Mirror Mirror

Maybe she went after you, said Fra Ludovico, scowling at the hickory bark and sanguine berry slopped on the ground. She was growing up, you know; she couldn’t help it. You can’t fix a child in time.

If I find her corpse, or hear word of her death, you will bless her spirit?

I bless her spirit daily. I’ll bless yours too, if you take to wandering the woods and fields looking for evidence. And I’ll not say the Mass of the Dead until I know one or the other of you have died.

Vicente had to smile despite himself—weakly, affectionately. You’re as superstitious as Primavera, in your own way, he said.

Now that’s blasphemy.

Vicente wandered through the airy chapel and out into the stable yard. The gooseboy was settling his flock behind their brambly hedge, and fixing what passed for a gate with a twist of moldy rope.

You never know which goose you will lose and which goose you will find, he was muttering to himself.

Fidelio, said Vicente. Fidelio, is it? Or Paolo? I can’t remember.

Michelotto. Everyone seems to want to know today.

In your wanderings, lad, have you come across anyone who could tell me the whereabouts of Bianca? Your friend from those years back—you must remember her? With the skin so fair, and the black, black hair—

The gooseboy twisted his face as if trying to remember. He opened his mouth to speak, but another voice cut through the air first, calling him away from Vicente. Lucrezia Borgia stood at a window, her beautiful hair falling to one side, an ivory comb in her hand. Michelotto, she called. Michelotto, my boy. It’s time to brush my hair. Come and give your poor mother some attention.

The gooseboy shrugged at Vicente and raised his eyebrows, and went to do as he was told.

Vicente made his way at last to the kitchen. He found Primavera squatting upon a stool in the middle of the floor, sifting through a bowl of lentils. When she came upon an occasional stone, it went skipping out the door into the lettuces.

He didn’t know what he was after, nor could he bear to plague the oldnonna with questions when she had no way to answer. But he sat down on a bench along the wall, and she put aside her work and looked at him with eyes gone nearly glassy with milky film. She reached out and held his hands. She squeezed them again and again, as if there was a signal in the pattern of her grasp, but he could read it no better than he could read the comments of clouds scrawled against the sky.

An ivory comb, my dear

THE PREMONITIONin the mirror was accurate. The girl was alive. Any day she might come forward to stake her claim on the future and tell the truth about what had happened.

You’re certain it was she? said Lucrezia.

Michelotto had his hands on her head, playing with her hair, plaiting it. She slapped his wrist and said, You odd thing, listen to me! How could you know it was she?

By the time the answer to Vicente’s question about the whereabouts of Bianca had surfaced in the gooseboy’s brain, he was no longer speaking to Vicente but to his mother. She got the benefit of the information instead. Michelotto, though, couldn’t remember how the conversation had come up, nor what proof he had to offer her that Bianca still lived. There was a house, he finally said, not as far away as all that, but one I never saw before.

Could you find it again?

If it wanted to be found, I suppose.

She was gripped with a desire to smash his skull with a heft of marble. He lived to mock her all her days, but he was the one person she couldn’t be seen to kill. He was too thoroughly a Borgia. Would she had managed it when he was a toddler, would she had been able to throw him off the aqueduct at Spoleto! But Michelotto was her son and nephew both. In the years following the death of her father, her brother, and her son Rodrigo, and with the collapse of the romance of her marriage, she had come to cling to Michelotto, despite all his fancifulness. And she had begun to feel fond of him. Because she could expect nothing of the Punishment—not even that he bear the family name—she had found a way to love him without stint or mercy.

This didn’t keep her from wanting, on a regular basis, to brain him.

We will walk, she said, this very day, we will walk for a while, and you will suggest a path to take. This way, that way? Whichever way you think best. Just give me a moment—she was thinking quickly—that I might ready myself. Put up my hair. She held the ivory comb in one hand and considered the various recipes at her disposal. Go downstairs now, Michelotto, and speak to no one. Wait for me on the steps and I’ll be with you in a trice.

Michelotto did as he was told. He sat on the bottom step of the outside staircase and played with a kitten as, nearby, Vicente cut himself a staff. Michelotto watched the wheezing man begin, with effort, to scale down the steepest slope behind Montefiore. He couldn’t guess why Vicente would be risking the integrity of his limbs in such an exercise. He didn’t bother to guess.

Vicente thought: Perhaps Bianca had gone sleepwalking and fell from a window, and her corpse has laid buried in undergrowth at the foot of the bluff? Or perhaps she was pushed by hands accustomed to murder? In any case, one had to start looking somewhere.

The comb was a lovely Spanish piece that had belonged to some courtesan of her father’s—perhaps her own mother, for that matter. It was carved with an expressive burst of orange blossoms. The rack of pins curved inward for better purchase. It wasn’t difficult to coat the tines with a lethal substance that dried quickly and would liquefy again when it came in contact with blood. Now: how to disguise herself. She thought at last of the vestibule of the chapel, where Fra Ludovico hung old garments for use while gardening. She found a cloak and draped it close upon her face, pushing her own hair back so its luxuriance and color wouldn’t give her away. Then she smeared her face with soot from the inside of the fireplace, and surveyed herself in the mirror over the mantel. She looked agreeably like Primavera’s older sister.

The sun was bowling down the sky, and the yard clear of laborers but for Michelotto, who took a bad start when he saw the old hag coming down the steps. Shhh, my boy, it’s a masquerade game! she cawed, trying out an appropriate voice. As when we wear metal casques at carnival, nothing more.

