City of God (10 page)

Until Nicholas caught the spy in his legation, he belonged to Valentino, since he could do nothing without Valentino's knowledge. He felt as if Valentino's eyes might be on him even now.

Valentino valued his opinion.

“You say you knew of this pact beforehand?” The Venetian ambassador was saying to Bruni.

“I surmised,” Bruni said. “The signs were there. For a man of sensibility to read.”

Valentino and the French army marched off to Capua, where the betrayed King of Naples hoped to defy his enemies. Nicholas sat in his chamber at the legation writing out a copy of his notes of the Grand Council for the Signory. As he worked he fretted over the issue of the spy, searching out some way to trap him.

There was a knock. He said, “Come in,” and Stefano Baglione entered the room.

“What are you doing here?” Nicholas said, peeved. He pushed his chair away from the desk.

“I need a hundred crowns,” Stefano said, taking off his floppy hat.

“One hundred crowns!”

“I lost at cards. They want it now—today. Or they'll throw me into the river.”

“One hundred crowns.” Nicholas glared at the younger man. The temper he had checked so long broke forth in a flood of words. “How dare you come here asking me for money!”

“I will pay you back—all of it.” Stefano leaned over the desk, his face taut; he looked much older, harried. “These people are dangerous. There is no one else I can ask, Nicholas!”

“One hundred crowns!”

There was another knock.

For a moment neither Nicholas nor Stefano spoke; they stared at one another across the desk, Stefano's face full of pleading and Nicholas resisting. He said, “One moment,” loudly, and went around the desk and Stefano to open the door.

It was Ugo, with a document to be read. While Nicholas stared at him, forcing his temper down, Ugo turned to Stefano and introduced himself, holding out his hand.

Gracelessly, Stefano said his name and shook the other young man's hand. At the sound of the name Baglione, Ugo bloomed into a brilliant smile.

“Oh, really! How long have you been in Rome? Are you attached to Gianpaolo's staff?”

“No,” Stefano said. He slouched against the wall, one hand on his hip.

“Here,” Nicholas said. He poked the document into Ugo's face. “This needs His Excellency's approval, not mine. But you were right to bring it to me first.”

“I assure you, Messer Dawson, I have every respect for your prerogatives in this office—”

Nicholas ushered him, still talking, out to the corridor, and pulled the door shut between them. He turned to Stefano. “You have the courtesies of a peasant.”

“Oh Christ,” Stefano said.

Nicholas stared at him, thinking that he was wrong: Stefano had the true manner of an aristocrat, the only people who could be wholly free with their feelings. There was that in Stefano, nothing so respectable as honor, really, but a kind of honesty. After all, he was a Baglione.

“How much do you want?” Nicholas asked.

Stefano wheeled, all his attention intensely fixed on Nicholas. “One hundred crowns. I'll pay you back every carlini—you may be sure of it.”

Nicholas was not sure. He doubted Stefano's honesty extended that far. Yet it was worth a hundred crowns to have him, a Baglione. Nicholas went to his desk to write out a bank draft.

“I warn you,” Angela Borgia said, “my cousin does not care for those who try to reach her father through her. She has turned away far greater men than you, turned away magnificent gifts. She is very likely to listen to you and send you away.”

“Even that would be more than I have been able to achieve elsewhere,” Nicholas said.

Angela gave him a quizzical look. They were, walking up and down on the loggia of the palace of the Pope's daughter, in and out of the sunlight; Angela had taken Nicholas's arm and tucked it firmly around her own. She smelled heavily of Egyptian perfume. Nicholas turned his nose out of the mainstream.

“What are you trying to achieve, anyway?” Angela asked.

“A trifle.”

“You can tell me.”

“I would not bore your beautiful ears.”

A page appeared at the end of the loggia, at the doorway. Nicholas let go of Angela's arm. Angela did not let go of him; she clung to him like an anchor.

“Your secret's safe with me, love. You can tell me.”

“Madonna, you have done enough in procuring me the introduction.”

She glowered at him. The page rescued him, coming to his side, and without a bow demanding, “Messer Niccolo Dawson?”

