barricades, and the news comes that inside the city the rich have opened their cellars to feed the poor. But it is not enough to halt the inevitable. Final victory comes through betrayal when a local merchant escapes the city and shows them a vulnerable place in the defences. Before he moves his cannons into place, Cesare has the man strung up as a traitor for all the town to see.

  With the walls breached, the young Manfredi and his even younger brothers surrender. Cesare sends food and supplies and a strict no-plunder order goes out to the troops. That night Manfredi joins him at his table and accepts his generous offer of a place in his army. If there is any other thought in the duke’s mind, he keeps it well hidden.

  With the fall of Faenza Duke Valentino is lord of the whole of the Romagna, just as he said he would be that night in Nepi when he had convinced Lucrezia that her destiny lay in marriage to Ferrara. Now he needs to make good his promise that he can achieve it. The great military wheel starts to roll again. Within days the Borgia army is back on the road, but this time marching in the opposite direction. In thirty-six hours they are on the outskirts of Bologna. Thirty-six hours! Bologna, no less! A direct attack is bought off by the offer of another fortress in the Romagna, and the army swerves south – into the territory of Florence this time.

  With the wolf in the sheep pen there is instant panic. Both cities are under the formal protection of France. In Rome, the Pope publicly disowns his son and orders him to return home, while privately delighting at the chaos he is causing: it is a strategy between them that is fast becoming an art. Cesare’s army gets to within six miles of the walls of Florence before the struggling government agrees to pay a hefty sum to have the duke as its ally rather than its enemy.

  For King Louis, whose own attack on Naples is scheduled to begin in a few months’ time, the point is well made: if the Pope doesn’t get what he wants, his son will get it for him. He remembers that hunter alone in the royal forest, his hands thick with boar’s blood, and the marriage night with so many broken lances. Who would not want to have such a man on one’s side? His daring and his skill make the rest of Italy feel like a bunch of snivelling virgins.

  Louis t
akes up his royal pen and uses it as a knife to cut the rope by which he has had the Duke of Ferrara dangling. If Ercole d’Este really cannot bear the thought of such a match then, when they start negotiations, he should try making his demands too outrageous to be accepted. The King even offers a few suggestions as to what he might ask for.

  But as for French brides – alas, there are none available at present.

  Ercole d’Este receives the news having come from visiting one of his favourite women – saintly Sister Lucia (he collects visionaries with as much passion as he collects composers and architects, though he tries to get them all cheaply).

  ‘It seems you will have to marry this Borgia whore after all,’ he says to his son who has had to be extracted from a nearby basement where he runs his own weapons forge. ‘It is the victory of the practical over the honourable.’

  ‘I don’t really mind that much,’ Alfonso replies, wiping a black hand over an even blacker face. ‘As long as she isn’t ugly and doesn’t need coddling.’

  The duke shakes his head. He is the ruler of one of the most sophisticated courts in Europe – and his first-born son only wants to play with guns. Well, he will have the money to build whatever defences he likes when they have bled the Borgias dry.

  Ercole starts to compose his wish list.

  CHAPTER 58

  Lucrezia and Alfonso. It is unfortunate that her prospective new husband shares the name of her old one. It is even more unfortunate when one considers what he looks like. His portrait arrives as the dowry negotiations begin in earnest. Surely she has never met this man before? Even a young girl would remember such ugliness. It is a wonder the court artist still has his job. At twenty-five, Alfonso d’Este has the face and build of a street fighter: square jaw, thick nose, thick eyebrows and cheeks flushed by the freezing winter fogs that roll off the River Po. The gossip – which flows both ways – says that the only thing he loves more than his cannons are women who are not his wife. His first marriage to Anna Sforza had ended when she died soon after her stillborn child. They had been together since she was fifteen and some say he had made her cry so much that death was an easy way out.

  She studies the portrait again. A child of her time, Lucrezia knows that while female beauty is a mirror to the inner sweetness of the soul, men are less constricted by the niceties of Platonic theory. If Cesare’s beauty fools no one any more, then surely boorish features do not necessarily mean a boorish soul? Alexander’s own commentators do their best. The bridegroom, they assure her, is an honest, manly man, plain-spoken with none of the flounces or counterfeit emotions of the wily courtier. He is a talented soldier who takes the well-being of his state seriously – hence his passion for the techniques of new warfare. But he can dance until the sun comes up and those same blunt hands that weld metal over a blacksmith’s fire also play the viol with the delicacy of an angel.

  Vulcan with a streak of celestial music. How… how charming, she thinks.

  ‘And what will he think of me?’ she asks coyly.

  ‘Oh, he will worship you,’ they say with all the counterfeit conviction of wily courtiers.

  There is one man in Rome who might be able to give her a more honest answer. When Gaspare Torella is not overseeing treatments in his steam bath he spends hours in communication with university doctors in Ferrara, and his notebooks are filled with descriptions taken from their noble clientele, a number of whom are from the Este family. Given Alfonso’s appetite for prostitutes, it is not surprising that the heir apparent is on the list. The truth is (and it is the truth, for men of science pride themselves on avoiding gossip) that the man has been so ill with the pox that he was forced to miss his own wife’s funeral.

  But what good would it do for Lucrezia or indeed anyone else to know such things? This is not a union of love. Not even of affection. It is a brutally imposed political treaty. Ferrara will gain an ally against Venice, immunity from Cesare’s vaulting ambition and an eye-watering dowry, while the Borgias secure a northern border for their emerging state and a legitimate branch for their family tree, grafted on to one of Italy’s most distinguished dynasties. Who is to say which one will be the final winner and which the loser?