You terrify me. I don’t like a masquerade.

Oh, I’ll let you wander home alone then, when you have shown me what I need to see.

She wasn’t sure the light would last, nor that Michelotto would be able to find a path at all, daylight or not. But he had the idea to bring a goose along and give it instructions. The goose seemed disinclined to assist in the exercise. But after a good swift kick in her downy behind, she focused her attentions and began to waddle down the road.

Lucrezia found something liberating in the disguise she’d taken on, and she enjoyed hobbling and sighing as if she were really a healthily farting old dame instead of a lithe and beautiful thirty-two. Michelotto kept a good distance from her.

Across the bridge and along a ways, and before long the goose left the track.

Is this the way? asked Lucrezia.

She thinks it is, said Michelotto.

What do you remember of where you were?

I can’t say for sure that we were here. Or that we weren’t.

You sweet cunning idiot. I’ll have Primavera bake you your own private tart if you lead me correctly.

An apple tart?

She glared at him. A goose tart, of course. Are we still true?

Are we? he asked her.

The goose paused. The gloom was thickening in the underbrush, and a wind twitched the canopy of leaves high above. There’s the pool in which we found the goose, said Michelotto at last, unhappily, honestly, for he wasn’t quite capable of guile. Look, she heads for it. The house was just up that slope and around the copse of trees with white leaves.

Very well, said Lucrezia. Now you may take your ladygoose home. I will proceed alone.

You’ll get lost coming back, he said. The dark is falling.

I see in the dark, she answered. Her eyes swam with a silvery light; Michelotto couldn’t tell if she had bewitched herself or if it was merely a trick of the dusk. Now off with you, friend, and leave me to my work. I intend to pay a social call.

I would like to see her again, he ventured.

If you would like to see anything again, she answered, I suggest you heed my advice. Good-bye.

He wouldn’t leave and she wouldn’t go on with him in tow. At last she stooped and found a small, sharp rock. With a steadiness of hand that surprised all three of them, she pitched the missile at the goose. It drove into the back of the goose’s head and a small flower of blood bloomed on the white scalp. She honked her irritation and rage and with an explosive clatter of her powerful wings she lifted out of the pool. Your goose is gone, said Lucrezia. You are the gooseboy. So find her.

Tending geese was his life. He knew no obligation more pressing. So Michelotto lit out after the goose. She was smart enough, Lucrezia observed, to head back in the direction of Montefiore, so there was no need to worry about Michelotto’s getting lost in the woods at night.

She followed the imprecise directions, and they proved precise enough. Before long she discovered a cottage in the woods, with a lit wick sitting in a stone basin of oil at the window. The cottage was improbable, and Lucrezia puzzled about it as she drew nearer. There were no fields, no byres for sheep or cows, no orchards nearby, no rutted track for the approach of a farm cart. The thing had grown up in the middle of the woods like a toadstool in the rain.

Yet there was glass in the window, real glass—small circlets and lozenges set in a grid of lead, and a splash of color here and there. A bit of shapelyferro battuto ornamenting the roofline in a festive scroll, that looked from here like the iron letters of a very foreign alphabet. A smell of roasting venison, with autumn gourds and onions, hung in the air. And then—she leaned forward to assess it—the sound of a lute being plucked in a desultory and unpracticed manner, as if someone had nothing else to do but try to make music while the meal finished cooking.

A meal for a mendicant, called Lucrezia in a small voice, to try it out, and then lowered her voice and roughened it up. A meal for a wandering monk, who will bless this house.

The music stopped. Lucrezia had reached the door, and she thumped on it. There must be a good wife at home, preparing the evening meal. I beg for mercy. She drew the shawl down upon her face so that nothing but her chin might show.

The door opened. Bianca de Nevada, exactly as word had had it.

Lucrezia flinched and flushed. Simple rage—that Bianca de Nevada should somehow have escaped the death sentence issued years earlier? Or rage supplanted by pleasure, that the girl lived still, to be killed again. Another chance. The Borgia blood quickened.

And the cause? It would take an Ariosto to unravel the root of her guile. Any murder, even suicide—especially suicide, perhaps—is an attempt to stop the future from happening. Though Lucrezia Borgia knew herself to be as comfortable as a well-born woman could wish, with influence, romance, fame, and luxury, she couldn’t stop the future without Cesare from unrolling. Every day, every hour, both she and the world further adjusted to soldiering on without him. On the day that Cesare, secretly and in pain, had made his last assignation with his sister, at the mountain retreat of Montefiore, he had grown distracted by the beauty of Bianca de Nevada. He was leaving not just for Spain, but forever, but he left Lucrezia an hour or two earlier than he needed, by noticing Bianca.

Lucrezia couldn’t murder to bring Cesare back. She wasn’t Zeus, to cause Phaëthon to stop driving the chariot of bright Helios: she couldn’t halt the daily chariot of crushing light and rushing time. But she could murder to stop the innocent virago—the only seriously dangerous kind—from living and thriving when Cesare couldn’t.

Mercy, Lucrezia repeated.

I’ve been alone such a long time, said the girl child, in a voice of surprise at itself, a voice that leaned toward womanliness, and now the world repopulates itself in my direction.

Forgive the world its intrusions, if you can, said Lucrezia, husking her own voice in a masculine manner as best she could. The wandering hermit such as I makes effort to avoid the snares of the devil, so often hooked and crooked into the words and doings of humankind. But even I become hungry, and I must eat if I am to pray for our salvation. You tempt me with aromas of dinner. May I come in and share a meal with you?

