Mirror Mirror (14 page)

Bianca knew enough not to come forward. “A mouse doesn't accept invitations from a cat,” she said politely. “A mouse wouldn't know how to converse with a cat.”

“She's got the trim of your sails!” Lucrezia hooted with unprincipled glee.

“I'm not well,” said Cesare, “I need some tending. Be a good girl.”

Bianca wasn't a reticent child when it came to pirouetting about the farm buildings. She played with the gooseboy and teased her old nursemaid, and endured Fra Ludovico's tender smiles and muttered benisons. But she thought that the man who smiled at her from a half-raised position was less cat than panther. Clearly he wasn't well, and hadn't been for some time. He must have paid for his adventures with a burden of infirmity taxing his soldier's body. The skin fell on his cheeks and his hair had no gloss. But the panther inside Cesare's exhausted form was still healthy and handsome. It was the panther that frightened Bianca. She stayed where she was.

Some small trinket on the desk snapped in Lucrezia's hand—perhaps a comb made of tortoiseshell. She flung its pieces in a glittering handful at the mirror, and the tines clicked like toenails against the glass. “Brother, you're hounded like a fox, and as near to cornered as you have yet been. You're broken down with the ailment that killed our father, or some version of the French disease calculated to rot your nose off your face. You've squandered the strength you commanded. Don't bring this desperate campaign down to a seduction.”

“I'll find out what we need to know,” he said to his sister. “In my weakened form I can still break your neck, Donna Lucrezia, should I decide.”

But Bianca could tell that Lucrezia held sway over her brother. He brought himself up to a sitting position, steadying himself on the cot with both hands like an aged man. The panther in him retreated, though it seemed to Bianca perhaps more dangerous for it to be hidden.
She had a sense of being awake to peril in a way she had never known, and only because of how Lucrezia and Cesare spoke with each other. A peril as evident in their courtesy as in their sharpness.

“State your business to her, now that I'm awake enough to listen,” he said.

“Very well,” Lucrezia answered. “Bianca, will you sit?”

“I'd rather stand,” she said. Children didn't regularly sit in the presence of their betters—primarily so that they could get a head start should they have to run for safety.

“Sit,” said Cesare. Bianca sat, though on the very edge of the stool he had indicated. Her heels drummed on the floor.

“I've made it my business to oversee affairs at Montefiore,” said Lucrezia in a formal tone, as if addressing an assembly of princes of the Church. “I've been tireless in turning over the papers involved in your father's ownership of this establishment. There are tithes to be paid to the Church, there are costs to the guards who patrol the valley below and keep you safe from invasion and pillage. All this I've done out of love for your father.”

I doubt that, Bianca thought. In what ways could you love my father? For one thing, he's been missing for half my life.

“It turns out that some time ago, blithering Fra Ludovico had a letter from Don Vicente. It was secreted into his book of devotions, and when confronted with its presence he didn't seem to know what it meant. The first part was in Italian, and directed the cleric to maintain the letter in a safe place and present it to you when you were older. The letter then continued in Spanish. It was addressed to you. Have you read it?”

“I'm schooled in my letters,” Bianca admitted, “but not so that I can read in the language of my grandsires.”

“I thought not,” said Lucrezia smugly. “Shall I read it to you, translating as I go?”

“If it's a letter from my father to me, perhaps I should wait until I've learned enough Spanish to read it for myself.”

“How ungrateful,” snapped Lucrezia. “I can understand how Fra
Ludovico might have erred, in that he has become a halfwit; but for a young person you seem to have a head on your shoulders. Fra Ludovico understands no more Spanish than you do. Suppose the letter were a request for help? Suppose your father has fallen into the hands of brigands, or is wasting in an Ottoman prison? Suppose he knows a way you could help release him? Would you have him wait another six months until I could find a tutor for you, and then another six months beyond that until you'd learned enough to attempt a translation? Your father's face might have become mantled with mildew by that time.”

Bianca flushed, knowing this could be true. Her lungs kicked in her, as if she were underwater; her vision watered and caused the room to stew. “If you must, then.”

“I don't offer because I
must.
It's nothing to me,” said Lucrezia. “You must petition courteously if you require my services.”

“Sister,” growled Cesare, but she cocked her wrist at him as if to say
This is my hand to play; let me do it as I like.

“Please, Donna Borgia,” said Bianca then, wringing her hands together. “I most humbly entreat you to read my father's letter aloud.”

“Very well,” said Lucrezia. “Since you've asked so nicely.”

She unfolded an uneven scrap of parchment that had become creased from being stored between the leaves of a breviary. “So it begins, Most beloved Bianca,” she said.

“I write in haste to put down a few details of your family of which you, as a child, have not been made aware. My work in the service of Il Valentino takes me far from you, and I must serve my Duke or risk upsetting what remains of our happy life as a traveling family who has found a welcoming home in the hinterlands of central Italy.

“I cannot know what fate will befall me as I march to a most unpredictable goal. However, should I fail to return before you have reached your maturity, I want you to know that there is help for you abroad. If famine or plague or the danger of war
threatens your safety at Montefiore, you should make all haste to your mother's family home in Navarre. There a treasury is reserved for our family's use, and petition can be made to draw upon it once you have reached your womanly estate.

“If, however, news should come to the Castedo family of Navarre or to my kin, the de Nevada family in Aragon, that harm has befallen you, don't worry: our cousins will mount an expedition and pitch battle against your enemies. Those countrymen of ours, the Borgias, have talents in intrigue that they didn't invent wholecloth. The de Nevadas and Castedos could match them in cunning and outstrip them in cruelty. So let these words give you some comfort, that though I've become a simple farmer in Italy, there are impressive resources at my call—and at yours. Apply to the reigning Bishop of Navarre for help, and he will not fail you.

