The Borgia Betrayal: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

sweetly on the air—the strum of a lute accompanying a troubadour not shy about sharing his skill. He was singing a tale of love, of course, something involving the doomed Troilus and Cressida, when I smelled the city.
    How to describe the aroma of Rome? I have heard it spoken of slightingly by those intent on displaying their refinement but who succeed only in making themselves out to be asses. For myself, it is a perfume like no other, comprised of equal parts wood smoke, tidal flats, manure, sweat, and a tantalizing high note I cannot identify but know in my dreams. On those occasions when I have been required to leave the city—usually mercifully brief—I can ease the inevitable homesickness by holding up some item of my own clothing that, even when washed, still retains the olfactic memory that is uniquely Roma.
    Since the healing of the Great Schism a few decades before, the city had been restored as the rightful center of the Christian world. The place old men and women remembered as a tumbled ruin of hovels and shanties was being rebuilt at dizzying speed into the greatest city in Europe. The results were marvelous, of course, with magnificent palazzi of travertine marble springing up seemingly overnight, transforming the drab palette of wattle and daub into a glorious array of rose, purple, and gold. That the air was choked with dirt and grime, the streets all but impassable, and the cacophony virtually deafening was of no matter in the larger scheme of things.
    Sofia and I parted near the Ponte Sant’Angelo. “Go safely,” she said as she embraced me. Despite our travails, she looked strong and resolute, but I could see the worry in her eyes. We both knew that our reprieve was no more than temporary. The new spirit of learning and inquiry to which we of Lux had dedicated ourselves was fiercely opposed, then as now, by forces determined to keep the world shrouded in ignorance and superstition. It was only a matter of time before they struck again.
    “You as well,” I said, and hugged her back, not for the first time wishing that she was bound elsewhere than to the Jewish Quarter. The influx of refugees expelled from Spain by Their Most Catholic Majesties, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, had overwhelmed the small warren of narrow streets and twisting alleys built on marshlands flooded regularly by the Tiber. The resulting outbreaks of disease and the all-pervasive sense of despair had put me in mind of my beloved Dante’s Divina Commedia.
    With Innocent VIII’s timely death, the Jews had struck a bargain with Borgia. In return for a payment rumored to be as great as four hundred thousand silver ducats, which he used to buy his way to the papacy, he agreed to tolerate their presence in Rome and by extension in Christendom.
    In the months since, conditions in the ghetto had improved somewhat as many of the refugees moved on to other destinations and those left behind allowed themselves to enjoy a fragile sense of security while remaining mindful that it could prove to be all too illusory. I had offered to use what influence I had to find Sofia accommodation in the larger city but she had demurred, pointing out that she was unlikely to be able to run her apothecary business anywhere the Christian guilds held sway.
    Even so, she remained in my thoughts long after she was out of sight, as I made my way to my own apartment on the edge of Trastevere. Upon his ascension to the papacy, Borgia had arranged for me to be housed along with his daughter, Lucrezia, his mistress, Giulia, and their servants within the Palazzo Santa Maria in Portico. That lasted only a few weeks, until I convinced him that while a pope could flaunt his daughter and his mistress to his heart’s content, his poisoner should remain cloaked in a modicum of discretion. I know he agreed, although he never said so directly, because he raised no objection when I moved into the newly constructed building, one of many in the city owned by Luigi