The Scarlet Contessa (14 page)
Read The Scarlet Contessa Online
Authors: Jeanne Kalogridis
We made our way southwest over the ancient Via Emilia, worn by the tread of Roman legions. It was the very path Matteo had taken on his last journey, and I thought often of him as our great caravan wended its way from town to town, from Piacenza to Reggio nell’Emilia, and beyond. The road was level and boringly straight; we passed dozens of travelers who paused to gape at our magnificent cavalcade with its fluttering flags and banners: the crimson and white Sforza arms of a basilisk swallowing a naked child, the golden oak against sky blue of the della Rovere and Riario, and the golden tiara and keys of Pope Sixtus himself. At every city, our messengers rode ahead to announce the imminent arrival of Her Illustrious Highness, Caterina Sforza, and all the local dignitaries rode out to greet her, to the blaring of trumpets and cheering of hastily assembled crowds.
She dined and slept in the palaces of the ruling families, who publicly praised her grace, beauty, and manner and sent additional escorts with her to add to the carnival atmosphere. With each day, her bearing grew prouder, her behavior toward underlings ruder; by the time we reached Bologna to be welcomed by the family Bentivoglio, she had adopted her father’s arrogance. During the day, she treated me with such contempt that I came to despise her for it; only at night, when I lay beside her in a strange bed, did she sound like the frightened child who had wept when I abandoned her.
After eleven days of torturously slow progress, we rolled into the lush, fertile region dotted with orchards, vineyards, and wheat fields known as the Romagna.
By Milanese standards, the Romagna was provincial and fiercely independent; the region was broken into several small fiefdoms. The Malatesta family held the town and outlying areas of Rimini, and the Ordelaffi clan the town of Forlì; various other families claimed other towns, and skirmishes between rivals were common. They agreed on only one thing: their shared disdain for the pope, who yearned to unite them, preferably under his rule.
An hour before sunset, our carriage rolled over a slight promontory. When we reached the crest, Imola lay before us, a trifling town with its eastern flank nestled against the languidly snaking Santerno River.
At the sight of it, Caterina let go a small gasp of delight and beamed.
I followed her gaze, perplexed; had I been in her place, I would have been painfully disappointed. Compared to Milan or even bucolic Pavia, Imola was one of the more provincial hamlets we had passed. West of it stood a great square fortress, its towers bleached to bone by the sun, its base ringed in dark green mold from the moat. Beyond it lay the redbrick city walls; inside them was a sparse collection of buildings set upon a few dusty roads. I counted five churches and as many convents, a small government hall, a marketplace, and a half dozen dwellings suitable for nobility. The rest of Imola was given over to pasture, crops, or hovels for the poor, most of the latter huddled on the riverbank.
“All mine,” Caterina whispered to herself, her eyes wide with awe and desire. She was staring at the garlands of flowers set upon either side of the road leading to the gate, its doors thrown open beneath a huge crimson and white Sforza banner, with smaller banners of the Riario and Sixtus flanking it. A crowd had gathered to welcome the new mistress; church bells rang in a sonorous cascade.
We were covered with dust from travel, and the contessa bedraggled from the heat. Caterina ordered the caravan to stop at a nearby castle outside town. There she bathed, and I directed the chambermaids as they dressed her—first in a gleaming white chemise of the finest spun silk, then a kirtle of white satin to which was sewn gold braid. The sleeves were tight and slashed, and the silvery-white chemise was pulled through the slashes and puffed. Over all this went an overdress, open at the sides and cut deep at the neckline, of pure, glittering gold brocade textured to create a pattern of stylized pomegranates. I tucked Caterina’s long braids into her favorite gold and diamond snood, and drew forth tendrils round her face; a poker, swiftly heated in the kitchen hearth, coaxed them into tight ringlets. Upon her head went a veil so gossamer as to be invisible; around her neck, a heavy gold necklace studded with large diamonds; and around her shoulders—at her insistence, despite the heat—went a cloak of rich sable velvet, lined in gold satin. Imola was in the grip of unusually warm weather for the first of May; sweat was trickling from Caterina’s forehead by the time we set off again, but she scowled at my suggestion that she looked just as splendid without the cloak.
