The Borgia Mistress: A Novel (14 page)

She started as a dark flush bloomed across her cheeks. I regretted my outburst at once, but before I could attempt to repair it, she said, “Your father loved you. He thought that if you didn’t know what really happened, you would be protected from the memory of it.”

The fireflies were brighter and swarmed even more thickly. I blinked, trying to banish them, but without success. A sudden, unanticipated rush of loathing for what my father had done swelled up in me. It was so at odds with my normal feelings for him that it shook me to the core. I had lived all my life trying to please him, because he was good and kind to me but also because in the darkest corners of my mind I wondered if he didn’t blame me for my mother’s dying at my birth, as he had told me was her fate. I wanted to make amends for that, as I yearned to avenge his death not only as my final gift to my father but also as the ultimate proof that I had deserved to live.

But if he had lied, if all that I thought I knew was false … Where was the truth, then? In what obscure corner of the darkness did it crouch?

I clutched the psalter tightly, as though it might otherwise dissolve into dust and I with it. Blinded by the brilliance of the fireflies, I said, “As you loved my mother, tell me how she died.”

14

“
Three days at most,” Giovanni said. “Four at the outside. You understand why I must go?”

Adriana laughed, her face turned to the sun, her eyes shining. Her skin bore the tint of apricots; a smattering of freckles marched across her nose. She looked young, filled with life and, incredible as he always found it, love for him.

“It is the best opportunity you have ever been offered,” she said. “Apothecary in the household of the Duke himself. You deserve no less.”

“Assistant apothecary, one of many. Still, it would mean a great deal more money and a better life for us all.”

“We have a good life right now. Even so, I understand. This town is charming but too small for your aspirations. Go, then, and awe the majordomo or whomever it is that you must impress. I will start packing.”

He laughed and seized her around the waist, swinging her in a wide arc so that her skirt billowed out like a sail about to carry them all away on some marvelous adventure. Nearby, the child watched, solemn-eyed but with a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Rather than the usual infant fare, her father told her tales of great voyages when he tucked her into bed at night. The Portuguese were plunging down the coast of Africa, even claiming that they would find the southern tip of it and discover a new route to the spice wealth of the Indies. He wanted her to share his wonder in the new age into which she had been born. She was too young to understand completely, but such was her trust in him that she believed all the same. He felt the responsibility of that, knew he should never break faith so innocently given.

At the moment of parting, he hesitated, a sudden sense of apprehension moving through him. He was a Jew by birth and, as such, accustomed to always looking over his shoulder in an unfriendly land. But he had embraced the Christian faith with sincerity, if also with some regret that he kept entirely private within himself. Mounted on the borrowed horse, he shook off his dread and turned to look at the woman and child. Though the rising dust of summer clouded his vision, he saw his wife smile once again and raise her hand in farewell.

When he was gone, the child sat outside and drew with a stick in the dirt. The shapes she traced were simple: a lopsided circle, an almost square, lines that wandered off to nowhere. The lack of rain in the days that followed preserved the markings.

Evening came; the candles were lit, and her mother spooned soup into a bowl and helped her to eat. They were finishing when a dog barked in the road just beyond the shop. Or some other sound drew their attention. The child dipped a small piece of bread in the bottom of the bowl and sucked on it. Her mother went to the window. She opened a shutter and peered down.

Or so Giovanni imagined when he sat in the room afterward, trying to grasp what had happened. There were tiny signs: the bread left on the table beside the bowl, the shutters drawn a little apart, the overturned stool where the child would have been sitting just before her mother grabbed her up.

He tried to see it all in his mind’s eye even as the ghost of his butchered wife stood at his shoulder, gazing at him with great sorrow.

The next tenants would have to sand the wood floor to get the bloodstains out, and even that might not work. So much blood—incredible to think that the body of one small woman could have contained all that.

As for the child …

She had not spoken, might never again. Her mind was broken in some way that, for all his skill as an apothecary, he could not heal.

