The Wisdom of the Poppy: Part I (Cesare & Lucrezia fanfic)
The Wisdom of the Poppy: Part I
Note: deviates slightly from events in the series.
"You miss her that much?"
"If anything happened to her...I'd die."
Die! In that instant? The bond that existed between them was such that at fourteen years old, Lucrezia (listening surreptitiously at the door when she should have been asleep) could imagine it.
She could imagine her heart, which he habitually kept about his person (indeed, he had sometimes joked that if she would grant him her heart, he would store it safely where not a soul in the Vatican would think to look-between the pages of a bible) suddenly shattering. That no matter what divided them, sea or land, Cesare would feel that which he owned perish. Perhaps then, Lucrezia had conceded to herself, at the moment he felt her heart break and the connection between them sever, he would die.
Now lying beneath the suddenly cloying sheets of her bed, fearful of that promise, Lucrezia ran nimble fingers across the beads of her rosary at the very thought-as much to cleanse herself of the sin of thinking it as to ward that dark possibility off. For as unthinkingly painful as the idea of Cesare dying was (like an apocalypse, for what could ever happen afterwards? Nothing of consequence could ever follow), there had been something horribly satisfying in it too; in the great, comforting heaviness of his love for her. They were bound in some unspeakable covenant-if her heart broke, his world would end, if he died, surely she would die also.
*
How childish she now realizes she was. The breaking of one’s heart is suffered alone.
Lucrezia stands nude in front of her gilded looking-glass, taking in the damage of the night before. Bruises bloom deep purple and sickly green across her ribcage and there are five angry welts on both of her small shoulders, from where the beast’s fingers dug into the skin. They do not cause her as much pain as the bruises that can’t be seen, below. But the ones that worry her the most are the visible ones, like the darkening shadow across her throat shaped like the creature’s right hand.
“My husband should take more care,” she comments drily, as Alessandra deftly powders the area. “Soon, it will beyond even your powers to conceal.”
“Oh, my Lady…” Alessandra shakes her head, her face turning ghostly pale-whiter than her powder.
“It is no matter, little maid,” Lucrezia whispers soothingly to the girl, though her maid is in fact several inches taller and not a few years older-but then, Lucrezia is a Lady and a Lady is not a child, even if she is fourteen years old. “The Lord, in His wisdom, shall provide.”
The phrase means nothing, of course, it is merely what Father (Holy Father, now) often said when waging his plots. So many of His Holiness’s promises now seemed empty and how many of his sayings double-ended. The Lord may indeed provide, but with what? Was this cursed marriage His provision? If so, cursed was the day He provided it.
“My dear Lady, I fear your death will come before He does.”
Lucrezia gazes contemplatively at her reflection, Alessandra’s words ringing true at the sight of the bones that stick out further now than they did before (for it is sometimes easier to drink than to eat, in anticipation of what night will bring), the cuts and wounds and bruises.
Unlike the Pope, Cesare had never promised her happiness in marriage. (“Happiness and greatness,” he had warned, “have little to do with each other.”) Really, he’d promised her nothing-but his own devotion, come marriage, come death. And in these months of industriously covering injuries with cleverly draped gowns, higher and higher necklines to hide the bruises, gloves for broken fingers and powder to mask scratches, that too was proving hollow.
As far as letters from Rome revealed, Cesare did not guess her suffering, did not ask (and had certainly not been struck dead at the moment her world fell to pieces, as she had once imagined). Indeed, Juan’s single letter heavily hinted at their brother’s happy licentiousness (“it is said she is a married lady, with lips as red as wine”) and in writing that flourished with barbed malice, asked if their angelic sister was not a little jealous.
But jealousy was too kind, too civilized a word.
The thought of him-while she-
“My Lady, could you not write to His-”
Lucrezia whirls around and her great blue eyes flash. “That will do, Alessandra.”
The maid bows her head and falls to her knees, “My Lady.”
Now she is a Lady, no mere girl (indeed, she never was) and her eyes bore holes into the top of Alessandra’ pretty foolish head until she sees the silly thing’s hands begin to tremble. Softening, she touches her maid’s shoulder. Alessandra is, after all, a good girl and cannot be expected to understand.
“Then help me to dress. The green velvet.”
*
Though Paulo is no less in service to Lucrezia than Alessandra is, he isn’t so easily put off. “Why do you not write to His Holiness, my Lady?”
