The Borgia Betrayal Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  A Conversation with Sara Poole

  Historical Timeline

  An Original Essay

  Recommended Reading

  Reading Group Questions

  Also by Sara Poole

  Praise for Sara Poole’s Poison

  Copyright

  Prologue

  “I see…,” the woman said. She walked a little distance across the room to glance out the small window facing the river. Moonlight fell across her face. A young woman, pleasing enough in appearance though hardly remarkable in a city where beauty was common currency. Someone who would have aroused only passing interest were it not for the whispers that swirled around her.

  “You never knew their names?” she asked.

  The man who was about to die shook his head. He was kneeling on the bare wood floor in just his shirt, having been preparing for bed when she arrived. Come morning when the gates opened, he would have been gone from the city, taking the road north to Viterbo, to safety. Too late now.

  His hands were clasped tightly in front of him, the knuckles showing white. “Why would they tell one such as I, lady? I am nothing.”

  She smiled faintly. “You were almost something. The killer of a pope.”

  Bile rose in the man’s throat. He wondered how long she would make him suffer and what methods she would use. He had heard terrifying stories.

  “Why would you do such a thing?” she asked. “For God?”

  If he told her the truth, perhaps she would spare him a little. “For money.”

  Behind him, the man she had come with snorted. He had the look of a grizzled soldier but he wore the broad sash and other insignia of a high-ranking condottierre. A self-made man then, proud of it.

  “I hope you got a good price,” he said. “It was your own life you haggled for, whether you realized it or not.”

  The man’s voice cracked. “I knew the risk.”

  “But you thought—what?” the woman asked. “That you could outwit me? That I would not realize what you had done until it was too late?”

  “I hoped—” That they were cleverer than she, as they claimed. That what they gave him to put in the wine would not be detected. Yet she had found it all the same, the woman who bent down closer now to get a better look at him. He shivered, desperately afraid, praying not to wet himself. He had been reduced to that: Please God, don’t let me piss.

  “You wanted money that much?” she asked.

  Had he? He couldn’t seem to remember now. But he had looked at the gold they offered, more than he had ever imagined, and saw his life transformed. Wealth, comfort, ease when he had never known any, the best foods, lovely women. The promise of all that and more had shattered his wits. He thought that he must have been mad, knew that it would do no good to say so.

  Instead, he said, “I was tempted into sin.”

  The woman sighed, almost as though she sympathized with him. Not so the condottierre.

  “We can take him to the castel,” he said. “Put him to the question.”

  She stood, looking down at the man for a moment, then shook her head. “There’s no point. He doesn’t know anything.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “He would have told us by now,” she replied, and pointed to the puddle spreading across the floor.

  The man’s lips moved frantically in prayer. He stared up into her face, luminous in the moonlight, not unkind, almost gentle.

  “Drink this,” she said, and held out a wineskin made from the hide of a young goat, topped with a smooth wooden valve that slipped easily between his lips.

  “I don’t—” Tears slid down his cheeks.

  She touched his hair soothingly and lifted the bag, helping him. “It will be easier this way. A few moments and it’s over. Otherwise—”

  The castel and hours, perhaps days of white-hot suffering before his life would end. Had already ended though he had not realized it, in the moment when he had allowed himself to hope for more.

  It was a rich, full-bodied vintage fit for a pope, what he would have drunk in his new life had he been given the chance. He had a moment to wonder how she could possibly have known what the wine concealed. What if she was wrong? What if it had all been a trick and he was not going to die—

  Scarcely had the thought formed when fire exploded in him, burning down his throat into the pit of his stomach and beyond. He cried out, convulsing. The woman stepped back, watching him closely, almost as though she was curious to see what effect the poison had on him. No, exactly like that.

  He heard a great buzzing sound, a thousand insects swarming inside his skull. His eyes opened wide, bulging, even as his vision narrowed down, racing toward pinpricks of light before blinking out. He was blind and deaf save for the buzzing, and none of that mattered because of the pain. He would have cried out but the muscles of his throat were paralyzed as very quickly was the rest of him so that his last breath barely reached his lungs before his heart ceased to beat.

  When it was over, the condottierre went to find the innkeeper who had been roused from his bed and stood quaking in the great room. A few coins in his hand, a quick word, and the grateful man learned that he had only to dispose of a body and keep his mouth shut, which he would do to the end of his days, he swore, and give thanks unceasingly to be shown such mercy.

  * * *

  Outside, in the pleasant coolness of the early spring night, Francesca waited. She pulled her cloak more closely around herself, for comfort more than warmth, and tried not to think too much about the dead man. She was very tired but she knew that she would not sleep. Not then, not yet.

  The condottierre returned. Together, they walked toward the horses. “How many does that make this year?” he asked.

