Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (10 page)

I suspected that Borgia’s daughter was privy to far more secrets than the usual young woman her age, in fact, I was counting on it. But I was still surprised that she would offer one like a marzipan confection for my enjoyment.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Cesare wants to come to Rome even though Father told him to stay in Pisa. He is so bored at university and afraid of missing something here that he says he may just come anyway.”

Had she been speaking of anyone other than her eldest brother, I would have discounted that as mere bravado. But Cesare had the combination of impulsiveness and ruthlessness that could lead him to challenge the Cardinal and escape unscathed. Certainly, Borgia was known for indulging the son he expected to follow him into Holy Mother Church.

As always, the thought of Cesare as a priest made me smile. Lucrezia leaped on that at once. “My brother amuses you?” she asked.

Cesare did a great many things to me and in time I suppose I will speak of most of them. But yes, under certain circumstances, he could amuse me.

“Forgive me, Madonna,” I said, very properly. “I was thinking of something else entirely.”

“Oh, you were not,” Lucrezia said, quite rightly. “Don’t even try to pretend. You are as fascinated by Cesare as everyone else.”

Fascinated? Yes, I suppose that was true, but I was also wary.

“I told him about your father,” Lucrezia said. “He writes that he is most sorry but he is certain that you will fulfill your new responsibilities admirably.”

God forgive me, I blushed. Seeing that, Lucrezia chortled. But a moment later, her mood grew serious.

“He is not really so terrible, is he, Francesca? When all is said and done, Cesare has a good heart.”

If she meant a heart that beat strongly and gave its possessor no trouble, she was certainly correct. Apart from that—

“I am sure that he is the best of brothers.”

“He is, but I have also heard that he is a very good lover. Isn’t that also true?”

Are you shocked? Are you perhaps leaping ahead to think of the vile rumors that surrounded Lucrezia and Cesare in later years? Rumors that, allow me to assure you now, were entirely false.

“I wouldn’t know—” Even to my own ears, my protestations sounded weak, inevitably so for they were not true. Let us suppose that following my first encounter with Cesare, when he backed away before the reminder that I was the poisoner’s daughter, he found me worthy of pursuit. This speaks to his love of a challenge far more than to my own desirability, I am sure.

Let us further suppose that one night not long after I refused Rocco’s offer of marriage, while yet my spirit was severely bruised, Cesare happened on me in the library. I was reading Dante again, ever my bane. You may assume, if you like, that I was seeking relief
from my turbulent emotions in familiar intellectual pursuits. My father was above in our apartment. The Cardinal was away, visiting La Bella. It was very quiet.

Cesare was supposed to be in Pisa, where he was supposed to be taking the measure of his fellow student, the Medici heir, at the same time he was distinguishing himself as a scholar. By all reports, he accomplished both, having a versatile mind and a talented tongue. Very talented.

He had slipped away to Rome for a few days to try to persuade his father to change his plans for him. Don’t laugh, or if you must, not loudly, but Borgia really did intend his eldest son for the Church. When Cesare was not yet seven, his father arranged for him to be made protonotary apostolic to the pope. I have no idea what tasks are performed by that august office and neither did Cesare, I am sure. Swiftly thereafter, he acquired rights in the bishopric of Valencia at the same time he became a rector and an archdeacon. In the following years, he acquired the bishopric of Pamplona with all the rich revenues of same. That he had not yet taken holy orders was a mere detail easily overlooked.

But his father intended for him to take such orders, to become in due time a prince of the Church, and eventually to follow Rodrigo himself as pope. That Cesare foresaw an entirely different future for himself made no difference to Il Cardinale.

Cesare had come to make the case for the military career he wanted but, per the talk in the kitchen, father and son had fought. He stomped off to who knows where, returned less than sober, and somehow found his way to the library.

Where I was. Imagine me as I was then,
virgo intacto,
whole and complete within my alabaster world where I was resolved, however regretfully, to remain. And imagine him, wild and dark, smelling of
wine and leather, bringing the wind of the wider world into my maiden’s sanctuary.