They are in the forest, she lying on a bed of leaves with Paulo beside her. His fingers trace a scratch on collar bone that is fast becoming a scar.
“I have told you to call me Lucrezia.” She half-rises to press a swift kiss to his young, innocent mouth. “Your Lady commands it.”
“Lucrezia, then.” He stares into her eyes with such naked earnestness that she feels compelled to look away, up at the ceiling of leaves above her. He is so young. “Why don’t you?” he urges.
“Dear Narcissus,” she murmurs to the leaves, eyes half-shut. “You do not attend me. In this, our forest, I hardly wish to speak of my Lord.” Finding his thigh by touch, she strokes it lightly and hears him breathe faster. “Shall you guess what I’d like to do instead?”
“My Lady…”
“Lucrezia.”
They are silent, except for Paulo’s breathing as her fingers ghost across his groin. Then suddenly, he removes her hand, placing it gently down against the ground and holds it there, in his soft boyish hand. “Lucrezia, they say he will be recovered from his fall in days. It will happen again.”
Lucrezia snatches her hand back.
Paulo winces but persists, “If he does not stop, he will kill you.”
She feels treacherous tears pressing against her eyelids, hot and intemperate, so she tilts her head back and hides her face, willing them away again. Wounded she may be, humiliated even but not even Paulo may see her weaken.
She is a Borgia. And no one, no one may see her weaken.
(How had Cesare once put it? They’d been in the square, she but ten or eleven, he a young man of fourteen. It was before Rome bowed to Papa, before crowds of Roman aristocracy parted for her or the peasant children kissed her train. She was just a child, twirling to admire the skirts of her apricot dress that had been made from Mama’s, her new almost-a-Lady dress, when someone crowed, “See the little Borgia whore dance! A free show, that!” There was laughter.
How quickly Cesare had acted. After she had stopped turning but before the words had made any real impression, her brother’s blade shone strangely in the afternoon light as it sliced through the mellow air and was pressed (none too gently) to the man’s groin. Without moving, Lucrezia watched as Cesare spoke in the man’s ear. The blackguard turned a waxy shade of white and his gaping, toothless mouth parted. Those who’d laughed, scattered. “I mean’ no disrespect, m’Lord, I mean’ no disrespect…” he began to half-whisper, half-cry.
In a movement as precise as a step in a dance, Cesare took the blade from the man’s groin and severed his left ear from his head. Blood burst, came pouring down his cheek and his neck in a red as bright as a poppy’s petals. Cesare snarled a command but Lucrezia no longer remembers the words, only that gorgeous spray of blood. The grown man went on his knees to her, wild-eyed with pain but with the blade at his neck, he begged for “milady’s pardon.”
And later, at home, when she had asked her brother how he’d been so calm, so perfectly controlled, he told her that the world divided into two different types of people: Borgias and everyone else. To be a Borgia was to be ready, to live and to breathe on the tip of the blade. No matter how angrily and vengefully one thrusts a sword, the tip should always hit true. So when an enemy-
“An enemy?” she’d repeated.
“Everyone else,” he clarified. “When they see you, they see not fear, pain or vengeance, they see only the tip of the blade before it pierces them through. They see only their own death, reflected in your eyes.”
“In my eyes?”
“Any man would see his downfall in your eyes, my Love.”
“But I am not brave like you, Cesare.”
He took her little hands in his and held her gaze. Her whole body went still and quiet. This was important. “Were you frightened? Of the blood? Of the man?”
“No,” the answer had come unbidden, naturally. “The man was nothing to you, I was safe. And the blood…”
“Yes?”
“It was so pretty in the light… like fields of poppies.”
Cesare laughed and twirled her before him. “Shall your next dress be poppy red, my love?”
The world went spinning, spinning and she was laughing and Cesare was laughing though she would only later grasp the joke. He caught her in his arms, still grinning but then she caught his eye and his face changed, became stone.
“I would dye the cloth myself for you, sweet sister.” )
Lucrezia smiles at the memory. Whatever else has happened, she has been taught strength-surrounded by it.
“Lucrezia? Are you listening to me?” She feels Paulo's gaze.
Strength is the only true religion.
In a movement so swift, Paulo gasps, Lucrezia is atop him, her long golden-white hair falling around them like a curtain hiding all the inconvenient truths and she laughs out loud at his shocked, scandalized expression-the barely concealed delight.
“Call me Echo and speak no more, Narcissus.”
