The Borgia Mistress: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

years and the burden of his office, he sat erect in the saddle. For a man about whom it was said that he was better suited to rule in Hell than reign in Christendom, he made a very convincing pope. Given the low state of Holy Mother Church, riddled by corruption and venality to rival a poxy whore, perhaps that was no great challenge.
    Behind him dozens of prelates followed—among them several cardinals who still claimed to support him—as well as his personal household, including his young daughter, Lucrezia, and her husband of four months, the increasingly dour Giovanni Sforza. Il Papa had forbidden consummation of their marriage on the grounds that thirteen-year-old Lucrezia was too young for carnal intercourse. All the world, including Lucrezia, knew that His Holiness’s true intent was to preserve an easy path to annulment should the political winds, which were blowing particularly fiercely of late, suddenly shift.
    I rode with the rest of the papal household, close enough to observe His Holiness but far enough back to avoid being spat upon. Renaldo d’Marco rode beside me. Borgia’s steward caught my eye and frowned.
    “Did you see that?” he asked.
    Renaldo had the misfortune to bear an uncanny resemblance to the common ferret in both manner and appearance. A small, perpetually nervous man, he fussed over the minutest detail and lived in dread of ever making a mistake. Accuracy was his shield against a world he too often found overwhelming, yet he had proven a true enough friend to me, whom others walked in fear of and shunned. Bound together by our mutual obligation to serve and protect la famiglia, we had long since fallen into the habit of talking over matters of shared interest.
    “The old man?” I replied. “What of him?”
    “He wasn’t the first. There was a fellow about an hour ago who waited until just as His Holiness was passing to pull out his cock and take a piss.”
    I shrugged. “Who can explain the curious customs of country folk?”
    Under his breath, Renaldo said, “You can’t dismiss such behavior, Francesca. The peasants are emboldened to show their contempt for our master because they do not believe he will be pope much longer.”
    Equally quietly, I replied, “They do not know him as we do. If they did, they would be far more circumspect in their behavior.”
    The steward looked unconvinced. “Perhaps, but this cursed progress was ill-advised. It makes it look as though he is running away.”
    It was true that Borgia’s departure from Rome could be seen in that light, and his enemies would not hesitate to present it as such. But his real purpose in going was no secret.
    “By personally inspecting the fortifications at Viterbo and elsewhere to the north,” I said, “he is declaring that he will not shy away from war, should it come to that.”
    “Heaven and all the saints forbid,” Renaldo muttered.
    I shared his sentiment even though I nurtured little hope of divine intervention. We were all of us gamblers to one extent or another, but no one gambled so furiously or for such high stakes as did Christ’s Vicar. His boundless ambitions for la famiglia had put him on a collision course with some of the most powerful rulers in Europe and made war, as Sofia had said, inevitable. Any such conflict would threaten Borgia’s papacy and give his enemies within the Church the opportunity they sought to unseat him. How, precisely, he intended to work his way out of this particular problem remained a mystery. I was confident only that, being Borgia, he had a plan—or, more likely, several.
    “What if it really does come to war?” Renaldo asked. “What then?”
    “Then I can think of one person at least who will be very happy.”
    The steward did not have to ask whom I meant. My relationship with Cesare was hardly a secret, but I had not seen my sometime lover since shortly after his consecration as a prince of Holy Mother Church the previous week. Rather than deal with the ongoing