A STORM had come up from the south, a tarantella of wind and surging smells. Apple trees lost their limbs, and the cow byre its roof, and the cows could be heard singing in plainsong throughout the night. By morning the roads were slick with the fallen fruit of olive trees and smelled like a fine breakfast.
Fra Ludovico had had a vision in the middle of the night. He had thought it was dyspepsia at first, as he had met with a sausage of suspicious vintage, and his stomach had been shouting at him. But despite bouts of digestive grief Fra Ludovico had kept sinking into a velvety somnolence, pitched between sleep and a wakesome drowsing, and in that state of half-here-half-there, he had seen the girl stepping on clouds of carven ivory, for all the world like Saint Catherine of Siena in her mortal stoles and immortal graces. But she stepped toward a cliff edge and seemed not to realize it; and though the priest tried to cry out, his voice—with the persistent laryngitis that afflicted him in dreams—was feeble. Too small a thread of warning spun out. She didn’t hear. She walked on at her own pace toward a danger.
He stood, relieved his bladder, picked a shred of gristle from his teeth, and noticed, in the yard below, that visitors had arrived under cover of darkness. Sometime between midnight and dawn, during the hours pertinent to the sanguine humor.
The prelate was feeling his age. The years following the departure of his master hadn’t been easy. First, Lucrezia Borgia had dismissed the overseer that Don Vicente had assigned to watch after things. Dismissed or removed from the district, it was unclear which, but in any case the hapless local governor was gone as gone. Fra Ludovico had little practice in standing up to strong beautiful women—not for nothing had he fled into the skirts of the Church instead of the more profane variety—but for all his timidity, his fondness for the true daughter of the house prevailed. He wouldn’t leave Bianca alone to suffer at the hands of la Borgia, now the Duchessa de Ferrara. If suffer it would be: and he thought it would.
Well, who could doubt it, really? As far off the public way as Montefiore was, the rumors from Rome arrived, nonetheless. The glamorous Lucrezia, married first to Giovanni Sforza of Milan, didn’t demur when her powerful father and brother declared Sforza to be impotent. The courts opined: virga intacta. End of marriage—naturally: Sforza had proven too unimportant a match for the Borgias’ expanding ambitions. And what about the rumors that Cesare had dared murder a Spaniard whose amorous interest in his sister rivaled his own? Was Perotto Calderon’s corpse found bobbing in the Tiber? Well, whose corpse, given enough time, wasn’t?
In the way of things, Lucrezia had made a second marriage, to Alfonso of Aragon, Duc de Bisceglie, of the family of the King of Naples. All lutes and sonnets and garlands of posies, right? And Lucrezia was said to care for him, in her limited way, and to care for the notion of living by the sea even more. But a seasoned garroter broke into the house one night—bad luck, wasn’t it?—and Lucrezia once again found herself free to marry to her family’s advantage. In his professional capacity Fra Ludovico cherished the sacrament of matrimony as a spiritual union, but he knew that in this time of internecine struggles it wasn’t uncommon for a man or a woman to marry several times over. It took a highly cultured woman to manage to marry more advantageously each time her husband, through murder or carelessness or the decisions of the courts, happened to be disposed of.
All powerful families have their detractors. Fra Ludovico had no way of knowing which reports were true and which were slanderous gossip circulated by the competitive Roman families or by the vengeful Sforzas, whose reputation had been besmirched. Over the past few years Fra Ludovico had carefully remade himself from a solemn cleric into a harmless, beneficent idiot. It was a charade of witlessness designed to protect his position. And so carefully conceived. He knew, for instance, that Lucrezia Borgia had a delicate constitution and rank odors offended her. So whenever she was in residence, he would be sure to traipse through the ripest of cow muck and track it in onto Montefiore’s clean, straw-strewn floors. He spilt milk on his garments and left it there to sour. When she confronted him in his disgrace, he affected a beatific smile and quoted Scipture in a raggle-taggle Latin. Omnia alterans, he would say in response to any criticism. She was educated classically, better than he was, but he needn’t worry about getting his references straight. His errors served to illustrate his general befuddlement.
With Primavera aging ever more decrepitly, Fra Ludovico felt he had to take larger responsibility. He liked to think, in his careful campaign, that he was cannier than a Borgia. Helpfully, his strategies also afforded him extra hours of napping and woolgathering, which conserved his strength for what he feared might be mortal combat someday.