And Paulo obeys his Lady.
*
Lucrezia is sitting in front of the looking-glass, Alessandra brushing her hair in long, steady strokes with a silver brush, when the memory of blood as red as poppies stirs another. “Alessandra, do poppies grow on my Lord’s estates?”
“I believe so, my Lady.”
Lucrezia watches Alessandra’s reflection in the mirror but the girl’s expression does not change.
“Of what variety, Alessandra?”
“Ah…” Alessandra looks puzzled. “Red, my Lady…”
“The papaver somniferum, perhaps,” Lucrezia murmurs, as if to herself. “A common enough flower, Alessandra. A weed, really.” Lucrezia smiles sadly, twisting a golden strand of hair around her little finger which is still bent slightly to the left from a break that never properly healed. “But my mother would twine them in my plaits when I was a child. Would you gather me some? I would be reminded of my childhood today.”
She lifted her shining grey blue eyes to meet Alessandra’s dull brown ones.
Alessandra, in the mirror, has turned ashen with sympathy. “Oh my Lady…I would do so gladly and at once.”
Lucrezia thanks her.
When Alessandra reaches the door, she turns and says slowly, “My Lady… when I was a child, my mother often said the seeds of the poppy soothe pain.”
Without turning around, Lucrezia replies, “I’m afraid my knowledge of flowers is limited to the symbolic, little maid. But…” Meeting her maid’s eyes in the looking-glass, Lucrezia’s eyes fill with tears. “My husband is said to be recovering swiftly, so perhaps your country wisdom will be of use, after all. The Lord knows I shall know pain once more.”
Alessandra touches the wooden crucifix around her neck, shaking her dear head, “You shall have baskets of poppies, my Lady,” and then rushes out, eager to cheer her mistress’s low spirits.
When she is gone, Lucrezia’s sorrowful expression vanishes as though she had slipped off a Venetian mask. She takes the silver brush and brushes her golden mane until it shines. Her eyes are dry and hard.
*
That evening, when the monster is able to join her at dinner, she is her most beautiful. The bruises he made that marred her beauty have faded. Her golden-blond curls hang down her back in gleaming waves. Her ivory skin glows. Her grey-blue eyes shine when they look upon him.
“Will you have wine, my Lord?”
The servants are gone and boldly, she stands and reaches for the decanter, her eyes never leaving his. Pouring, she knows he won’t see her ring snap open (a gift, coincidentally from Cesare) or even hear it-his eyes are devouring her, eating her up and he will never know the difference.
She is an angel in the light, helping her husband to his evening drink.
The tip of the blade.
Now lowering her eyes, she offers him the glass, as if humbled by his very presence. Nothing pleases him so much as a show of submission. In daytime, submission and at night, humiliation. “Drink, my Lord, if it pleases you.”
He drinks it down.
Later, a servant boy tries to fill his glass and the brute dashes it out of his fingers, sending broken glass shattering onto the floor. The boy cries out. “My Lady will serve me my wine tonight.”
Smiling, Lucrezia rises.
*
That night, he tries to come to her bed. For a moment, she fears the scheme has not come off and terror claws at her heart-but then, just as he crawls across the sheets, his body gives out, his eyes shut and in moments, he is deeply asleep.
“Take my husband to his chamber,” Lucrezia tells the servant, “he is clearly not yet well.”
And after they’ve taken the foul-smelling beast away, she lies unafraid in her own bed. When she rests her head against her folded hands, they still smell like the juice of poppy seeds.
*
Cesare is no great writer and never was but the following morning brings a letter written in his hand.
“Lucrezia, dear sister,
You have not written. Is Pesaro so full of delights that your Ladyship cannot spare a moment to send word to the brother banished from your presence? Rome is what it always was, is and shall be, Father likewise-Juan more so. They, Joffrey and Mother all send their love. My love for you is not so easily contained by a few bare words scribbled in haste on the page. But last night, when I was lonely for you, I sat up in your old room and read from a book of poetry:
I will tell you what inordinate love is
Insanity and frenzy of mind
Inextinguishable burning, devoid of happiness
A great hunger that can never be satisfied
A dulcet sickness, sweetness evil and blind
A most wonderful sugared sweet error
Without respite, against human nature,
It is to have vast incessant labor
Write, sweet Lucrezia, and tell whether I should forsake my father’s command to travel to Florence-for if you wish me come to you bearing a dinner knife, I shall not fail.
