I NEEDED the air, I needed freshness on my skin. I needed to see what was to be seen. I didn’t wait for the hand of my brother to prompt me from the carriage. I, the daughter of a pope, I, who had been the governatrice of Spoleto at the age of nineteen, I never waited for prompting.
“Vicente. The comfort of reacquaintance.” I used our common Iberian tongue, toying with his Christian name as a courtesan teases a drunken courtier, with malice and pleasure at once. “Vicente, before you are seduced into intrigues of state by my brother, be so good as to favor me with your welcome.”
I awaited a kiss but accepted his hand. It’s best to acquiesce to custom, at least when one is in the country. Avoiding his eyes, I trained my attention on the child instead, feigning an interest I didn’t possess.
“Who are you, who looks on a Borgia with impunity?” I said, though the child had hidden her eyes behind her father’s legs. I could examine Vicente’s form while pretending to play find-the-child. A tiresome pretense, but even a young Borgia had to observe some proprieties, as scurrilous spies are always lurking about to report on our deeds and misdeeds.
“Bianca,” murmured her father, “surely you remember my Bianca?”
“I haven’t taken her measure before,” I answered. “She was a shit-smeared froglet the last time I was by. Why, she’s turning into a person.”
“They do, you know,” said Vicente.
“Let me see the cherubina, then,” I said. “Come to Lucrezia, child.”
The child was wary. She didn’t obey me until her father nudged her forward.
And we looked at each other, that girl and I. She out of childish curiosity and caution, I out of the need to have something to talk to her father about. I had no native interest in this child. I attest to that now. I would have been happy never to see her again. She was no more than a saucer of spoiled milk to me.
Though she had her beauty, I’ll grant you that. She curved, rushlike, against her father’s well-turned calf. She had the face of a new blossom, a freshness and paleness one could imagine some sorcerer growing in a moonlit garden. Her hair was pinned up in a womanly fashion, despite her youth, and its blackness, under a net of simple unornamented cord, had a steepness to it, a depth. Odd how such things strike one. Her eyes were hidden from me; she wouldn’t look up. Her skin was white as snow.