Of course, Primavera did most of the work of caring for Bianca. The girl slept on a rush pallet next to Primavera’s and helped with the household chores. The local maids came less often, as there was little entertaining to speak of, and Bianca and Primavera managed whatever domestic work was required.
As to the farmwork—such was the awe in which the Borgias were held that the contadini kept to their schedule of tasks without much supervision. Yearly the olive trees were cut back just far enough to allow a bird to pass through the main branches without its wing tips brushing the leaves. During the spring, the fields were planted on the seventeenth day after the full moon. Now that Lago Verde had a better channel for drainage, worries about mal aria—bad air—could be countered by a more conscientious attention to the letting out and the stopping up of the water flow.
Beyond, tenant farmers harvested the apples and grapes and olives, and hayed when haying was on, and slaughtered a spring lamb or two and an autumn hog, and a goose for the Christmas season. One could hardly have imagined a landlord was needed, so practiced were olive trees and ewes and meadows and apple orchards at producing, without instruction, their signature offerings. Or maybe the threat of Lucrezia Borgia’s inevitable return bullied the farm into behaving itself: that’s what Primavera said.
Bianca lived in her house like a child on an island—not quite alone, but a priest and a cook for company weren’t enough, either. She was about eleven years old now. She begrudged the sacrifice she’d been required to make, but she wasn’t a fool: she could tell that showing contempt to Primavera or Fra Ludovico would be misdirected. She misbehaved mildly, as was fitting for her age.
She dreamed of leaving, but she had too little exposure to the world to imagine where to go. And her father had made her promise. Would the terms of that promise ever expire? What if she were as old as—oh, a village maiden, or la Borgia, or Primavera even, and her father had never come back? Would she be bound to live and die on the hilltop all because she’d once given her word?
The notion of disobedience occurs, in time, to everyone. One summer day when the sky featured blazing, portent cloudscapes, Bianca decided she had to leave Montefiore, she had to break her promise and run away. If she could do nothing else, she’d begin a pilgrimage to find out what had happened to her father: to rescue him if she could, to mourn and pray over his grave if she must.
She got as far as the bridge at the bottom of the property, where the cultivation ended and the woods began, on slopes descending too steeply for agriculture.
She paced noisily on the well-worn boards to the middle of the bridge. She would gain the other side today, and her thumping was to drum courage in her.
She stopped, though; the echo of her footsteps seemed a warning. She remembered her father’s story about a mudcreature below the bridge. She leaned on the stone railings to look. “Have you something to say to me?” she said. “If you’re going to protest, at least do it in person so I can try to argue you down.”
The fact that the mudcreature didn’t speak didn’t mean it wasn’t there, of course. Silence can be tactical. Even God used silence as a strategy.
She looked. She peered further, both into the shadows and into the surface of the stream. The water today was high, but running slowly, and the surface reflective, trees and sky and rocks shivered into interlacing tendrils of green and blue and brown. It was so easy to imagine what might lurk beneath the gloss of the reflected world, a gnarled, hairy hand flexing to grab her ankle.
“Gesù,” she said, disgusted at herself. She couldn’t make herself pass. Not yet. Sometime when the bridge wouldn’t thump at her, when the water wouldn’t wink at her: then she would cross it. But today—and in several other tries that summer—she failed, and kept failing. Was it her promise to her father that waited under the bridge, with its hairy hand?
A Borgia entourage had arrived in the dark. A small one, only four horses. Lucrezia made her breakfast from the house stores and supplies she carried with her. Currants from Corinth, bread in honey, a glass of wine imported from Crete. She made a lazy inspection of the farm—the accounts, the state of the orchards, the gooseboy and his geese, the buildings and outbuildings, and in the evening she came to a conclusion. She decided that Bianca no longer needed a nurse, and Primavera could be let go.
“Go where?” said the cook, grinning as toothily as her teeth would allow.
“Go. Retire. Haven’t you some feeble spawn to take you in? They’ve foisted you off on us for far too long. Go back to them and require that they obey the Fourth Commandment, and honor you, whether you deserve it or no.”
“There’s no one,” said Primavera.
“No one who will admit to it,” murmured Lucrezia. “Who could blame them?”