Nicholas followed him out through the doorway to the waiting room beyond.

Away from the sunlight, his eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness; he followed the page more by instinct than sight—by the sound of his feet on the marble floor. A door opened ahead of him and he was let into another room. Still half-blind, he bowed toward the hazy group of people before him. The page said his name.

“Messer Dawson,” Lucrezia Borgia said coolly. “My cousin tells me that you desire some few moments' speech with me?”

He blinked; now he could make her out, seated before him, with a woman behind her arranging her fine-spun golden hair. The room was full of mirrors. What he had taken for a group were her repetitions in the glass wall behind her.

“Madonna,” he said. “I know that men come before you as suppliants with precious gifts of fur and jewels to purchase your kindness, but I have no gifts, only an entreaty. Please hear me out in spite of my poverty.”

“Go on,” she said. “I have little time.”

“I come here to ask you to intercede for a prisoner in your dungeons, a woman like you yourself, a fabled beauty who has lost her beauty in the cellars of Sant' Angelo, a woman like you yourself, of noble mind and courage, whose only court now are the rats and lice.”

She was watching him intently now. She seemed paler than before. She said, “Who is this luckless creature?”

“The Lady Caterina Sforza.”

She jerked her head away. The hairdresser murmured, plucking at the smooth curls of hair on the crown of the Pope's daughter. “My brother's prisoner,” Lucrezia Borgia said. “I have nothing to do with that.”

“Your brother's victim, Madonna.”

“Her cities belonged to us. We were right to take them back from her.” Still she would not look at him. He went down on one knee before her.

“Forli and Imola are yours, as they have ever been the Pope's cities. She cannot take them back. Even her children have deserted her cause—signed their patrimony over to your brother Valentino and sworn never to help her. Madonna, she has nothing left, nor beauty, nor wealth, nor even the privacy of her body. Valentino has taken everything.”

Her blue eyes flashed; she faced him again, leaning forward. The hairdresser caught at the mass of sliding uncurling hair and Lucrezia struck over her shoulder at her.

“No—leave it! You, Messer whatever-your-name is—you insinuate that my brother violated—had her by force? That whore! How many lovers has she had?”

“Madonna,” Nicholas said, “surely a woman may give, herself endlessly without consenting to a rape.

“I do not believe it. Not my brother.”

“Madonna, let me ask only this—that you visit her in her dungeon. See for yourself what has become of her, and remind yourself that once she was a woman much like you.”

The princess stared at him, her cheeks patched with red and her hands clenched in her lap. The hairdresser was standing behind her, arms folded. In the mirrors Nicholas saw their backs, their profiles, all sides of them at once.

She took her eyes away from his. The masses of her hair were spilling down over her shoulders and her breast and throat.

“Well,” she said, “you are right, Messer who-ever-you-are. “Someday I may need mercy too.” She lifted her hand, palm out, a gesture much like the Pope's in blessing. “But that changes nothing—I cannot help you. You may go.”

“Madonna.” Nicholas left.

Yet a few days later he received a summons from the Madonna Lucrezia to attend her at Castel Sant' Angelo. Surprised, he hurried there—the message commanded him
immediately
—and found the Pope's daughter already in the courtyard of the fortress.

Her cheeks were sucked hollow, and her eyes looked damp. She wore a gown whose heavy satin skirt was picked out with tails of ermine and rows of seed pearls. Two or three handsome men in her livery attended her; she had brought no women.

“Madonna,” Nicholas said, kneeling. “I dare hope that you have called on me to mediate at an interview between you and Madonna Caterina Sforza.”

He reached for her hand, expecting to be given it to kiss, but she recoiled at his touch. She backed away from him.

“I have seen her just now,” she said, her voice sibilant. “I have no will to talk to her. Men say she was beautiful! Oh, I could not face her.”

Nicholas got up off his knees. Dust clung to the knees of his hose. He held his hat in his two hands before him.

“I shall—” her voice was low. “You may tell your principals that I shall—Oh God, here is Cesare.”

Nicholas startled. She was looking beyond him, into the courtyard by the gate, and he jerked his gaze around over his shoulder.