I will ride until I am your gate, and if it is locked, I shall break it open and if you are within, I will seek you out and serve you in any manner that you desire, for I am truly
Your Cesare."
*
After Alessandra brings word that Lord Sforza is once again too weary to leave his bed (“For that strange exhaustion still plagues him, my Lady”), she takes Lucrezia’s letter in reply to Cesare’s and promises to send it with only the most trustworthy messenger to Rome.
Though it contains nothing that could not be read by all:
"Revered, worshipful and my most well-beloved Cardinal and brother, I commend myself to you with all my heart. I beseech the Almighty to keep you well, according to His wish and my own fervent desire. If it please you to know how it is with me, or how I am, I am not well in body, heart or spirit-nor shall I be, until I am with you once more. Yet Pesaro is as full of delights as Rome is full of pigeons. As for the dinner knife, would that not rather spoil His Holiness’s alliance? Go to Florence with my blessing, as our Father the Pope bids you, for it is your sacred duty to obey him and as you obey, so shall I, and remain here in Pesaro,
By your own L.B.
Postscript: the love sent to me from our family via your letter, is of course answered in mine. As to your poem, lately I heard a poem too:
Keep your kiss to yourself,
White-toothed young virgin!
In your kiss I find no taste;
Keep your lips away from me.
A kiss far sweeter than honey
I got from a married woman for love
I shall not find, till Doomsday,
Taste in another kiss after that."
*
A week later, Lucrezia wonders if the very fragrance of the poppy induces the death-like sleep from which her husband has now begun to suffer for she too, is often so tired she can barely rouse herself to meet trusty Paulo in the forest.
Alessandra has told her, shamefaced, that there were those in Pesaro who whispered that the Pope poisoned Sforza with cantarella. “My Lady, I was so furious. To accuse the Pope! And who but you has even been in your husband’s presence of late? Why, people die every day, I tell them…”
“Tell no more, Alessandra, my head begins to ache.”
But Lucrezia’s husband is not dead yet, nor even dying for the poppy is much subtler and far slower than cantarella. The rumors do not concern her. Now that she too finds herself often in bed, sleeping fitfully, the rumors of poisoning will no doubt die down again. They will think it an illness, afflicting husband and wife.
She asks Alessandra to move all the many vases of poppies from her chamber, to open the windows and let the sun in. Still her body aches and she goes to her bed, wet through with sweat and bone-tired.
*
Closing her heavy eyes, she remembers the terrible fever that took Jem. They never even let her go to him for they warned it may be contagious, but sometimes at night you could hear his tortured cries. And he cried for Cesare, for Cesare in his long robes of poppy red, like blood, like love, like vengeance…
(“Insanity and frenzy of mind”)
Someone wipes the perspiration from her forehead.
He wore those very same robes when he promised her. When he swore, with those eyes as black as sin, that he would cut her husband’s heart out with a dinner knife and serve it to her. But as he moved her up against the marble wall and leaned down low to be level with her eyes, his breath mingled with hers and she knew-
(“A great hunger that can never be satisfied”)
Lucrezia moans.
She knew he was pledging her his heart, as he had done so many times before in so many different ways: teaching her to read, to dance, chasing her through the courtyard, kissing her palms, promising her all, spilling a man’s blood, spilling his own, marrying her only to freeze when she said ‘I do’, his firm palm against hers when they danced, promising, promising…
“Blood,” she whispers, “Like the poppy...”
“My Lady?”
“It’s in the blood…”
You will always have me.
“Where is he?” she screams. “Where is he?”
“Who, my Lady?”
*
Once, weeks before when she was well and strong, Paulo had asked her why, if she insisted on not writing to the Pope, she did not write to one of her brothers?
“Cesare.” The name comes to her lips as easily as her own.
“Yes, him or any of them, my-Lucrezia.”
“And if I wrote to him, Paulo, and bade him to come? And the letter was not intercepted, made it safely to him in Rome... And still, he never came-then what would you say?”
“But he would. How could he not?”
“To safeguard the alliance between the Sforzas and the Borgias. To honor his father. To bed his women, to live his life as he pleases…”
“If he loves you, as he should, he will come!”
“Then I shall not test him, Paulo. For I would rather fear I am not truly loved by my brother, than know it.”
*
"My Lady?"
