Authors: Lisa Hilton
It pleased her, as her time drew near next spring, to walk the walls of the Rocca, looking down over the
cittadella
and the town. After the child was born, she would build a new house
outside the city, where the air would be fresher in the summer, and where she could retire when the time came for her eldest son to govern.
‘Or perhaps we shall go to Florence, Mora. It is so long since I visited. Should you like that, to see Florence once more?’
I did not care much for the idea of Florence, but so long as she said ‘we’ like that and turned her eyes upon me so gently, I think I should have followed her anywhere. Or she would
speak of the child, a boy, we were both certain. He would be her seventh, and sure to be a great man.
‘He shall be a soldier, certain,’ she said, ‘a true Sforza warrior.’
She told me of the first Sforza duke, the greatest
condottiero
of Italy, and how his mother had trained all her children, even the girls, to fight like Roman gladiators. The Sforza were
Tuscans, like the Medici; the finest soldiers in Italy were Tuscans.
‘He shall have warrior blood on both sides, Mora. The Medici claim one of Charlemagne’s knights as the founder of their line.’
‘Truly?’
She laughed. ‘No, not truly. But a better story than money grubbing in the Mugello marshes, no?’
The baby came in April, on a night so filled with stars that the sky looked like black sequins in a cloth of silver. It was an easy birth; the child slipped out like a fish, and bellowed and
grasped his mother’s hair so that even in her pains she laughed and kissed him. When he was washed and had been put to her breast, she told me to carry him to the window, to bathe him in the
starlight. Our shadows fell on her pillows. ‘I’ll call him Lodovico,’ she said softly, ‘for my uncle of Milan.’
Men like my old master were so dedicated to detecting the auguries of fate that they overlooked its most obvious manifestations. While Piero de Medici was playing the prince in Florence, the
statue he commissioned in snow from Michelangelo was thawing quietly to nothing in his own courtyard. The struggling figures of the angel and the serpent collapsed gently into an embrace, drop by
gelid drop his power was melting and he never troubled to notice. So my lady chose to celebrate her last son’s birth that spring and rejoice in the bright stars that heralded his coming,
allowing them to eclipse the memory of the comet. I went to my books and tried to work diligently with my compass and my astrolabe, but she barely gave a thought to my researches, lost in milk and
the sweet-hay scent of her baby boy, a true Madonna. Each day, her messengers brought news, and I began to see that the new baby’s fate would not be determined by the planets but, like all
the people of Italy, by Rome.
I dreamed of wolves again. Huge black wolves, streaming down a mountainside, slavering, savage. I dreamed too of a great bull, rampaging through the farmlands of the Romagna under a flaming
sunlit sky. The devices of the Borgia, the bull and the flaming double crown of Aragon. I dreamed I saw a palace where the bull walked docile between the streaming rays on the walls, ridden by
Cupid. I tried to warn her. I explained, as though to a child, that the Borgia bull must be tamed or it would ravage and put the countryside to fire, and she listened to my child’s stories
with her head on one side and her amber eyes the colour of the Aragon sun and told me that my dreams were very pretty and that she ought to have me whipped for lying, for what could a slave know of
the great game of politics?
I was ashamed then, and dared not tell her of my other dream, of the Rocca all aflame and she led out captive, like a pagan queen, through her ruined city. She believed herself indomitable,
Caterina. She had her sons and her young Medici husband. She was beautiful and beloved in her cities of Forli and Imola, and her uncle was the lord of Milan. Had she not held the Castel
Sant’Angelo against her enemies? Had she not defied those who rebelled against her and scorned their threats to murder her children and triumphantly revenged herself? Had she not lived as it
pleased her, for all that she was a woman? She was a Sforza. What need did Caterina, Countess of Forli have of the counsels of her maid, cobbled together from eavesdropped dispatches? So I held my
tongue and dandled her baby and kept my place. But I wish I had not.
I heard him called a sorcerer, the Borgia Pope. He had cozened his power from the devil himself. I did not believe greatly in the devil, he was not someone for whom my master Ficino had much
time, but then nor did I believe in the powers of sapphires and unicorns. People fear what they do not understand, true; yet my lady thought she understood the Spanish Pope too well. He had long
been her ally, and she saw no reason that he should not remain so. In the days of her first marriage when she had queened it in the Holy City and Alexander VI was Rodrigo Borgia, the Catalan
cardinal, they had been friends, such friends indeed that Borgia had stood godfather to Caterina’s first son, Ottaviano. And had he not restored the Riario palazzo in Rome to Caterina once
the papal tiara was on his head, receiving her ambassadors with honour and giving a cardinal’s hat to her uncle Ascanio Sforza? And now, had he not just offered his own daughter, Lucrezia, as
a bride for his godson? And Caterina practically laughed in his holy face.
