Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess d’Este

Three women stood before a marble-margined pool in the grounds of the Ducal palace at Ferrara; behind them three cypresses waved against a purple sky from which the sun was beginning to fade; at the base of these trees grew laurel, ilex, and rose bushes. Round the pool was a sweep of smooth green across which the light wind lifted and chased the red, white and pink rose leaves.

Beyond the pool the gardens descended, terrace on terrace of opulent trees and flowers; behind the pool the square strength of the palace rose, with winding steps leading to balustraded balconies. Further still, beyond palace and garden, hung vineyard and cornfield in the last warm maze of heat.

All was spacious, noble, silent; ambrosial scents rose from the heated earth–the scent of pine, lily, rose and grape.

The centre woman of the three who stood by the pool was the Spanish Duchess, Lucrezia, daughter of the Borgia Pope. The other two held her up under the arms, for her limbs were weak beneath her.

The pool was spread with the thick-veined leaves of water-lilies and upright plants with succulent stalks broke the surface of the water. In between the sky was reflected placidly, and the Duchess looked down at the counterfeit of her face as clearly given as if in a hand-mirror.

It was no longer a young face; beauty was painted on it skilfully; false red, false white, bleached hair cunningly dyed, faded eyes darkened on brow and lash, lips glistening with red ointment, the lost loveliness of throat and shoulders concealed under a lace of gold and pearls, made her look like a portrait of a fair woman, painted crudely.

And, also like one composed for her picture, her face was expressionless save for a certain air of gentleness, which seemed as false as everything else about her–false and exquisite, inscrutable and alluring–alluring still with a certain sickly and tainted charm, slightly revolting as were the perfumes of her unguents when compared to the pure scents of trees and flowers. Her women had painted faces, too, but they were plainly gowned, one in violet, one in crimson, while the Duchess blazed in every device of splendour.

Her dress, of citron-coloured velvet, trailed about her in huge folds, her bodice and her enormous sleeves sparkled with tight-sewn jewels; her hair was twisted into plaits and curls and ringlets; in her ears were pearls so large that they touched her shoulders.

She trembled in her splendour and her knees bent; the two women stood silent, holding her up–they were little more than slaves.

She continued to gaze at the reflection of herself; in the water she was fair enough. Presently she moistened her painted lips with a quick movement of her tongue.

“Will you go in, Madonna?” asked one of the women.

The Duchess shook her head; the pearls tinkled among the dyed curls.

“Leave me here,” she said.

She drew herself from their support and sank heavily and wearily on the marble rim of the pool.

“Bring me my cloak.”

They fetched it from a seat among the laurels; it was white velvet, unwieldy with silver and crimson embroidery.

Lucrezia drew it round her shoulders with a little shudder.

“Leave me here,” she repeated.

They moved obediently across the soft grass and disappeared up the laurel-shaded steps that led to the terraces before the high-built palace.

The Duchess lifted her stiff fingers, that were rendered almost useless by the load of gems on them, to her breast.

Trails of pink vapour, mere wraiths of clouds began to float about the west; the long Italian twilight had fallen.

A young man parted the bushes and stepped on to the grass; he carried a lute slung by a red ribbon across his violet jacket; he moved delicately, as if reverent of the great beauty of the hour.

Lucrezia turned her head and watched him with weary eyes.

He came lightly nearer, not seeing her. A flock of homing doves passed over his head; he swung on his heel to look at them and the reluctantly departing sunshine was golden on his upturned face.

Lucrezia still watched him, intently, narrowly; he came nearer again, saw her, and paused in confusion, pulling off his black velvet cap.

“Come here,” she said in a chill, hoarse voice.

He obeyed with an exquisite swiftness and fell on one knee before her; his dropped hand touched the ground a pace beyond the furthest-flung edge of her gown.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Ormfredo Orsini, one of the Duke’s gentlemen, Madonna,” he answered.

He looked at her frankly surprised to see her alone in the garden at the turn of the day. He was used to see her surrounded by her poets, her courtiers, her women; she was the goddess of a cultured court and persistently worshipped.

“One of the Orsini,” she said. “Get up from your knees.”

He thought she was thinking of her degraded lineage, of the bad, bad blood in her veins. As he rose he considered these things for the first time. She had lived decorously at Ferrara for twenty-one years, nearly the whole of his lifetime; but he had heard tales, though he had never dwelt on them.

“You look as if you were afraid of me—”

“Afraid of you–I, Madonna?”

“Sit down,” she said.

He seated himself on the marble rim and stared at her; his fresh face wore a puzzled expression.

“What do you want of me, Madonna?” he asked.

