Blood & Beauty The Borgias

Chapter 54



If Alfonso had been killed on the steps of the basilica that night it would have been so much simpler: less scandal, less fury, less suffering. For everyone. A calculated sword-thrust up and under the ribs to the heart would have done it in a matter of minutes. He might have died cradled in the arms of his Neapolitan comrade, for the order was to murder him, not all of them. Only him. Alfonso de Aragona: young, brave and honourable. A manly death, followed by suitable, traditional womanly grief: intense, certainly; spiced with outrage, no doubt, but clean and eventually over.

But weeks of high drama, of swooning, tension, coddling and pampering, the intimacies of wounded flesh and the gushing of women’s bleeding hearts as they pull a man back from the brink, a rope of salvation plaited thick with love and tears… all this means that the real death – which must follow – can only be a messier, more humiliating affair, and the grief that it triggers will carry long-term infection.

The afternoon of August 18, 1500. The door to the room where Alfonso lies is smashed open and a squad of Cesare’s own men, led by Michelotto, throw themselves in, shouting about a bloody plot against the Borgias. They seize everyone, guards, servants and the Neapolitan doctors who are in the middle of their daily examination of the wounded body of their patient.

Lucrezia and Sancia rise up like harpies, screaming and protesting, throwing themselves at Michelotto. He steps back, defending himself as best he can, his face in ugly anguish.

‘But I am ordered, Your Ladyships, I am ordered.’ And his voice is filled with such patent distress that for a second they are caught off-guard. ‘There is a plot to kill my lord Duke Valentino and I am ordered—’

‘By whom? Ordered by whom?’ the women scream back. ‘Not by the Pope.’

‘I – I do not know. I thought… but if this is wrong then… then the Holy Father is only doors away…’ And he glances anxiously towards the soldiers holding the prisoners, as if to stop them from going any further. ‘I am ordered,’ he repeats plaintively.

‘No!’ Lucrezia is already out of the room, hurling herself down the long corridor that connects the apartments, shouting, shouting for her father, Sancia fast on her heels.

Three doors down in the newly repaired papal salon, Burchard steps back as the women rush in towards the Pope, who is already rising from his chair. ‘What? What is happening?’ he says, taking in the panic of these mad women.

‘Did you order the arrest of Alfonso’s doctors and guards?’ Sancia is close to hysteria.

But Lucrezia doesn’t wait for an answer. Everything she needs to know is in her father’s face. She lets out another howl and turns on her heel, careering back along the corridor.

She has been gone – what? Three, maybe four minutes? You could measure the time in heartbeats.

The door to the room is shut, two of Cesare’s guards in front of it. They have orders too, oh yes. But even they are not going to physically manhandle the Pope’s own daughter. They stand shame-faced as she screams, then step aside as she moves towards them. One of them has been holding the handle on the smashed bolt so that the door now swings open easily.

The room is empty of guards and prisoners. Michelotto stands by the head of the carved bed. At his feet lies the crumpled body of Alfonso, his head caught at a strange angle and his face, open-mouthed, in a rictus of terror.

‘I am so sorry, Duchess Bisceglie.’ Michelotto’s voice, in contrast, is now quite calm. ‘He was trying to get up out of bed. I think the shock of our intrusion must have started some internal bleeding and in his – weak state, well… he has haemorrhaged to death.’

And as he says this he brings up both his hands as if to make it clear that at no point during the last five minutes have they been around Alfonso’s throat.

The wailing is everywhere. Down the corridors, out of the windows, across the garden. The peace of the palace has not been so shattered since that terrible night when the Pope lost his son. And not just in the Vatican; in Santa Maria in Portico Lucrezia’s ladies take up the crying: high-pitched, like animals being gutted alive. Women’s grief: nothing rends the air quite like it.

