Sarah Bower - Sins of the House of Borgia

For Kairo

Copyright

Copyright 2011 by Sarah Bower

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

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Originally published as The Book of Love in the UK in 2008 by Snowbooks.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bower, Sarah.

Sins of the House of Borgia / by Sarah Bower.

p. cm.

1. Young womenItalyFiction. 2. Household employeesFiction. 3. Borgia, Lucrezia, 1480-1519Fiction. 4. Borgia, Cesare, 1476?-1507Fiction. 5. Alexander VI, Pope, 1431-1503Fiction. 6. ItalyHistory1492-1559Fiction. 7. NobilityPapal StatesFiction. 8. PopesFiction. I. Title.

PR6102.O944S56 2011

823.92--dc22

2010048515

C ONTENTS

The past doesnt change, of course; it lies behind you, petrified, immutable. What changes is the way you see it. Perception is everything. It turns villains into heroes and victims into collaborators.

Hilary Mantel, A Change of Climate

Now Love has bent the pathway of my life.

Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani

P ROLOGUE

C ACHIQUIN, IN THE SECOND MONTH OF THE VANILLA HARVEST, 5281, WHICH IS THE YEAR OF THE C HRISTIANS 1520

Sometimes I dance, alone, to music no one can hear but me. When I dance I feel the beat of the earths own heart rise through my feet and legs, through my loins and belly and into my chest, until my own heart beats in time with the earths. Then I wonder if you feel it too, beneath that portion of the earths crust where you stand, or walk, or lie, or dance too. Because always, when I am dancing, I am dancing with you.

The end of the vanilla harvest always attracts a lot of visitors. There are the merchants, of course, and the queens representatives who come to set the price, but there are also those who come to see the flying men. The tree has been chosen, felled, and set up in the town square, and priests of all denominations have chanted their prayers over it, sprinkled it with incense, and daubed it with chicken blood. The ropes have been tested and the finishing touches put to the feathered capes and headdresses. I sleep poorly these days, and I was awake before dawn this morning, haunted by the brave, lonely music of the caporal , high up on his platform, where he is bent by the wind and the weight of the sky, practising on his flute.

So I was already up when Gideon arrived back from Villa Rica with a traveller from Ferrara. The floor was swept and the maize pot on the boil. Gideon went straight in to Xanat and the baby, perhaps out of tact, perhaps because he had missed them, leaving me alone with the traveller. I say alone, but four or five of the older children were about, also up early because today was the day of the flying men. I shooed them all outside while I asked the traveller for news. Silly, really. None of them understands Italian and even if they did, I have nothing to conceal from them. But I did not want them to hear our conversation. I do not want to live with anyone who is contaminated by my past.

The traveller told me the duchess was dead. My first thought was to wonder what she had done with the letters from Spain, but I made no mention of them to the traveller. I hope she had time to destroy them.

She had died last summer, the traveller said, after a difficult childbearing. The duchesss pregnancies were always difficult, for one reason or another. I do not mourn her because I know she has longed to leave this life for the past twelve years. And I am too close to death myself for mourning. The orange tree is four years old now. It has blossomed this year for the first time, which seems to me like a sign. My body is as sere and twisted as an autumn leaf; it curls ever tighter as though it longs to return to the womb, to be a bud again, a little fist of life. In Toledo, where I was a child.

T HE B OOK OF E STHER

Then said the kings servants that ministered unto him, Let there be fair young virgins sought for the king.

The Book of Esther, 2:2

C HAPTER 1

T OLEDO, O MER 5252, WHICH IS THE YEAR OF THE C HRISTIANS 1492

There are days when I believe I have given up hope of ever seeing you again, of ever being free, or master of my own fate. Then I find that the heart and guts keep their own stubborn vigil. When we say we have given up hope, all we are really doing is challenging Madam Fortune to prove us wrong.

When I was a little girl in the city of my birth, when my mother was still alive, she would take me to the synagogue, to sit behind the screen with the other women and girls and listen to the men sing the prayers for Shabbat . Sometimes, out of sight of the menfolk, while they were preoccupied by the solemnity of their duty, the women would not behave as their husbands and brothers and fathers liked to think. There would be giggling and whispering, shifting of seats, gossip exchanged by mouthing words and raising eyebrows. Fans would flutter, raising perfumed dust to dance in sunbeams fractured by the fine stone trellis which shielded us from the men. And around me was a continuous eddy of women, touching my hair and face, murmuring and sighing the way I have since heard people do before great works of art or wonders of nature.

This attention scared me, but when I looked to my mother for reassurance, she was always smiling. When I pressed myself to her side, fitting the round of my cheek into the curve of her waist, she too would stroke my hair as she received the compliments of the other women. Such a beautiful child, so fair, such fine bones. If I hadnt been there for her birth, added my Grand Aunt Sophia, I would say she was a changeling, possessed by a dybbuk . And several of the other children my age, the girls and little boys who had not yet had their bar mitzvah , would fix solemn, dark eyes on my blue ones as if, whatever Aunt Sophia said, I was indeed a dybbuk , a malign spirit, an outsider. Trouble. Rachel Abravanel used to pull my hair, winding it tight around her fingers and applying a steady pressure until I was forced to tip back my head as far as it would go to avoid crying out and drawing the attention of the men. Rachel never seemed to care that my hair bit into her flesh and cut off the blood to her finger ends; the reward of seeing me in pain made it worthwhile.