The Scarlet Contessa (15 page)

The last sentences were uttered with gushing obsequiousness; Caterina was mocking him openly. Girolamo, however, did not yet know Caterina well enough to know it. He digested her words and nodded to indicate her reply was acceptable.

“Let’s go then,” he said flatly, “and make quick work of this. I have pressing business.” He turned his back on his noble-born wife without the simple courtesy of leave-taking, and waved to his men as he headed back to the horses.

Caterina did not move. Instead, she stood staring in the direction of the vacant spot where Girolamo had stood, her craven smile rapidly fading, her eyes narrowing with suppressed rage. While the others were mounting their horses and hurrying back to carriages and wagons, I touched her elbow.

“Your Illustrious Highness,” I said. “We must go, too.”

Her back was to all the others; only I could see her face, hear her voice.

“Ignorant fucking fisherman,” she muttered softly, then fixed the artificial smile upon her lips and turned back to her waiting entourage.

Caterina rode on horseback the rest of the way while the maids and I rode in her carriage; as we drew closer to the city, we were obliged to stop every quarter mile for Caterina to dismount so that she could be greeted by scarlet-clad cardinals and prominent Romans. By nightfall, we arrived at the palace of the Cardinal of Urbino on the northern outskirts of the city. Despite the grandeur of the dwelling—newly renovated, with a marble façade, columns, friezes, and pediments—the street leading to it was in disrepair. Weeds sprouted between the bricks, and our coachman had to shoo away grazing goats; hares scattered in front of the horses’ hooves and quickly took refuge in a field across from the palace.

Exhausted, Caterina slept soundly despite the unrelenting heat; she did not stir even when wolves howled beneath our bedchamber window.

I woke at daybreak to the sounds of retching, and rolled from the bed to discover my naked mistress huddled over the basin, emptying her stomach. I found a cloth, wet it with water from the pitcher by the basin, and gently lifted her damp hair to press the cool cloth against the back of her neck.

When she had finished, she straightened and looked up at me. Her face was ghastly pale, her eyes and nose streaming.

“Was it the food?” I asked. We had both dined on a surfeit of rich dishes and a good deal of wine.

She shook her head. Her entire body was trembling and her brow slicked with sweat from the oppressive heat. “He is a horrid man,” she whispered. “A boor and a bully. I want to go home.”

I freshened the cloth with more water and cleaned her face. I considered telling her that her bridegroom had simply been nervous and in ill sorts, that he was surely a nicer fellow than he had seemed, but that would have been a lie. Instead I said, “I am with you, Madonna. He would have to kill me first before I let him hurt you.”

Perhaps I said the wrong thing; her eyes filled with sudden tears. But she swallowed them deliberately, and said, in a stronger voice, “I’m not sick. It’s just this damnable heat.”

I judged the first statement to be true, the second a lie, but did not contradict her. Instead I rinsed the cloth, wrung it out, and pressed it to her warm brow.

“Ride with me,” she said. “I want you by my side today.”

She would not listen to my protests, but made me put aside my widow’s unadorned black, and gave me a gown of cobalt silk embroidered with silvery white leaves; it was only slightly too short, and a bit too full in the bodice.

Despite the heat and the sun, already relentless at that early hour, she dressed in her full wedding regalia: a kirtle of black damask imprinted with a pattern of roses, and quilted with gold thread in a diamond pattern; her black bodice and sleeves were similarly quilted and studded with gold beads. Over this went an overdress of crimson satin and a heavy black damask cloak embroidered with the Sforza crest. Large rubies hung from her ears and around her neck on gold chains thicker than my thumb, along with the long strand of pearls from Girolamo.

It was Pentecost, and all of Rome was in a festive mood. Girolamo arrived wearing a faint, forced smile, a sullen gaze, and a shimmering silk tunic of Riario sky blue, embroidered with the golden oak. He and his male entourage led the way on horseback, followed by Caterina on a white mare. I rode just behind my mistress, ahead of representatives of the most powerful Roman families—the Gonzaga, the Orsini, the Colonna—and her large Milanese contingent. We made our way through the heart of the city, along the broad Via Recta, roughly paralleling the course of the River Tiber and recently repaved with brick and widened by Sixtus. Rome hosts hundreds of churches, more than I had ever seen, and every bell was ringing; their chimes, along with the cheers from the crowd that lined the street, deafened me.