This isn’t my home, and I’ve no permission to welcome a guest, said Bianca. But I won’t turn you away hungry. I’ll give you a bite, and you can bring news of the world to me. Can you tell me much of the doings of the day?

You need to know whether the wheat is sewn in the fields yet, or the sow has had her spring litter? Or are you more interested in the status of Pope Julius the II’s campaign against Bologna? Or the latest fashions from the court of Louis XII of arrogant France?

I scarcely know what to ask, she said. Can you tell me of Montefiore?

I don’t know the place. I avoid towns and estates where I can, preferring to take my meal with the small farmholder and the vagabonds of the woods. But by the aroma of it, you eat more agreeably than most tenants. Where do you get your fulsome table, here in the middle of nowhere?

Bianca de Nevada said, Let me cut you from the heel of the joint, where the meat is cooked already, and spoon you some marrows and carrots and the like. I’ll pass you a plate through the window. And so, in a minute, she did, and Lucrezia took the offering with a fine and sudden hunger. Primavera with all the produce of Montefiore, and the hunters and poachers and snarers at her disposal, hardly could prepare a meal as sumptuous as this. But Lucrezia couldn’t bother with food, however enticing.

I can’t pay you for your kindness, said Lucrezia. What coin I collect is dedicated to relieving the suffering of the poor.

My needs are supplied, said Bianca. Your company is payment enough.

Let me hunt in my cloak for a token of my gratitude then, said Lucrezia. A monk is often thrust trinkets by blushing gentlewomen who confess the sins of their boudoirs to his holy ear. But we have no use of such finery, and they weigh down the hems of our garments as well as our souls. You have a face as beautiful as the evening; you will be ornamented as you deserve.

Bianca cast her eye down, unused to compliments from men, even monks. She didn’t ask for the gift, and had not yet found words to decline it, when Lucrezia fastened her grip around the comb and raised it high.

May it bring you much happiness, she said and drove the ivory implement down into the back of the girl’s lowered head. She felt the tines scrape and then dig into the scalp, as fully as that stone had driven into the skull of the goose. Bianca de Nevada gasped and her hands fluttered like two doves in the gloaming. She fell against the casement of the window, then slumped back inside the cottage, lost in shadows. Lucrezia flung the plate of food, uneaten, in the window over the girl’s corpse, and made her way with haste back up the hill and toward Montefiore.

I am a girl who did little wrong

I am a girl who did little wrong.

I courted loneliness to be my lover.

I spoke in tongues to insensible rocks, pretending

Only I their natures could discover.

Each of us wishes more than the world can offer.

The hermit his coffin, the prince his princely coffer.

To thirst for solitude while the carnival rages

Is the curse of fools or the saintly goal of sages.

Neither a simpleton nor a saint, I suffer

The attentions of my coldly unvarying lover.

She wakes once more

THE DWARVESwere around her, snuffling like colts.

We leave you alone, they said, more or less in one voice, and provide you a window upon the wicked world, and your vanity betrays you. There is nothing but grief out there! Haven’t you learned this yet?

She sat up and felt the back of her head, where blood had matted.

Have you been to Arezzo and back? she said. They shook their heads.

The farther we got from you, the less sure we seemed of ourselves, said Heartless sadly. Your kind imagination of us—as individuals, with names, of all things—has begun to seem a kind of nourishment. Without your regard, our initiative was sapped.

You must get that mirror back and regard yourselves, she told them. Oh, my head hurts so.

It would have hurt you worse until it couldn’t hurt you further, had we not come back. Heartless held out the ivory comb. Several of its tines had broken off, and among those that remained was a residue of blood and dried matter and threads of her raven black hair. A serried rank of small poisonedstiletti, he said.

Still, it was a beautiful thing, even with broken tines.

She steadied herself with a hand to her temple, and then said, You are too kind, and too . . . too . . . She wanted to saylittle, but that would have been repaying their kindness with rude honesty; she thoughttoo incomplete, but that also seemed uncharitable. Andtoo attentive was wrong. Without their attention, she would be dead.

She didn’t finish her sentence. They helped her to her feet. Across the room—and didn’t the venison smell wonderful! Where had that come from?—she saw the silvery fog in the wall, the oval through which she had once seen Montefiore. She walked over to it and put up her hand to her head, and held the ivory comb gingerly in place, taking care not to scrape her scalp with it.

She didn’t know if it was herself she was seeing. The reflection was imprecise, varnished with mist; but there was a woman’s face therein, and as its lips moved, so Bianca moved hers, as if under a spell. Mirror, mirror, she said. What is to become of us?

What is to become of you, if you don’t take care? complained Gimpy.

We won’t be here forever to guide your every step, snapped Deaf-to-the-World.

As if we have nothing better to do, added MuteMuteMute.

We have nothing better to do, damn the fact, observed Bitter, but that still doesn’t mean we want to do it.

We will be here forever, said Heartless. That’s the truth of it. But you, dear Bianca . . .

He didn’t finish his sentence, just stood looking at her fondly.

You must take the mirror back, said Bianca. What are you waiting for? You want to be human enough, you have to learn to steal. What was the first act of disobedience but a theft? Let me come with you, I’ll lead you as a band of rogues. The robber queen! I like the notion.

It isn’t safe for you yet, said Nextday.

You’re less than men, she said. How do you know what’s safe for me?

They had protected her and she had shamed them. Bitter made a rude gesture before the others could stop him. We’ll go as far as the bridge anyway, said Nextday decisively. We’ll look to see what we can.