“I lost both sons to Cesare’s wars,” said Primavera pointedly. “The ill-fated attack on Forlì wasn’t good for our family line. They were stupid and cloddish but they were my sons, and they’re gone. My only grandson is a hunter, and seeing what conscription did to his father and uncle, he keeps out of the way of the condottieri. He lives by his wits, no place special, and I can’t go roost in a tree with him. I haven’t got the hips for it. I should mention that he has no interest in displaying his handsome head on a stake on the walls of some castle Cesare wants to occupy, and therefore the lad uses his head, unlike others in his family.”
“So he’s off and gone,” mused Lucrezia, in a pleasant threatening way.
Primavera was on her mettle. “As it happens, he’s here today; when I saw that you’d arrived in the nighttime I sent for him, so he could provide us some meat for the table. He’s here to protect me should I need it.”
“You’re not listening,” said Lucrezia. “Go throw yourself on the mercies of the almshouse. Throw yourself off the precipice behind the apple orchard. I don’t care. Just stuff your personal items in the cleft of your bosom and take yourself elsewhere.”
“My knees won’t manage the slope anymore,” said Primavera. “I have to stay at Montefiore because I can’t maneuver myself down the hill.”
“Shall I arrange to have you rolled out in a barrel?”
“I’m sure you could,” said Primavera. “There are some wine casks in the village large enough. But you’d have to get them up here first. Now, will there be anything else, Donna Lucrezia? I’ve the girl’s supper to get.”
“Send her to me,” said Lucrezia.
“She has her supper to eat,” said Primavera. “I’ll send her to you when she’s fed.”
“You won’t correct me, “ said Lucrezia. “You won’t dare.”
“I beg your forgiveness with all my heart, and trust in your legendary mercy,” said Primavera dryly. She took herself off to the kitchen, histrionically wheezing on the stairs.
From the piano nobile Lucrezia listened to the sounds of cooking below. Primavera called Bianca to come clean her hands and wipe her face. Then she bellowed for Fra Ludovico to come bless the damned meal before it got cold. When the meal was over, Primavera bullied Bianca out of the rags and aprons of her everyday wear and into better clothes, and rubbed the Sign of the Cross on her forehead and pressed a leaf of basil into her collar. Then Bianca was released to become the audience of the de facto mistress of Montefiore, Lucrezia Borgia, Duchessa de Ferrara.
She held herself to one side of the door before she entered.
She wasn’t a saint stepping on ivory clouds, no matter how Fra Ludovico dreamed of her. Nor was she quite the bambina that Primavera remembered. She was at that age of halfling, that moment of sheerest youth that drives elders wild. She was Susanna at her ablutions, the more beautiful in her allure because the more innocent of it. Her bosom hadn’t swollen yet. She was as sleek as a kouros oiled for the games of wrestling in old Athens or Sparta, which Hellenic sculptors had memorialized in marble to emblemize human potential. One had been dug up in Ravenna recently and Lucrezia had bought it for her palazzo.
“Come in,” said Lucrezia Borgia.
Bianca stepped into the room. When her trips between Ferrara and Rome allowed it, Lucrezia Borgia stopped to supervise the development of Bianca’s poise and manners. Bianca couldn’t quite remember the arrangement by which she’d come to be a ward of the Duchessa, but it had to do with her father’s departure, so Bianca had cultivated a habit of caution.
Still, Lucrezia was so glamorous, so civilized, and spoke in such a dulcet hush. Bianca had to lean close to hear, and closer still. “Come in, come in! Forward into the lamplight. The room is gloomy. I take it the old onion has fed you your supper?”
Bianca nodded.
“Turn, so I might look upon you,” she said. “And see how God has formed you in these months since my last examination. What sort of vestment is that robe; does the peasant nonna think you are a giantess?”
Primavera had wrapped Bianca in a crimson cloak far too large for her.
“This robe belonged to my mother,” said Bianca. “That’s what my father used to say.” Feeling a fool, she shucked off the heavy garment, and laid it in folds carefully over the arm of a chair. Then she turned back to Lucrezia. She held her shoulders high but tucked her chin into the collar of her dress. Her eyes stayed trained upon the patterned carpet of red and blue that Lucrezia preferred to walk upon instead of to hang against the cold stone walls of the house for warmth.
“You chose to wear a green like a Frankish bottle of may wine, and a white cascade of lace through the collar,” said Lucrezia.
“Primavera chooses my clothes,” murmured Bianca. “I don’t care about what I wear.”
“Nonetheless, you’re well clad. Clever fingers have stitched that bodice to show you off well. But you don’t observe the sumptuary laws. You are above your station. And the redness of that huge cloak! A laugh. Still, you’re a pretty enough child, Bianca.”