They have to use measured force to recover the body. Michelotto, who does not try to defend himself, leaves the room with the mark of Sancia’s nails as further decoration on his face. By the time the Pope and the papal guards arrive the room is in chaos, Sancia’s rage unstoppable: chairs upturned, covers thrown off the bed, pillows ripped open spewing hair and feathers everywhere, so that the garden on this hot August day sees a gentle snowstorm falling on to the orange trees. Lucrezia meanwhile sits on the floor by the bed, cradling her husband’s body in her lap like the dead Christ, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. When they try to take him from her, she throws her own body over his, and no one, not even the Pope, knows what to do. It takes her women, a wailing Greek chorus descending and enveloping, touching, fussing, stroking, to gradually release her grasp on him, so that he can be lifted up and carried away to be made ready for burial.

Not for Alfonso the skilled hands of the beauticians of death, no bier surrounded by flowers carried by noblemen, no obligatory parade of mourners. For him burial is a mean affair. Neither wife nor sister is allowed to attend. By nightfall it is all over; his body, accompanied by a small band of friars, entombed in a tiny church so close to St Peter’s that there is no room for any public display at all.

But it is not over for the women. On the contrary, the violence of their grief keeps the palace awake all night. By next morning a small crowd is gathered outside the gates of the Vatican just to hear the noise, and the Pope’s waiting room is packed with dignitaries and ambassadors desperate to pay their respects and hone their stories. It is, everyone agrees, the most scandalous thing ever to have taken place in the history of an already scandalous papacy. How delicious.

Cesare faces Alexander while the body is still being laid out and Burchard is waiting on instructions for the burial. The women’s ululation is a backdrop to the encounter.

‘It is insupportable!’ The Pope’s fury is almost as great as his daughter’s. ‘To kill a man inside the Vatican palace when he was under my protection. What? Have you gone mad? It makes a mockery of my authority.’

‘Worse than mad. I am very sane indeed. Tell me, Father, what else would you have had me do? If I had come to you and told you that he had tried to kill me, would you have given me permission to do this? No – how could you? I had no option but to do it without you.’

‘What do you mean, tried to kill you?’ These last weeks have tested Alexander’s patience sorely: though he knows that Naples is the price he must pay for his ambitions, such gross public violence is a challenge to his style of politics. ‘The man was half dead.’

‘Well, I tell you this: he was not so dead that he could not pick up a crossbow and aim it out of a window. He had enough strength for that.’

‘When? How? What happened?’ he pushes, as Cesare falls silent as if reluctant to repeat the tale. ‘Tell me!’

‘I was in the garden five days ago – you know I walk there sometimes when I wake. I was unarmed, no chain mail, simply a shirt and open doublet in the summer heat. I happened to look up towards the tower. And there he was, at the window with a weapon drawn. He must have had it brought to him. Indeed it must still be there, somewhere in the room – others must have seen it. And then he shot at me; though I dare say it caused him pain to pull back the bow, it nearly caused me a great deal more. If I had not turned at that second it would have gone through my neck. As it is, it only grazed my cheek.’

And he tilts his face up so that it is possible now to see a line of newly broken flesh moving into his hairline.

‘Should you need more than my word, here is the arrow itself,’ he says, pulling it from his belt and handing it to the Pope. ‘You can see the mark of the duke on its head. I am sure if your men were to check the quiver in the room they would find that one is missing.’

Alexander is aghast. Though the story may be bizarre, the passion with which Cesare tells it and the evidence he brings give it conviction. Later, he will call the guards and they will find Alfonso’s crossbow leaning beside the window. They will ask the doctors and the servants how long it has been there and when they examine the quiver there will indeed be an arrow missing, though at what point that happened, how can anyone know?

‘The man may have had good reason to hate me, Father. I do not deny that. I hated him too. But it was my life against his. The House of Aragon would be only too happy to see me dead. As a soldier I have the right to defend myself when threatened.’ He drops to his knees before the Pope. ‘If you had known – had been a party to it – that would have made you guilty too. As it is, I carry his death on my shoulders. If what I did abused your authority, then I ask your forgiveness.’

