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“I heard rumors that my brother had found himself a new shadow. Is that you?”
Lucrezia Borgia. Not yet fifteen, not yet married, eyes wide and innocent, golden hair glowing in the sunlight: a rose just on the verge of blooming. She places her hand on top of his, smiling as if they are already dear friends, as if she is about to lean in and share some intimate secret with him. Perhaps testing out some little trick taught to her by la Bella Farnese. And he can tell she has been an excellent pupil—her touch would make most men weak in the knees; her smile would make them wage war.
Not him, though. Still, he makes no move to draw his hand away. “Where did you hear such rumors, my lady?”
“Oh,” she shrugs. “Here and there.”
“I think you should not place too much stock in rumors. They are often wrong, after all.”
“So am I wrong?”
“No,” he concedes. It is true that ever since the evening in Orsini’s kitchen, he has been clinging to Cesare Borgia like a barnacle. Lingering in dark corners, creeping down alleys, hauling away the bodies so his Eminence need not stain his own hands.
“Try this one, then,” she says. “I heard a rumor that you poisoned poor Cardinal Orsini.” Her voice is light and teasing, incongruous with the words coming out of her delicate mouth.
He does not tell her that it was Cesare himself who tipped the poison into Orsini’s wine. He just looks at her.
She laughs in delight and finally removes her hand from his. “What is your name? I should know the name of my brother’s shadow.”
He decides he rather likes this little Borgia. “Micheletto,” he tells her.
“Micheletto,” she repeats, testing out his name. “Where are you from?”
“Here and there.”
Except that isn’t true, is it? Everyone must come from somewhere. For the Medici, it is Florence. For the Colonnas, the Baglioni, and the Orsini, it is Rome; those illustrious families tracing their origins back to Caesar himself. For the Borgias, those foreigners, it is Valencia in Spain.
And for Micheletto, who belongs to no great family, it is Forli. He sees it comes as a surprise to Cesare that he has a mother; that he did not come slithering out of the Tiber fully formed, or materialize one afternoon in the back room of some whorehouse. You don’t, after all, expect that your shadow had its own life before it came to you, because then you might have to consider the life it will have after you.
Cesare must make it into a jest, of course. “Those hands, dottore,” he teases, pitching his voice high and grabbing Micheletto by the wrists before he can get safely out of range. “Look at those hands!” This, from the man who killed a baron over an insult to his own mother.
Are you quite finished, Your Eminence? he wants to say. He knows the cardinal is needling him, trying to provoke a response, but Micheletto won’t give him that satisfaction. He simply stares at Cesare until he lets him go and steps back. “My apologies,” Cesare says with a sheepish grin, perhaps realizing for once that he has gone too far. “Your mother is a good woman.”
“I know,” Micheletto says stiffly.
“And yet you have lied to her, these many years.”
He cannot stop himself. “You tell your mother of all you do, Eminence?”
Cesare’s grin is no longer so friendly. “Careful. You forget your place.”
Micheletto does not forget anything, much less his place. He does not tell Cesare, however, that he thinks his mother must know. She is no fool, and women have their ways of knowing such things anyhow. But if it pleases her to brag to her friends of her only son, who is studying to be a doctor, who makes broken people whole, then it is not his place to take that away from her. In her mind, that other Micheletto will return to Forli for good one day and settle into his trade and marry and have children and build a fine house for all of them to live in and be happy. He will not kill people for Borgia gold and he will not fuck men in cemeteries in the dead of night.
“That man at your mother’s shop, Augustino,” Cesare says suddenly. “A friend of yours?”
Micheletto shrugs. “Yes.” After Cesare has dismissed him for the evening, he will go to their usual meeting place and wait among the graves. He knows Augustino will come, despite his impending marriage. Or maybe because of it.
Cesare shakes his head. “Every day, you surprise me, Micheletto. Today I have learned you have a mother and a friend. Perhaps tomorrow I will discover that you keep two mistresses and have fathered a dozen children.”
That sounds more like Cesare’s own father, Micheletto thinks. “Little chance of that, Eminence,” he tells him instead.
