The Lion and the Rose (36 page)

But she hadn’t laughed. She had loved it, my pathetic little collection of sonnets, loved it more than Petrarch’s sonnets to his Laura, she said. She’d loved them and sighed over them and read them aloud to anyone who would listen, and soon everyone in Rome was quoting my stunted private passions back and forth to each other.

Even that bitter shame had not stopped me from writing a second batch.

I scrabbled the pages of new sonnets away in frantic haste, but Giulia’s eyes had already widened. “Leonello, don’t go.
Please
don’t go, I—”

“I wouldn’t stay if you spread your legs for me right now,” I grated, and slung my pack over my shoulder. Maybe it would look suspicious to some, my flight so soon after Juan’s death, but so be it. I wouldn’t stay here to see Giulia’s pity—I would rather die on the rack than bear that. So I took a jagged breath, and turned my back on her.

She rose to follow me, but she had heavy velvet skirts to weigh her down, and I’d dropped into that speedy undignified scuttle that I never used in her sight because I had to be tall for her, as tall as I could manage. I scuttled out of my chamber and slammed the door, and drawing the dagger at my belt, I wedged it fast between the door and the jamb. A few jolts would dislodge it, but that was all the time I needed to disappear from this
palazzo
.

“
Leonello!
” my mistress cried through the door, hammering on it, and I strode away without a second glance.

Giulia

F
or the very first time in my life I wanted to drink myself insensible. I wanted to sink my wretched body into a warm scented bath, I wanted to cuddle Laura tight and feel her arms about my neck, I wanted to curl up in my bed and weep for a very long time. What I did
not
want, at the very end of this agony-filled day, was Cesare Borgia striding into my
sala
with a curt “Come to my father at once.”

“No,” I said into my hands. I’d been sitting curled on my day bed with my head in my arms ever since my bodyguard vanished from the
palazzo
like a devil disappearing into a puff of smoke, and I saw no reason to change my plans just because my lover’s eldest son was being peremptory. “No, I am not going anywhere. I am not at your beck and call, Cesare, and all I want to do for the rest of this evening is curl up in a chair and weep.”

But Cesare was not inclined to take a woman’s tears seriously, or her wishes either for that matter, and striding across the
sala
, he took me by the arm and levered me up. “You will talk to my father, and you’ll do it now. He’s gone mad. Sweet Christ,” Cesare swore. “Three days and nights he refuses to eat or speak, and now he’s speaking again but he won’t speak sense!”

“What’s wrong?” Another terrible fear struck me. “Has he—harmed himself?”

“Worse.” Cesare sounded grim. “He wants to
reform
himself.”

I refused to believe him as he towed me out of the Palazzo Santa Maria, over the marble steps at the threshold where I’d stood for an hour waiting as one by one my guardsmen came back saying none of them had found or even glimpsed Leonello after he’d gone striding off into the teeming streets of Rome. I went on not believing what Cesare had told me, until he ushered me with great speed and none of his customary grace through the passages of the Vatican to the private papal apartments—and then I saw my Pope.

I did not even recognize the bent figure in humble homespun robes, kneeling in prayer not at the elaborately carved and gilded prie-dieu, but on the hard floor itself. Then he turned his head and I saw the hooked nose and gray grief-stricken face of Rodrigo Borgia. All at a stroke, in the days since Juan’s death, he had grown old.

I could not resist flying to him, putting my hands to his face. “Oh, Rodrigo,” I whispered, and he allowed me to embrace him, fold his head against my bosom. I felt tears drop from my eyes to his tonsured head, but I didn’t know if the tears were all for him or for—

“Giulia,” the Pope said, pulling away from me and rising. “You should not have come.”

“I only wish to comfort you—”

“My son is dead,” Rodrigo said simply. “If I had seven papal thrones instead of one, I would give them all to have Juan alive again. No one can comfort me.”

I felt rather than saw the Pope’s living son fold himself against the tapestries, inscrutable and silent as ever. “God is looking over Juan now,” I said, and wondered how many lies, how much blood, had swirled around that name—that vicious, prancing boy surely damned to hell.

Rodrigo was looking at Juan’s magnificently turbaned figure in Pinturicchio’s fresco. “I will have all this removed,” he said, waving a ringed hand that suddenly seemed shrunken to my eyes. “The gilt, the paint, the marble. Simplicity will become me better in future.”

“Your Holiness?” I said, cautious.

“God has seen fit to punish Us for Our sins.” Rodrigo turned from me, folding his hands into his homespun sleeves. “It is the only explanation. Juan did not deserve such a death.”

I bit my tongue at that.

“My son’s killers will be found,” Rodrigo said in his sonorous Spanish bass as though addressing the whole College of Cardinals, and I bit my tongue even harder. “They will be found and tried, but there must be more. There must be change. There
will
be change. We have prayed upon it; God has spoken to Us. His Holy Church has become a sinkhole, and We have allowed her to be fouled. No more.”

I looked at him even more cautiously.

“We summon a consistory tomorrow.” Rodrigo turned to look at me again with his ghastly sunken eyes, and somehow the sweep of his plain robes was more regal than all his papal regalia. “There will be reforms made, and men of virtue rather than rank appointed to make them. The sacred offices will be carried out with rigor. Benefices will be conferred upon those who earn them, not those with coin. We shall renounce nepotism, simony.” His voice had its old energy now, the passion of planning, though I still heard the ocean of grief behind it. “And Our priests must change themselves as well, if they are to serve the Church as she deserves to be served. Cardinals must limit themselves in income, six thousand ducats—”

“They won’t like that,” Cesare spoke behind me. “Speaking as Cardinal Borgia, I do not like that.”