I ask your pardon for my crude remarks, she said, but they paid no attention to her.

A bodice, my darling

SO THEmirror revealed that the girl had survived, and the comb clasped to her temple lent a further beauty against her black hair.

Lucrezia discharged her lady-in-waiting and took to the dressing room herself. With abandon she rooted through trunks and leathern satchels and thearmadio in the corner until she located what she was seeking. There had been a masquerade at New Year’s, in January of 1503, when the guests and revelers all cavorted behind masques shaped crudely like human genitals. She had found the affair sumptuously corrupt, and had kept several of the masks for their comic or aphrodisiacal effect. She dug up the most objectionable and, making sure the door to the hallway was shut and bolted, she affixed the creation to her head by means of a pair of leather straps.

It looked crude and terrifying, and she was satisfied. If her turn as a holy fool had not worked, let her make more of a mockery of things.

She could hardly sleep that night, in anticipation, and she arose long before dawn. Even Vicente, who slept poorly, could be heard through the door still moaning in his dreams. She took a torch from the stable. A horse stamped and whinnied—then nothing but silence. She left the house behind in green moonlight.

How long had Cesare been dead?—three years, four, and her father only a year or more than that? Since then she had turned into a monster—look at her, a fiend sneaking through the fields beyond Montefiore with a lecherous disguise hidden under the skirt of her tunic. She felt the very blood in her heels pound, and she had to run along the road, the papier-mâché genitals hidden under her apron slapping her again and again in the groin, mocking her failure as a mother, her loss as a sister.

This time it was early morning when she came to the cottage. As before, an enticing aroma suffused the mysterious clearing, something of eggs and cheese, onions and herbs, and the nutty snap of breakfast ale. How could there be eggs and cheese here, without the cackle of hens or the barracking opinions of a goat?

Extinguishing her torch in a ditch, she paused behind a stand of hawthorne. It had blushed into fuller leaf since her last visit and gave her enough protection to listen for the sound of voices. And, to be sure, she was wise to wait, for she heard a clamor of unfinished male voices. Then, ridiculously, the bottom half of the severed door opened, and out came creatures that she hesitated to call dwarves, though what else could they be?

Lucrezia Borgia had dwarves in her court at Ferrara. Dwarves were a mischievous and important presence in royal society, serving as confidantes, jesters, aides-de-camp, and chaperones. Generally they possessed expressions of profound gravity, whatever their social station or native intelligence; there was something dignified about how their solid, full-size heads sat without remorse or apology upon bodies that had to work harder than most to manage an outsize world. The tendency of dwarf legs to bow, of dwarf hands to be clumsy at small work—managing broth in a soup spoon, the hilarity!—oh, oh, that was a common enough cause of low humor. But even the cheeriest and most self-deprecating dwarf, capering like an imp, couldn’t shuck off a self-possession, which left audiences somewhat uneasy, even while holding their sides from the pain of laughter.

These small men who departed from the cottage in the woods were a different breed of dwarf, from a different race, perhaps, though what little she could see of their faces suggested they were swarthy, bearded, compact, like dwarves. It was something else; it was that the shortened torsos and small legs were proportioned differently—neither better nor worse, just differently. These dwarves—six, seven, eight, she lost count—seemed more like children still forming their milk teeth. Their rib cages were not barrels but slender butter churns. They talked with one another in a language she couldn’t make out—it seemed to be a Romish language, full of slanting vowels and surprising stops and starts. But the small men were gone soon, traipsing away from her, and the clearing took on a fresher bloom, as if they swept away with them the last miasma of night.

She removed her apron and affixed her indecent headdress. Then she hurried to the door and pounded upon the closed upper half. Her legs were swathed in leggings, like the tight, flattering crimson apparel that Florentine youths wore, making codpieces a boast, an escutcheon, rounding buttocks to seem as fervent and inviting as a courtesan’s cleavage. She could stand like a man—hadn’t she admired enough men in her time, and learned their pendulums by heart?—and she had an airy tunic to disguise her breasts, which anyway were bound flat in lengths of cotton.

The girl called, You’ve forgotten something, how kind to knock, but I’m just here with my meal— and came to the door, expecting a returning dwarf. She must have seen the male legs, for her sentence stopped, but then she was drawn by courage or curiosity to swing open the top half of the door, and she stood face-to-face with the obscene reveler.

Lucrezia Borgia marveled at how musical a girl’s scream could sound. She tossed her head like a horse as it nickers, and the thread-haired scrotum and the half-erect member (cheesecloth wrapped around a length of toweling) flopped menacingly down over her nose.

The girl couldn’t speak and couldn’t breathe. Lucrezia advanced upon her into the room, and put her hand as roughly upon the girl’s waist as she could manage. She pushed Bianca against a post in the middle of the room, and flipped the girl’s long apron up, as if intending to forage between the girl’s legs. But instead she caught the corners of the apron and pulled them back around the post, and she ducked behind and tied the corners together, so the girl was caught, at least momentarily, tied like Saint Sebastian at the pillar, and in nearly as lusciously fainting a state.

Lucrezia wheeled about again. Her eyes in this cottage worked poorly; was it the mask, or did the light bleed improperly from the lamps? She found she could make out little of the furnishings. There was nothing with which to attack the girl—no poker from the fireplace, no conveniently clawed kitchen implement. Only a few carved stone tables, or were they sarcophagi?—and a statue of someone very like Proserpina in a sitting position, munificently holding out an apple.