“You killed your father,” Cesare says, eyes shut. His hands are still shaking, even as he clutches his glass of wine. When he had stabbed his brother and pushed him over the bridge, he had shown no signs of nerves, but now that the deed is done, Micheletto can see him coming unraveled. “Tell me how.”
This again. “I broke his neck,” Micheletto tells him. “In the field. I told my mother that he had slipped and fallen off the cart. I was sixteen.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Many reasons,” Micheletto repeats dully.
No son of mine—your filthy, unnatural dealings—I’ll kill you—
It is the rustling of the wind through the corn that he remembers later. The warm evening light setting everything aglow. The birds chirping in the trees.
Look at my face, Father. Mark it well. It is the last you will ever see.
(Years later, he said the same words to Savanarola, huddled in the darkness of Castel Sant’Angelo: look at my face, you old fraud. Because this sodomite will outlive you. What do I care if I am condemned to hell for all eternity for my sins; I will see to it that you burn first. I will reduce you to a pile of ashes. When I scatter you to the winds and grind you into the dirt under my feet, I will smile.
And the fat friar had trained his pale blue eyes upon him and sneered. “The last face I will see will be that of our Lord God. Poor sinner that I am, I will rejoice to receive His embrace. But you will never see Him; the gates of Heaven are forever barred to one such as you.” Then he threw back his head and laughed until he wheezed. Who laughs now, Father?)
“My brother Juan—” Cesare begins, and then stops. He gazes into his cup.
“Your brother Juan was stupid and vicious and weak,” Micheletto finishes the sentence for him. “He would have brought ruin on you and your entire family.”
“Ah,” Cesare says softly, choking down the words. “And who says I will not. Bring ruin on us all.”
What does this Borgia want from him? He is not the Pope; he cannot give him absolution. He waits for Cesare to speak, and when he does not, he clears his throat. “We should be getting back soon, Eminence. Dawn is almost here and you will be missed.”
“Yes.” Cesare gulps down the rest of the wine and lurches to his feet. He casts his eyes around, lost. Micheletto puts a hand on his shoulder to steady him, but Cesare brushes him off. “Did you hate your father, Micheletto?”
“I did,” Micheletto sighs. “And I loved him too.”
My name is Pascal, he said. I was born in a little fishing village outside of Genoa, he said. One of those places you pass by and don’t even look at. You wouldn’t know it.
I’ve been lots of places. Try me.
There were other things Pascal told him—about his father, a merchant of modest means; his mother baking bread in the kitchen for him and his two older brothers. Idle talk, as the sweat dried on his back; Pascal’s arm draped over him, stroking his side. “When I was ten, I went out to sea to fish with my brothers. I looked over the side of the boat and I saw a mermaid under the water, her dark hair fanning out behind her. She looked at me and smiled. Her eyes were as blue as sapphires.”
“It might have been a trick of the light. You were hungry and thirsty from fishing all day, and the movement of the waves deceived you.”
Pascal had removed his hand and propped himself up on his elbows, looking thoroughly offended. “I know what I saw,” he insisted. “What can you trust, if not your own eyes?”
What indeed? Was the story of the mermaid a lie, Micheletto wonders afterwards. The fishing village near Genoa, the happy family? In the end, he cannot even be sure of Pascal’s name, or if that was a lie too. The only thing he can be certain of is that his touch was real. The warmth of his breath on the back of his neck. The corners of his mouth turned up in a smile as he read out loud. In those early weeks, some part of Micheletto had expected to return to his rooms one night and find Pascal had taken his things and gone, and yet he had always been there when he came back. He should have known sooner; Pascal was young and beautiful, what could he possibly want from a rough, unsmiling man twenty years his senior with no learning to speak of—but nobody had ever stayed like that, before. For him.
