Mirror Mirror (17 page)

Lucrezia had taken leave of her mother casually, mockingly. Well, her robust and homely father was in his ascendancy, and court
life seemed more alluring than learning the arts of needlework at her mother's elbow. Lucrezia had been fattened on the notion of Borgia supremacy, after all, and her mother wasn't a Borgia—not even by marriage. With difficulty Lucrezia managed to choke back her impulse to correct her mother's comportment—as Lucrezia left to take up her proper place in the Vatican palace, Vannozza's tears and hand-wringing weren't suitable gestures
at all
—and besides, the girl didn't envision what a profound change it would be. The distance to Vannozza's door was, mathematically, exactly as far as the distance from it. Surely?

As it turned out, such measurements aren't entirely governed by the laws of mathematics. The laws of politics and one's personal humors alter the equation.

And Lucrezia, impressed with Giulia Farnese's beauty, was cowed by it. Giulia was her own age, nearly,
and her father's lover.
The paradox of that!

Before state affairs and court life began to restrict her liberty, the young Lucrezia haunted the servants' quarters in the Pope's fortress, the Castel Sant'Angelo. She exchanged her silks and furs for her handmaiden's broadcloth tunic and slipped out a window, and played tricks on fishermen struggling to find dinner in the filthy Tiber. To see how it felt, she'd laid down with shepherds in fields striped with the shadows of poplars. She'd wandered incognita—the daughter of a pope—giving free kisses among the tombstones and cypresses on the Capitoline Hill. In matters amorous, Lucrezia was finding herself talented. Too soon, her beauty became unique. Before long she couldn't show her face inside or out of Saint Peter's Basilica without being recognized.

Study came easily to her. She spoke four languages well. Without much effort she could hear in the rhythm of foreign tongues a certain implied meaning, even when vocabulary and the nuances of grammar escaped her. For a child with spotty tutoring, she engaged in her own private trivium: not grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, the traditional roster of subjects, but glamour, intrigue, and power. She followed the affairs
of the court of the Pope with closer attention than most bishops. Once, when the Pope was indisposed, she even had managed the affairs of the Church for a short while, until she was prohibited by cardinals from signing a papal document with the question “
Ubi est penna vestra?
”—meaning not only
Where is your pen?
but also
Where is your penis?

But she'd enjoyed governing, when the time arrived to try it. She'd spent those few months in 1498, when she was scarcely eigh-teen, as
governatrice
of Spoleto. Five long months there, married to one man, Alfonso of Aragon, and in love with another who would no longer have her. She was pregnant with the child who would be named Rodrigo, after her father, and she was saddled with the other one, the mortal mistake in her arms, the one who cried piteously at night, who wouldn't be thrown over the edge of the aqueduct, all because of the meddlesome de Nevada . . .

Adult as she could be by now, at the age of twenty-six, she sat before the mirror and studied her face within it. Had so much happened in such a short time? In seven years? Vicente de Nevada, having learned of her residency there, had made his way to Spoleto, on the Umbrian flank of the Apennines. He had gone to hear Mass at the duomo. He had ventured forward and caught Lucrezia at the conclusions of the Sacrament. She'd been praying in front of Fra Filippo Lippi's fresco, in which the Virgin hovers in robes of white and gold before God the Patriarch, who sets a crown of surpassing glory upon her head. Lucrezia had been jealous, not of the Virgin's beauty, but of her crown.

“I beg to speak with the Donna Borgia,” said Vicente, in Spanish, and from her impious thoughts she had been torn, for the consolation of hearing the family tongue.

De Nevada asked for the
governatrice
's intercession with her brother Cesare. De Nevada had a motherless child, and his profession was agriculture; might Cesare, out of feeling for a fellow Iberian, secure the immigrant a position, perhaps even a small landholding?

“Put the child in an orphanage till she's older, and send her to be
a nun when she's ready,” decreed Lucrezia. “Neither my brother nor I have property we hand out for the asking. If you need work, Cesare is always looking for
condottieri.
A mercenary earns good pay and can usually find a war to fight. Besides, I don't oversee my brothers' rare administrations of mercy.”