They quarrelled about it, the Countess and Ser Giovanni. I was as eager to listen to their talk as I had been to avoid the sighs of their lovemaking, though it grieved me to hear them at
odds.
‘It would be unwise to offend him, my love.’ Ser Giovanni’s voice was soft and reasonable. I heard my lady pacing their chamber in the darkness.
‘He is a Sforza! Would you give our son to a Spanish bastard?’
‘Ottaviano is Riario’s son, too. We may have need of Rome, in time. And the younger boy is married to a princess of Naples.’
‘Sancia of Aragon?’ my lady hissed scornfully. ‘A bastard married to a bastard. And she is Cesare’s whore.’
I knew that name. Cesare Borgia was cardinal of Valencia, the lover of his own sister-in-law and, it was whispered, of his own sister too.
‘Would you have my son polluted with incest as well as bastardy?’
She spoke of the scandals of the Pope’s children, the same as I had heard whispered in the stables and the kitchens and the marketplace. Of Juan, Duke of Gandia, the second of those
beautiful, dissolute siblings whose body had been fished out of the Tiber, a sponge of stab wounds. And everyone knew, but no one said, that it was Cesare who had put him there.
‘He will have Cesare renounce the cardinal’s hat. He has sought Carlotta of Naples for a bride, and Federigo of Aragon gives out that a Borgia will do for his bastard but not his own
true born child. Is a Sforza to stoop where a Spanish interloper will not bend?’
‘They say that she is beautiful, the girl.’
‘She is a whore! I had it from Mantua that she had a bastard to her own father, hidden away in a convent. Has she not shamed my family enough?’
Caterina might say that a Borgia bastard was no wife for a son of Sforza blood, but this Lucrezia had been married to a cousin of the Countess, Giovanni Sforza of Pesaro. Lucrezia’s father
and brother insisted on a divorce, forcing Giovanni to claim that he was not enough of a man to make the marriage true. I thought the Countess might pity her a little; for all she was the
Pope’s daughter she remained the pawn of her father and brother, to be pushed passively across the chessboard of Italy where they willed it, just as Caterina herself had been.
‘They are calling her a virgin still. She’s the laughing stock of Rome.’
‘We must think. Why did His Holiness take his child from Pesaro and offer her to you?’
‘So that her children will rule Forli and Imola. I will not have it. I want no more papal meddling in the Romagna. Ottaviano will marry where I choose, and I do not choose a Catalan whore
for my son.’
All the gentleness was gone from her voice. I heard the woman I had been told of, before I came to Forli – defiant, fearless, bowing to no man’s will. Ser Giovanni was no match for
her. So the Countess of Forli wrote to the Pope most politely that she did not think that her conscience could accept a divorced woman for her son, even one whose chastity had been so vigorously
proclaimed as Donna Lucrezia’s, and she wrote to her uncle of Milan that she cared too much for Ottaviano to entrust him to a whore and a poisoner.
There was no more talk of Rome. Nor did the Countess seem much concerned with the new French king, Louis XII, who had taken his throne the same month that she declined the alliance with the
Borgias. Florence was allied with France and Forli with Florence. There was no cause for anxiety. More pressing was the Florentine’s war against Pisa, which Piero de Medici had so carelessly
thrown away to another French king, and which Giovanni was determined to help them take back. That spring, the Lion of St Mark flexed his muscles, and news came that the Venetians planned to move
into the Romagna in support of Pisa. Forli would remain neutral, but Caterina had obtained a
condotta
, a paid mercenary post, for her son Ottaviano, and like their Sforza ancestors, he was
now obliged to turn out his men. Giovanni, she insisted, must accompany him. The Florentines ignored her increasingly urgent requests that they garrison the mountain passes. Caterina temporised
with the Venetians, proclaiming that her neutrality was unaffected by the fact that she was sending her son to fight on the other side as a business arrangement, yet she grew more and more anxious,
and had the walls of the Rocca inspected and reinforced.
