Free Blood & Beauty by Sarah Dunant Page B

ointments and special drinks, bitter to the taste. It will pass, she says. It will pass. I know that, thinks Lucrezia, even more angrily. Why does everybody still take me for a child? In the convent such things were happening all the time. There were days in the month when the smell of stale blood was everywhere, swirling through the cloisters, leaking out around them in the chapel at night.
    It had not been compulsory for the boarders to attend the night service of Matins. The convent was their school rather than their life and they had privileges that the novices and nuns were denied. Lucrezia, however, had always had trouble sleeping. When Cesare left home, she had substituted God as her companion in the night, so she had found it comforting to be with others who were even more in love with Him. It was a venerable place, San Sisto, centuries old and close to the site where St Paul himself had been martyred, the abbess recounted when she addressed them during those first days. If they emptied themselves in preparation for God’s grace they might catch the echo of his last prayers. The convent was filled with the daughters of Rome’s most powerful families, all of them rich, most of them waiting for husbands either promised or yet to be decided. They would exchange smuggled trinkets or sweetmeats, whispering and laughing in the night, tales of love and scandal. It was there, when the gossip turned cruel, as it must between young girls, that she was made aware of some scandal in her father’s household; the hint of sin in her own birth. The nun in charge of the boarders had found her in tears, so inconsolable that she had taken her to the abbess.
    ‘You are not to let such things muddy the love of God that I know you have, Lucrezia,’ she had said, with such kindness and passion that Lucrezia had been hard pressed not to fall in love with her too. ‘He understands everything and His capacity for forgiveness is boundless.’
    It is only recently that she wonders how many other young boarders might have needed the abbess’s same words of comfort.
    The house has fallen silent. She is wide awake now. It is close to dawn: she can feel it in the air. She is struggling with other thoughts, and it would be good to be more directly in God’s presence when she addresses Him. She slips from her bed and, lighting the taper, braves the darkness to make her way downstairs.
     
    In the grainy light, Alexander, deep in thought, waddling his way back to the Vatican through the little house chapel, is confronted by what seems to be a ghostly floating figure at the altar. He, who has never in his life seen anything that is not flesh and blood, registers a rush in his gut, a sudden fear of the incorporeal; a visitation for a man who has been making passionate and unrepentant love to someone else’s wife.
    The figure turns.
    ‘Lucrezia!’
    ‘Papà! You startled me!’
    ‘What are you doing here, child?’
    ‘Ah – I… I am praying.’
    He gives a little laugh to recover himself. He should have known. For years Lucrezia has been the only one of his children who would spend time in church of her own volition. She rises from her seat and he comes to greet her. He takes her face in his hands, studying her in the half-light. Her skin is moist and there are small shadows under her eyes, a hint of the adult that she will soon become, though the cherub double chin remains, reminding him of the baby who had so torn at his heartstrings.
    ‘It is barely light, carissima. Could you not sleep?’
    ‘You forget, Papà. In the convent we were up well before dawn. I woke… well, I woke early today. And I… I needed to talk to someone.’
    She glances towards the figure of Christ.
    ‘Ah. Do you think your pope would do instead?’
    She smiles and he settles himself next to her. There is a faint sour smell about him, the remains of passion. There has been no time for him to wash. They are both aware of it. He pats her hand fondly. It is too