The Malice of Fortune Read Online Free

forehead less broad, her eyes a lighter tint. But perhaps now I share with your aunt Lucrezia the same sorrowful hope.
    No less real than Lucrezia’s portrait were the two figures at oppositesides of the scene. Your grandfather had intended his most cherished son, Juan Borgia, the Duke of Gandia, to serve as the model for the Emperor Maximinus. But Pinturicchio’s vision had been less clouded by sentiment and he instead made another bastard son, Cesare Borgia, the face of this all-powerful sovereign. At the time the painting was done, Cesare had been twenty years old; he was still a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church and he still had his sister Lucrezia’s delicate beauty. Yet Pinturicchio had given him a peculiar gaze, the dark green eyes staring down and away, fixed on something that could not be bound within the picture, as if Cesare were peering into a realm even the painter could not imagine.
    Opposite Cesare, on the other end of the wall, Pinturicchio had placed Juan in the guise of a Turkish sultan, the sort of costume this most beloved son had indeed favored in life, a great linen turban around his head, his cape and loose trousers a tapestry of Oriental patterns. Juan was darker than his siblings—Cesare and Lucrezia are quite fair-complected—and in this portrait his gaze is predatory, a falcon’s angry yet wary stare. In life, if Juan ever looked thus, it was a pose.

    My meditation on those fleet years that “carry us to death’s sharp spear,” as Petrarch would say, was at last interrupted by your grandfather. Beheim at his side, still in his sweaty shirt, His Holiness wore only sagging hose and scarlet slippers, the better to display his legs, which were still sturdy and well-shaped. He advanced to me with the graceful step of a much younger man, toes out as if his dance master were watching. Only when he was close enough to touch me could I see how much he had aged—the liver spots, the thin skin stretched taut over the great obstinate hump of his nose. But his lips were luxurious as ever, pursed delicately, as if he had just sipped a particularly fine wine and was trying to get the taste of it.
    He nodded at Beheim, who removed a knife from the physician’s box. I prayed for a quick end. But Beheim simply cut the cord that held my gag. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t spit out the wooden plug. Employing the point of his knife, Beheim gouged it loose.
    Your grandfather leaned forward and stared at me with thoseobsidian eyes. “Damiata. I always knew where you were.” His voice was deep but his words hissed a bit, a whisper of his Spanish ancestry, even though the Borgia family—your family, carissimo —has been in Italy for generations. The snake in the grass. Or the serpent in the tree.
    His fingers flicked at my hair; this gesture was not a caress but that of a stableboy examining the mane of a sick horse. “Dyeing your hair, hiding in some Jew’s tavern …” He shook his head wearily. “I could have come for you at any time. Each breath you have taken in the last five years has been at my indulgence.”
    “You are the prince of indulgences, are you not?” I said. Your grandfather sold forgiveness from the altars of his churches like a whore selling candles on the street corner; the only crimes he would not pardon for a price were those against his person, or in aid of the Turk. “Perhaps you can even afford to absolve yourself. You murdered a blameless, dear old man at my house tonight. And your grandson’s dear little pet.” I did not want to tempt Fortune by speculating on Camilla’s fate.
    I thought he would strike me. Instead he turned his back and looked up at Juan, the alla turca Duke of Gandia, as if beseeching this most cherished son to restore the flesh to his own moldering bones. After a time your grandfather’s heavy shoulders sagged and he turned his attention to the prophetic image of the son who yet lived: the Cesare Borgia who is now, as I write this, captain