“I've arranged passage cross country to Città di Castello, and I start as much before dawn as a crowing cockerel can wake me. I do this with the knowledge that every step advancing me toward my goal is a step I will be eager to retrace to come home to you. Be good, my sweet Bianca, and keep your father in your prayers and in your heart. Be mindful that only love could make me leave you, and if the Love that governs our days is merciful, it will be love that returns us to each other too. If not in these days of our lives, then in the long golden day without sunset, in heaven.”

Lucrezia cleared her throat. “How very tender. Your father's humor is melancholic as well as phlegmatic.”

Bianca couldn't speak for the tears in her throat. After all these years, to hear her father's words.
Papà!
Though unschooled in treachery, she knew enough to guess that the Borgias wouldn't hesitate to fabricate a letter from her father if they thought they could gain by it. But this was her father's voice, without compromise, without doubt. The rawness of his grief at parting from her brought her own loneliness
back to her, and she wept silently but openly, as if he had only left that morning, and all the intervening years that had passed so far were yet to be endured. And who knew how many were left, before the reunion in heaven or on this wretched earth?

“How recently has this arrived?” asked Bianca. “May I go ask Fra Ludovico?”

“He's dotty as a dormouse,” said Lucrezia. “I asked him the same question and he answered,
tomorrow, or the week after, I'm not sure.
”

“But do you have any word from my father?” Suddenly she was emboldened to ask. “On your behalf he left on a campaign: what you have heard?”

“Nothing, but silence means nothing in itself,” said Lucrezia, turning a common viperous thought of Bianca's into a posy.

“Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop?” said Cesare.

“You ask me questions and you don't answer mine,” she said.

“Let me suppose you didn't hear what I said. Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop?”

“I don't know a Tuscan cock from an Umbrian hen,” said Bianca desperately.

“What is meant, herein, by ‘womanly estate'?” mused Lucrezia.

“He must mean that a dowry or a debt to be discharged can be effected when Bianca comes to marrying age, of course,” said Cesare. “How old are you, little mouse?”

“She is a child still, with the chest of a boy,” scoffed Lucrezia.

“You were engaged to be married when you were eleven,” Cesare reminded his sister. “That disgusting
cherubino
from Valencia.”

“I was the daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia,” she snapped. “I'd have been engaged in utero, had it benefited the family fortunes, as you know very well. Despite Vicente's implication of wealth and connections, the de Nevada family is neither powerful nor clever. This letter may be a ruse to confound us.”

“We weren't meant to see it,” said Cesare.

“Of course we were.
It's written in Spanish. Who else at Montefiore would have been able to read it?”

“It's written in Spanish to keep news of the family wealth away from prying eyes. Else the threat of kidnapping and ransom might apply.”

“Let me think. It could be a ploy. On the other hand, the threat of retaliation by loyal cousins . . . I never knew de Nevada well, but he didn't seem the scheming sort. Was he clever enough to plan a strategic defense of his daughter like this?”

“Was he?” Bianca was affronted. “You mean
is
he.” She didn't know or care whether her father was clever; she cared that he still
was
.

“The first rule of success, my dear sister, a rule you should have mastered by now, is not to underestimate the deviousness of your enemies.”

“Oh, but who is an enemy?” asked Bianca, meaning it rhetorically: Certainly not us: we've given our father's years to some campaign of yours! Some years, but not a life.

“You're not an enemy, you're a bother. We've learned nothing from you. Run on now, and take the ridiculous cloak with you.”

“Oh, let the mouse stay,” said Cesare.

Shades of rock

T
HE YEARS
peeled slowly off, one by one, or perhaps dozens at a time. Vicente had lost the ability to read time from the spatter of light the high window allowed to trail across the wall of his cell. Some days he couldn't imagine whether it was starlight or sunlight, and other days—or nights—he felt that each individual stone was outlined with a pressure of silver edging, as if its crystals were yearning to make useful luminescence for him.

He knew that some days must be wintry, for a fine snow managed to filter in through the slitted aperture, and failed to melt for hours on end, but lay like the ghost of a carpet for him to regard. His fingers ached and stung, and then lost feeling. Other days he might catch the sharp sweet smell of a newly cut meadow. He was most aware in the spring, for once a year the monks butchered a lamb, likely for the paschal celebration, and in a matter of hours what started as the stench of searing flesh and bubbling blood became the aroma of choicest meat.

Always, there were the sounds of bells, as the monasteries across the rough forested hills of Agion Oros tolled their times to God and signaled news of their continued existence to one another.

Occasionally the sound of winds, or of distant birds of the sea, spiraled down to his celibate ears.

Once he heard a donkey bray, and he laughed for a while, at the gait of its voice picking its ungainly way through the air.

Never, though, did he hear the monks at prayer or at chant. Indeed, he rarely saw more than two of them at a time. Whenever the door of his prison opened, two new monks brought in his food, or clean clothes occasionally, and swapped a fresh empty bucket for the stinking fly-struck bucket of shit he had prepared for them. Maybe the monks were on a rotation, but there were too many of them for Vicente to identify by sight or voice. They all wore black robes, and the black hair on their chins raveled halfway down their chests identically. Every now and then one might smile a bit more kindly than the others, as he delivered bread and vegetables in broth, or a pastry with pistachios and honey, or a flagon of cool welcome water. But Vicente had not learned enough Greek to be able to converse. Besides, the monks were either living under vows of silence or, without a woman leading them in the arts of conversation, they had lost the capacity to chatter.