Alessandra is shaking her awake and out of the corner of her eye is a flash of poppy red robes--
"Your brother is here."
TBC
Note: deviates slightly from events in the series.
"You miss her that much?"
"If anything happened to her...I'd die."
Die! In that instant? The bond that existed between them was such that at fourteen years old, Lucrezia (listening surreptitiously at the door when she should have been asleep) could imagine it.
She could imagine her heart, which he habitually kept about his person (indeed, he had sometimes joked that if she would grant him her heart, he would store it safely where not a soul in the Vatican would think to look-between the pages of a bible) suddenly shattering. That no matter what divided them, sea or land, Cesare would feel that which he owned perish. Perhaps then, Lucrezia had conceded to herself, at the moment he felt her heart break and the connection between them sever, he would die.
Now lying beneath the suddenly cloying sheets of her bed, fearful of that promise, Lucrezia ran nimble fingers across the beads of her rosary at the very thought-as much to cleanse herself of the sin of thinking it as to ward that dark possibility off. For as unthinkingly painful as the idea of Cesare dying was (like an apocalypse, for what could ever happen afterwards? Nothing of consequence could ever follow), there had been something horribly satisfying in it too; in the great, comforting heaviness of his love for her. They were bound in some unspeakable covenant-if her heart broke, his world would end, if he died, surely she would die also.
*
How childish she now realizes she was. The breaking of one’s heart is suffered alone.
Lucrezia stands nude in front of her gilded looking-glass, taking in the damage of the night before. Bruises bloom deep purple and sickly green across her ribcage and there are five angry welts on both of her small shoulders, from where the beast’s fingers dug into the skin. They do not cause her as much pain as the bruises that can’t be seen, below. But the ones that worry her the most are the visible ones, like the darkening shadow across her throat shaped like the creature’s right hand.
“My husband should take more care,” she comments drily, as Alessandra deftly powders the area. “Soon, it will beyond even your powers to conceal.”
“Oh, my Lady…” Alessandra shakes her head, her face turning ghostly pale-whiter than her powder.
“It is no matter, little maid,” Lucrezia whispers soothingly to the girl, though her maid is in fact several inches taller and not a few years older-but then, Lucrezia is a Lady and a Lady is not a child, even if she is fourteen years old. “The Lord, in His wisdom, shall provide.”
The phrase means nothing, of course, it is merely what Father (Holy Father, now) often said when waging his plots. So many of His Holiness’s promises now seemed empty and how many of his sayings double-ended. The Lord may indeed provide, but with what? Was this cursed marriage His provision? If so, cursed was the day He provided it.
“My dear Lady, I fear your death will come before He does.”
Lucrezia gazes contemplatively at her reflection, Alessandra’s words ringing true at the sight of the bones that stick out further now than they did before (for it is sometimes easier to drink than to eat, in anticipation of what night will bring), the cuts and wounds and bruises.
Unlike the Pope, Cesare had never promised her happiness in marriage. (“Happiness and greatness,” he had warned, “have little to do with each other.”) Really, he’d promised her nothing-but his own devotion, come marriage, come death. And in these months of industriously covering injuries with cleverly draped gowns, higher and higher necklines to hide the bruises, gloves for broken fingers and powder to mask scratches, that too was proving hollow.
As far as letters from Rome revealed, Cesare did not guess her suffering, did not ask (and had certainly not been struck dead at the moment her world fell to pieces, as she had once imagined). Indeed, Juan’s single letter heavily hinted at their brother’s happy licentiousness (“it is said she is a married lady, with lips as red as wine”) and in writing that flourished with barbed malice, asked if their angelic sister was not a little jealous.
But jealousy was too kind, too civilized a word.
The thought of him-while she-
“My Lady, could you not write to His-”
Lucrezia whirls around and her great blue eyes flash. “That will do, Alessandra.”
The maid bows her head and falls to her knees, “My Lady.”
Now she is a Lady, no mere girl (indeed, she never was) and her eyes bore holes into the top of Alessandra’ pretty foolish head until she sees the silly thing’s hands begin to tremble. Softening, she touches her maid’s shoulder. Alessandra is, after all, a good girl and cannot be expected to understand.
“Then help me to dress. The green velvet.”
*
Though Paulo is no less in service to Lucrezia than Alessandra is, he isn’t so easily put off. “Why do you not write to His Holiness, my Lady?”
They are in the forest, she lying on a bed of leaves with Paulo beside her. His fingers trace a scratch on collar bone that is fast becoming a scar.
