Blood & Beauty The Borgias

PART V


A Father’s Grief


Rather, had we seven papacies we would give them all to have him alive again.

POPE ALEXANDER VI, JUNE 1497



Chapter 27



Mid-June. The days are balmy and long, swelling heat under brilliant skies, but with enough of a breeze to bring respite. Deep in the cellars of the greatest palaces, servants are lowered into the ice store to chisel scrapings for the making of lemon sorbets or the chilling of summer wines. There is a bean harvest in the markets and the last of the apricots melt like honey in the mouth. The sewage-filled river sparkles under the sun and the boatmen, stripped to the waist, take their time as the slow barges pull wood and supplies between landing posts, while away from the centre of the city, shepherds and goatherds lie half asleep in the grasses of various ruins as their flocks munch contentedly at the leftovers of history.

In her vineyard near the ancient baths of Diocletian, Vannozza is overseeing preparations for a family dinner. The news of Lucrezia’s flight a week before has upset everyone, but there is little she can do to help. Her daughter had been taken from her when she was barely six years old, and unlike Cesare, she has retained no closeness. Vannozza has learned to live with it. Now, however, she tastes the loss again: a girl who flees to the convent of her childhood as her marriage disintegrates is in need of a mother’s care. She writes a careful letter. I understand that you must bow to your father’s wishes, but sometimes such a thing is not easy to do. I, more than many, know that. Should you need me…

She signs herself, as she always does: Your unfortunate mother, Vannozza dei Catanei.

As yet there is no reply. She has heard that Alexander, furious at Lucrezia’s unauthorised leaving, has sent a cohort of the papal troops to follow her and bring her home, but he bargained without the stalwart Dominican prioress of San Sisto, who met them at the gate using God as her shield: ‘A young woman seeks sanctuary with us. It is not for us to deny her that right. Tell His Holiness that we will protect her with our lives and care for her until she is ready to leave.’ Not even Alexander VI can storm a convent and get away with it.

The glee of the gossip is everywhere. The Pope’s daughter is to become a nun! Marriage – or something more unspeakable – has turned her to God and the Pope is beside himself because he cannot get her out.

‘Foul slander!’ Alexander bluffs in response to Vice-Chancellor Sforza’s worries over what is happening. ‘I sent her there myself because a convent is a proper place for her to be until your recalcitrant cousin makes up his mind. Perhaps you would tell him that. Or shall I? I cannot believe you and the Duke of Milan would put his miserable concerns before the deep and necessary friendship between our two families.’

In Pesaro, Giovanni puts his head in his hands and groans. The Augustinian preacher, whose best has not been good enough, sets off back to Rome. This problem calls for stronger arguments than God can provide.

Vannozza lays an elegant table under a long pergola. Whatever worries she has about her daughter, she lays them aside. She does not enjoy the company of both her elder sons very often and tonight they will come with the Pope’s cousin, the Cardinal Juan Borgia of Monreale, and a few close relatives.

It is a perfect summer’s evening. Supported by their grooms and the ever-present Michelotto, Cesare and Juan arrive together in full fashion and finery: two young lions in their prime, a fitting compliment to their mother’s ageing beauty. While at other times they have been known to spat in her presence, tonight everyone is well behaved. Juan is in haughty, happy mood, cracking jokes and magnanimous to others if paid enough compliments himself. Cesare, in contrast, says very little. Vannozza is accustomed to her eldest son’s moods: times when his mind seems so active that the stillness of his body is almost unnatural. Tonight, though, he seems more relaxed. Almost dreamy. And so beautiful. In less than two weeks he will be donning his papal-legate robes and crowning a king in Naples. Whatever other ambitions he might have had, this is greatness enough for now. Vannozza cannot take her eyes off him. Dear Lord, she thinks, how blessed am I? And with Your further benevolence, I may yet live to see him clothed in more glory. To be the mother of a pope; me, the daughter of an almost-nobody. And she, who is usually so sensible and level-headed, finds herself burying her face in the lengths of Venetian silk that he has brought her as a present.

When the talk turns to Lucrezia, he is reassuring.

‘The dissolving of the marriage is not easy. She will have to present herself before a court. It will make a better case if she is seen to come from the sanctuary of a convent.’

‘But it was so sudden. And she takes no visitors. Not even you, I hear.’

‘No.’ He hesitates; because it is true Lucrezia has refused him. ‘But then, can you see me in a convent?’

The table laughs.

‘I could do it,’ Juan interrupts. ‘Though they would have to lock all the nuns in their cells first.’

‘Is that to keep you out or them in?’ says someone else, and the laughter grows dutifully louder.

‘So there has been no contact with her?’ Vannozza pushes.

‘Not directly. But we’ve appointed a messenger: a young Spaniard who has worked for Father and now works for me. He rode out with her when she left for Pesaro: a good man, honest and silent, who can be trusted with family matters.’

‘Well, I hope she is not in too much distress.’

‘What she needs is a good husband to see to her.’ Juan laughs. ‘Women, eh? More trouble than they are worth.’

‘You sound like your father,’ she says mildly.

It is close to midnight when the evening breaks up. Juan has remained the centre of attention, not least because towards the end of the meal he is joined by a bearded man in a mask who takes a place at his end of the table but offers no introduction.

‘It is a pleasure to welcome any friend of my son’s, but are we not allowed to know your name?’ Vannozza, like many parvenus, has always been fierce in the upholding of manners.

‘Alas, Mother, my friend has taken a vow of silence.’

‘And anonymity,’ someone else adds.

‘Everyone needs a little mystery in their life,’ Juan laughs. ‘He is my new and wondrous bodyguard.’ And he slaps him on the shoulder.