  ‘The man bargains like a common tradesman,’ Alexander explodes as the negotiators leave the room. ‘How much is it now?’

  Burchard and the secretaries pore over the figures. ‘With the castles of Pavia and Pieve and the benefices to Alfonso’s brother, Cardinal Ippolito, as well as the jewels and the cash dowry, it is… it is close to four hundred thousand ducats.’

  ‘Blood suckers! You are an expert at parsimony, Burchard. Can’t we beat them down?’

  ‘Not if Your Holiness wants the marriage to take place while the Lady Lucrezia is still of child-bearing age,’ says Burchard in a rare flash of humour, though the smile is so thin that his lips look glued together.

  ‘Ha! The older the family, the deeper the greed, eh? Still, I dare say it will not seem so much when my grandsons are ruling Ferrara.’ And he grins. He has celebrated his seventieth birthday a few weeks before and his energy, far from waning, seems to be keeping pace with his circumference.

  Burchard returns to his figures. With Vice-Chancellor Sforza still in prison, more of the financial work has fallen on to his shoulders, which gives him ample scope for the pleasures of disapproval. These are most expensive days for the papacy. Besides Cesare’s war chest, half a French army is currently camped on the outskirts of Rome, en route to the great assault on Naples. With memories of the last French invasion still raw in people’s minds, Alexander is determined to keep them outside the walls, but to do so he must supply them with everything they need so they don’t take it from the land. Burchard’s diaries are full of loaves and fishes, with little sign of a miracle to keep the costs down.

  Nevertheless the French manage to make their presence felt. Their commanders have not forgotten their chivalrous commitment to Caterina Sforza, and from France King Louis presses for her to be set free to go into exile in Florence.

  ‘The woman can go wherever she likes, as long as she and her children sign away their rights to the Romagna,’ the Pope says airily.

  Caterina, whose hair has turned grey without her special dyes and potions, signs and is released from her dungeon apartments in Castel Sant’ Angelo. She has gambled hard all her life and has always known that to survive one must know how to lose as well as how to win.

  No sooner is she freed than the two Manfredi brothers of Faenza, who have been ‘travelling’ with Cesare’s army over the last months, are imprisoned in her place. The young man’s only sin is to be exceedingly well loved by his people and therefore too dangerous to be left roaming free. It is a bold-faced betrayal of the promises Cesare made him, but it surprises almost nobody. Covering one’s back is an age-old political strategy and it is not as if the Borgias are unique in their flouting of morality. Only a few months before, in the city of Perugia, one half of the ruling Baglioni family had massacred the other half in their beds, using a wedding reception as a smokescreen for the violence. Of course there had been flurries of diplomatic outrage, but behind closed doors there had been an equal admiration for the sheer audacity of the move. Compared with that, the Manfredi brothers are lucky still to be alive. Though few would take bets on how long such a state will continue. One enemy at a time.

  Cesare, as usual, is too busy for matters of conscience. He must pay his debt to the French King and having frozen in winter he must now look forward to roasting in summer. It is mid-July when he and his crack troops, sweat pouring from under their monstrous armour, join the forces of France to advance on Naples. Within a few weeks it is all over. The House of Aragon is finished and the doomed King Federico goes into exile in France, where at least he will be in the company of his graceless daughter, Carlotta. How different all of their lives might have been if Federico had made her take Cesare Borgia for her husband.

  Duke Ercole d’Este, surely not the only one to muse on the power of marria
ge, takes comfort in the number of noughts negotiated into the dowry and writes to the Pope and then Cesare separately, declaring his deep delight at the union.

  Lucrezia’s household packs away the earthenware dishes and brings out the silver plate. Though the year is not yet up, her mourning is over. Bedecked again in bright colours and jewels, she makes the acquaintance of a new young woman in the mirror. The hollowed-out sadness has gone. In its place has come a quiet, clear-eyed determination. Radiance seems to have passed her by.

  With a settlement more or less hammered out, Ercole sends two special envoys to make the further acquaintance of the bride-to-be. For a while it is all the two men can do to keep up with the pace of celebrations that follow the public announcement of the betrothal. Cesare throws off his surliness and joins the Borgia charm offensive. The Pope, growing sprightlier with each triumph, stays up to greet the dawn, and because it has always been his greatest pleasure to watch his children dancing together, everyone must stay up with him to watch too.

  ‘I think you will agree – your future duchess is not lame,’ he quips proudly as the two envoys prop their eyes open.

  It is a sight worth missing sleep for. The room is lit with torches and standing candelabra and the brightly coloured tiled floor glows beneath their feet. Lucrezia is renowned for the vibrancy of her dancing and Cesare has always been the only man at court to match her. The drum and pipes offer up a bright beat, so that there are moments when the music seems to have them dancing on air. Then there are other passages, laid on a bed of plucked lute strings, where they slide and prowl around each other and, like candle flares, there are flashes of tension, aggression almost, inside their grace that communicate immediately to the audience. Everyone in the room knows the wound between this beautiful brother and sister. How long is it since they last danced together? But of course everyone knows. In the intervening months since Alfonso’s death they have led almost separate lives, busy with war and marriage. It is as if their bodies now are saying things that their tongues could never dare to.