What shall I tell you? All of it? How he approached me with a smile in his wild eyes? How I thought to flee but somehow could not even manage to rise from my chair? How he knelt before me, his hands warm and strong as he lifted my skirts, stroked my skin, found the heat of me—

How I died there, in his arms.

How he smiled and told me I was beautiful, his precious girl, lauding my attractions even as he slipped into me? Yes, slipped, for all the talk of pain and rending I had heard whispered by eye-rolling serving maids.

How afterward, as he stroked my hair and crooned to me, the world seemed reborn in the light of the astounding discovery I had just made. I was not, contrary to what I had feared, barred from all intimacy by the darkness within. I had only to confine my experience of it to one such as Cesare, a being of purest physicality with no more interest in what lay in my heart than I had in his. Despise me if you will for lacking the tenderer feelings of a woman, but knowing myself as I did, I simply could not see how I could afford them.

“Please,” I said to Lucrezia. “Let us speak of more important things.”

That caught her attention, as I knew it would. She waved away the hovering servant. “Can we really? No one ever wants to talk with me about anything important. I am, after all, only a girl, therefore presumed to be ignorant.”

“We both know you are far from that.” I was not merely flattering her. Lucrezia had at least as good a mind as any man of her family. “Besides, you will be married soon and a married woman
must concern herself with important matters whether men wish to acknowledge that or not.”

The mention of marriage usually cheered her but this time she only sighed. “If my father does not become pope, I fear that he will never find a husband he thinks good enough for me. But, of course, if he does become pope, the same may be true.”

The frankness with which his only daughter spoke of Borgia’s ambitions took me aback. But it fitted well with where I hoped to guide our conversation.

“Truly, if it pleases God to call Il Cardinale to the Throne of Saint Peter, we will be blessed.” Having expressed the correct sentiment, I plunged on. “But it must be daunting to contemplate the burden of responsibility that falls on the Holy Father.”

Lucrezia selected another strawberry, took a bite, and swallowed it before she replied. “I suppose. Perhaps that is why my dear
papà
seems so distracted these days.”

“Does he?” I asked with what I hoped was the right measure of polite interest and nothing more.

She nodded. “Giulia says he sleeps badly when he sleeps at all. He never used to be like that. Nothing ever seemed to disturb him.”

“I am sorry to hear this. Do you have any idea what is troubling him?”

For a moment, I feared I had been too obvious, but then Lucrezia sighed and sat back in her chair, looking thoughtful. “I know that your father’s death upset him greatly. He was here when the news came and I feared . . . let us just say that I have rarely seen him so angry.”

Indeed? This from the man who had not raised a hand to find my father’s killers, much less punish them.

Carefully, I said, “The death of any servant would be cause for distress, no?”

“Your father was far from just any servant,” Lucrezia admonished. “
Papà
trusted him with our lives, to be sure, but also with . . . secrets, I think, that perhaps did not die with him?”

She looked directly at me, her eyes golden in the sunlit garden. It was then that I realized that Lucrezia was as intent on gleaning information from me as I was from her. Moreover, this daughter of Il Cardinale was more adept at the art of intrigue than I could ever hope to be.

In a bid for time to gather my thoughts, I asked, “What makes you say that?”

“No special reason,” she assured me. “It is just that
Papà
was so upset when it happened and he has not been himself since.”

“But he said nothing in particular about my father’s death?”

Lucrezia hesitated. A servant stood nearby to attend to her needs. She waved him away.

“He said
‘Alea iacta est.’
”

The die is cast. The words Julius Caesar supposedly spoke as he stood on the bank of the Rubicon, about to invade Rome and make himself its master.

Lucrezia, who was being educated to be a great lady, already spoke several languages, including Latin. She would have understood her father but it was not likely that anyone else in
il harem
could have done so. Even in his agitation, the Cardinal had sought instinctively to conceal his thoughts.

I, too, had been educated and I, too, understood, all too well. Even so, I asked, “What die? What did he mean?”

