Free The Borgia Betrayal: A Novel by Sara Poole Page B

opinion.
    “He says that I am a traitor for marrying where our father says I must! He says I will rue the day I set eyes on Giovanni Sforza! He calls him a weakling, a drone, and a sodomist!”
    My eyebrows rose at that last part for it was the first I had heard that the Lord of Pesaro liked boys. Indeed, I suspected Cesare had made the slander up out of whole cloth. But as to the rest … there was something to that.
    “He even calls him a bastard,” Lucrezia concluded, a little more calmly. “Has it escaped his notice that so are we?”
    “Cesare only notices what suits him,” I said, and summoned a smile. Gently, I wiped her tears away with my fingertips, then stood and held out a hand.
    “Come now, you will make yourself ill. And look what you’ve done to all this lovely cloth. Your maids will be forever smoothing out the wrinkles and dabbing up the water spots.”
    She rose and, glancing down at the mess she had made, had the grace to look abashed. “It was foolish of me—”
    My point made, I moved to soothe her. “Anyone in your position would be upset. But you must understand, Cesare is a man—” In fact, he was a few months short of eighteen and, in my eyes at least, still very much a boy for all that he had risen to the occasion the previous year when I most needed his help. Apparently, he could not manage to do the same for his sister.
    “—and men,” I went on, “have no understanding of what it means to be a bride.”
    Neither did I, having done my utmost while my father was alive to convince him that I was unfit for matrimony. Not that I don’t appreciate men; as I have already revealed, I have a weakness for certain of them. But I value my independence above all else, in large part because it is only by keeping some distance between myself and others that I can hope to conceal the darkness within me, that which leads me to my peculiar trade.
    “He says he won’t come to the wedding,” Lucrezia said with a final sniff. I took it as a good sign that she lowered her voice. Now that the worst was over, her ladies were hovering closer. No doubt they hoped to pick up some indiscreet remark from either of us that they could bear off in triumph and bray to the world.
    “Of course he will come,” I assured her. “We both know that he would never hurt you like that.”
    “But what if he causes a scene?” she asked with sudden consternation. “What if he even … attacks Giovanni?”
    The possibility was not as outlandish as it might seem. And not, whatever you may think, because there was anything unnatural in the love Cesare and Lucrezia had for each other. Yes, I know the evil things that have been said about them. I also know that they were both incapable of acting as they have been accused of doing.
    Besides, I shared Cesare’s bed often enough to be certain that no thought of his sister lingered there.
    “He may be tempted to do something unforgivable,” I admitted, equally softly. “But in the end, he will not dare to set himself against Il Papa.”
    Clasping my hand, she drew us both out of the disheveled room and into the walled garden beyond. At the same time, she gestured the ladies to stay behind, to their visible disappointment.
    We walked a little distance along one of the gravel paths set between beds overflowing with spicy carnations, heavy-blossomed geraniums, climbing passion flowers, and delicate pansies stretching toward the sun. The paths intersected at the center of the garden where a stone fountain topped by a naked cherub sprayed a fine mist of water filled with miniature rainbows.
    “How I pray you are right,” Lucrezia said as we settled on a stone bench near the fountain.
    “But you must know that Cesare is very unhappy with Papa. He is furious that it is our brother Juan and not himself who is made a duke, and promised an army to lead as well as a grand marriage. That is the life Cesare wants for himself, not the life our father plans for him.”
    Borgia