My lady set off upon a horse, caparisoned in crimson and white; I rode close behind, with her two maids. Preceded by the trumpeters and Girolamo’s escort, heralded by church bells, Caterina rode through the gate onto streets covered with garlands of spring flowers and lined by townsfolk, who cheered her beauty.
Our procession stopped at a pavilion draped with banners, where Girolamo’s sister, Violantina, wife of the governor, stood waiting alongside the dignitaries of the town. When Caterina dismounted, several lads came to blows over the honor of claiming her horse, which delighted her further.
By the time she had been properly welcomed, with speeches, the keys to the city, poems, and the songs of a children’s choir, her features were incandescent with joy; I had never seen her behave with such charm, such poise, such confident authority. Violantina then led us to the Palazzo Riario, a stern square building covered in the ubiquitous terra-cotta. Caterina’s chamber walls and ceiling had been covered in white silk and gold brocade, but the view from the windows was still that of a small, dreary town, whose most notable landmarks were the house in which we resided and the grim, weathered fortress on its outskirts.
The first few days saw Caterina too busy to take much note of her surroundings; she was escorted to feasts, entertained by jesters, musicians, plays, and spectacles. Peasants surrounded the Riario palace and presented gifts of local delicacies, wines, and preserves.
Her husband, Girolamo, had promised earlier to meet her at Imola, but after four days, she began to chafe. Her instructions were to wait for him until he gave word that danger from assassins and plague had eased. After twelve days, a letter came from Girolamo, but she would not open it. Instead, she set out the following morning for faraway Rome.
We continued on the Via Emilia to Cesena, then due south. With each passing day, the weather grew warmer; by the time we passed Perugia, midway to our destination, we women stripped down to our chemises in the carriage, and hung out the windows, hoping to catch a stray breeze.
After more than a fortnight of dull, miserable travel, our messengers went ahead of us into the Holy City, while we stopped a few hours shy of it, at Castelnuovo, owned by the powerful Colonna family. Caterina was again feted and overfed, and put in luxurious quarters.
The next day she was anxious, and snapped irritably at me and at the maids as they outfitted her again in the grand gown she had worn on her triumphant entry into Imola. Our host, Stefano Colonna, honored her that afternoon with a banquet; by the time our unwieldy caravan again headed south, three hours before dusk, all of us were sated and drowsy. The Roman sky was cloudless, the sun merciless, the heat so sweltering that Caterina abandoned all notions of wearing the velvet cloak.
Along with Caterina, I craned my neck out of the carriage at the driver’s shout: Rome lay shimmering in the near distance. They say the Holy City rests upon seven hills, but age has worn them to gentle swells, enclosed by the crumbling, overgrown remains of the Aurelian Wall. Bona had been to Rome, and while I was still a girl, she had had me schooled carefully in its culture, geography, and history. She had always spoken of it with such reverence that I had expected to see a crowded but shining heavenly paradise—and indeed, there were hundreds of palaces, cathedral domes, and churches of shimmering white marble, dazzling in the afternoon light. To my disappointment, however, there were far more squalid, crumbling structures, small forests, overgrown meadows, abandoned vineyards and orchards, and ancient ruins playing host to grazing flocks of sheep and goats, all within the city walls. The gleaming new Jerusalem was far too small to fill them; in ancient days, it had held close to a million souls. Now it was home to barely forty thousand.
Nestled against Rome’s western flank, a brown river flowed north to south; on its eastern bank, which contained little more than rolling countryside, sat an isolated, aging complex of massive rectangular buildings. These were Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican, whose name meant vacant, uninhabitable. The land on which these were built had acquired its name in the first few decades after Christ’s death, when Caligula’s mother, Agrippina, had ordered the marshy, spring-laden hill to be drained so that she could plant her gardens there. Later, her son began construction of a circus nearby, which was finished by the tyrant Nero.
Nero entertained the pagan masses by martyring hundreds of Christians on the spot. Many were crucified, others covered in tallow and burned alive; still others, forced to wear the bloody pelts of beasts, were torn to pieces by wild dogs. They died as the mad emperor himself took part in wild chariot races around them.
The bones of these martyrs were too many to be recovered and properly buried, so a church was erected upon them to consecrate the remains, including those of Saint Peter, who had been crucified upside down in the very center of the circus.