Pretty enough for what, thought Bianca, but she said nothing.
“Attend to me when I speak, my girl,” said Lucrezia. “It offends me for you to ignore my remarks.”
“I’m here to do your bidding,” said Bianca, as evenly as she could given that her knees, as usual, were knocking. “But I don’t know what you wish.”
“You will be a woman one day,” said Lucrezia. “You need guidance in the womanly arts of conversation, negotiation, deception, prayer, and the management of a private purse. Please, take your place in this chair. I will have a few words with you as a mother might do with a daughter.”
Bianca sat, and the silence was profound and grew somewhat tense, as if Lucrezia was studying her and finding her wanting. Perhaps she was intended to speak? “I know little about Donna Lucrezia,” Bianca said at last. “I don’t know if you have a daughter.”
“I have you,” said Lucrezia, “which is as close as I come. There are other children, boys, here and there; and at a masquerade ball at Lent the sad miscarriage of my new child began. I’m bereft. This causes me to move from place to place.”
She looked less bereft than bored. Bianca felt her skin prickle. “The loss of a child must be a pitiful thing,” she said guardedly, but with feeling too, as she couldn’t help but think about the loss of her father, and how such a condition became constant, like an appendage or a tumor. Hello, this is I, and these my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I’ve learned how to hump it about with me, so pay it no mind.
“I should have liked a daughter,” said Lucrezia, “but perhaps it’s for the best.” She turned and gazed at the mirror that hung over the mantel ledge. When she continued, it was in a voice as if she were speaking to herself, to control her passions: the undertones trembled. “When my father died three years ago, and the triple crown of Rome passed first to Pius III, the House of Borgia was protected, and Cesare’s career as the temporal arm of the Papal States in Italy seemed secure. But the new prelate saw fit to live only the month, and no amount of judicious payment could effect another election that favored our line, so under the reign of Julius II, we have been hounded. Hounded! And much of our family’s wealth has been appropriated. They say Cesare has been secreted out of the country, hoping to appeal to the King of France for the rights to the duchy of Valentinois.”
Bianca heard the cautionary phrasing. “They say this? Is it true?”
Her question brought Lucrezia sharply back. “You aren’t as empty-headed as you appear,” she said. “Did I bring myself to murmur in your presence? Oh, I did, but no matter, for you are as bound to this crop of house on this old Etruscan hill as your feeble nursemaid is. Don’t look in the corner of the room, my dear, but someone is here, secretly and without defenses.”
Despite herself, Bianca’s head swiveled, and she saw that a mattress had been set up in the shadows. Coverlets were mounded upon it. A man was just then propping himself up on his elbow, blinking.
For an unholy instant she thought it might be her father, and she started with an expression of joy.
“Such a welcome,” said the man—Cesare Borgia, for it was he—and Bianca fell back, chastened. Cesare had seen the involuntary gasp of a smile, the hopeful eyes, and he worked himself out of his stupor and sat up. “Who is this young thing then?”
“I told you. She’s the child of Don Vicente de Nevada. She’s the only one of the family left behind, now that the mother is dead this past decade, and the father lost on your fool’s errand.”
Lost? Lost?
“You said she was a child,” said Cesare, watching Bianca appreciatively. “You said she was still bound in a baby’s apron.”
“Well, she’s grown then,” said Lucrezia crossly. “I forgot that children grow.”
“What a natural mother you are.” He looked at Bianca with an expression of sweetness. “Come here, then, my dove. Sit beside me.”
His sister snapped at him. “We’re after something other than succor. Cesare, remember your aims.”
“There’s more than one way to tease a secret out of a young thing,” he said. “A soldier can be hung in a cage in the sun till he confesses, or he can be wooed into submission if he’s pretty enough. Come here, come here, my little mouse.”
Bianca knew enough not to come forward. “A mouse doesn’t accept invitations from a cat,” she said politely. “A mouse wouldn’t know how to converse with a cat.”
“She’s got the trim of your sails!” Lucrezia hooted with unprincipled glee.
“I’m not well,” said Cesare, “I need some tending. Be a good girl.”
Bianca wasn’t a reticent child when it came to pirouetting about the farm buildings. She played with the gooseboy and teased her old nursemaid, and endured Fra Ludovico’s tender smiles and muttered benisons. But she thought that the man who smiled at her from a half-raised position was less cat than panther. Clearly he wasn’t well, and hadn’t been for some time. He must have paid for his adventures with a burden of infirmity taxing his soldier’s body. The skin fell on his cheeks and his hair had no gloss. But the panther inside Cesare’s exhausted form was still healthy and handsome. It was the panther that frightened Bianca. She stayed where she was.