“I have told you to call me Lucrezia.” She half-rises to press a swift kiss to his young, innocent mouth. “Your Lady commands it.”
“Lucrezia, then.” He stares into her eyes with such naked earnestness that she feels compelled to look away, up at the ceiling of leaves above her. He is so young. “Why don’t you?” he urges.
“Dear Narcissus,” she murmurs to the leaves, eyes half-shut. “You do not attend me. In this, our forest, I hardly wish to speak of my Lord.” Finding his thigh by touch, she strokes it lightly and hears him breathe faster. “Shall you guess what I’d like to do instead?”
“My Lady…”
“Lucrezia.”
They are silent, except for Paulo’s breathing as her fingers ghost across his groin. Then suddenly, he removes her hand, placing it gently down against the ground and holds it there, in his soft boyish hand. “Lucrezia, they say he will be recovered from his fall in days. It will happen again.”
Lucrezia snatches her hand back.
Paulo winces but persists, “If he does not stop, he will kill you.”
She feels treacherous tears pressing against her eyelids, hot and intemperate, so she tilts her head back and hides her face, willing them away again. Wounded she may be, humiliated even but not even Paulo may see her weaken.
She is a Borgia. And no one, no one may see her weaken.
(How had Cesare once put it? They’d been in the square, she but ten or eleven, he a young man of fourteen. It was before Rome bowed to Papa, before crowds of Roman aristocracy parted for her or the peasant children kissed her train. She was just a child, twirling to admire the skirts of her apricot dress that had been made from Mama’s, her new almost-a-Lady dress, when someone crowed, “See the little Borgia whore dance! A free show, that!” There was laughter.
How quickly Cesare had acted. After she had stopped turning but before the words had made any real impression, her brother’s blade shone strangely in the afternoon light as it sliced through the mellow air and was pressed (none too gently) to the man’s groin. Without moving, Lucrezia watched as Cesare spoke in the man’s ear. The blackguard turned a waxy shade of white and his gaping, toothless mouth parted. Those who’d laughed, scattered. “I mean’ no disrespect, m’Lord, I mean’ no disrespect…” he began to half-whisper, half-cry.
In a movement as precise as a step in a dance, Cesare took the blade from the man’s groin and severed his left ear from his head. Blood burst, came pouring down his cheek and his neck in a red as bright as a poppy’s petals. Cesare snarled a command but Lucrezia no longer remembers the words, only that gorgeous spray of blood. The grown man went on his knees to her, wild-eyed with pain but with the blade at his neck, he begged for “milady’s pardon.”
And later, at home, when she had asked her brother how he’d been so calm, so perfectly controlled, he told her that the world divided into two different types of people: Borgias and everyone else. To be a Borgia was to be ready, to live and to breathe on the tip of the blade. No matter how angrily and vengefully one thrusts a sword, the tip should always hit true. So when an enemy-
“An enemy?” she’d repeated.
“Everyone else,” he clarified. “When they see you, they see not fear, pain or vengeance, they see only the tip of the blade before it pierces them through. They see only their own death, reflected in your eyes.”
“In my eyes?”
“Any man would see his downfall in your eyes, my Love.”
“But I am not brave like you, Cesare.”
He took her little hands in his and held her gaze. Her whole body went still and quiet. This was important. “Were you frightened? Of the blood? Of the man?”
“No,” the answer had come unbidden, naturally. “The man was nothing to you, I was safe. And the blood…”
“Yes?”
“It was so pretty in the light… like fields of poppies.”
Cesare laughed and twirled her before him. “Shall your next dress be poppy red, my love?”
The world went spinning, spinning and she was laughing and Cesare was laughing though she would only later grasp the joke. He caught her in his arms, still grinning but then she caught his eye and his face changed, became stone.
“I would dye the cloth myself for you, sweet sister.” )
Lucrezia smiles at the memory. Whatever else has happened, she has been taught strength-surrounded by it.
“Lucrezia? Are you listening to me?” She feels Paulo's gaze.
Strength is the only true religion.
In a movement so swift, Paulo gasps, Lucrezia is atop him, her long golden-white hair falling around them like a curtain hiding all the inconvenient truths and she laughs out loud at his shocked, scandalized expression-the barely concealed delight.
“Call me Echo and speak no more, Narcissus.”
And Paulo obeys his Lady.
