Mirror Mirror (24 page)

Not just in Spain, I wanted to say. Perhaps remembering stories of his grandfather, Pope Alexander VI had such a basin created in the gardens at Tremante. A sumptuous afternoon was to be had, as the sun heated the water. One could shuck one's heavy clothes and step in, as if descending into a mirror. The many times I sported myself therein, heedless of opinion. Cesare with me once or twice, more often than not my father looking on . . .

A foolish notion, continued the lecturer, as quicksilver has many dangerous effects upon our species. It can provoke drooling, and lassitude, and lapsing into a mental state of sharp terror, in which one can believe that conspiracies against one are being whispered in every quarter.

A Borgia doesn't need to bathe in a quicksilver pool to believe this, for it is always true and always has been.

“The more common term is mercury,” continued the alchemist, “and the mineral is derived from cinnabar. The celestial body that we call Mercury is red, as the poison of quicksilver. The lost chapter of
The Secret of Secrets
by Rhazes, the Persian alchemist, concerned itself with the bodies of the world—the metals, stones, and salts—and the volatile liquids, or spirits. Though Rhazes couldn't complete the transmutation of base metals into gold, as the Emir of Khorassan had required, and was fatally thumped on the head with his own
Secret of Secrets,
there is much we learned about how the world is arranged, in its secret inclinations.”

I listened, for secret inclinations are of abiding interest to a woman. In sometimes being able to determine the secret inclinations of others, woman has her signal advantage over man. I left with instructions to my attendant to summon the curious student.

In due course he presented himself at court and, without tedious delay, in my bed. He wasn't personally possessed of any Secret of Secrets, to my mind, and my attempt at spiritual corruption was an uncharacteristic failure. I couldn't induce in the young man anything approaching physical ecstasy. Oddly beardless, perhaps he was deficient in the manly properties. But he did chatter engagingly about the nature of quicksilver, and I learned from him much that would prove useful. He styled himself Paracelsus, though in his adoring letter of thanks and apology he signed his name
Theo. Bombast von Hohenheim.

I gave what I could, in those years, and waited out my days. My father was gone, my dear brother was gone, and who was there to promote? My husband would always be an Este, not a Borgia. My young Rodrigo was being raised apart from me, as I in my day was raised apart from my mother. I had one miscarriage after another, and nothing worthwhile to occupy my time. I even considered becoming devout, in some benighted homage to Cesare's flares of faith.

Then at the age of thirteen Rodrigo died. We'd lived apart for eight years, and he died apart from me. I had imagined, eventually, he would grow old enough to deserve my company, strong enough of character not to be corrupted by me. I was anticipating that day with joy. It wasn't to be.

So more and more often I took to repairing to Montefiore. It pleased me for its obscurity. There, without courtiers to entertain or ignore, I pretended at being the widow of a farmer, and nothing more. I sat at the window and watched the laborers at their jobs. I berated the ancient Primavera, who no longer saucily answered back. I invented false confessions for Fra Ludovico. (“Father, there were three beautiful brothers, each untutored in love, and their own father dead from the famine, so how were they to learn with no whore to teach them? Out of the mercy for which I am so well known, I took them to my bed, Father, at the same time, and in the following way . . .”) I enjoyed trying to talk him into an occasion of sin beneath his robes.

I was in the
salone
one afternoon, considering the range of alembics, the crucibles of ground minerals, and herbs I had Primavera gather by the roadside. A dog began to bark in the field beyond, and there was something urgent in its barking. Sometimes a
cinghiale
will lurch from the woods and stray too near the farm, and I always had the gooseboy on my mind, for he was slow of wit and liable to wander into the jaws of a wild boar without noticing. I stood and looked out the window to see the commotion.