  “Three,” she said as he cupped his hands to give her a boot up. She disliked horses and preferred not to ride but as with so much in life, sometimes there was no good alternative.

  Settled in the saddle, she added, “There will be more until we can put a stop to this.”

  “Or until one succeeds,” her companion said.

  She nodded grimly and turned her mount toward the river, anxious suddenly to be done.

  1

  The fate of the world rests upon a piece of paper set in front of a man who puts down the freshly cut quill pen he has been toying with for far too long and calls for wine.

  The moment is suspended in my memory, caught like an insect in amber as though some power beyond our ken stopped time at that instant.

  Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Time went right on, bringing with it great events involving great personages. But beneath the glittering scaffold of history imagine, if you will, the lives of humble people hanging in the balance. For truly, they did so hang, and m
ore than a few found their necks stretched unbearably.

  I could have done with a drink myself just then. On this pleasant day in early May, Anno Domini 1493, Rodrigo Borgia, now Pope Alexander VI, had spent most of the afternoon considering the papal bull Inter caetera, decreeing the disposition of the newly discovered lands to the west. I had been in attendance throughout, for no good reason; what man needs his poisoner to help him decide how to divvy up the world? But since I had played a role the previous year in hoisting him up onto Saint Peter’s Throne, His Holiness had fallen into the habit of keeping me nearby. I would like to believe that he saw me as a talisman of sorts but the truth is that he thought it prudent to keep a close eye on me lest I do who knows what.

  My name is Francesca Giordano, daughter of the late Giovanni Giordano, who served ten years as poisoner to the House of Borgia and was murdered for his pains. I succeeded to his position after killing the man originally chosen to take his place. I also slit the throat of one of the men involved in my father’s death. Ultimately, I tried to poison the man I believed—incorrectly, as it turned out—to have ordered his murder. Only God knows if Pope Innocent VIII died by my hand.

  Before you recoil from me, consider that I had good reason for all I did, at least by my own lights. Yet there is no denying that a darkness dwells within me. I am not like other people, although I can pretend to be when the need arises. I am as I am, may God have mercy on my soul. But then we can all say that, can’t we?

  Beyond the high windows overlooking the Piazza San Pietro, the day was fair. A northerly wind blew the worst of the stink off the city and bathed us in the perfume of the lemon groves and lavender fields for which every good Roman claims to yearn. That is a lie; we can barely spend a few days in la campagna without longing for the filth and clamor that is our beloved city.

  Popes come and go, empires clash, new worlds arise, but Rome is eternally Rome, which is to say that its people were busy as always sweating, swearing, working, eating, fornicating, occasionally praying, and without surcease, gossiping.

  How I longed to be among them rather than where I was, in an uncomfortable window seat under the censorious eye of Borgia’s secretaries, both men, both priests, both despising me.

  Not that I blamed them. My profession alone provokes fear and loathing without any additional effort on my part, but there is no escaping the fact that as a woman in a man’s world, I discomfited many a male. I was then twenty, auburn haired, brown eyed and, although slender, possessed of a womanly figure. That, too, makes some men, especially priests, prickle with disapproval—or with something. Men prickle for so many reasons it is often impossible to know what provokes them on any given occasion.

  Borgia being Borgia, a young woman of any degree of attractiveness could not be in his company without suspicion arising that she shared his bed. Disabuse yourself of any such notion regarding me. Borgia and I shared much over the years that would be thought unlikely between a man of his stature and a woman of mine, but bed was never one of them.

  As for his eldest son, Cesare, that is a different matter. Thoughts of the son of Jove, as Cesare’s more overwrought admirers styled him, distracted me from the endless, interminable moment. He had been away from Rome for several weeks, attending to his father’s business. In his absence, my bed had grown cold.

  Cesare and I had come to each other’s notice as children in Borgia’s palazzo on the Corso, he the Cardinal’s son and I the poisoner’s daughter. What began as wary glances progressed over the years until the night he came upon me in the library. I was reading Dante, ever my favorite; he was drunk and in pain after yet another argument with his father. I could claim that, having taken the virgo intacto by surprise, he had his wicked way with me under the benign gaze of the portrait of Pope Callixtus III, the family uncle and patron who had set them all on the road to glory. Yet the truth is that I had my way with Cesare as much as he had his with me, perhaps more. The darkness within me was drawn to him, constructed as he was of raw appetites that left no room for morality or conscience. He was without sin in the sense that he recognized none. With him, I came as close to being myself as I could ever hope in those years.

  In his absence, I had considered taking another lover, but the only one I truly wanted other than Cesare I could not have. I was forced to fall back on the canard that self-denial is a virtue even as each passing day—and night—made eminently clear that it is anything but.

  Does all this shock you? I hope so, for in truth, I am remembering how exquisitely bored I was just then and would do almost anything to liven things up.