Caterina’s nerves were forgotten. Once in public, she was again the poised, confident contessa, wife of the second most important man in Rome; she turned her head from side to side as she waved to the masses, allowing me a glimpse of her joyous, beaming face.

We wended our way past countless churches, most of them in serious disrepair, with broken spires, missing bricks, broken windows, and stone steps so badly worn by the centuries as to be unnavigable. There were shops—some new, some old, most selling religious items to pilgrims, who were obliged to traverse the Via Recta on their way to holy sites—and parks, some desolate and overgrown, and the occasional cluster of filthy shacks. There were also massive palaces belonging to the wealthy families and to the equally wealthy cardinals; I imagined that the ancient Roman temples, when new, had appeared much as these square white travertine structures, their entrances flanked by marble columns topped with ornate pediments, the whole embellished wherever possible with the forms of gods and cherubs.

Our cavalcade turned west and crossed the bridge leading to the imposing papal fortress that once housed the emperor Hadrian’s bones. This was the Castel Sant’Angelo, a squat, stark cylinder, many stories high, of brick so bleached and weathered its original color was uncertain. Some nine hundred years earlier, it was said, when the city was in the throes of a deadly plague, the Archangel Michael appeared atop the fortress and sheathed his sword; with this act, the pestilence retreated and Rome was saved. As we passed over the River Tiber—murky brown, littered with floating garbage and reeking of raw sewage—bile rose in my throat, and I covered my nose with my hand.

From there, our way led straight to Saint Peter’s Square, where papal guards held back the cheering throngs. At the steps leading up to the gatehouse in front of the basilica, we dismounted. I stayed close behind Caterina as she, Girolamo, and a Milanese orator were met by a middle-aged cardinal, whose height and long limbs marked him as one of the groom’s many cousins. This was Giuliano della Rovere, who otherwise resembled Girolamo not at all: Giuliano’s features were even, his jaw square, his cheeks sculpted, his nose straight, his chin delicate, with an attractive cleft. He was, in a word, pretty, and his gestures and movements graceful and refined. The rest of the nuptial entourage followed us through the arched gateways and across the atrium known as the Garden of Paradise to the church proper.

As I write this some thirty years later, the old basilica is no more, having been replaced by something new and shining and obscenely grand; I am grateful to have had the opportunity to set foot in it before its destruction. For the original Saint Peter’s—worn and stained, patched and crumbling as it was—dazzled not the eye but the soul. Its most impressive trait was not its architecture; the sanctuary was laid out in the simple shape of a Latin cross, with a broad central nave supported on either side by interior columns and flanked by two smaller aisles on the right and left, the whole covered by a leaky gabled roof. Nor was its adornment impressive; the great dark wooden doors were plain and deeply scarred, the marble floors worn and patternless, the small windows set high, admitting only narrow shafts of sunlight. Set upon a high platform of dark gray marble, beneath a plain, scarred wooden crucifix and a frieze supported by four spiral columns, was the altar, covered with gold brocade. Above the frieze, in a small half-cupola built into the wall, was the basilica’s most notable work of art: a mural of Christ attended by Saint Peter and Constantine, its builder.

None of these things awed me as much as its overwhelming vastness and its age. Its length and breadth allowed the gathering of several hundred souls in the central nave alone, and its height was more than three full stories. The windows were so high they blocked all view, forcing one’s attention away from external matters onto the spiritual. The instant I stepped inside, I felt a thrill, knowing that beneath my feet lay the bones of the first martyrs and all the popes, including Peter himself. Here trod Nero and Constantine and all the powerful men of Rome, past and present. And though the air was close and warm, filmed with the smoke of incense and redolent of human sweat, I breathed it in, and felt sanctified.

We made our way down the right aisle, passing the marble columns and the hushed congregation of hundreds, rich and poor alike. Upon the tall dais containing the altar, Pope Sixtus IV sat on an overlarge throne, surrounded by a scarlet flock of some two dozen cardinals.

Bona had raised me to revere the Holy Father, and despite my anger at God over Matteo’s death, I was still awed by the realization that I stood on the very ground hallowed by the bones of Saint Peter, staring at his successor.

