Heart Lines
"I fought with our brother today."
"Fought? With my brother?"
"With our brother." He tosses his sweat-stained shirt onto the bed and faces his wife, who is standing by the door with her hands behind her back and her back to the wall. "He didn't ask to be remembered to you."
"Why should he need to be remembered to me? He is my brother. It would be impossible to forget him."
"Our brother, did you not hear me?" The grey-blue-green of her eyes, first bewitching, now distracting, flares bright as he comes towards her. "It was not you who married Naples. It was I who married Rome, yet I do not think I will ever love our brother as you do."
"My love –"
"No." He grips her chin too tightly, but she just raises it higher; she is a Borgia, after all. He laughs. "Cesare Borgia would not be a kind bedfellow, I think. Kisses and caresses and curses, and a dagger in your belly to match the dagger between your thighs. Does my beautiful wife enjoy the pain? Has she enjoyed such pain all along, and never said so? Is our marriage –" His tongue trips him, and he feels younger than ever, more of a cuckold than ever, unable to even accuse her properly. "Is our marriage damned to Hell because it is one part you, and one part him, and no part –"
"Enough." The little white hand closes around his throat, but she will not hurt him. She loves him as she would a puppy, a beloved childhood toy. A doll can only go so far to salve her soul, to save her soul: she needs her nurse, her nourishment, her punishment. "No more, my love. I chose you, above all others, to be my husband. I forgive you for listening to slander, but Rome is not as forgiving as I am. It may not forgive you if you repeat it."
She pushes him away from her with the slight force of her arm and the stronger force of the Papal Tiara hovering in the form of a glittering phantom over her head. Her skirts swirl and settle as she strides down the corridor towards the main door of the palazzo, but before it can be opened, she stops and turns.
"Who appointed you my protectors?"
"The master of the household, my lady."
"And the master of the household was appointed by my lord Orsini, and my lord Orsini was appointed by my brother, and I am going to see my brother now. Stay where you are. I am sick of having more than one shadow."
They still follow her, not quite as silently as shadows, and she longs for Micheletto as she walks through the night like a thief or a whore, past the strumpets who know Lucrezia Borgia and who have been complicit in her schemes, who curtsey like highborn ladies, past the cardinals who have worse manners than the strumpets. She shucks her shoes on the way into Cesare's room, so she is another half-inch shorter and he is another half-inch more suggestive.
"Why did you fight with my husband?"
"Because he wanted to fight with me."
How infuriating he is, the black bishop from the game of chess now become the black knight, lounging back in his chair, giving the compliment of his attention to the fire and not to her. She yanks him by the chin, as Alfonso did her, and holds him thus.
"He made accusations."
"Yes."
"Accusations you must not have denied."
"No."
How infuriating it is, the easy cunning and the speed with which he pulls her onto his lap, his reward her shriek of surprise.
"Let me go, Cesare."
"No. The Devil is after you, and for the good of your soul I must hold it inside your body."
She struggles against him, beating her fists on his chest and slapping his face. She digs her nails into his neck, and he seizes hold of her head with only one hand and squeezes as if he might care to crush her skull. Then he kisses her, a kiss of want and wanting: a kiss that her husband cannot see but dreams about, and cries about at night. It is not a tender kiss, salty with blood but sweet from longing. There is too much too close to Lucrezia's own mouth in Cesare's kiss, too much of the feeling that she is kissing herself, that she is tasting her own sins when she tastes the sinful taste of his tongue.
"And for the good of whose soul was that?"
"Mine."
"Deny his accusations, brother."
He bites the yielding, peach-like flesh which sets the curve of her shoulder apart from the curve of her throat; she makes no sound, but her spine begins to bend, and then she is pliant between his hands.
"No, sis."
"Then ensure he makes them no more."
"Do you want him to die?"
"No."
"Then tell me what you do want, my love."
She looks into his heart with her grey-blue-green eyes. She pierces it with lightness as the Spear of Longinus pierced holy flesh and spilt holy blood. "I want you to love me, brother."
"All the days of my life."
"Now."
So he does.
Their love is like a coupling of cubs, the teasing, the nipping, the growls and then the half-stifled sighs of human happiness. Their love is absolution from the sins of their marriages, from d'Aragona and d'Albret. Their love is the night wrapping around naked flesh, waking it and making it sing when it thought never to sing again, the dagger between her thighs, the noose around his neck. Their love is ecstasy which, like the fire in the hearth, builds and dies in the dark, but the embers are still smouldering when morning comes.
"When you go," he tells her, before dawn, before the sun can burnish the locks of hair he strokes off her cheek. They have no colour in the dark. "My heart breaks, and when you go again, it breaks again. The pieces of my heart are so many and so scattered throughout the Romagna that I do not know if I could ever find them all to put it back together."
"I never go," she promises. "I never leave you." She presses her hand to his face. "Here is where a witch saw how I love you. It is written upon my hand."
"Upon this hand?" He blesses it with a kiss and closes her fingers around it.
"It is written upon this hand, and upon every piece of this heart, and every piece is in your possession."
Fin.