Mirror Mirror (13 page)

As to the farmwork—such was the awe in which the Borgias were held that the
contadini
kept to their schedule of tasks without much supervision. Yearly the olive trees were cut back just far enough to allow a bird to pass through the main branches without its wing tips brushing the leaves. During the spring, the fields were planted on the seventeenth day after the full moon. Now that Lago Verde had a better channel for drainage, worries about
mal aria
—bad air—could be countered by a more conscientious attention to the letting out and the stopping up of the water flow.

Beyond, tenant farmers harvested the apples and grapes and olives, and hayed when haying was on, and slaughtered a spring lamb or two and an autumn hog, and a goose for the Christmas season. One could hardly have imagined a landlord was needed, so practiced were olive trees and ewes and meadows and apple orchards at producing, without instruction, their signature offerings. Or maybe the threat of Lucrezia Borgia's inevitable return bullied the farm into behaving itself: that's what Primavera said.

Bianca lived in her house like a child on an island—not quite alone, but a priest and a cook for company weren't enough, either. She was about eleven years old now. She begrudged the sacrifice she'd been required to make, but she wasn't a fool: she could tell that showing contempt to Primavera or Fra Ludovico would be misdirected. She misbehaved mildly, as was fitting for her age.

She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go. And her father had made her promise. Would the terms of that promise ever expire? What if she were as old as—oh, a village maiden, or la Borgia, or Primavera even, and her father had never come back? Would she be bound to live and die on the hilltop all because she'd once given her word?

The notion of disobedience occurs, in time, to everyone. One summer day when the sky featured blazing, portent cloudscapes,
Bianca decided she had to leave Montefiore, she had to break her promise and run away. If she could do nothing else, she'd begin a pilgrimage to find out what had happened to her father: to rescue him if she could, to mourn and pray over his grave if she must.

She got as far as the bridge at the bottom of the property, where the cultivation ended and the woods began, on slopes descending too steeply for agriculture.

She paced noisily on the well-worn boards to the middle of the bridge. She would gain the other side today, and her thumping was to drum courage in her.

She stopped, though; the echo of her footsteps seemed a warning. She remembered her father's story about a mudcreature below the bridge. She leaned on the stone railings to look. “Have you something to say to me?” she said. “If you're going to protest, at least do it in person so I can try to argue you down.”

The fact that the mudcreature didn't speak didn't mean it wasn't there, of course. Silence can be tactical. Even God used silence as a strategy.

She looked. She peered further, both into the shadows and into the surface of the stream. The water today was high, but running slowly, and the surface reflective, trees and sky and rocks shivered into interlacing tendrils of green and blue and brown. It was so easy to imagine what might lurk beneath the gloss of the reflected world, a gnarled, hairy hand flexing to grab her ankle.

“Gesù,” she said, disgusted at herself. She couldn't make herself pass. Not yet. Sometime when the bridge wouldn't thump at her, when the water wouldn't wink at her: then she would cross it. But today—and in several other tries that summer—she failed, and kept failing. Was it her promise to her father that waited under the bridge, with its hairy hand?

A Borgia entourage had arrived in the dark. A small one, only four horses. Lucrezia made her breakfast from the house stores and supplies she carried with her. Currants from Corinth, bread in honey,
a glass of wine imported from Crete. She made a lazy inspection of the farm—the accounts, the state of the orchards, the gooseboy and his geese, the buildings and outbuildings, and in the evening she came to a conclusion. She decided that Bianca no longer needed a nurse, and Primavera could be let go.

“Go where?” said the cook, grinning as toothily as her teeth would allow.

“Go. Retire. Haven't you some feeble spawn to take you in? They've foisted you off on us for far too long. Go back to them and require that they obey the Fourth Commandment, and honor you, whether you deserve it or no.”

“There's no one,” said Primavera.

“No one who will admit to it,” murmured Lucrezia. “Who could blame them?”