“AhÈ!” she cried. “How very young you are, Orsini!”

Her eyes flickered over him impatiently, greedily; the twilight was beginning to fall over her, a merciful veil; but he saw her for the first time as an old woman. Slightly he drew back, and his lute touched the marble rim as he moved, and the strings jangled.

“When I was your age,” she said, “I had been betrothed to one man and married to another, and soon I was wedded to a third. I have forgotten all of them.”

“You have been so long our lady here,” he answered. “You may well have forgotten the world, Madonna, beyond Ferrara.”

“You are a Roman?”

“Yes, Madonna.”

She put out her right hand and clasped his arm.

“Oh, for an hour of Rome!–in the old days!”

Her whole face, with its artificial beauty and undisguisable look of age, was close to his; he felt the sense of her as the sense of something evil.

She was no longer the honoured Duchess of Ferrara, but Lucrezia, the Borgia’s lure, Cesare’s sister, Alessandro’s daughter, the heroine of a thousand orgies, the inspiration of a hundred crimes.

The force with which this feeling came over him made him shiver; he shrank beneath her hand.

“Have you heard things of me?” she asked in a piercing voice.

“There is no one in Italy who has not heard of you, Madonna.”

“That is no answer, Orsini. And I do not want your barren flatteries.”

“You are the Duke’s wife,” he said, “and I am the servant of the Duke.”

“Does that mean that you must lie to me?”

She leant even nearer to him; her whitened chin, circled by the stiff goldwork of her collar, touched his shoulder.

“Tell me I am beautiful,” she said. “I must hear that once more–from young lips.”

“You are beautiful, Madonna.”

She moved back and her eyes flared.

“Did I not say I would not have your flatteries?”

“What, then, was your meaning?”

“Ten years ago you would not have asked; no man would have asked. I am old. Lucrezia old!–ah, Gods above!”

“You are beautiful,” he repeated. “But how should I dare to touch you with my mouth?”

“You would have dared, if you had thought me desirable,” she answered hoarsely. “You cannot guess how beautiful I was–before you were born, Orsini.”

He felt a sudden pity for her; the glamour of her fame clung round her and gilded her. Was not this a woman who had been the fairest in Italy seated beside him?

He raised her hand and kissed the palm, the only part that was not hidden with jewels.

“You are sorry for me,” she said.

Orsini started at her quick reading of his thoughts.

“I am the last of my family,” she added. “And sick. Did you know that I was sick, Orsini?”

“Nay, Madonna.”

“For weeks I have been sick. And wearying for Rome.”

“Rome,” he ventured, “is different now, Madonna.”

“AhÈ!” she wailed. “And I am different also.”

Her hand lay on his knee; he looked at it and wondered if the things he had heard of her were true. She had been the beloved child of her father, the old Pope, rotten with bitter wickedness; she had been the friend of her brother, the dreadful Cesare–her other brother, Francesco, and her second husband–was it not supposed that she knew how both had died?

But for twenty-one years she had lived in Ferrara, patroness of poet and painter, companion of such as the courteous gentle Venetian, Pietro Bembo.

And Alfonso d’Este, her husband, had found no fault with her; as far as the world could see, there had been no fault to find.

Ormfredo Orsini stared at the hand sparkling on his knee and wondered.

“Suppose that I was to make you my father confessor?” she said. The white mantle had fallen apart and the bosom of her gown glittered, even in the twilight.

“What sins have you to confess, Madonna?” he questioned.

She peered at him sideways.

“A Pope’s daughter should not be afraid of the Judgment of God,” she answered. “And I am not. I shall relate my sins at the bar of Heaven and say I have repented–AhÈ–if I was young again!”

“Your Highness has enjoyed the world,” said Orsini.

“Yea, the sun,” she replied, “but not the twilight.”

“The twilight?”

“It has been twilight now for many years,” she said, “ever since I came to Ferrara.”

The moon was rising behind the cypress trees, a slip of glowing light. Lucrezia took her chin in her hand and stared before her; a soft breeze stirred the tall reeds in the pool behind her and gently ruffled the surface of the water.

The breath of the night-smelling flowers pierced the slumbrous air; the palace showed a faint shape, a marvellous tint; remote it looked and uncertain in outline.

Lucrezia was motionless; her garments were dim, yet glittering, her face a blur; she seemed the ruin of beauty and graciousness, a fair thing dropped suddenly into decay.

Orsini rose and stepped away from her; the perfume of her unguents offended him. He found something horrible in the memory of former allurement that clung to her; ghosts seemed to crowd round her and pluck at her, like fierce birds at carrion.