Valentino was dismounting from his horse, only a dozen feet away. He strode down on Nicholas and his sister, coming fast at them; Nicholas he brushed aside, without noticing him, and his sister he caught by the wrist.

“What are you doing here? This is no place for you.”

Lucrezia pulled her hand back from his grasp, as she had from Nicholas's, but Valentino would not let her go. She said, between her teeth, “I have just seen your victim for myself.”

Valentino laughed. He lifted her hand to his cheek. “Which one?” Her fingers cradled in his hand, he stroked his cheek over her palm.

“Madonna Caterina,” Lucrezia said. “Please, my brother, let me go—see how many are watching us.”

He pressed his lips to her hand. “The virago—my victim? I assure you, dearest one, she fought more staunchly for her city than for her virtue, such as it was.”

He let go of her hand. “Go. You will need the afternoon to bathe away the stink of the dungeon.”

“With your permission,” Lucrezia said; her eyes flashed at him. She lifted her skirts in one hand and swept off across the courtyard.

Nicholas backed away, hoping to escape without more attention falling on him, but Valentino wheeled toward him. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere, Magnificence,” Nicholas bowed.

“Why did you bring her here?”

“Magnificence, I assure you—”

“Tut tut tut, my dear Nicholas, let me assure you that I will let nothing taint my sister's happiness. Nothing. You brought her here to make her unhappy for your own ends. What a cur you are for that.”

Valentino's voice was soft enough that no one but Nicholas heard him. Nicholas's scalp crawled; the dungeons were only minutes away. He plunged his hand into his wallet.

“Magnificence, I would cut off my arm before I would suffer the princess Lucrezia one moment's unhappiness—she summoned me here, my lord—” he found her message and held it out, folded in quarters, toward her brother.

Valentino blinked at him. He plucked the folded paper out of Nicholas's hand and held it a moment, unread, unopened, his eyes still on Nicholas's face. Suddenly he tossed the letter into the dirt and walked away.

Nicholas stooped to retrieve the letter. His head whirled with relief and he remained down squatting on his heels a moment, until Valentino had left the courtyard. With the letter in his hand he hurried out of the castle.

Valentino and his army marched away with the French to Naples. A few days later, the Lady of Forli, Caterina Sforza, rode out of Sant' Angelo prison. Bruni escorted her, since his negotiations had freed her. Some curious folk waited on the street to watch her pass by, but when she did they did not look at her. They expected a great lady of beauty and station, not the ruined woman who went by them, wincing from the sun, her clothes in rags and her hair turned white as ash.

“Some say the cards can tell the future,” Stefano said. Shuffling through the deck, he came on another of the major trumps and laid it on the table.

“Do you?” Nicholas said.

The other man laughed. His eyes were lowered to the cards and his fingers stroked the edges of the deck; he loved the cards.

“Do you believe in that—in such things, astrology and the like?” Nicholas asked.

“I believe in luck,” Stefano said. “If the future is determined, I don't want to know it.”

He swept the cards up again and the carnival faces of the trumps disappeared inside the block of the deck. He and Nicholas were sitting opposite one another at a table in the center of the room. The walls were draped with cloth and scaffolding; the workmen had begun plastering over the old scenes only two days before and the entire house stank of lime. Even so Stefano had managed to eat two platefuls of the soup Juan had made them and a loaf of bread. Nicholas had eaten nothing. The smell and the disorder upset his stomach.

“I could love a game,” Stefano said.

“I suppose you could teach me,” Nicholas said, “but I am witless at games.”

“Tarocco needs time to learn. Months. Years.” Stefano braced his elbows wide-spread on the table. “Come down to my den, and I'll play and you can have a decent supper.”

“Go where? To that taverna? I assure you, I am not hungry enough to eat in a taverna.”

“Not the regular food. One of my girls cooks my dinner for me—she'll have something there, you can eat of that.”

Nicholas snorted. Stefano's hands were laying out the major trumps again, the Fool, the Hanged Man, the World, painted in blue and red, and hedged around with Hebrew and Greek letters.

“I would not care to put her to any trouble.”