“I lost both sons to Cesare's wars,” said Primavera pointedly. “The ill-fated attack on Forlì wasn't good for our family line. They were stupid and cloddish but they were my sons, and they're gone. My only grandson is a hunter, and seeing what conscription did to his father and uncle, he keeps out of the way of the
condottieri.
He lives by his wits, no place special, and I can't go roost in a tree with him. I haven't got the hips for it. I should mention that he has no interest in displaying his handsome head on a stake on the walls of some castle Cesare wants to occupy, and therefore the lad uses his head, unlike others in his family.”

“So he's off and gone,” mused Lucrezia, in a pleasant threatening way.

Primavera was on her mettle. “As it happens, he's here today; when I saw that you'd arrived in the nighttime I sent for him, so he could provide us some meat for the table. He's here to protect me should I need it.”

“You're not listening,” said Lucrezia. “Go throw yourself on the mercies of the almshouse. Throw yourself off the precipice behind the apple orchard. I don't care. Just stuff your personal items in the cleft of your bosom and take yourself elsewhere.”

“My knees won't manage the slope anymore,” said Primavera. “I have to stay at Montefiore because I can't maneuver myself down the hill.”

“Shall I arrange to have you rolled out in a barrel?”

“I'm sure you could,” said Primavera. “There are some wine casks in the village large enough. But you'd have to get them up here first. Now, will there be anything else, Donna Lucrezia? I've the girl's supper to get.”

“Send her to me,” said Lucrezia.

“She has her supper to eat,” said Primavera. “I'll send her to you when she's fed.”

“You won't correct me, “ said Lucrezia. “You won't dare.”

“I beg your forgiveness with all my heart, and trust in your legendary mercy,” said Primavera dryly. She took herself off to the kitchen, histrionically wheezing on the stairs.

From the piano nobile Lucrezia listened to the sounds of cooking below. Primavera called Bianca to come clean her hands and wipe her face. Then she bellowed for Fra Ludovico to come bless the damned meal before it got cold. When the meal was over, Primavera bullied Bianca out of the rags and aprons of her everyday wear and into better clothes, and rubbed the Sign of the Cross on her forehead and pressed a leaf of basil into her collar. Then Bianca was released to become the audience of the de facto mistress of Montefiore, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchessa de Ferrara.

She held herself to one side of the door before she entered.

She wasn't a saint stepping on ivory clouds, no matter how Fra Ludovico dreamed of her. Nor was she quite the
bambina
that Primavera remembered. She was at that age of halfling, that moment of sheerest youth that drives elders wild. She was Susanna at her ablutions, the more beautiful in her allure because the more innocent of it. Her bosom hadn't swollen yet. She was as sleek as a kouros oiled for the games of wrestling in old Athens or Sparta, which Hellenic sculptors had memorialized in marble to emblemize human potential. One
had been dug up in Ravenna recently and Lucrezia had bought it for her palazzo.

“Come in,” said Lucrezia Borgia.

Bianca stepped into the room. When her trips between Ferrara and Rome allowed it, Lucrezia Borgia stopped to supervise the development of Bianca's poise and manners. Bianca couldn't quite remember the arrangement by which she'd come to be a ward of the Duchessa, but it had to do with her father's departure, so Bianca had cultivated a habit of caution.

Still, Lucrezia was so glamorous, so civilized, and spoke in such a dulcet hush. Bianca had to lean close to hear, and closer still. “Come in, come in! Forward into the lamplight. The room is gloomy. I take it the old onion has fed you your supper?”

Bianca nodded.

“Turn, so I might look upon you,” she said. “And see how God has formed you in these months since my last examination. What sort of vestment is that robe; does the peasant
nonna
think you are a giantess?”

Primavera had wrapped Bianca in a crimson cloak far too large for her.

“This robe belonged to my mother,” said Bianca. “That's what my father used to say.” Feeling a fool, she shucked off the heavy garment, and laid it in folds carefully over the arm of a chair. Then she turned back to Lucrezia. She held her shoulders high but tucked her chin into the collar of her dress. Her eyes stayed trained upon the patterned carpet of red and blue that Lucrezia preferred to walk upon instead of to hang against the cold stone walls of the house for warmth.

“You chose to wear a green like a Frankish bottle of may wine, and a white cascade of lace through the collar,” said Lucrezia.