The woman turned back and looked at Bianca. The tightened apron around the girl’s rib cage had pushed up her small breasts and made them prominent. With a roar Lucrezia pushed her masqued face against the girl, rubbing, and the girl sagged against the post, which now looked like a stalagmite in some cave.

Lucrezia didn’t want to leave with the job incomplete this time, but she thought she heard a sound. A sound, surely? The tramp of small feet? Were those creatures coming back? She wouldn’t be caught here by a tribe of midgets. Or was that the roar of time in her ears, had she been here longer than she ought? The girl’s pale skin was whiter than before—was it cadaverous! Perhaps. Lucrezia fled, praying it might be so.

Two bites from the Apple

BUT THEmirror wouldn’t let her alone. Try as she might, shroud it in black lace from Seville, blow out the candles in the room, close her eyes—the mirror still gripped her. At last she could take no more, and she positioned herself in front of its harsh eye, and demanded the truth of it.

She no longer knew, nor even cared to question, whether the shapes revealed therein were phantasms of her mind or whether there was a magic at work. She wiped the spittle from her chin—she was chewing her own lips from rage and frustration—and saw the dwarves reviving the young woman once again. They loosened the makeshift bodice formed by the tied apron. They settled her upon the floor and rubbed her wrists with oil of lemon flowers. She could smell the tang of coastal fruit through the looking glass, and she gashed her wrist against the side of the ornate frame, wanting to beat the offending scene out of the bowed mirror. But the mirror would have none of it; it showed her Bianca de Nevada until it was through. It showed how young she became, when refreshed by the dwarves; how the color stole back into her cheeks, and her anthracite hair bloomed more luxurious than ever, and her limbs, flexing for circulation, the more perfect and admirable than ever. And her life more hers than ever.

Lucrezia watched as the dwarves presented the girl with a small leather sack drawn closed with a cord. The girl opened it and a splash of water flowered in her lap. She withdrew a handful of coins, which she set aside, in a bowl held up by a reclining statue. Lucrezia felt a scalding of gorge in her gullet.

So she fell back, at last, to the tradition perfected by her ancestors. What a library of recipes they’d amassed—poisons that had killed cardinals and princes, dukes and their wives, inconvenient lovers overstaying their welcome.

When Cesare had abducted Caterina Sforza at Forlì, he’d wrested from her the secrets of her signal achievement, aveleno attermine, which promised perfect sleep. But Lucrezia Borgia would improve upon this unfailingly reliable decoction. She’d assure her own ascendancy while dooming the durable child to death at last. She’d use the last Apple brought from Agion Oros, use it for her redemption and Bianca’s downfall at the same time. The same fruit that killed Bianca would give Lucrezia mastery unfathomable. Perhaps even the wisdom to adjust the mistakes of time, to correct the past.

She had seen what a bite of the Apple had done to the stone-faced beast. A mere slice of it had given the creature a mouth, an upright posture, the talent to pass through stone. What might it do for a person more magnificently human than most?

The mirror, maddening one minute, was helpful the next. Lucrezia began to realize that it alerted her when the dwarves were ready to leave. They would begin to appear in garb more clearly like human garments. They constructed a clumsy box with wheels and shafts, and practiced hauling it about. They were on a campaign of some sort. What were they up to? No mind, never mind; enough that they were gone.

She couldn’t guess the colloquy the dwarves engaged in: whether to behave as their kind didn’t behave, to leave behind the morally neutral state of their natures and commit a more human act. Lucrezia didn’t associate the stone dog to whom she’d offered the Apple and the dwarves who had gone on to eat the rest of it. She was an unwitting Eve. But now they were on their own. They would take the mirror, without permission, and damn the cost. They wanted to keep Bianca safe.

She wouldn’t be a crone this time, nor play the role of a waggish courtier. She would face the child in finery. She had Primavera wring the juice from ten lemons and work it into her fair hair. If Bianca, stars glowing in the highlights of her midnight hair, would preen as Hecate, Lucrezia would pounce as Aurora. She sat on the top step of the flight above the loggia, turning her tresses in the strengthening sun. Summer would be here before long; she would reign as the goddess of dawn. The peacocks screamed at the competition; she threw her head back and answered them.

The time came at last. She plucked the Apple from the silver stem—the second of the reported three, the third said by Vicente to be hidden in the treasury of the Doge.

The Apple sat in a bronze dish like something pagan. Had Lucrezia a more fanciful mind she would have supposed it to be humming at a level just below the threshold of the human ear to comprehend. But fancy was for servants and infants, and poison was the real work at hand. She set about with the tools of her trade to re-create, in the darkest way she could,al-iksir.

Roots of mandrake, a knife with a handle made from human pelvis carved into obscene figures, a mortar and pestle for the mashing of savorless mushrooms, a drop of Fra Ludovico’s communion wine for perversion, an alembic, a small fire underneath it in which she fed scraps of human hair, bits of the girl’s old childhood garments, a letter from María Inés to Vicente, feathers of geese, and a live mouse she’d caught by overturning a water bucket. (The mouse escaped with a singed tail.) But the crucial ingredient of choice was quicksilver, crushed and refined in a crucible, then reduced into a more docile and transparent state through the private alchemy for which her family was known.

She varnished one half of the Apple with the poison—the half toward which the last remaining silver leaf pointed, like a trembling needle. The tight, unwithering red skin of the holy fruit took the application sympathetically; indeed, only by the closest peering could she see the faint line that marked the edge of the brushwork.