‘He looks more like a procurer to me,’ Cesare says, but with no apparent malice. ‘Who is it to be tonight, brother?’

Juan smiles. ‘Ah, I have so many invitations.’

‘That is enough of that,’ Vannozza retorts briskly. ‘I do not lay a fine table in order to hear my sons’ indiscretions. If this is indeed to do with a woman, I would hope you treat her with honour. You are a married man.’

‘But with a wife in Spain, alas,’ he says, and they all laugh, she included because the atmosphere is too jubilant for her assumed displeasure to last long.

‘Come, children, it is getting late, and with the city so fretful it would be better for you all to leave while there is still respectable traffic on the streets.’

‘She worries that this is not a good district, don’t you, Mother?’ Cesare says playfully. ‘You need not fear. We will all leave together, filled to overflowing with your hospitality, most especially the taste of your own grape.’

‘Oh, you are too much the flatterer.’ She stands on tiptoe to ruffle his hair as he comes to embrace her. It is a gesture that no other living soul would risk.

When the goodbyes have been said, they mount their horses, the masked man riding behind Juan, as it seems he has brought no animal of his own.

At Ponte Sant’ Angelo Juan’s horse, along with that of his groom, peels off from the rest of the party. ‘A matter of a well-defended fortress that needs besieging,’ he calls as they head north-east along the river.

‘Do you need artillery?’ Cesare calls after him. ‘I can offer you Michelotto – he’s as good as a dozen cannonballs. Bom bard!’

But all they hear is the sound of laughter swallowed up in the darkness.

A few hours later the city yawns and rumbles into life. The hours before the heat begins to bite are always the busiest of the day. In the Vatican the Pope and Burchard are up early, in consultation over arrangements for the upcoming coronation in Naples. Cesare joins them midway through the morning. There is much to be done before he leaves.

It is afternoon when a Spaniard from Juan’s household comes with news that his master has not arrived home. The Pope registers a twinge of anxiety: since the incident in the Vice-Chancellor’s palace he frets more over the whereabouts of his son. Still, Juan is a man used to waking up late in someone else’s bed, and with Rome all ears and eyes for further Borgia scandal it has been drummed into him that he must cover his romantic tracks with darkness. If only I still had the stamina, Alexander thinks to himself, and tries to put it out of his mind.

But as afternoon turns towards dusk, there comes a report that the duke’s horse has been found wandering the streets with one of its stirrups cut. And then his groom is discovered unconscious near the Piazza degli Ebrei, blood bubbling from his mouth and a deep knife-thrust in and up through his lungs. Whatever his story, it will go with him to the grave: the man is dead long before they get him home.

Alexander, now frantic, sends out patrols of Spanish Guardsmen. The sight of their swords on the streets brings out other family gangs, alert for any new threat, and suddenly there is a terrible urgency abroad. The Duke of Gandia is missing. Missing. The word contains all manner of horrors. Traders close early and family palazzi bolt their great wooden doors. The night brings skirmishes and brawls but, crucially, no further news. The Pope barely sleeps.

Next morning, the troops accost anyone and everyone in the area of the Piazza degli Ebrei or Santa Maria del Popolo who might have seen something. From along the Tiber, a Slav boatman called Giorgio Schiviano comes forward. He owns a woodpile by the hospital of San Girolamo where the Dalmatian community gathers, and he sleeps every night in his boat among the reeds to keep guard against thieves. The story he tells is so vividly drawn that when Alexander hears it read out, word for word, by the head of the guards he lets out little moans, as if it is happening right there in front of his eyes.

‘I was lying awake in my boat in the hours after midnight when two men came up out of the alley by the hospital to the open ground by the river. In the half-moon I could see their figures but no faces. They looked up and down to check there was no one about, then they disappeared. Then two more followed and did the same thing. One of them made a signal back towards the alley and a rider on a white horse appeared. There was a body slumped over the crupper behind him: head hanging over one side, legs on the other, with the two first men walking next to it, holding it so it didn’t fall off. They got as far as the river’s edge, the place where people throw rubbish, and then the horseman turned so the horse’s backside was to the river. The men pulled the body off and swung it with all their might into the water.

‘Then the horseman said to them. “Has it sunk yet?”

‘And they answered, “Yes, sir.” But the dead man’s cloak was still floating on the surface and when he turned he saw it. “What’s that?”

‘“His cloak sir,” they said, and they all threw stones and bits of rubbish at it until the water pulled it down. They stood watching to make sure it didn’t rise again then turned and went off where they came from. I watched for a while, but I didn’t see anything after that.’

And so the fishing starts. Within hours, the Tiber around San Girolamo is clogged by boatmen from all over Rome, trawling and poking the muddy waters, spurred on by the promise of a reward. It fast becomes the joke of the day: the Borgia Pope, whatever his reputation for corruption, has turned out to be a real fisher of men. His enemies laugh hardest of all.

The river proves only too eager to disgorge its grotesque treasures. The first corpse comes up fast: a young man, half dressed, with a fat knife wound in the chest: the flesh of the face swollen and nibbled by fish but still recognisable. Except that no one knows who he is.

Not long after that a shout goes up as a trawling net snares a sodden mass of velvet and flesh. And now, sure enough, it is Juan, Duke of Gandia, who rises from the foul water, decorated with bits of debris and fully clothed down to his shoes, gloves and purse, still heavy with ducats, hanging from his belt. He might be ready for a night on the town, save for the fact that his legs and torso are riddled with stab wounds and his neck is a gaping grin of slashed flesh. Behind his back, his arms are tied fast. Whoever did this clearly enjoyed themselves.