THE YEARS had shunted past, and life had never resumed in the way it ought to have done. When she was thirty-three, Lucrezia Borgia d’Este ordered an inventory of her ornaments. Rosaries, enameled buckles, hundreds of pearls, broaches of finely wrought silver, clasps and combs beyond figuring. And a single stem as if from an apple tree, made in what appeared to be the finest silver, though in three places where rubies as large as apples might once have hung, dots of black tarnish proved resistant to any means of removal.
In 1514 Lucrezia suffered terrible wounds with the birth of Alessandro, who entered the world with a huge head. It was a mercy that he died a year or so later. Anyway, he was survived by his new sister, Eleonora, and was replaced by another son a year later. Lucrezia paid a call on one of her favorite lovers, Francesco Gonzaga, to find him supine and withered, attended by several greyhounds and a pet dwarf upholstered in brocade. She showed him her new baby—named Francesco—but she wondered if she had named the baby precipitously, for Francesco Gonzaga was troubled by the French pox. Though he was being treated with mercury, taken internally, he seemed in danger of losing his handsome nose to rot. He wasn’t interested in her new baby. She didn’t visit the sick man again.
Another new pope was elevated, in time. This one cast his lot with the resurgent Medici. The campaigns in northern and central Italy swept back and forth with the usual shifting of allegiances, granting of concessions, revocations of treaty, accusations of betrayal. The winds from the north, the tramontana and the sirocco, had anyone the nose to detect it, carried the first whiffs of Protestant objection to papal vice and corruption. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed the ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenberg Castle Church. Strong stuff.
In Lucrezia’s repose at the Belvedere on an island in the Po near the Castel Tedaldo, intimates and prospective lovers and her husband discussed these matters over the fine strong broth known as chocolate, the beans for which the Genoese navigator had discovered fifteen years earlier in the spice islands in the seas weeks west of Lisbon. The sun seemed as secure in the sky as ever. It wasn’t, though.
Lucrezia became qualmish about everlasting life, which, as her energies began to fail her, was of increasing concern. How had her obsession with an ignorant farm girl brought her to such grief? How had she squandered the very Apples of Eden—if such, indeed, they were—on an act of revenge and hatred? The convents and hospitals she had founded, the pious works tediously entered into and sometimes completed—these works of mercy seemed insufficient when posted against her crimes. Acedia chief among them.
Pregnant for the eleventh time in 1518, she spent her autumn nourishing the fetus with pastries, sugared fruits, honey by the spoonful, roasted nuts seasoned with salt from the Venetian suppliers at Cervia. She grew plumper than usual and feared that the next baby would have the same large head as Alessandro, or even larger, and that the force of its passage would split her asunder.
Within a matter of months she lost not only Francesco Gonzaga, as expected, but also her mother. Lucrezia had never been close to Vannozza Cattanei, and so the shock she experienced at the news of her mother’s death was unexpected. She found herself lighting candles in chapels whose adornments she had commissioned but whose doors she had seldom darkened. She remembered leaving her mawkish mother when she was only eleven, and the mean-spirited glee she’d felt about it. She recalled succumbing to the lure of Vatican Rome, the mobs, the ceremonial parades, the glints of color, the pageantry of power—how drab all that seemed, considered now against the tears her mother had bothered to shed at Lucrezia’s breezy departure.
As Lucrezia’s confinement neared the end, she removed herself to Belriguardo, one of her luoghi de delizie, pavilions of delight. It wasn’t a score of miles from Ferrara, but when she arrived and inspected the frescoed chambers, the cloistered gardens, the choice meals laid out to tempt her appetite, she turned away. She decided she would go to Montefiore instead, and settle in to give birth there, and pretend to be the widow of a farmer, with another kind of life.
She lay beneath sumptuous trappings of cobalt blue and gold, tossing and turning in her sheets of silvery silk. The physician would not allow her to travel. She was too near to term, she had had too many problems in the past. I have had problems in the past, she replied in her own mind, and they all center around my appetite to know everything.
Had she been a farmer’s wife—had she been Vicente’s wife!—instead of the daughter of a pope, she might have had humbler tastes. She dashed the wine upon the floor and asked for clear mountain water instead. She laughed at the sight of the hefty haunches of the chambermaid who had to wipe up the mess.
I saw one bite of the Apple turn a headless dog into a squat man-cub, she remembered, a creature who took the Apple when offered and left with it into the chimney wall. I nibbled one small bite myself—and it hasn’t changed me dramatically. I have had no immunity from illness or sorrow, and I hear the doctors murmur in the antechamber. Maybe I needed more of the thing—with my wretched past, one small bite was too little. I need more.
Then she raised herself up on an elbow and recalled that one Apple remained. It was in the protection of the Doge of Venice, someone who had professed, from a distance, an admiration for Lucrezia Borgia. That was sensible enough, for Venice was within striking distance of Ferrara, scarcely a day’s travel if the roads were good, the brigands busy elsewhere, and the weather helpful.
She had always meant to return to Venice, and now she realized it wasn’t Montefiore but Venice that called her. The final Apple would heal her, would kill the child within her womb if such were needed. It would grant her some measure of fuller life than she, even with all her advantages of beauty and birthright, had ever managed.
She called upon the midwives, the surgeon, her confessor, and, an afterthought, her husband, and declared her intentions to take a retinue to Venice. The heat of the summer was almost upon them, she said, and the breezes off the Adriatic would calm her, would sing her new baby through the canal on easing tides.
“Yes,” said Alfonso, looking down his strong hooked nose at her, eager to be elsewhere. He glanced at the confessor and made a motion: Confer the appropriate blessings and administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction. If she continues to fail, we’ll petition the Pope to send a more senior prelate, as befits her station.
She tried to flail at them, to rip the dressings of her bedstead.
Alfonso patted the pillow and blessed her mildly and without conviction, and withdrew his hand before she could bite it.
Her labor pangs began shortly thereafter, and the death knells sounded on her horizon. They weren’t immediate but they were imminent; they were nextday. She wouldn’t give in, though, until she had risen from her bed and made her way through the watery highways of Venice, to greet the Doge at his palazzo and bargain or beg or steal that Apple that rightly belonged to her.
Decades earlier, some hack of a poet seeking to make a reputation of his own by sullying hers had called her a Thaïs. He’d embellished beyond recognition her appetite for venom, lust, and vengeance. A Thaïs, a Roman harridan, a maenad, a murderess, a corrupt and unforgivable harpy. Once she had laughed in delight at the sound of her fierce reputation. But she wouldn’t be unforgivable; she would see to that. She would find the final Apple and lunge at it before it was too late. Learning all there was to know at last, she would find a good reason to forgive herself her random sins and well-cloaked crimes, and ensure she would be forgiven in the afterlife as well.
She was thirty-nine.