One side, holy improvement; the other, an instant death.

The world was so easy to face with a tool like this in her hand.

She dressed carefully, finely, in the richest gown she happened to have on hand, and tied ropes of pearls about her waist and looped other strands of pearls through her hair. Then she flung open Vicente’s wardrobe and pulled from a hook a crimson cloak that had belonged to María Inés de Castedo y Nevada. Lucrezia didn’t know if Bianca would recognize the garment, but it felt superb to dress herself in it. The fit was perfect.

She swept through thesalone, startling Primavera, who was just getting around to opening the wooden panels at the windows. The old woman crossed herself and followed as fast as her legs allowed.

Lucrezia flung open the door onto the loggia. Fra Ludovico was carting armloads of brilliant yellowginestra to the roofless chapel. Looks like our Duchessa is off to market, he said, but at a second glance he added, and she intends tobuy the market. Where on earth are you going? Her look was so venomous and straitened that without delay he flung down the blossoms in two intersecting lines, making a yellow cross on the ground. It didn’t hold her back. She trod upon it and kept going.

Appearing at the corner of the house, Vicente was on his way to continue his search. Daily he was making ever wider circuits out from the house, and one day he knew he would not come back. Now he gasped and fell into a fit of catarrh, raising his staff against her. That very cloak. Villain, he said, or tried to, his voice merely a throttle of phlegm in his throat.

Bother, she answered, distractedly. Who can tell me where Michelotto is?

Vicente wouldn’t and Fra Ludovico wouldn’t and Primavera Vecchia couldn’t even if she wanted to. Lucrezia found her son by herself, loitering in the sheepfold at the bottom of the slope. She proposed that he escort her into the woods for a walk. She was eager to see the rural springtime flowers. She would have company, and a young man’s arm, as she didn’t want to slip into a bog or tread upon a snake.

You are too lovely to walk in the woods, he said cautiously.

Then let the woods improve themselves as I pass by.

The cottage came into view. Michelotto seemed surprised to find it; perhaps he didn’t remember having seen it before? Or who might live within? No matter. Lucrezia paused at the edge of the clearing and said, Let’s pause, have a bite to eat, you and I.

She withdrew from an inner pocket of the cloak a portion of cheese, a small loaf of bread, and the Apple, which was wrapped in a coppery silk cloth for safekeeping.

I don’t care for bread or cheese, said Michelotto, though the Apple looks fine enough.

The Apple isn’t for you, she said. But isn’t it appetizing?

She held it up, and her own hunger for it began to gnaw at her. The air in the clearing fell still, and the bees about the doorway of the dwarves’ cottage seemed to cease their noisy commerce with flowers.

Please, he said. I rarely ask you for anything.

Eat the bread if you’re hungry, she said again. The Apple is for another.

Who? he asked, and she realized that, just possibly, he didn’t see the cottage before them. What a liability a slanted mind was.

At last, cursing mildly below his breath, he grabbed the bread and broke a segment off, and fitted a hunk of cheese upon it, and ate the two together, his eyes on the Apple all the while. It took little enough time for his eyes to grow heavy, as she knew they must. Still, waiting, she was almost driven mad herself by the rosy scent of the Apple.

Then Michelotto stretched, and yawned happily, and fell to the ground, heavy as lead. She waited a minute or two, and shook him roughly, but her labors over the bread had proved effective. He didn’t stir. Had she a mind to, she could have sliced his heart out of his chest and held it up for review, and he would never have awakened until the sedation wore off. How helpful to have a talent for cooking.

She got up and walked to the door of the dwarves’ cottage, and rapped upon it with impertinence.

I am told not to open the door to anyone, came the voice of Bianca de Nevada from within.

And a sensible precaution, in these times, said Lucrezia Borgia in her own voice. I hear tell of men abusing the lonely maidens in their cow stalls and convent cells around here. But I’m a friend of your family’s, and I’m in sorest need. You may remember me or you may not; you may think of me well or ill; it doesn’t bother me. But my companion has fallen ill, and I want a scupper of water to revive him.

She could hear Bianca pause.

There is water in every stream, she said.

I don’t have the time, and I don’t want to leave him alone here. Rogues roam the countryside in these perilous times. Weren’t you bothered by someone yourself, recently? For the love of mercy, Bianca, open the door and at least pass me a flask of water; I ask for nothing more than that.

Such small charity couldn’t be denied a traveler in need, Lucrezia knew, and Bianca was forced to open the top half of the door.

Oh, she cried as Lucrezia had known she must. Not you, no, and she went to slam the panel shut. But Lucrezia nudged an elbow in and stopped her, and pointed wanly at her son, ensnaring the girl’s attention through her instinct for good works.

Michelotto, Michelotto. What has happened. I’ll fetch water—

She disappeared for a moment and brought back a small earthenware flagon.

Lucrezia accepted the water without comment and crossed to the body of the boy, which looked convincingly crumpled and lifeless. She knew that water would revive him shortly. She had only a handful of instants in which to finish her task. Gently she raised his head onto her lap and used a finger to work his mouth open. She dribbled a little water onto his tongue. Some of it trickled out the corners of his mouth, making him seem more like his slack-jawed self, even though comatose.

Is he recovering? asked Bianca. She hadn’t come outside. She’d been well warned by those dwarves. But her hands twisted at the top of the locked lower portion of the door, worrying.

He may, in time, said Lucrezia. I’m glad I remembered you were here, Bianca de Nevada. I had heard about it, but hardly believed it.