How much had she seen? Understood? There had been three men, he thought, working backward from the number of stab wounds in his wife’s body and the footprints in her blood. She must have recognized them in that moment when she looked from the window. They had worried her enough for her to hide the child, but not herself.

Perhaps she had feared that failing to find her, they would tear the place apart and discover the child as well.

Or perhaps she simply had not been able to believe that men she knew would do what they had.

It was his fault. In his vanity, he had believed that the letter summoning him to the ducal palace was real. Believed that he—a converted Jew of humble origins—would be offered a position for which the ablest and best-connected men vied. Arriving to the discovery that no one had any knowledge of him had been merely annoying at first. He had wasted precious hours trying to rectify what turned out to be no one’s mistake but his own. By the time he started for home, it was too late.

So much blood … Slipping and falling in it, he cried her name, gathering her into his arms, refusing to believe what all his senses told him. The woman who had filled his world with light and love was gone, leaving nothing but a torn, empty shell.

And the child. Scrambling frantically to his feet, he looked in all directions, terrified that he would find the tiny body.

“Francesca!”

Nothing, no sound. Was she dead? Had she fled? Was she out there somewhere wandering, alone and afraid?

Or—

He tore desperately at the wall that he had built despite Adriana’s laughing protestations, knowing in his soul that hatred never slept.

“Francesca!”

Was there a sound? Not a voice, only a soft rustling. He ripped the last plank away and fell to his knees, grasping the small, still body. Still but alive. Alive but … away.

*   *   *

“That was the word he used when he spoke of you,” Mother Benedette said as she finished her recitation of the events as told to her by my grief-stricken father. “You were there … but not. It was as though your mind were somewhere else and he had no idea how to reach you.”

Floating in a sea of silence for how long? A year? Two? My memory was such that I had difficulty remembering much of anything until the day we came to the grand palazzo on the Corso, the home of the renowned prince of Holy Mother Church, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who had hired my father in some capacity I did not then understand. At that moment, walking through the doors into Borgia’s domain, my life seemed to begin again.

Yet, contrary to my father’s hopes, the past had never given up its grip on me. Its talons were wedged deeper than ever into my soul.

“Who killed her?” I heard my voice as though from a great distance. The wall loomed before me, pressing me down into a narrow, confined space from which there had never been any real escape.

“All the signs pointed to her family being responsible. They never forgave her for marrying a Jew.”

“Are they still alive?” Why did I ask? Because I had a sudden, fierce need to seek them out and kill them one by one as they had killed my mother?

“Two years later, a plague swept through Milan. They did not survive it.”

The thought of my anonymous, faceless relations writhing in Hell failed to satisfy me. Plainly, I lacked sufficient trust in divine retribution.

“Your father blamed himself for not being there, for putting your mother in such jeopardy by marrying her, for everything. You were all he had left, the sole reason for his continuing to live. He could think of nothing except protecting you.”

Perhaps that was true, but it was equally true that my father’s lie had left me exposed to the hideous nightmare that haunted me. Robbed of the right to acknowledge it as memory, and deal with it as such, I could only conclude that I was mad or damned, or both. My fear, as I sat on the stone bench clutching my mother’s psalter, was that the truth had come too late to save me. Could I be anything other than what I had so long believed myself to be? Did I even want to try? My infirmity, as Renaldo had so delicately called it, was the price I paid for my armor against the world. Without it, how could I live?

“I must go.” The world tilted as I stood. I reached out a hand to steady myself. My legs turned to water and my head spun. Only with an effort was I able to right myself.

“You are not well,” Mother Benedette said as she, too, rose. “Let me help you.”

I had difficulty hearing her, so thick had the fireflies become. But I managed to shake my head. “I’m fine, really, and I have much to do. This business with Herrera—”

I broke off, abruptly aware that I had begun to speak of matters entirely private to His Holiness. Even so, the look that flitted across the abbess’s smooth face suggested that she had heard about the incident with the officer’s wife.

“The Spaniard,” she said. “He is not liked.”