Something in de Nevada's expression—his refusal to consider farming the child out—made her feel a modest pity, though. She invited him to visit her in the castle. That afternoon, from a rampart, she watched the father and daughter make their way up the slope and be admitted to the interior courtyard.

There, despite a chill in the air, Lucrezia greeted them. She had dismissed her retinue of attendants and chaperones, and her husband was off hunting for the day. To prove her own motherliness, and as a badge of respectability, she kept the Punishment on her hip. He was docile enough until it proved inconvenient—his usual way.

She had arranged a table to be set with Castilian lace, and platters of fresh fruit and decanters of wine were at the ready. Vicente had the young girl by the hand. The young Bianca.

The child must have been three years old or so. Good-looking in her way, considering how lumpy and irregular children's faces could be. The dark hair, the skin so white. Pale eyes, the color of water, set wide, and cunningly large, the way children's eyes so often seem. The child was preternaturally self-possessed. She didn't join the other urchins playing chase and seek games among the arches. She didn't interrupt her father, pull at his sleeves, nor did she whine or fuss. She stood with both feet planted, her little stomach a smooth shallow bowl beneath the pleats of her green-black tunic. And while she stood and watched, too well behaved for belief, Lucrezia's own Punishment thrashed in her arms, threatening to unbalance her onto the cobbles, maybe endanger the child growing within her.

“Let me help you,” said Vicente, a capable father. She despised him for having the nerve to assist without leave. But he had a natural touch, and the squirming toddler settled, and she hated Vicente for that talent too.

They exchanged a few remarks about life in Iberia, in Italy, about the weather and the church services in Spoleto. She asked why he had left his homeland in the first place. That might have been all. But Vicente had touched Lucrezia somehow, in some way she didn't know—perhaps as a speaker of Spanish he reminded her of her brother, whose company she missed so? It was hard to say. And when the weather grew sharply colder, and a sudden squall fell like white nets around them, she found herself extending the hospitality of the castle to this newcomer. Spend a few nights, she had said; make your beds here. Until the snow lets up, at least. Little hope, really, of my finding you a foothold of property, but I can find you a bed and a meal.

That night, before Alfonso had approached her chamber to take his due as a husband, the Punishment squalled worse than ever. The wet nurses couldn't calm him down, and she wouldn't let them take him away for fear they would kill him before she had a chance. She would rather do the job herself so she could ensure that blame fell safely elsewhere. She'd thought it through often enough, hadn't she? And here was de Nevada, a man of no apparent connections, presenting himself as a likely candidate. Fortune smiled on her, for once! She could accuse him and imprison him before morning, and no one would come forward to speak on his behalf.

Long after midnight, she wrapped a bunting around the sleeping child's mouth to muffle any sudden cries, and she carried him down the steps of the courtyard and exited the palace by a side door. (She had seen that the guard would be deeply asleep thanks to a helpful powder in his evening ale.) She made her way across the brow of the mount, to where the bridge, stepping in Gothic arches on top of a Roman aqueduct, began its lofty walk from the castle, across the gorge carved out by the Tessino River, to the monastery on Monte Luco, the far side of the valley.

Even in the scatter of snow, her step was swift but sure, for she had taken the air and the views from the bridge many times before. It was guarded at the far end, she knew. But the near end was desolate. Not even a viper could swarm up the steep legs of the arches.

She went to where she judged the halfway point must be. She lay down the Punishment to unwrap him, to send him naked to his Maker, and good riddance—when, a whisper on snow, she heard a footstep or two coming from the direction of the castle, though no one could have seen her leave.

She turned and peered. A mist had come up on the valley's western slope. If her pursuer was hidden from her, she must also still be hidden from him.

She hadn't bargained at working hastily. Perverse to the last, the child chose this moment to wake. He kept writhing as she leaned against the edge of the rampart and readied herself to pitch the weight mightily, to clear the wide ledge in an arc and ensure fatality. She couldn't get a firm enough footing. Damn. He seemed to have an animal's instinct for what was happening.