She tossed a sweet roll to the Maltese pups and shrugged. “Perhaps you can tell me.”

Inexperienced as I was at the game of intrigue, I knew that I had to offer information in turn, otherwise I could not hope for her to be forthcoming in the future.

Slowly, I said, “I think it means that my father was doing something on behalf of Il Cardinale from which there is no going back.”

“But what is that ‘something’?” Lucrezia asked. This girl who, so far as I could tell, truly did love her papa, furrowed her brow in concern. “That is the question, isn’t it?”

How I wish that it had been, but any doubts I might have had about the enormity of what my father had been doing were gone. He had served a man who would never be content until Peter’s Throne was his own. But more than that, he had cared deeply about a people whose only hope of survival rested on removing the present occupant of that throne through the only means possible—death.

My father was gone, but all the rest remained: Borgia and his overweening ambition; the Jews and the knife-edge of extinction upon which they teetered; and my poor self, who had set out to avenge a murder only to discover that I was being maneuvered into committing another that would reverberate through all of Christendom and damn my soul for eternity.

I returned from the Palazzo Orsini to discover that I had won a brief reprieve. The Cardinal had departed for his offices at the Curia, but not before expressing his displeasure that I was not to be found when he summoned me. He would return in the afternoon; I was expected to be on hand. So Vittoro informed me at the same time he shook his head in admonishment.

“You took advantage of Jofre,” he said, referring to the young guardsman I had bullied into accompanying me. “Now I have to put him on latrine duty for a week.”

“I am sorry,” I replied, with no hint of contrition. “But I did take an escort and surely that is what matters?”

The captain of the guard expelled a mournful sigh. “Francesca, you know perfectly well that what matters is what the Cardinal says matters and nothing else. I suggest you do not disappoint him again.”

Advice I would do well to remember, but such was my agitation that I had difficulty doing so. In that state, which it must be said comes upon me only very rarely, I find it useful to keep busy.

Accordingly, I plunged into the day’s work, inspecting provisions, checking seals, observing the servants as they went about their tasks. Did any seem particularly nervous or self-conscious? Was there any change in routine? Was there any sign, however slight, that an attempt was in the works against the Cardinal?

All the while I was doing this, guards patrolled outside the palazzo and within, keeping constant watch. Beyond in the city, spies were at work in the markets, brothels, trading houses, the Vatican itself, ferreting out whatever morsels might be useful to Borgia. All this in service to the one great goal: the preservation and advancement of La Famiglia.

But let us not forget that there were other families, the great and the would-be great, and that they were not at rest. Alliances formed and dissolved like the mists that rise above the Tiber at night only to vanish in the morning sun. Today’s friend could as easily be tomorrow’s enemy. Rome, like much of Christendom, was in foment, torn between two great forces. On one side was the ancient injunction to bow before God and tradition as defined by our betters. On the other, the new, still only half-formed impulse to lift our faces to the light of change, what some were calling a rebirth of the world and others deemed paganism. Any such challenge to their authority being terrifying to our earthly rulers, they responded by trying to smother it in its cradle. So far, at least, they had not succeeded; the struggle continued.

I had my own role to play in it. While the priests were chanting their offices at sext, I withdrew to my rooms to confront the terrifying question I knew could no longer be avoided: If my father had
been trying to kill Pope Innocent VIII, as I now believed, how had he intended to do it? Sofia said he had been looking for a means of killing that would appear to be an entirely natural death. I knew of no way to accomplish that.

Not that some poisons aren’t subtler than others. Arsenic is an old favorite, of course, and its symptoms can be confused with those of malaria, but such is the nature of our times that anyone of consequence so stricken would suspect poison immediately. Wolfsbane yields a useful substance that in the proper dose stops the heart; so does foxglove, such a pretty flower, but again not without arousing immediate suspicion. Hemlock, Socrates’ slayer, is highly effective but not in the least discreet, causing paralysis and agonizing pain before bringing on death. Belladonna, which some foolish women use to brighten their eyes, can cause a rapid heartbeat, disorientation, and the like before it slays.