Primavera was spinning in the sun, and squinting, for her eyes were no longer strong. The gooseboy was slack-jawed—as usual, no surprise. Fra Ludovico had fallen to his knees as if beholding an apparition. He needed Latin for the moment: “
Ecce homo.
” But it wasn't Cristo Himself stopping for lunch at Montefiore, but Vicente de Nevada, trudging up the sloping road, accompanied by something that looked from this distance like a dog without a head.

I admit that my days had not been filled with surprise of late, and what is life without surprise? I had never expected to see Don Vicente again. I had not expected that someone would need to tell him that, despite his sacrifices, his daughter was dead.

I stepped to the mirror and passed a hand over my hair, and then tore from my scalp a circlet of pearls, to appear more common. I bound my stomacher with quick hard pulls of the cords.

I hurried down the flight of steps from the door of the
salone
to the terrace below the loggia. I stood with my hands on both my cheeks, to appear as I truly felt: terrified and overjoyed.

Vicente

H
E SAW
Donna Lucrezia appear, in a black cloud of silks paneled with gold brocade, like a thunderstorm slotted with stripes of lightning. He had to catch his breath, for the years in a dank dungeon had done their mischief in his lungs, and there were certain exercises he'd never undertake again. The last few miles, the soft approach up and down the succession of hills, slowly rising toward Montefiore's red roofs, had seemed to take longer than the weeks and weeks between Ouranopolis and Venice. But there was the famous Borgia, more beautiful than ever. More beautiful than any fishwife of the Adriatic or courtesan of the Doge. More beautiful than anyone but his Bianca.

The stone beast hung back, skulking in his shadow. On the shores of Agion Oros, once the sun had opened its Cyclops eye again, the beast had seemed less marmoreal. Its limbs took on the snapping energy of a puppy's, and its aspect was marginally more animal. So
Vicente began to think of the creature as an improperly made dog, one with a faceless knob that passed for a head. The companion had certainly helped him obtain passage in every instance, as no one wanted to be bitten by a stone dog that had no mouth.

Lucrezia Borgia met him at the bottom step. She held her hands out at last. Her fingers touching his were like lilies set against burned twigs.

“Welcome to Montefiore,” she said. Not
Welcome home,
he noticed, but here were Fra Ludovico and Primavera to do that.

He didn't turn to them yet. He could hardly get his breath. He hoped before he would need to ask, a shutter would fly open, a voice would ring out. Her hands would lift in the air in the gesture of surrender to the impossibility he knew he was manifesting: that, after all this time, he had come back.

But the day kept its secrets. The house teased him. His retainers and his unexpected houseguest waited for him to speak. With difficulty he discharged a clutch of phlegm and found his words. “Donna Lucrezia. My house is yours.” He couldn't continue with the formal language, though. He couldn't afford to spend his breath in pleasantries. “My daughter. Where is my daughter?”

“Oh, there's much to tell you,” she answered, “but we won't speak out here. You need to change those hideous rags. Come in, my friend. I'll decant some—”

“Primavera?” he said. “What is the state of affairs here?”

Primavera kept silent. He pressed her to explain, but she spilled tears down the netted wrinkles of her cheeks, and shook her head.

“Primavera,” he demanded. His voice was a croak, a whisper.

Fra Ludovico said, “She can't answer your questions, Don Vicente. She doesn't have the faculties.”

“Has she lost her mind?”

“She has lost her tongue, in some accident or feat of vengeance. It was ripped from her mouth. She could never write, as you might remember, so there's no way to learn what happened to her.”

With some surprise, Lucrezia said to the priest, “You've become
coherent with the return of your employer. I haven't heard you make so much sense in years.
Your
tongue will have to come out next.”

“I have no idea if what I say is true, of course,” continued Fra Ludovico hastily. “For all I know, Primavera slept with the famous squid again and in a dangerous moment of passion swallowed her own tongue.”

“What nonsense is going on here? Where is Bianca?”

“Vicente.” Lucrezia laid her hand on his sleeve. “I'll tell you what I know, but not here, not in front of them. You don't understand about Fra Ludovico. In your absence he's gone mad and he gabbles like a lunatic.”