After he takes his leave of Cesare for the last time, he goes north to Genoa, to the fishing village, just to see. Every house he passes by, he wonders, is that the one; is Pascal’s mother in there kneading the dough and wondering why she hasn’t had any word from her youngest son in months? He walks along the shore and imagines Pascal as a boy, splashing around in the surf with his brothers and laughing. He takes a small boat out to sea at dawn and looks over the edge. He sees no mermaids down there, just the outlines of fish and the bottomless ocean. But Pascal had been adamant that he had seen one, so perhaps they live in the places where the light cannot reach and rarely show themselves to men, because a man would try to catch her in his net and drag her from her home and scrape off her scales and sell them for coin. Little wonder, then, that they hide in the dark and keep their secrets.
His trouble is that he knows too many Borgia secrets now, and the whole world wants to know Borgia secrets. He keeps a low profile and doesn’t stay in any one place for too long, but the hunt is on in earnest once the pope is dead and Della Rovere occupies the chair at St. Peter’s and Cesare himself is taken in Naples through treachery. Even for a person with his talents, Micheletto cannot hide forever, and eventually they find him and haul him in chains into the depths of Castel Sant’Angelo. They have many questions for him there: where have the Borgias hidden their gold, what of Pope Alexander’s secret dealings with the Jews, did Lucrezia poison her second husband, did Cesare murder brother Juan in a fit of jealous rage over Lucrezia, did Cesare fuck his sweet sister?
For the most part, he bears his torturers no ill will: after all, they are men like himself, and skilled in their trade, or at least not incompetent. The exception is the little Sforza spawn that visits from time to time to check on his progress, some worthless nephew or the other of Lucrezia’s first husband. “That blond Borgia whore,” he leers at Micheletto as they turn the handles on the rack. “I heard that Cesare shared her freely with his men. Was she any good? How wet was her cunt?” Perhaps feeling that he has not made his point sufficiently clear, the Sforza makes an obscene gesture and sticks his hand in his pants.
I’ll make you suffer for that, Micheletto thinks. I’ll kill you slowly. I’ll flay you alive. I’ll cut you to pieces and feed you to the dogs. But all he can do for now is groan in agony and squeeze his eyes shut. Time grinds to a halt when they put him on the rack; everything fades except for the pain. After they are done with him, he lies in the straw and weeps and wishes to die. He sometimes thinks of Cesare, who, for all he knows, might be sitting in the cell next to his, or might be imprisoned thousands of miles away. In the past, he would have thought that they would never rack a duke, but in this new world they live in, well…
And then, one day, they unlock the door, take him by his elbows, and drag him not to the rack or to his execution, but outside into the light. A horse, a bundle of clean clothes, a sword, and a small purse are waiting for him out there, and they put the reins in his hands. Somebody has paid his way. They don’t need to tell him who.
The last thing he does before leaving Rome forever is track down the little Sforza and butcher him. He is weak from his imprisonment and he is in a rush, so it’s not done entirely to his liking, but the look on the Sforza’s face when he sees him is satisfying enough. Then he takes the horse and rides north to Ferrara, to Lucrezia Borgia, to the unknown.
Lucrezia Borgia: a girl no longer, but a woman thrice married, and enormously pregnant with her third child. This is the woman who rode out in front of an entire French army and all their cannons and negotiated a truce, who saved her father from poison, and who made and unmade kings, for good or ill. But when he presents himself to her, still covered in dirt and sweat from the road, she flings herself into his arms and kisses his cheek with girlish abandon, all decorum forgotten.
“Mind your dress, my lady,” he tells her gently as he sets her down.
“Ah, what do I care,” she says, wiping away tears. “I have missed you.”
It moves him, this simple admission, and he falls to his aching knees in front of her. She puts her hands on his shoulders and raises him to his feet. If she is shocked by his appearance, by how thin and pale he is and how painfully he moves after two years in Castel Sant’Angelo, she makes no sign of it. “Come, Micheletto,” she says warmly, and places her hand on his. “You are my honored guest.”
He manages to not weep, but only just.
“I am sorry that I could not act sooner on your behalf,” she says later that night, after he’s had a chance to eat and rest and visit with her children. Now that the sun has gone down and the air is chilly, she’s had him wrapped in blankets and set him in front of the fire over his mild protests. “But you see how things are now that my father is dead. No one wants to have dealings with the Borgias anymore, and I have little left to bargain with at any rate.”