*
Lucrezia is sitting in front of the looking-glass, Alessandra brushing her hair in long, steady strokes with a silver brush, when the memory of blood as red as poppies stirs another. “Alessandra, do poppies grow on my Lord’s estates?”
“I believe so, my Lady.”
Lucrezia watches Alessandra’s reflection in the mirror but the girl’s expression does not change.
“Of what variety, Alessandra?”
“Ah…” Alessandra looks puzzled. “Red, my Lady…”
“The papaver somniferum, perhaps,” Lucrezia murmurs, as if to herself. “A common enough flower, Alessandra. A weed, really.” Lucrezia smiles sadly, twisting a golden strand of hair around her little finger which is still bent slightly to the left from a break that never properly healed. “But my mother would twine them in my plaits when I was a child. Would you gather me some? I would be reminded of my childhood today.”
She lifted her shining grey blue eyes to meet Alessandra’s dull brown ones.
Alessandra, in the mirror, has turned ashen with sympathy. “Oh my Lady…I would do so gladly and at once.”
Lucrezia thanks her.
When Alessandra reaches the door, she turns and says slowly, “My Lady… when I was a child, my mother often said the seeds of the poppy soothe pain.”
Without turning around, Lucrezia replies, “I’m afraid my knowledge of flowers is limited to the symbolic, little maid. But…” Meeting her maid’s eyes in the looking-glass, Lucrezia’s eyes fill with tears. “My husband is said to be recovering swiftly, so perhaps your country wisdom will be of use, after all. The Lord knows I shall know pain once more.”
Alessandra touches the wooden crucifix around her neck, shaking her dear head, “You shall have baskets of poppies, my Lady,” and then rushes out, eager to cheer her mistress’s low spirits.
When she is gone, Lucrezia’s sorrowful expression vanishes as though she had slipped off a Venetian mask. She takes the silver brush and brushes her golden mane until it shines. Her eyes are dry and hard.
*
That evening, when the monster is able to join her at dinner, she is her most beautiful. The bruises he made that marred her beauty have faded. Her golden-blond curls hang down her back in gleaming waves. Her ivory skin glows. Her grey-blue eyes shine when they look upon him.
“Will you have wine, my Lord?”
The servants are gone and boldly, she stands and reaches for the decanter, her eyes never leaving his. Pouring, she knows he won’t see her ring snap open (a gift, coincidentally from Cesare) or even hear it-his eyes are devouring her, eating her up and he will never know the difference.
She is an angel in the light, helping her husband to his evening drink.
The tip of the blade.
Now lowering her eyes, she offers him the glass, as if humbled by his very presence. Nothing pleases him so much as a show of submission. In daytime, submission and at night, humiliation. “Drink, my Lord, if it pleases you.”
He drinks it down.
Later, a servant boy tries to fill his glass and the brute dashes it out of his fingers, sending broken glass shattering onto the floor. The boy cries out. “My Lady will serve me my wine tonight.”
Smiling, Lucrezia rises.
*
That night, he tries to come to her bed. For a moment, she fears the scheme has not come off and terror claws at her heart-but then, just as he crawls across the sheets, his body gives out, his eyes shut and in moments, he is deeply asleep.
“Take my husband to his chamber,” Lucrezia tells the servant, “he is clearly not yet well.”
And after they’ve taken the foul-smelling beast away, she lies unafraid in her own bed. When she rests her head against her folded hands, they still smell like the juice of poppy seeds.
*
Cesare is no great writer and never was but the following morning brings a letter written in his hand.
“Lucrezia, dear sister,
You have not written. Is Pesaro so full of delights that your Ladyship cannot spare a moment to send word to the brother banished from your presence? Rome is what it always was, is and shall be, Father likewise-Juan more so. They, Joffrey and Mother all send their love. My love for you is not so easily contained by a few bare words scribbled in haste on the page. But last night, when I was lonely for you, I sat up in your old room and read from a book of poetry:
I will tell you what inordinate love is
Insanity and frenzy of mind
Inextinguishable burning, devoid of happiness
A great hunger that can never be satisfied
A dulcet sickness, sweetness evil and blind
A most wonderful sugared sweet error
Without respite, against human nature,
It is to have vast incessant labor
Write, sweet Lucrezia, and tell whether I should forsake my father’s command to travel to Florence-for if you wish me come to you bearing a dinner knife, I shall not fail.