Some small trinket on the desk snapped in Lucrezia’s hand—perhaps a comb made of tortoiseshell. She flung its pieces in a glittering handful at the mirror, and the tines clicked like toenails against the glass. “Brother, you’re hounded like a fox, and as near to cornered as you have yet been. You’re broken down with the ailment that killed our father, or some version of the French disease calculated to rot your nose off your face. You’ve squandered the strength you commanded. Don’t bring this desperate campaign down to a seduction.”
“I’ll find out what we need to know,” he said to his sister. “In my weakened form I can still break your neck, Donna Lucrezia, should I decide.”
But Bianca could tell that Lucrezia held sway over her brother. He brought himself up to a sitting position, steadying himself on the cot with both hands like an aged man. The panther in him retreated, though it seemed to Bianca perhaps more dangerous for it to be hidden. She had a sense of being awake to peril in a way she had never known, and only because of how Lucrezia and Cesare spoke with each other. A peril as evident in their courtesy as in their sharpness.
“State your business to her, now that I’m awake enough to listen,” he said.
“Very well,” Lucrezia answered. “Bianca, will you sit?”
“I’d rather stand,” she said. Children didn’t regularly sit in the presence of their betters—primarily so that they could get a head start should they have to run for safety.
“Sit,” said Cesare. Bianca sat, though on the very edge of the stool he had indicated. Her heels drummed on the floor.
“I’ve made it my business to oversee affairs at Montefiore,” said Lucrezia in a formal tone, as if addressing an assembly of princes of the Church. “I’ve been tireless in turning over the papers involved in your father’s ownership of this establishment. There are tithes to be paid to the Church, there are costs to the guards who patrol the valley below and keep you safe from invasion and pillage. All this I’ve done out of love for your father.”
I doubt that, Bianca thought. In what ways could you love my father? For one thing, he’s been missing for half my life.
“It turns out that some time ago, blithering Fra Ludovico had a letter from Don Vicente. It was secreted into his book of devotions, and when confronted with its presence he didn’t seem to know what it meant. The first part was in Italian, and directed the cleric to maintain the letter in a safe place and present it to you when you were older. The letter then continued in Spanish. It was addressed to you. Have you read it?”
“I’m schooled in my letters,” Bianca admitted, “but not so that I can read in the language of my grandsires.”
“I thought not,” said Lucrezia smugly. “Shall I read it to you, translating as I go?”
“If it’s a letter from my father to me, perhaps I should wait until I’ve learned enough Spanish to read it for myself.”
“How ungrateful,” snapped Lucrezia. “I can understand how Fra Ludovico might have erred, in that he has become a halfwit; but for a young person you seem to have a head on your shoulders. Fra Ludovico understands no more Spanish than you do. Suppose the letter were a request for help? Suppose your father has fallen into the hands of brigands, or is wasting in an Ottoman prison? Suppose he knows a way you could help release him? Would you have him wait another six months until I could find a tutor for you, and then another six months beyond that until you’d learned enough to attempt a translation? Your father’s face might have become mantled with mildew by that time.”
Bianca flushed, knowing this could be true. Her lungs kicked in her, as if she were underwater; her vision watered and caused the room to stew. “If you must, then.”
“I don’t offer because I must. It’s nothing to me,” said Lucrezia. “You must petition courteously if you require my services.”
“Sister,” growled Cesare, but she cocked her wrist at him as if to say This is my hand to play; let me do it as I like.
“Please, Donna Borgia,” said Bianca then, wringing her hands together. “I most humbly entreat you to read my father’s letter aloud.”
“Very well,” said Lucrezia. “Since you’ve asked so nicely.”
She unfolded an uneven scrap of parchment that had become creased from being stored between the leaves of a breviary. “So it begins, Most beloved Bianca,” she said.
“I write in haste to put down a few details of your family of which you, as a child, have not been made aware. My work in the service of Il Valentino takes me far from you, and I must serve my Duke or risk upsetting what remains of our happy life as a traveling family who has found a welcoming home in the hinterlands of central Italy.