He caught the glitter of her eyes through the dusk; she was surely evil, bad to the inmost core of her heart; her stale beauty reeked of dead abomination.… Why had he never noticed it before?

The ready wit of his rank and blood failed him; he turned away towards the cypress trees.

The Duchess made no attempt to detain him; she did not move from her crouching, watchful attitude.

When he reached the belt of laurels he looked back and saw her dark shape still against the waters of the pool that were beginning to be touched with the argent glimmer of the rising moon. He hurried on, continually catching the strings of his lute against the boughs of the flowering shrubs; he tried to laugh at himself for being afraid of an old, sick woman; he tried to ridicule himself for believing that the admired Duchess, for so long a decorous great lady, could in truth be a creature of evil.

But the conviction flashed into his heart was too deep to be uprooted.

She had not spoken to him like a Duchess of Ferrara, but rather as the wanton Spaniard whose excesses had bewildered and sickened Rome.

A notable misgiving was upon him; he had heard great men praise her, Ludovico Ariosto, Cardinal Ippolito’s secretary and the noble Venetian Bembo; he had himself admired her remote and refined splendour. Yet, because of these few moments of close talk with her, because of a near gaze into her face, he felt that she was something horrible, the poisoned offshoot of a bad race.

He thought that there was death on her glistening painted lips, and that if he had kissed them he would have died, as so many of her lovers were reputed to have died.

He parted the cool leaves and blossoms and came on to the borders of a lake that lay placid under the darkling sky.

It was very lonely; bats twinkled past with a black flap of wings; the moon had burnt the heavens clear of stars; her pure light began to fill the dusk. Orsini moved softly, with no comfort in his heart.

The stillness was intense; he could hear his own footfall, the soft leather on the soft grass. He looked up and down the silence of the lake.

Then suddenly he glanced over his shoulder. Lucrezia Borgia was standing close behind him; when he turned her face looked straight into his.

He moaned with terror and stood rigid; awful it seemed to him that she should track him so stealthily and be so near to him in this silence and he never know of her presence.

“Eh, Madonna!” he said.

“Eh, Orsini,” she answered in a thin voice, and at the sound of it he stepped away, till his foot was almost in the lake.

His unwarrantable horror of her increased, as he found that the glowing twilight had confused him; for, whereas at first he had thought she was the same as when he had left her seated by the pool, royal in dress and bearing, he saw now that she was leaning on a stick, that her figure had fallen together, that her face was yellow as a church candle, and that her head was bound with plasters, from the under edge of which her eyes twinkled, small and lurid.

She wore a loose gown of scarlet brocade that hung open on her arms that showed lean and dry; the round bones at her wrist gleamed white under the tight skin, and she wore no rings.

“Madonna, you are ill,” muttered Ormfredo Orsini. He wondered how long he had been wandering in the garden.

“Very ill,” she said. “But talk to me of Rome. You are the only Roman at the Court, Orsini.”

“Madonna, I know nothing of Rome,” he answered, “save our palace there and sundry streets—”

She raised one hand from the stick and clutched his arm.

“Will you hear me confess?” she asked. “All my beautiful sins that I cannot tell the priest? All we did in those days of youth before this dimness at Ferrara?”

“Confess to God,” he answered, trembling violently.

Lucrezia drew nearer.

“All the secrets Cesare taught me,” she whispered. “Shall I make you heir to them?”

“Christ save me,” he said, “from the Duke of Valentinois’ secrets!”

“Who taught you to fear my family?” she questioned with a cunning accent. “Will you hear how the Pope feasted with his Hebes and Ganymedes? Will you hear how we lived in the Vatican?”

Orsini tried to shake her arm off; anger rose to equal his fear.

“Weed without root or flower, fruitless uselessness!” he said hoarsely. “Let me free of your spells!”

She loosed his arm and seemed to recede from him without movement; the plasters round her head showed ghastly white, and he saw all the wrinkles round her drooped lips and the bleached ugliness of her bare throat.

“Will you not hear of Rome?” she insisted in a wailing whisper. He fled from her, crashing through the bushes.

Swiftly and desperately he ran across the lawns and groves, up the winding steps to the terraces before the palace, beating the twilight with his outstretched hands as if it was an obstacle in his way.

Stumbling and breathless, he gained the painted corridors that were lit with a hasty blaze of wax light. Women were running to and fro, and he saw a priest carrying the Holy Eucharist cross a distant door.

One of these women he stopped.

“The Duchess—” he began, panting.

She laid her finger on her lip.

“They carried her in from the garden an hour ago; they bled and plastered her, but she died–before she could swallow the wafer–(hush! she was not thinking of holy things, Orsini!)–ten minutes ago—”