Read Sins of the House of Borgia Online
Authors: Sarah Bower
Sins of the House of Borgia
For Kairo
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Bower
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Originally published as
The Book of Love
in the UK in 2008 by Snowbooks.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bower, Sarah.
Sins of the House of Borgia / by Sarah Bower.
p. cm.
1. Young women—Italy—Fiction. 2. Household employees—Fiction. 3. Borgia, Lucrezia, 1480-1519—Fiction. 4. Borgia, Cesare, 1476?-1507—Fiction. 5. Alexander VI, Pope, 1431-1503—Fiction. 6. Italy—History—1492-1559—Fiction. 7. Nobility—Papal States—Fiction. 8. Popes—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6102.O944S56 2011
823’.92--dc22
2010048515
C
ONTENTS
The past doesn’t change, of course; it lies behind you, petrified, immutable. What changes is the way you see it. Perception is everything. It turns villains into heroes and victims into collaborators.
Hilary Mantel,
A Change of Climate
Now Love has bent the pathway of my life.
Pietro Bembo,
Gli Asolani
P
ROLOGUE
C
ACHIQUIN, IN THE SECOND MONTH OF THE VANILLA HARVEST, 5281, WHICH IS THE YEAR OF THE
C
HRISTIANS 1520
Sometimes I dance, alone, to music no one can hear but me. When I dance I feel the beat of the earth’s own heart rise through my feet and legs, through my loins and belly and into my chest, until my own heart beats in time with the earth’s. Then I wonder if you feel it too, beneath that portion of the earth’s crust where you stand, or walk, or lie, or dance too. Because always, when I am dancing, I am dancing with you.
The end of the vanilla harvest always attracts a lot of visitors. There are the merchants, of course, and the queen’s representatives who come to set the price, but there are also those who come to see the flying men. The tree has been chosen, felled, and set up in the town square, and priests of all denominations have chanted their prayers over it, sprinkled it with incense, and daubed it with chicken blood. The ropes have been tested and the finishing touches put to the feathered capes and headdresses. I sleep poorly these days, and I was awake before dawn this morning, haunted by the brave, lonely music of the
caporal
, high up on his platform, where he is bent by the wind and the weight of the sky, practising on his flute.
So I was already up when Gideon arrived back from Villa Rica with a traveller from Ferrara. The floor was swept and the maize pot on the boil. Gideon went straight in to Xanat and the baby, perhaps out of tact, perhaps because he had missed them, leaving me alone with the traveller. I say alone, but four or five of the older children were about, also up early because today was the day of the flying men. I shooed them all outside while I asked the traveller for news. Silly, really. None of them understands Italian and even if they did, I have nothing to conceal from them. But I did not want them to hear our conversation. I do not want to live with anyone who is contaminated by my past.
The traveller told me the duchess was dead. My first thought was to wonder what she had done with the letters from Spain, but I made no mention of them to the traveller. I hope she had time to destroy them.
She had died last summer, the traveller said, after a difficult childbearing. The duchess’s pregnancies were always difficult, for one reason or another. I do not mourn her because I know she has longed to leave this life for the past twelve years. And I am too close to death myself for mourning. The orange tree is four years old now. It has blossomed this year for the first time, which seems to me like a sign. My body is as sere and twisted as an autumn leaf; it curls ever tighter as though it longs to return to the womb, to be a bud again, a little fist of life. In Toledo, where I was a child.
T
HE
B
OOK OF
E
STHER
Then said the king’s servants that ministered unto him, Let there be fair young virgins sought for the king.
The Book of Esther, 2:2