The former Francesco della Rovere was grotesquely obese, a mountain of jiggling flesh covered by white linen robes and a chasuble of bright gold brocade edged with panels of crimson velvet; his cloak was of white satin embroidered with red and gold thread. On his crown sat a mitre of white silk trimmed with gold braid and studded with rubies, amethysts, topaz, and emeralds. A large pectoral cross of gold inlaid with diamonds rested upon his wheezing chest.

His square head was massive, his body even more so; even seated, he was clearly as tall and long-limbed as his gargantuan “nephew,” Girolamo, though his large bones were covered by mounds of fat. He was clean-shaven and nearly bald, with a bloated, jowly face that dripped sweat despite the efforts of two attendants who stood on either side of his throne waving two great ceremonial fans. His nose was straight and long, with a hooked tip, and wide, flaring nostrils; the whole looked as though it had been squashed deep into full, puffy cheeks. His long chin and jaw were lost in folds of fat, and he seemed to have no lips at all. The whites of his eyes were yellowed beneath heavy lids and fine, sharply arched brows; the jaded intelligence in those eyes was unsettling.

Della Rovere was a brilliant man, born to an impoverished peasant family in the Ligurian village of Savona. Young Francesco realized early that the church was his one way out of a miserable existence as a fisherman and joined the Franciscan Order. He rose quickly to the highest ranks, eventually becoming its general. He claimed surprise when Pope Paul II gave him his cardinal’s hat, and was outraged when, after Paul died and della Rovere was promptly elected pope, charges of bribery were leveled at him.

We paused before the altar, where two braziers and a censer hung. I took my place beside the orator from Milan, the ambassadors, and the rest of the wedding party while Cardinal della Rovere, Girolamo, and Caterina ascended the gray marble steps to the altar, genuflecting there, then crossing to the right hand, where the pope and his cardinals sat. At the top of the stairs, Cardinal della Rovere turned to take her elbow, and led her to the pope on his throne. She knelt with swanlike grace, her shoulders square, her neck held high to emphasize its sweep, and kissed first the pope’s slipper, then his ring.

Sixtus’s bored, pompous expression transformed into a brilliant grin, revealing at last his lips—small and round, like his son’s—and gray, toothless gums. He squeezed Caterina’s hand affectionately, and patted the chairs on either side of him. Girolamo sat on his right, Caterina on his left, and for the next three hours, we suffered through an interminable mass, during which Sixtus, from time to time, favored Caterina with smiles, and the Spanish ambassador, obliged to stand with the wedding party the entire time, fainted dead away and was carried off.

When mass was over, every soul in the expectant crowd remained to see what followed. Cardinal della Rovere rose and directed Caterina to kneel again before His Holiness. She kissed the pope’s red velvet slipper a second time, and remained kneeling while the orator from Milan stepped from beside me and, after clearing his throat nervously, produced a piece of paper from his cloak and read a summary, in Latin, of Caterina’s marvelous virtues. This went on to nauseating excess, until Sixtus, smiling and with the kindliest of manners, cut him short with a wave and praised him for a job well done. He then motioned for Girolamo to stand up and take his place beside his bride.

Girolamo took Caterina’s hand while Sixtus recited the marriage ceremony; his voice was forceful, deep, resonant, his enunciation as lacking as his teeth. His consonants were indistinct, his sibilants as slurred as a drunkard’s. Even so, his delivery was compelling, for as a young man, he had devoted himself not only to the diligent study of theology and philosophy, but also to the art of diction and oration, with the result that the only remnant of his peasant origins was a slight nasality to his speech.

At the pope’s direction, Girolamo, ashen from nerves and unsmiling, slipped a plain gold band onto Caterina’s finger, then bent low to kiss her quickly.

At this, Sixtus clapped his hands in boyish delight, his lips curving upward in a black cavernous grin, the corners disappearing beneath the ponderous folds of his cheeks. “Come, my darling, come!” He held out his giant, pudgy hand to Caterina.

She took it and began to kneel again, but he stopped her and signaled to Girolamo, who stepped behind his wife to unclasp the pearls around her neck. Sixtus snapped his fingers at Cardinal della Rovere, sitting nearby; the cardinal rose with alacrity and handed a small velvet box to His Holiness.