Giovanni was ill the day I bade him farewell. The gout, that plague of the Medici, was grieving him and I had prepared a medicine of lime paste to ease the pain in his leg. He thanked me and
bade me have a care for his son.
‘I’ll be home in the autumn, Mora. And perhaps we will go to Florence again, now that the mad monk is where he should be, eh?’
The priest who had burned the treasures of Florence had perished that year in the flames of his own ardour. The Florentines who had so joyously gathered up their wigs and rouge pots, their
perfumes and trinkets, their books and their paintings and cast them all into the fire now crowded to the Signoria to see Savonarola himself consumed by the blaze. His very bones had been reduced
to ashes and scattered on the waters of the Arno, and the people cried ‘liberty’ once more. But I could not rejoice with Giovanni at the thought that the Medici might have their own
again. It was the Pope in Rome who had brought about Savonarola’s end, always the Pope behind it all, and I saw him as a fat spider, squatting in his palace, spinning a web in which all Italy
would flail and stifle.
‘Will we see a Medici in Florence again, Mora?’
His tone was teasing, yet I sensed the need in his question.
‘I make medicines, sir, not predictions, as my lady the Countess reminded me. God speed you safe home.’
I stood on the walls of the Rocca and watched until Giovanni and his column of men were obscured by the dust from their horses’ hooves. He seemed a boy to me, peacocking in the chased
silver armour my lady had ordered him from Milan, a boy playing at war and greatness, who had no care or knowledge of the conflagration that awaited him. And how could I warn him, when I had seen
it only in my dreams?
Giovanni did return home that autumn – but to Florence, not to Forli. And he did not ride at the head of his men, a Medici champion, but in the plain wooden coffin of the soldier he had
never truly been. All summer he had sickened and failed, though he wrote daily to Caterina, reassuring her of the news from the field, even as the Venetians drew closer, anxious to hear when Il
Moro would finally send the troops he had promised from Milan. Not until September did his letter reveal his illness and urge the Countess to come to him. Though we rode hard for Bagno, Caterina
arrived only in time to hold him in her arms as he left her. We remained in Bagno just long enough for the arrival of Lorenzo, who came to transport his brother’s body for burial in the
Medici chapel in Florence. The Countess spent her time in prayer until his arrival, but when he was announced she rose from her knees and greeted him with the same regal haughtiness she had
displayed on our arrival in Forli two years before. Lorenzo offered her no condolences, and beyond the merest words of convention, nor did she console him for the loss of his brother. The marriage
had created no family affection between them. She did not wear mourning, and on the ride home she sent her men before her with her own standard and that of Giovanni. Whatever her grief, she kept it
to herself, and I barely heard her speak in all the three days of the journey. There could be no bloody revenge for Giovanni, no public quarterings to assuage the violence of her misery. His death
was not to be spoken of. I wondered how it should go with her then, into what conduit her rage should pour, but I did not dare to offer her comfort, for what comfort might I offer, I who had never
loved or been loved?
So we returned to the Rocca, and much of that winter was spent by my lady in correspondence, with her uncle of Milan, with the Venetians. She began to send out her jewels and her plate to
dealers in Rome who could supply her with money to pay troops. Something had shifted in Caterina, the loss of Giovanni had hardened her. The woman she had been was giving way to something else,
something ruthless and warlike that it pained me to see. That soft, contented flesh which had enfolded her began to fall away, showing the planes of her face sharp, and though she looked beautiful
still, there was something fierce and wild in her face now.
When she was not in her
scrittoio
, she rode out for hours, galloping away her grief so that her horses returned broken-winded and covered in foam, and the grooms complained. Nor was this
enough to calm her. I had thought that with Giovanni gone it might ease her to have me to sleep in her chamber, but my truckle bed was set up in the anteroom as usual, and still I heard the soft
click of the door to her rooms night after night. I did not know which of the young men about the court visited her when her doors were closed, and nor did I care to, but what I heard – and I
could not help hearing – was far removed from the joyful cries of her lovemaking with Giovanni. It was not love I heard then, but desperation, as though in the poundings of a young
man’s body Caterina sought to bludgeon herself into quietude. Some nights the straining of the bed, the slaps and gasps, were so loud that I felt my face burn in the darkness and wrapped my
ears in the coverlet for shame. And yet I was not sorry that I heard it, for the savagery of those cries spoke to me in a manner which the idea of pleasure never could.