“Primavera chooses my clothes,” murmured Bianca. “I don't care about what I wear.”

“Nonetheless, you're well clad. Clever fingers have stitched that bodice to show you off well. But you don't observe the sumptuary laws. You are above your station. And the redness of that huge cloak! A laugh. Still, you're a
pretty enough child, Bianca.”

Pretty enough for what, thought Bianca, but she said nothing.

“Attend to me when I speak, my girl,” said Lucrezia. “It offends me for you to ignore my remarks.”

“I'm here to do your bidding,” said Bianca, as evenly as she could given that her knees, as usual, were knocking. “But I don't know what you wish.”

“You will be a woman one day,” said Lucrezia. “You need guidance in the womanly arts of conversation, negotiation, deception, prayer, and the management of a private purse. Please, take your place in this chair. I will have a few words with you as a mother might do with a daughter.”

Bianca sat, and the silence was profound and grew somewhat tense, as if Lucrezia was studying her and finding her wanting. Perhaps she was intended to speak? “I know little about Donna Lucrezia,” Bianca said at last. “I don't know if you have a daughter.”

“I have you,” said Lucrezia, “which is as close as I come. There are other children, boys, here and there; and at a masquerade ball at Lent the sad miscarriage of my new child began. I'm bereft. This causes me to move from place to place.”

She looked less bereft than bored. Bianca felt her skin prickle. “The loss of a child must be a pitiful thing,” she said guardedly, but with feeling too, as she couldn't help but think about the loss of her father, and how such a condition became constant, like an appendage or a tumor. Hello, this is I, and these my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it about with me, so pay it no mind.

“I should have liked a daughter,” said Lucrezia, “but perhaps it's for the best.” She turned and gazed at the mirror that hung over the mantel ledge. When she continued, it was in a voice as if she were speaking to herself, to control her passions: the undertones trembled. “When my father died three years ago, and the triple crown of Rome passed first to Pius III, the House of Borgia was protected, and Cesare's career as the temporal arm of the Papal States in Italy seemed secure. But the new prelate saw fit to live only the month, and no
amount of judicious payment could effect another election that favored our line, so under the reign of Julius II, we have been hounded. Hounded! And much of our family's wealth has been appropriated. They say Cesare has been secreted out of the country, hoping to appeal to the King of France for the rights to the duchy of Valentinois.”

Bianca heard the cautionary phrasing. “They say this? Is it true?”

Her question brought Lucrezia sharply back. “You aren't as empty-headed as you appear,” she said. “Did I bring myself to murmur in your presence? Oh, I did, but no matter, for you are as bound to this crop of house on this old Etruscan hill as your feeble nursemaid is. Don't look in the corner of the room, my dear, but someone is here, secretly and without defenses.”

Despite herself, Bianca's head swiveled, and she saw that a mattress had been set up in the shadows. Coverlets were mounded upon it. A man was just then propping himself up on his elbow, blinking.

For an unholy instant she thought it might be her father, and she started with an expression of joy.

“Such a welcome,” said the man—Cesare Borgia, for it was he—and Bianca fell back, chastened. Cesare had seen the involuntary gasp of a smile, the hopeful eyes, and he worked himself out of his stupor and sat up. “Who is this young thing then?”

“I told you. She's the child of Don Vicente de Nevada. She's the only one of the family left behind, now that the mother is dead this past decade, and the father lost on your fool's errand.”

Lost? Lost?

“You said she was a child,” said Cesare, watching Bianca appreciatively. “You said she was still bound in a baby's apron.”

“Well, she's grown then,” said Lucrezia crossly. “I forgot that children grow.”

“What a natural mother you are.” He looked at Bianca with an expression of sweetness. “Come here, then, my dove. Sit beside me.”

His sister snapped at him. “We're after something other than succor. Cesare, remember your aims.”

“There's more than one way to tease a secret out of a young
thing,” he said. “A soldier can be hung in a cage in the sun till he confesses, or he can be wooed into submission if he's pretty enough. Come here, come here, my little mouse.”