“You seem well, though,” he points out cautiously. “You have married again. What is he like, this husband of yours?”
“Oh, Alfonso—” she shakes her head. “Well, we understand each other. I think that was part of the difficulty with my earlier marriages. I expected love, when I should have sought understanding. I leave him to his business and he leaves me to mine, and that suits both of us.” She does not try to hide the bitterness in her voice. “I think I am perhaps unlovable.”
You and me both, my lady. “You have your children, who love you.”
“I do, and I thank God every day for them.” Her hand drops to her belly. “But the rest of my family—my brother—” Her voice trembles and her words come tumbling out. “I have not seen Cesare in three years. He is imprisoned at La Mota, near Segovia. I have sent many letters and envoys and received none back; I do not even know if my letters are allowed to reach him. I imagine his jailers open them and make copies to send to Pope Julius, and the cardinals read them out loud to mock us.”
“Any man who offends you, send him my way, and I’ll see to it he never does it again,” Micheletto tells her, and is rewarded with a ghost of a smile.
Lucrezia takes a deep breath and composes herself. “You did a great service for my family. And for me, and my son. I haven’t forgotten that.” She looks down and traces her finger along the rim of her wineglass. “Why did you leave us?”
He closes his eyes. Kill him; kill the boy. “Please, my lady,” he begs. “Anything else you ask of me, I will answer. Any task you set to me, I will do. But please don’t ask me this.”
Lucrezia nods. “My brother asked too much of you.”
Little Borgia. Cesare asked too much; she sees too much, as always. “I refused him nothing.”
“Except to return to him.” She turns her gaze to the fire. “He spoke of you often, you know,” she continues. “He hired others after you, but he missed his shadow. He deeply regretted whatever happened that drove you from his side.”
Micheletto stares down at his hands. One day, maybe, he will tell her the truth. He has guarded Cesare’s secrets all these years, but perhaps in time he can start letting go of some of his own. “I have little use for regret,” he tells her. “It weighs you down. A man can drown in his regrets. I’ve seen it.”
“If only we could all be as wise as you.” Her eyes are wet with tears, which she quickly wipes away. She pushes herself up from the chair and walks over to the window, her back turned to him.
“I am not wise,” he calls after her, but her mind has already moved on to the next subject. She idly fingers her necklace as she stares out the window. “I have had a lot of time to think, Micheletto,” she says softly. “About what I want from this life. You see, my father and my brothers wanted to build an empire, and I was their prize calf, to be haggled over in the marketplace. But I never wanted their empire. I just wanted to be happy.”
“What would make you happy, my lady?” he asks, but he already knows the answer.
She turns to face him. “Cesare,” she says fiercely. “I want Cesare.”
“You love him.” And not in the usual way between brother and sister. Cesare had never breathed a word of it to him, of course, but he had known, even before Cesare himself knew. After years in Cesare’s service, how could he not?
“As do you,” she says with a raised eyebrow. “I may not be wise, but I do see things. Or am I wrong?”
“No, you are not wrong,” he admits, suddenly flooded with relief to finally speak it out loud after all this time. “I did love him. I do. Despite everything.”
“Well, then.” She leans forward intently. “I think we understand each other. I think you already know what I ask of you.”
He does. By morning, he is on the road again.
Tell me about love.
It hurts.
Micheletto hurts. In the morning when he wakes up shivering, his bones ache. His knees crack when he hauls himself onto the horse. His back twinges when it rains. He cannot remember a time when he was entirely without pain. But he has been through worse than this and survived. Beat him, cut him, whip him, starve him, burn him: do what you will, and you will find him bruised and bleeding and still standing on his feet.
Now the miles disappear between him and La Mota. And Cesare. “I will give you an army, if you require it,” Lucrezia had said to him before he left, but he had shaken his head. He has no need for armies; just a swift horse, a sword, and his wits. “Save the army for your brother,” he had told her. “He may need it when the time comes.” She had smiled.
Aut Caesar aut nihil. He rides. His body hurts. His soul has never felt more free.