Alexander puts a hand on this handsome head of hair. What is it that he feels? Does he doubt his son’s word? Surely he must. But if so, it is a fleeting thought. The madness of hot blood, vendettas, the superhuman strength of a wounded but athletic young man driven by fear and the need for revenge; if one wants to believe, it is surely all credible enough. For death to have come so close to his beloved son, this marvellous young man who is poised to take the family from greatness of present into greatness of future. To have lost him! Sweet Mary, Mother of God, what is the death of Alfonso, half traitor by his allegiance to Naples, compared to that? From beyond the door, they both hear the muffled wails inside the palace. The Pope lifts him up.

‘Come, embrace me. It was a brutal act, but you have made confession. And you will do so again to God. I give you my forgiveness. But you must make it right with your sister. For she is the one who has lost most.’

It is possible that if Cesare could have repeated his side of events to others with the same fire in his eyes, he might have found more people willing to swallow it. But with his father convinced, there is too much work to be done on his future to dwell on the past. As he goes about his business raising the next army, the details of his story – the crossbow at the window, the garden, the attempted murder – all leak out, as they must. But rather than offering a defence, they simply show the lengths to which the Duke Valentino will go to get what he wants. People begin to remember that earlier death within the family: another young man cruelly cut down in his prime, and how much Cesare Borgia had gained from that also. What had once been unsubstantiated gossip now becomes fact. His reputation slips from dark to black, condemnation colliding with fear. It is not something that will keep him awake at night.

But Lucrezia. Lucrezia is another matter.

He visits her the day after the murder. The Vatican and Santa Maria in Portico are still in uproar and he arrives – as he goes everywhere in the days following – surrounded by armed guards, players in his manufactured scenario of the plot against himself.

He and his guards are admitted to the receiving-room, where they stand awkwardly, grown men listening to the wailing of women, a wailing that has not stopped since the duke’s death over twenty-four hours ago. It is even possible to make out the angry sound of baby Rodrigo, whose pampered life has been torn apart by a house of mayhem.

The crying – his and theirs – grows louder until the door opens and Lucrezia enters flanked by her women, seven, maybe eight of them, every one dishevelled and weeping. In her arms she holds the wriggling, bawling baby. The level of noise is quite remarkable. The soldiers, who have withstood cannon fire in their time, fidget awkwardly.

‘Hush, hush, sweet one.’ Lucrezia, busy with the child, does not even look at her brother. ‘Hush, such pain cannot be cried away.’

But it is clear Rodrigo will not be soothed. She turns and hands him to a nurse, who wraps him tighter and takes him out. Now at last she turns to face Cesare. She is still wearing yesterday’s bloodstained clothes and her face is flushed, eyes raw and swollen with tears.

‘My dearest sister. I am come… I am come’ – and his voice struggles to rise above the women, who are the filling the air with a keening dirge. Surely the great Duke Valentino is not intimidated by the emotions of women – ‘to offer my condolences for the loss of your husband.’

‘Do you think you have enough soldiers to protect you?’

‘The House of Borgia has been threatened by gross conspiracy,’ he ploughs on. ‘The worst is thwarted, thank God. But we shall leave no stone unturned until we find who was behind it.’

‘Shall we indeed?’ Her sarcasm is icy. It would seem she can stop crying when she chooses, though she is trembling as she speaks. ‘And what will you find hidden beneath them?’

They stand, brother and sister, their respective armies behind them and a bloody death in between. The encounter, so painfully absurd, must be played out to its end.

‘This is not the time for us to talk in depth, sister. There are still issues of security to address – but if you would like—’

‘Oh no. I would not like,’ she says abruptly. ‘Are you come for anything else?’

‘Only to make sure that you are safe here.’

‘Safe! Here?’ And having done so well, she is struggling now to keep the ice from breaking up. ‘After what has happened I will never be safe in Rome again.’

Behind her one of the women lets out a harsh, strangled cry, and now the others join in, like a chorus that has been practising. ‘If you will excuse us, brother. We have a house to put into mourning.’

And they sweep out, the rising wails leaving Cesare and his men, armed to the teeth yet strangely vulnerable.