I will ride until I am your gate, and if it is locked, I shall break it open and if you are within, I will seek you out and serve you in any manner that you desire, for I am truly
Your Cesare."
*
After Alessandra brings word that Lord Sforza is once again too weary to leave his bed (“For that strange exhaustion still plagues him, my Lady”), she takes Lucrezia’s letter in reply to Cesare’s and promises to send it with only the most trustworthy messenger to Rome.
Though it contains nothing that could not be read by all:
"Revered, worshipful and my most well-beloved Cardinal and brother, I commend myself to you with all my heart. I beseech the Almighty to keep you well, according to His wish and my own fervent desire. If it please you to know how it is with me, or how I am, I am not well in body, heart or spirit-nor shall I be, until I am with you once more. Yet Pesaro is as full of delights as Rome is full of pigeons. As for the dinner knife, would that not rather spoil His Holiness’s alliance? Go to Florence with my blessing, as our Father the Pope bids you, for it is your sacred duty to obey him and as you obey, so shall I, and remain here in Pesaro,
By your own L.B.
Postscript: the love sent to me from our family via your letter, is of course answered in mine. As to your poem, lately I heard a poem too:
Keep your kiss to yourself,
White-toothed young virgin!
In your kiss I find no taste;
Keep your lips away from me.
A kiss far sweeter than honey
I got from a married woman for love
I shall not find, till Doomsday,
Taste in another kiss after that."
*
A week later, Lucrezia wonders if the very fragrance of the poppy induces the death-like sleep from which her husband has now begun to suffer for she too, is often so tired she can barely rouse herself to meet trusty Paulo in the forest.
Alessandra has told her, shamefaced, that there were those in Pesaro who whispered that the Pope poisoned Sforza with cantarella. “My Lady, I was so furious. To accuse the Pope! And who but you has even been in your husband’s presence of late? Why, people die every day, I tell them…”
“Tell no more, Alessandra, my head begins to ache.”
But Lucrezia’s husband is not dead yet, nor even dying for the poppy is much subtler and far slower than cantarella. The rumors do not concern her. Now that she too finds herself often in bed, sleeping fitfully, the rumors of poisoning will no doubt die down again. They will think it an illness, afflicting husband and wife.
She asks Alessandra to move all the many vases of poppies from her chamber, to open the windows and let the sun in. Still her body aches and she goes to her bed, wet through with sweat and bone-tired.
*
Closing her heavy eyes, she remembers the terrible fever that took Jem. They never even let her go to him for they warned it may be contagious, but sometimes at night you could hear his tortured cries. And he cried for Cesare, for Cesare in his long robes of poppy red, like blood, like love, like vengeance…
(“Insanity and frenzy of mind”)
Someone wipes the perspiration from her forehead.
He wore those very same robes when he promised her. When he swore, with those eyes as black as sin, that he would cut her husband’s heart out with a dinner knife and serve it to her. But as he moved her up against the marble wall and leaned down low to be level with her eyes, his breath mingled with hers and she knew-
(“A great hunger that can never be satisfied”)
Lucrezia moans.
She knew he was pledging her his heart, as he had done so many times before in so many different ways: teaching her to read, to dance, chasing her through the courtyard, kissing her palms, promising her all, spilling a man’s blood, spilling his own, marrying her only to freeze when she said ‘I do’, his firm palm against hers when they danced, promising, promising…
“Blood,” she whispers, “Like the poppy...”
“My Lady?”
“It’s in the blood…”
You will always have me.
“Where is he?” she screams. “Where is he?”
“Who, my Lady?”
*
Once, weeks before when she was well and strong, Paulo had asked her why, if she insisted on not writing to the Pope, she did not write to one of her brothers?
“Cesare.” The name comes to her lips as easily as her own.
“Yes, him or any of them, my-Lucrezia.”
“And if I wrote to him, Paulo, and bade him to come? And the letter was not intercepted, made it safely to him in Rome... And still, he never came-then what would you say?”
“But he would. How could he not?”
“To safeguard the alliance between the Sforzas and the Borgias. To honor his father. To bed his women, to live his life as he pleases…”
“If he loves you, as he should, he will come!”
“Then I shall not test him, Paulo. For I would rather fear I am not truly loved by my brother, than know it.”
*
"My Lady?"
Alessandra is shaking her awake and out of the corner of her eye is a flash of poppy red robes--
"Your brother is here."
TBC