A blessing,
the priest who tutored me had said,
for he died looking up toward heaven.
We traveled another half hour before those riding ahead of us issued a series of shouts; our carriage rolled to a stop. As the driver helped the Countess of Imola from the carriage, I followed, and glimpsed for the first time her husband.
He had dismounted a black charger, and carelessly tossed the reins aside without waiting to see whether the groom caught them. His entourage was no match for his wife’s; he had brought with him a dozen men, including the Bishop of Parma, a pair of red-caped cardinals, and a man dressed in bright blue silk who turned out to be the Milanese ambassador to Rome.
Girolamo Riario, the unacknowledged son of Pope Sixtus IV, wore a tunic of dark brown velvet embroidered with silver thread and trimmed with white ermine, despite the heat. His attendants wore the same brown velvet, sans embellishment, and they watched his every move with the same anxious attention I had seen Duke Galeazzo’s underlings pay him.
Girolamo gazed frowning upon his young wife. A gigantic, solid man, long of torso and limb, he stood three-quarters of a head taller than his tallest companion. His low forehead was hidden beneath light brown bangs, his dark eyes were wide set, his nose short and straight. His lips were red and small and round as cherries. His hair, cut like a page’s, fell just to his shoulders, framing a long, horselike face with a massive jaw that overwhelmed his face, though he could not be called ugly. It was not until he walked toward us that I saw he had a sparse mustache and goatee, both better suited to a raw youth than a man of thirty-four years.
When he stepped up to Caterina, he smiled, revealing crowded, overlarge teeth, but his eyes held no joy, only guardedness. He took in the golden glory of his bride—precisely twenty years his junior—with only the briefest flicker of carnal admiration. He was ill at ease; he glanced anxiously about until a sextet of armed guards encircled him, and the chief of them gave a short nod that it was safe to proceed.
“Madonna Caterina,” he said stiffly, in a husky bass, and gave a perfunctory bow. “Beloved consort, Countess of Imola, I’m glad to meet you. How lovely you look.” His unimpressive little speech was halting and clearly rehearsed; he spoke with such a pronounced Ligurian accent—nasalizing half his words and swallowing most of his
r
’s—that we all had to listen keenly to make out what he said. All the ermine and silver embroidery in the world could not hide the fact that he still sounded like a backward commoner from a tiny fishing village.
When Caterina, flushed from heat and nerves, proffered her hand, he took it clumsily and led her to the Milanese ambassador and the bishop, whose florid praise for her beauty made her husband’s words seem all the more lackluster. After the two dignitaries fawned over her a moment more, Girolamo grew impatient and led her over to a copse of tall, ancient oaks, accompanied by the guards.
I watched from a short distance, discreetly trying to swat away mosquitoes as the two of them spoke. Girolamo presented a necklace of very large pearls to his wife, and Caterina responded with gratitude; he tried, awkwardly, to fasten it about her neck, but grew frustrated and left the task to a guard. Through it all, he kept glancing about, utterly distracted and wearing a faint, sullen scowl; at the end, when Caterina ventured a few questions, he cut her short with a wave of his giant hand. And then he raised his voice so that Caterina’s maids and I, and all his male companions, could hear.
“I wasn’t happy,” he said, in his peasant’s accent, “when I heard you were coming. I wasn’t joking when I said there was plague, and there are men plotting to kill me—and now I’m forced to expose myself in a public procession through the streets! I sent a letter to Imola explaining these things to you. Didn’t you get it?”
For the first time, he fastened a distinctly menacing gaze on his bride, and became very, very still. He drew up to his full height to emphasize the point that the crown of Caterina’s head did not come so high as his shoulder; although his hands remained at his side, they coiled into fists.
Caterina, too, grew still. She dropped her gaze, now flinty, and tucked her chin in a manner that usually preceded an outburst of temper. She held this pose for only a few seconds and looked up at her consort with a smile only slightly less disingenuous than his had been.
“I did not,” she replied with cloying sweetness, in a breathless, feminine voice I would never have expected from her lips. “I would never want to endanger you or disobey you. Forgive me: I was so eager to see you in the flesh that I could wait no longer. And now, having met you, my happiness is complete.”