“I cannot know what fate will befall me as I march to a most unpredictable goal. However, should I fail to return before you have reached your maturity, I want you to know that there is help for you abroad. If famine or plague or the danger of war threatens your safety at Montefiore, you should make all haste to your mother’s family home in Navarre. There a treasury is reserved for our family’s use, and petition can be made to draw upon it once you have reached your womanly estate.
“If, however, news should come to the Castedo family of Navarre or to my kin, the de Nevada family in Aragon, that harm has befallen you, don’t worry: our cousins will mount an expedition and pitch battle against your enemies. Those countrymen of ours, the Borgias, have talents in intrigue that they didn’t invent wholecloth. The de Nevadas and Castedos could match them in cunning and outstrip them in cruelty. So let these words give you some comfort, that though I’ve become a simple farmer in Italy, there are impressive resources at my call—and at yours. Apply to the reigning Bishop of Navarre for help, and he will not fail you.
“I’ve arranged passage cross country to Città di Castello, and I start as much before dawn as a crowing cockerel can wake me. I do this with the knowledge that every step advancing me toward my goal is a step I will be eager to retrace to come home to you. Be good, my sweet Bianca, and keep your father in your prayers and in your heart. Be mindful that only love could make me leave you, and if the Love that governs our days is merciful, it will be love that returns us to each other too. If not in these days of our lives, then in the long golden day without sunset, in heaven.”
Lucrezia cleared her throat. “How very tender. Your father’s humor is melancholic as well as phlegmatic.”
Bianca couldn’t speak for the tears in her throat. After all these years, to hear her father’s words. Papà! Though unschooled in treachery, she knew enough to guess that the Borgias wouldn’t hesitate to fabricate a letter from her father if they thought they could gain by it. But this was her father’s voice, without compromise, without doubt. The rawness of his grief at parting from her brought her own loneliness back to her, and she wept silently but openly, as if he had only left that morning, and all the intervening years that had passed so far were yet to be endured. And who knew how many were left, before the reunion in heaven or on this wretched earth?
“How recently has this arrived?” asked Bianca. “May I go ask Fra Ludovico?”
“He’s dotty as a dormouse,” said Lucrezia. “I asked him the same question and he answered, tomorrow, or the week after, I’m not sure.”
“But do you have any word from my father?” Suddenly she was emboldened to ask. “On your behalf he left on a campaign: what you have heard?”
“Nothing, but silence means nothing in itself,” said Lucrezia, turning a common viperous thought of Bianca’s into a posy.
“Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop?” said Cesare.
“You ask me questions and you don’t answer mine,” she said.
“Let me suppose you didn’t hear what I said. Do you have knowledge of this Navarrese Bishop?”
“I don’t know a Tuscan cock from an Umbrian hen,” said Bianca desperately.
“What is meant, herein, by ‘womanly estate’?” mused Lucrezia.
“He must mean that a dowry or a debt to be discharged can be effected when Bianca comes to marrying age, of course,” said Cesare. “How old are you, little mouse?”
“She is a child still, with the chest of a boy,” scoffed Lucrezia.
“You were engaged to be married when you were eleven,” Cesare reminded his sister. “That disgusting cherubino from Valencia.”
“I was the daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia,” she snapped. “I’d have been engaged in utero, had it benefited the family fortunes, as you know very well. Despite Vicente’s implication of wealth and connections, the de Nevada family is neither powerful nor clever. This letter may be a ruse to confound us.”
“We weren’t meant to see it,” said Cesare.
“Of course we were. It’s written in Spanish. Who else at Montefiore would have been able to read it?”
“It’s written in Spanish to keep news of the family wealth away from prying eyes. Else the threat of kidnapping and ransom might apply.”
“Let me think. It could be a ploy. On the other hand, the threat of retaliation by loyal cousins . . . I never knew de Nevada well, but he didn’t seem the scheming sort. Was he clever enough to plan a strategic defense of his daughter like this?”
“Was he?” Bianca was affronted. “You mean is he.” She didn’t know or care whether her father was clever; she cared that he still was.
“The first rule of success, my dear sister, a rule you should have mastered by now, is not to underestimate the deviousness of your enemies.”
“Oh, but who is an enemy?” asked Bianca, meaning it rhetorically: Certainly not us: we’ve given our father’s years to some campaign of yours! Some years, but not a life.
“You’re not an enemy, you’re a bother. We’ve learned nothing from you. Run on now, and take the ridiculous cloak with you.”
“Oh, let the mouse stay,” said Cesare.