Who knew such a thing? said Bianca warily.

Your father.

Bianca drove the heels of both hands into the sockets of her eyes. Her spine shook and her garment slipped off one shoulder. Don’t speak to me of my father, she said, when she could talk. He made it his career to leave me, when I needed him. He took his instruction from you and your brother, when he might have stood up to you. He might have taken me with him. You lie to me, you old woman.

Lucrezia Borgia couldn’t be moved by the sentiment, nor could she forgive the insult. Old woman.Old. But she smiled with the wiles of a thousand years, and said, A child will rail against the inevitable, and then, as an adult, will learn that the inevitable can be avoided. My dear, you are marooned in a magical grave, a tumulus of ancient embittered spirits, and you refuse to emerge, out of fear and horror of the world, and of me. But I am atoning for having borrowed your father from you. I’ve come to withdraw you from your grave, to restore you to life and to your father. Vicente de Nevada has come back to Montefiore. He’s there now. He has sent me here to collect you. He has sent his proof.

She unfolded from the sepal-like corners of the cloth the magnificent Apple. Here is what he has found for us, the treasure he was dispatched to collect all those years ago. Though we need it no longer, it retains its holy magic. It will release you the rest of the way into your life, and you can come with me. When Michelotto awakes we will, the three of us, return to Montefiore, and reunite you with your father.

Lucrezia had been speaking without design, by instinct, but she could see by the widening of the girl’s eyes that she had put into words some silly belief the girl held. I don’t know why I should trust you, Bianca said at last, but her chin yearned forward, out of her tomb, and her voice was soft. She was still so young, so foolish. Petty ignorance has its charm, to be sure.

I’ll show you I mean you no harm, said Lucrezia. Your father brought this holiest of sacred totems for Cesare, but it can do him no good; he is dead, and his corpse rots in a graveyard in Navarre. But let it do you good, and me besides. Look, I will show you it’s safe; I will eat some of it myself.

She held it up in the sun, and turned the leaf so it pointed toward Bianca de Nevada. Then she slaked her own hunger with a single bite from the unvarnished side of the holy fruit.

She couldn’t say how she felt; she had seldom had words for happiness. Happiness was a cruel hoax, usually, eclipsing momentarily the true sour nature of the world. Yet now she had a moment of rankest hope, that perhaps beneath the shining aspect of the world there was a dark richness, a vein of clarifying joy. She waited for thegiubilo immenso to pass, for that is the nature of visions; they slam to a close and then, my dears, that is that. Better not to have had them at all. But the moment lingered until it wasn’t a moment, or she was inside the moment in a way so full it had infinite riches to it, aspects of immortality her usual apprehension denied her . . .

Like the sun coming out unexpectedly on a prospect of lagoon, lighting the surface of the water on fire with white, and someone like Cesare coming forward on the quay.

Michelotto burbled behind her insensibly, and she knew that time was passing, she knew it must be, though she couldn’t feel it. She smiled more genuinely than she expected to, and held out the Apple to Bianca de Nevada.

Oh, you try too, she said.

The girl held the fruit in both hands and trained her eyes upon Lucrezia. You are known for your poison, she said, but if God would will it, I would rather be removed from a world in which you can lie to me so. She bit from the side, the silver leaf trembling. Michelotto sat up suddenly and retched all over himself. Bianca dropped the Apple and her eyes slid up into her skull.

The oval window

WHETHER ITbe the highest of holy days or the day a comet smites a granary, the farm chores always need to be done. Despite the shock of seeing Lucrezia Borgia in glamorous dudgeon, the household had gotten on with its day. Fra Ludovico and Primavera were down in the fields, Fra Ludovico to perform a blessing over the spring planting, Primavera to supply some pastries and ale to thecontadini. No longer interested in his estate, Vicente had taken a small bark onto the mirrored surface of Lago Verde, and he stirred at the muddy bottom of the water, trying to dislodge any corpse he might find.

Montefiore had stood undefended.

So the dwarves had come in, without invitation, and made their way with some effort up the flight of steps to the piano nobile and through the door. It wasn’t their noses so much as their ears that turned their steps leftward beyond the entrance hall, because the glass made a sound of rippling, a kind of crystalline lapping. They could hear it sag. They weren’t so far beyond their earlier selves that they had lost that capacity.

There it was. The mirror waited for them. They still had a choice.

Getting it down from the wall was harder, though, than it looked. Nextday decided at last to enter the wall and unhook it from behind, and let the other dwarves wait before the fireplace and catch it. But he couldn’t enter the wall; it resisted, a convincing otherness, separate from him. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe for an instant, and the dread was full and interesting in itself; he rather liked it. But the job was neither to panic nor to observe how to avoid panic, but to get the mirror. So at last they pulled a table over from the center of the room and scrambled onto it.

In the end, they managed all right, and the mirror was removed from the place it had hung the past decade or two—a mere breath in their long life, but a painful breath, a held breath; and they felt coarser, richer, more devious, more themselves, to have it back among them.

Nextday found a length of fabric to blind the mirror’s eye. They carried it out as miners will carry a fallen brother, among them; there was something corpselike about the slight bulge of the glass beneath the shroud. It was stored in the wheelbarrow, and Gimpy, the roundest among them, got in with it, to cushion it with the softness of his belly.

They began to sing, merrily for them, as they made their way from Montefiore. A rooster crowed, a dog or two barked tympanically; the winds contributed atonalsostenuti. It felt good to be unformed, ready, capable of possibility.

No one saw them come or go.

