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~{June 23, 1519}~
At the palace of Duke Alfonso d’Este, the efforts of more than a dozen midwives and physicians steadily proved futile for Duchess Lucrezia, who just nine days before had brought another baby girl into the world. The tiny infant of frail health had already gone to heaven, baptised barely in time for her too-soon passing, and it seemed her lady mother would join her soon. After the birth, fever fell upon Lucrezia and would not break, and she burned from within as hot as the scorching sun beyond her flowing curtains.
Her legitimate children by d’Este had already been ushered through her chamber for fleeting private moments and sombre farewells, and finally, Lucrezia’s beloved but baseborn son, Giovanni, was permitted a moment for himself. Now a young man, he bore many of Paolo’s handsome features and the curly blonde hair of his mother.
“Mama?” Giovanni bid her to wake, but the lady was in the midst of fevered delirium.
She stirred from the pain in her womb and the unrelenting chill upon her bones. “Narcissus?” she asked helplessly.
“No, mama. It’s Giovanni,” he clarified, but Lucrezia faded again.
“Giovanni…” she murmured once, recalling her darling son before darkness closed in again.
Alfonso summoned the priest to deliver his wife her last rites on that final night. Thunder rolled in from the west, from Spain, and brought with it a kissing rain to make gardens and trees bloom. Lucrezia stirred only once in an hour, and her breaths fell slower and more shallow when the remaining physician finally left his vigil after midnight.
Reveries unfurled to Lucrezia in vivid dreams, and in them she was visited by Mama, Papa… her little brother Joffre, and even Juan. They were together again in Rome, when Papa was only Cardinal Borgia and not Pope. It was a time before everything changed; Before the marriages arranged for her, before love, before oceans of pain… sin… and death. But there was an emptiness in the dream, something she nearly forgot in her years in Ferrara - an absence which ached in her blood.
“I don’t feel safe unless I know you’re nearby,” she remembered her own voice from ages ago.
Cesare.
“I shall never love a husband as I love you,” she recalled her own voice admitting again. But Cesare could not be her husband - not ever - for he was an impossible love, even more than her sweet Narcissus.
She recalled fleeting kisses from his stubbled face, intense embraces from his arms, subtle touches of his hands, and poetry from his lips, and that first damnable night - her wedding night to her second husband, when she crept lonely into her brother’s bed and let all feelings between them be proven true in a confession of bodies and lust. It would be the only wedding night that gave her true pleasure, and set a curse upon her husband that would end in his violent demise in Rome.
“If you ever loved me…” she remembered him pleading for her to hasten his death as he bled out in agony from the wound in his gut.
“I cannot,” she surrendered, pitying him. She hadn’t wished his death, but fate - and her family - decreed otherwise.
“You can. You’re a Borgia,” Alfonso of Aragon forced the condemnation from bloody lips.
Only a Borgia can truly love a Borgia.
“Lucrezia,” a familiar voice whispered tenderly, as if regretfully waking her so as to not disturb an angel’s sleep. “Lucrezia.” A soft yet calloused palm touched hers upon the sheet.
Golden eyelashes lifted and eyes of opal blue shone in dim candlelight. “I have missed those hands,” she uttered softly. She blinked once, then twice before a face took a familiar shape on the figure at her bedside.
“I have missed that face,” he returned her loving sentiment. He wore not the armor of the gonfaloniere, nor the crimson robes of a cardinal, but a clandestine cloak over fine clothing.
“Cesare,” she smiled, tasting his kingly name as her heart soared. He leaned to softly nudge her nose with his as they used to.
Lucrezia’s radiant smile suddenly vanished in regret and memory as she remembered the bitter truth. “Cesare, they said you were killed in Navarre. Your letters stopped coming,” her lips trembled. “You left me here.”
“I am here now,” he comforted her with both familiar hands. He had not aged a moment since they last met, surely as comely as Aphrodite’s beloved Adonis.
“How can it be?” Lucrezia asked. “I have been surrounded yet alone in this palace for a lifetime.”
“I would not have had you marry the Duke, Lucrezia. If I had my way, if father’s reign lasted a little longer, if I had defeated Della Rovere... many things would have been different,” he explained.
“My dear brave brother, who said I would be naked, and clean and bloodless again, and yours…” she reminisced.
“A long time ago, my love. I have atoned for much,” he tried to quiet the memory of his own lust.
“But I wanted to be,” Lucrezia insisted soberly, seeing so clearly now that the pain and chill had dissipated. “How I wished we had truly run away, when we still had the chance,” she lamented sadly for many years lost.
Lifelong chivalry and enduring love for her lit his soft smile. “As you wish. My word is my word.”
“Cesare…” she hesitated.
Astonishingly, she glided to her feet as light as a dove. In disbelief at her lack of pain, she wrapped her arms eagerly around her brother’s shoulders. His body felt exactly the same with no wounds upon him, just as it did whenever she embraced him as a young woman. She cried with happiness and long-held burdens of grief.
He held her carefully, knowing his own strength, and his grizzled chin still fit perfectly over her crown of cascading blonde ringlets, just as before. Wet tears fell down her pale cheeks and onto his cloak, for she began to see the truth of it, here in her bedchamber in Ferrara. “I wished for years you would come back for me,” she admitted, sadly realizing the truth of it, of her own mortality. “And you have...”
Lucrezia turned her resolute gaze up to him and Cesare gently wiped her teardrops away with each thumb as he caressed her angelic face. She was the bravest of them. That was one of a thousand things he loved so dearly about her.
“It would not be any heaven to me without you,” he promised.
Their lips reunited once before brother and sister departed through the floral pavilions amidst moonlight and mist, never to return.