Perhaps she would have to bash his head in first to reduce his form to dead weight. She gasped with the effort and drew her son back, prepared to batter the wall with his skull—and then the sound of nearer footsteps, a whisper becoming a rhythm through the rising mist.

It was Vicente. The one figured to stand as a culprit was interfering instead. He was aghast. He threw himself between her swinging arm and the wall, so the baby thumped hideously, but not damagingly, against his chest. “Are you mad?” hissed Vicente. “My lady Lucrezia.”

She slumped against the far wall with the back of her hand against her mouth. “Who are you? Where am I?” she quavered, working for time in which to gather her thoughts.

“You don't know what you are doing,” he said. “Come, take my arm, and I'll walk you to safety.”

It wasn't hard to appear besotted with sleep, for she was dizzy with fright. If anyone were to learn what she had been about to do . . . Even for a Borgia, the slaughter of a child was extreme. By the time they had reached the castle side of the aqueduct, however, she'd prepared a defense and a strategy.

“I'm slow to wake,” she said. “I suffer from fits of sleepwalking. It's all as a dream, a horrid dream. Do me the honor of keeping my fretful condition a matter private between us. How lucky you were to come wake me and avert disaster.”

He saw her in the morning. At a table in the solar, he sat down with the young woman and her husband as they broke their fast. His little girl sat on his lap. The Punishment had been sequestered far enough away so his morning screams couldn't be heard.

“I hope you slept well,” said Lucrezia's hapless husband.

“Only so-so,” answered Vicente, studying the bread in his hands. “I had much on my mind and kept turning. I'm scarcely sure what I should do next. Donna Borgia,” he continued, looking her in the eyes, “I await your advice.”

“I've been thinking,” said Lucrezia hastily, “about your predicament. I believe with a little attention, Cesare or I may yet be able to find you a small estate, conferrable upon certain conditions.”

“I thought you considered that impossible,” said Alfonso de Bisceglie, surprised at his wife.

“I couldn't sleep either, and I put my mind to the task.” Her answer was brisk and the topic of conversation changed.

Thus had Vicente come into possession of Montefiore, after Lucrezia, privately, had had the previous owner smothered, to ensure the premises were available for new occupants.

Learning from her panic, Lucrezia had dismissed the Punishment from her life thoroughly as she had dismissed herself from her mother's. In due course, she had given birth to Rodrigo, of more honorable lineage, of better disposition and capabilities than the Punishment. To protect him she had him raised far from herself too. There was reason, in his legitimacy, to worry about his prospects, and she wouldn't see him besmirched by too close an association with her.

She looked at the mirror as these days, seven years past, reframed themselves. It was almost as if she could see the hills around Spoleto, dotted with ilex, lulled by the morose remarks of sheep. The palm trees, the threads of waterfall on the far slope of the canyon . . . She
had never been able to guess why Vicente de Nevada had been awake and clever or bold enough to follow his royal hostess out of a dark guarded castle and across a mist-shrouded bridge. He had been certain enough of himself to leave his little girl behind, dozing under her blankets. And
she
had not been screaming through the night, with the pains of teething, of colic, of general disapproval of the world.

That same good little girl, now swaying her boyish hips at Cesare.

The Duchessa couldn't bear what she had seen. Cesare was as good as dying—Lucrezia was no fool—and still the lecherous bastard had found the girl child alluring. Her own brother, the tenderest swift soldier ever to enter her bed—groping at a child. In a seizure of ire she gripped her stomacher and tore it. Good that he had bullied the priest off somewhere—probably to a local church with a real roof, so Cesare could take the sacrament in some sort of comfort. He enjoyed the penance almost as much as the sin. It didn't matter where he had gone. He had left her, that much was clear. He was gone for good.

Sweeping up in a tempest of silks and ermine, before she knew what she was about, she pitched herself toward the door.

“Primavera,” she commanded. “Where are you? Someone, get that old cow up here. Isn't it true that she has a grandson who is a hunter? Primavera. He will come and have an audience with me, as soon as he can wash the blood off his hands. Primavera. Does no one listen when I call?”