  “Are you going to sign it?” I asked finally, because really, someone had to. He’d been at it all afternoon, reading, rereading, groaning, complaining, insisting it be rewritten to change this word and that, and finally just staring at it. The pigeons that alit from time to time on the windowsill and pecked at the handfuls of grain I put out for them seemed more purposeful than did Christ’s Vicar on Earth.

  “Do you think I should?” Borgia asked. Despite the pleasant day, a faint sheen of sweat shone above his upper lip. He was then sixty-two years old, an age by which most men are in the grave or at the very least occupying a chair in Death’s antechamber. Not Borgia the Bull. The office he had fought to possess with such vigor and guile had aged him, yet he could still be said to be a man near his prime. Even on his worst days, he projected an aura of indefatigability that sent opponents scrambling like so many ants seeking shelter from the burning sun.

  Not for a moment did I believe he wanted my opinion. The question was merely one more excuse to delay disposing of what he feared might prove in time to be of greater value than he had yet perceived.

  But then who knew how to put a price on a new world?

  Unless it really was the Indies, as the instantly revered Cristoforo Colombo, hero of the hour, was claiming. In which case, there would be Hell to pay.

  The wine he had called for arrived. Borgia leaned back in his chair, swirled the claret, and stuck his nose into the goblet. Let no one say that he was a savage. He could, when he chose, enjoy the bouquet of a noble vintage as well as any other great prince.

  I watched him with hard-earned confidence. Since coming into the papacy, Borgia had collected an even greater assemblage of enemies than he had possessed as a cardinal. Fresh though the year still was, there had been three serious attempts against his life thus far. I had my own thoughts as to who might be behind the attacks but without proof my actions were of necessity constrained. Under any circumstances, nothing came near Il Papa—not food nor drink nor any item he might touch—without my scrutiny. The greater part of my job involved such efforts. Only occasionally was I called upon to do anything more, despite what you may have heard. Truly, people hear far too much.

  “The Portuguese will not be happy,” Borgia observed, whether to the air or to me I could not say. Perhaps it was the pigeons he addressed.

  “You’re giving them the other half of the world,” I reminded him. He was doing just that with the help of his geographers, learned men if somewhat dour now that they had to remake all their maps. West to Spain, east to Portugal, and the Devil take the hindmost.

  “I have to do something,” he said a tad defensively, but who could blame him?

  Just about anyone, as the situation was of his own making, but I forbear mentioning that. Let no one claim that I am entirely without diplomatic skills.

  “Their Most Catholic Majesties will be pleased,” I pointed out, meanwhile staring at the pen he had abandoned, willing it to leap of its own accord and sign the damn decree.

  Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain would be delighted, hopefully enough to help Borgia in his present difficulties with the Kingdom of Naples. Difficulties he had provoked by—let me see if I recall—oh, yes, trying among other things to steal land from Naples to give to his second son, Juan, who he fancied to make into a great prince. People can be so very sensitive about such matters.

  We would have war or we would n
ot. The outcome hinged on the ability of the Spanish monarchs, once sufficiently paid, to purchase peace. Would a new world be enough to inspire them?

  “Or not,” Borgia said with a wave of his beringed hand. “This will have to wait.” He tossed down the pen and rose from behind his desk.

  “You are going?” I asked as I, too, stood. Given the seriousness of the situation, you might have thought that Il Papa would be focused solely on business. But Borgia never did anything without a reason—or several, sometimes seemingly contradictory purposes that managed nonetheless to come together in the end to further his vaunting ambition.

  “I have promised to counsel a troubled soul,” he said, suddenly in better humor.

  I heard the secretaries groan and could not blame them. He would slip away to visit his mistress, Giulia Farnese Orsini, justifiably known as La Bella and, so far as I knew, not in the least troubled in her soul. Meanwhile, it would fall to the secretaries to deflect the questions of anxious ambassadors and courtiers trying to determine what, if anything, the Holy Father intended to do.

  “Well, in that case—,” I said, and made for the door. It being ever necessary to maintain appearances, Borgia would take the strictly private passage that linked his office with the adjacent Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico where he housed both his young mistress and his slightly younger daughter from an earlier affair that had also produced Cesare and two other sons. I would have to use the more public route, which meant running the gauntlet of hangers-on clustered just beyond the inner office. Fortunately, as I was both a woman and a figure of some considerable apprehension, I would be spared the worst of the interrogation about to afflict the hapless secretaries.

  I got as far as the first antechamber before a nervous, ferret-faced fellow sidled up. Do not be misled by my description of him for, although it is accurate, I had a certain fondness for Renaldo d’Marco, formerly steward of Borgia’s palazzo when he was a cardinal and now elevated to his service within the Vatican.

  “Has he signed it?” Renaldo inquired, eyes darting furtively, which of course only made him more likely to attract undesired attention to himself—and by extension to me.