“Reforms
will
be made,” my Pope said, steely. “You will serve God in future, Cesare—not yourself. Give up your fine clothes and your bullfights and your concubines.”

Cesare’s gaze drifted to me.

“Or you will give up your red hat and give it to one more worthy.”

“As to that—” Cesare shrugged. “Throw the red hat in a bullring for all I care. What about the rest of our family? Or am I the only one to be reformed, Your Holiness?”

“Joffre and Sancha can return to Squillace.” My Pope’s tone was listless again; this man who adored his children above all else now sounded indifferent to them, his eyes dull again as he fingered the plain wooden rosary at his waist. “Lucrezia—she has already retreated to the Convent of San Sisto; perhaps she will be inspired to take the veil. A fitting calling.” He closed his eyes in a hard blink. “I must be father to my flock first, not to my bastards.”

Cesare turned to me. “Perhaps La Bella will talk some sense into you.”

The words came out of me before I was aware I was thinking them. “Perhaps I don’t wish to.”

“What?”

I studied my Pope, thinking of the vigorous black-haired suitor who had first ambushed me in a garden the day after my wedding. The lover who had claimed me in a half-empty
palazzo
, his dark eyes heavy with passion as he looked on me. The father of my daughter, who had come to my bedside after Laura’s birth with a beautifully painted birth tray piled high with candied cherries, and insisted on feeding me every one. The bull in his red horned mask, more cheerful pagan satyr than Holy Father.

This man looked nothing like any of his previous incarnations. This man was weary, heartsick, determined—and stainless. He could have been an exhausted Moses gathering himself to face the Red Sea, or a bowed John the Baptist turning away from the temptations of Salome. This man was not Rodrigo Borgia; he was Pope Alexander VI. A man about whom even Fra Savonarola would have nothing evil to say.

Juan’s death. A maelstrom of pain and fury whirling out from the ending of that worthless, wasted life. If something good could come of it—if
Pope Alexander
could come from it—then perhaps all my lover’s grief would not be wasted.

“Your Holiness,” I said slowly, and dropped to my knees. “May I have your blessing?”

His ringed hand touched my head, stroked just once over the smooth piles of my hair. “Bless you always, my child.”

Our eyes met, and I saw love there. But so much weariness, so much grief. “May God keep you,” I whispered.

He would have to.

That job was no longer mine.

I remained kneeling as my Pope passed from the room to his private chapel with bowed head and bowed shoulders—but not bowed spirit. Not that, and I was glad for it.

“What are you doing?” Cesare hissed. “I brought you here to talk some sense into him. Not feed this fantasy of his—”

“Is it a fantasy?” I rose. “Perhaps it is a calling.”

Cesare regarded me impatiently, fingers drumming on his lean thigh. “He’s had these fits of reform before. When my older brother Pedro Luis died, many years ago in Spain—my father was going to renounce us all, give up his
palazzo
, join the Franciscans. As a plan, it lasted a month. Then he was back to his old ways.”

“Perhaps he will be back to his old ways this time, too.” I looked at the door where Rodrigo had gone, where I thought I could hear a murmured stream of Latin. “But if not, he could do great good.”

“Sweet Christ save me,” Cesare said in disgust.

“I hope He saves your father,” I said, and for the first time all day my sore heart felt lighter. “I would very much like to see what Pope Alexander VI could accomplish in this world, instead of Rodrigo Borgia.”

I couldn’t help a moment’s anxiety for what would happen to Laura—to me. But only a moment. I saw a
castello
in the green countryside, rearing over the bank of a heat-shimmering blue lake. Waiting for us both.

“Go home,” Cesare ordered. “Go home, and be ready to receive my father again when he has need of you. Because he
will
have need of you. Once he’s found Juan’s killers and put this all behind him, he’ll want to celebrate, and he’ll want to celebrate in your bed.”

“Yes, Cardinal Borgia.” I swept him an elaborate curtsy, then turned my back on his slit-eyed frustration and glided from the room, back through the papal apartments where my own face looked down from a Madonna’s veil, back through the passage to the Palazzo Santa Maria.

“Leonello?” I called in the entrance hall, hoping against hope, but only silence met my ears. I looked about the empty room with its checkered marble floors, its coffered ceiling and elaborate tapestries, and it seemed empty of anything but echoes.

It
was
empty of anything but echoes, I realized. I’d come here full of jubilation just a few short weeks after Rodrigo became pope, and I’d come with a cloud of friends. Adriana da Mila, watching over me even while she irked me; Carmelina feeding me endless sweets and shaking her head in despair when I could not even learn how to whip cream; Pantisilea giggling over her lovers and begging for tidbits about mine. Lucrezia who had been such a sweet-natured child; Joffre blinking at me shyly when I offered him a hug—and Leonello, my little lion, eternally at my back. The papal seraglio, Leonello had called it. Now every one of those friends had gone.

I thought of the blue lake again, and the
castello
beside it.

“Yes, Madonna Giulia?” A maid answered my summons with a curtsy.

“Go to my daughter’s chamber, please, and see her nursemaids pack all her things.” I was already on my way to my own chamber. “We are leaving on a journey tomorrow morning.”

How strange. I’d always feared this moment’s arrival, but now that it was here, I felt nothing but serenity. And sorrow, but that was not for my Pope.

I wrote a brief letter, giving it to the captain of the
palazzo
guards when I departed the following morning. “Give that to Messer Leonello should he return,” I said, tethering Laura by the back of her little traveling dress while she in turn held the gilt-leather leash of my pet goat.

“And what should I say to His Holiness?” the captain said curiously, watching the procession of my chests and maids. “Or to Cardinal Borgia, if he asks?”

“You may say,” I told him over my shoulder, walking to my carriage, “that the Bride of Christ is no more.”

PART THREE

September 1497–June 1498