“Where is she?” Vicente turned around and around, and the stone dog followed him in stone circles.

“Here's gabbing like a lunatic for you, my lady,” said the priest. “No one keeps news of a child from her parent. Don Vicente, listen: by force of will or by the will of force, Bianca made her escape from this prison. We don't know where she is or what has become of her. I pray for her departed soul daily.” He made to comfort Vicente, but the weakened man twisted and sat down on the ground, his legs giving up.

“You've been a comfort, clearly,” said Lucrezia icily. “Escort him to the piano nobile, you two. I'll prepare a restorative for him.”

When he had come to his senses some, he dried his face and looked about. The stone dog was sitting on its hind limbs alertly. Lucrezia reigned from behind a table of inlaid marble. Three candles, nearly invisible in the strong daylight, shifted their slender flames.

“I'd hoped to tell you news you could rejoice in,” she began.

He didn't speak. But he turned and looked at Lucrezia. Though his lungs were enfeebled after his years in prison, his eyes seemed fine. He had learned that he hadn't tired of looking at things. Even now his eyes were greedy. The beautiful Borgia woman lifted her slender neck to be looked at. Her chin had the tight articulation of a well-made lady's silk slipper. He could imagine burying his damp eyes into that
proffered hollow. But his years of celibacy stayed his mind from considering any pleasure more fervent than consolation.

His visions of Bianca—memories of her in this room—were of a child who didn't yet come up to his lowest rib. If he had seen his girl as a young woman on the road five miles out, he passed her without knowing. Would he know her again if he found her?

He said at last, “Let's finish the business first. I've brought Cesare the token he hired me to find.”

She rolled her eyes. “Cesare isn't in a position to care, so you can save your breath. I'm not the desperate man grasping at straws that he was. I have no interest in sham and trickery.”

“You supported him in his command of me to this task, Donna Lucrezia.”

“It was his strategy to follow every hope, however fantastic or mundane. It gave him peace. And what calmed him calmed us all. As you remember. But whatever deceit you've concocted to abuse us with, it isn't worth my time nor your breath, which I see must be husbanded.”

“Nonetheless. I've accomplished the task with which I was charged.”

“Then you've done my family a great service. Thank you.”

“In exchange for my undertaking Cesare's assignment, he was to keep my home and my family safe. He's broken his agreement. I'll have my words with him, and see how he can help to find my daughter.”

“You'll have to find him first. In the afterlife.”

He gaped. “Murder?”

“Of course. That's the only way Borgias agree to die.”

He lowered his eyes to the stone dog. “I've been away so long,” he muttered, “too long, for sure. I don't even know what year it is, nor who rules the states of Italy.”

Mincingly she said, “There is a della Rovere in the Vatican. As Julius II. He pretends to do
good.
He is of no interest to the Borgia enterprises. Florence has its Gonfalonier for life, and the Doge of Venice is a certain Leonardo Loredan.”

“That much I know,” said Vicente. He paused to cough. “I've had an audience.”

She raised a plucked eyebrow.

“I stopped to beg access to the Doge's treasury—for permission to lodge safely there the artifact I stole,” he said.

“Please, Don Vicente. You're not well. You don't need to spend your breath on such lies. For one thing, a gentleman farmer wouldn't dare to approach the Doge of Venice.”

“I dared approach you, once upon a time.”

“For another, it's a crude ploy to pretend you found something Prince Dschem doubtlessly invented in a desperate moment.”

“I did indeed. I found the branch of the Tree of Knowledge, and with such a credential I bartered for an audience with the Doge. Duchessa, I had had many years to think about the negotiations between your family and mine. I found that I didn't trust your brother to take possession of the entire artifact. I needed something to bargain with in the event he threatened me or my family. And wasn't I wise? He who took a good deal of my life from me, and in the interim lost track of my daughter's whereabouts—what right had he to this thing of unequaled magnificence?”