Apparently, the gossip of the town breached even convent walls. “The affection of the mob is always capricious,” I replied absently. Borgia had said that one night when we were drinking together, shortly after his election to pope. Cesare had come in and found us most of the way through a goodly amount of Lombardy red. He had thought it all very amusing.

“I must go,” I said again. The echo of my words rang hollowly within the church walls.

The abbess touched my arm to keep me a moment. “Read your mother’s psalter. It will give you comfort.”

I nodded and slipped the book into the pouch I wore beneath my gown so that the sight of it would not spark anxious speculation as to its contents.

“One more thing,” she said. “The road to Assisi is still closed, but I am of a mind to remain here awhile in any case. If you have need of me—”

I murmured something to the effect that I would be in touch with her as soon as circumstances allowed. I think I also thanked her for the psalter, but I am not certain. The world was splintering into a thousand pieces, like the shards of a mosaic suddenly free of the mortar that had held it in place. I feared that I would do the same if I did not get away quickly. Having bade the abbess farewell, I left the church and hurried across the piazza. My heart beat rapidly, and each breath I took was painful. I could scarcely feel the ground beneath me.

The guards on watch in front of the palazzo stiffened as I approached. No doubt I did not look my best, fleeing a church as though pursued by unseen demons. They made way for me with haste, all but falling over each other. Once in my quarters, I attempted to secure my mother’s psalter in the puzzle chest, only to discover that my fingers had turned to clumsy lumps unable to perform the complex series of movements needed to unlock the chest. Worse yet, I could not remember the sequence for more than a second or two before it flitted from my mind.

Hardly aware that I did so, I sat down on the floor in front of the chest. My heart beat frantically and my breath was ragged. I was in desperate need of a calmative, but when I looked, I discovered that less of Sofia’s powder remained than I had thought. Panic flared. Clearly, I had to restrain my use of it or I would be left without. Yet my need was great. I stumbled to my feet and set off for the cellars, thinking only of finding an alternative. I had in mind to help myself to a small cask of brandy, not that I would drink very much of it; not at all. Just enough to soothe my jangled nerves. Surely I deserved that much, given what had just been revealed to me?

At the bottom of the stone steps, I paused. I had visited the cellars once shortly after arriving in Viterbo, but with every bottle, barrel, vat, and cask intended for
la famiglia
secure under my seal, there had been no reason to return. For a moment, I could not remember where in the maze of redbrick chambers the brandy was stored. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through window slits at ground level, I began to get my bearings. Setting off in what I thought was the right direction, I soon came to an arched chamber lined with wooden stands holding supplies for the papal household.

A flicker off to the side distracted me. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I glimpsed a figure moving along the aisle that ran the length of the cellars. At once, I stiffened, fearful that the terrifying vision I had experienced earlier was about to return. When it did not, I looked again, but the figure had disappeared. With a sigh of relief, I stepped into the chamber.

Only to trip and almost fall over an obstruction in my path. Thrusting out an arm, I caught hold of a barrel to steady myself. Slowly, I straightened. In the dim light, it looked as though a large sack had been dropped carelessly just inside the chamber. I knelt, reached out a hand, and felt the unmistakable shape of a body.

Looking more closely, I saw that the eyes were open and as yet unclouded by death. The skin, when I touched two fingers to the side of the neck, was warm. The young man staring up at me wore the mulberry and gold colors reserved for His Holiness’s personal household staff.

I leaped up, ran out of the chamber, and looked in all directions. In the shadows, I could just make out the figure, too far away for me to catch. It was moving swiftly.

I took the stairs I had come down two at a time. For a change, Fortune favored me. Vittoro was in the hall, preparing to go out on patrol. As soon as he saw me, he stepped away from his men so that we could speak privately.

Quickly, I said, “A page is dead. In the cellars. The killer may also still be down there.”

Without hesitation, he called an officer over. “Fifty men.
Now
. Half block all stairs to the cellars, the rest come with me.”