In time, they reached their lair, which to them had never looked like a cottage, nor hardly a cave, but was still home, with all the musty coprolitic warmth and personality of home. The glamour of the mirror, even behind its shroud, commanded their attention, and they were well into their fourth or fifth argument about how and where the splendor should be set, and in what ways to revel about its recovery, when they finally stumbled upon the body of Bianca and took her for dead.

They began to weep and curse. Not for love of her, particularly, but because their transaction had been compromised. The mirror had come at too stiff a price, and while they had it, it wasn’t free and clear. So Nextday tore the shroud off the mirror and they looked at themselves therein.

They were seven or eight or nine small men, bleeding obstinately toward some kind of humanity, stuck in a process of change that they could no longer vary. They might have used their mirror as an escape hatch, to ask it the single correct question, the only question a mirror ever cares about: not who did I used to be, nor who am I now, but who am I to become?—for the secret act of light that fires a mirror is this: A mirror’s image is always forward of the truth by an instant or so. While a question is formulating—Who is the fairest of us all,say, orHow many crow’s feet can I pretend not to have today? orIs this the face of a murderer? —the mirror always knows the answer before the question is asked.

The dwarves had hobbled out of their stony natures partly by accident and somewhat by design, but they had hoped, at last, to be able to choose whether to consider the experiment a failed one, and if so, to retreat into their lost selves, and subside, insensate, insensible even. But now they couldn’t empty their pockets of memory, of irritation, of regret or conundrum, of paradox or paradise. They were trapped by the laws of their own devising.

Feeling the old moments silting away, Nextday took his all-but-human hands and put them upon the bowed glass of the mirror. He was able at least to remove the glass from the poisonous quicksilver behind it. However, he could no longer absorb the constituent parts of glass into his skin. He was left with a long oval of glass that could reflect nothing—a long anonymous shield, barren of deceit. The looking glass, clear enough now, without the looking aspect.

Putting the glass down, he huffed and ejected a knob of mucus, and his back bent over. He looked as if he would vomit with grief, but he didn’t. He dropped his head lower and scratched in the ground for something, and his tail hung in dejection.

The others set about to construct a coffin for Bianca de Nevada, and partly from sorrow—for their sadness strengthened as they began to recognize their castaway status—and partly for punishment, they set the glass from the mirror into the lid of the coffin, so the girl’s beautiful form could decompose as they watched, and as it rotted, their own indictment and incarceration would be more fully nailed upon them too.

I am a woman who killed for love

I am a woman who killed for love.

I am a woman who killed for lack of love.

The mirror declares that the twin accusations are equal.

I am the black dove who pecks at the coffin

Wanting to manage a more reliable insult,

To chew her eyes from their sockets, say, to wring

The hair from her head, to desecrate the silk

Of her unblemished skin in the way that birds do best.

Reflections

THERE WASno Apple left, for when she fell, the Apple rolled into the door behind her. I didn’t think to try to reclaim it until I was thirty or forty feet away, hustling that sluggish goose of a gooseboy up the slope. When I turned back, uncertain, I saw that the house had disappeared. There was simply a tumulus in a glade. Shadows of blue and granite. Traces of winter’s snow lingered in long striations, like the thin fingers of ancient women who refuse to clasp their hands in prayer and decently die. There was no door, no smoking chimney, and all I could smell was leaf rot and mold, and the wet earth waking up again.

Michelotto, small miracle of contradictions, was chattier as we came closer to Montefiore, and began to ask about the cottage in the forest. I hadn’t thought he noticed it, or remembered it at all if he did notice it, but he seemed clarified in mind. As if his episode in a coma had given his feeble mind a better rest than it was used to getting. A girl lived there, he said. And I spoke to her.

Oh, yes, I said, I’m sure there was. When you were little you used to speak to the geese, and you claimed they spoke to you too.

They did, he said. They told me many things that I didn’t understand.

Fascinating and marvelous. What secrets do geese know?

Who they like and who they dislike. Among the other geese, I mean.

I see. A hierarchy among the gaggle. I’m sure that was spellbinding to listen to. Look sharp, you clot, you’re trampling in the mud.

They also mentioned who they liked among the humans. They didn’t care much for you, for instance.

Well, I cared for them dearly, especially when braised with red wine and currants from Corinth.

They said you will listen to no one but yourself.

Well, you listen to the geese and the wind and the farting of frogs; you do the hard work for me.

They said you would listen to them someday.

Have they anything interesting to tell me?

I don’t know, he said, but in a complicated tone, as if he might have meantI don’t know if they do, but he might also have meantI don’t know whether you will find it interesting, but others would.

It was Bianca, he then said. Bianca de Nevada, who used to live with us.

Is that so. But I didn’t care to speak about Bianca, nor to allow the memory to take hold in his usually incurious shell of a mind. So I took his hand, and I let my middle finger trail across the center of his palm, as faintly as I could manage given we were lighting out cross-country. He took a swig of breath, being startled in a new direction, and my efforts were fruitful. I turned to smile at him and said, You have grown to such a man, my Michelotto. If we knew each other better I might be a better mother to you.

In this light vein I dragged him away from the subject of Bianca and turned several keys in that ill-regulated apparatus of a human being that had not been turned before. Raising a child is hard work, I’ve found; and this is why I’ve seldom kept myself to the task. But moment by moment, as a responsible parent is able, one must help the young fledgling to encounter more adult arenas of engagement.

The house was still empty. The pagan rites that attended the sowing of the fields were well under way and, I understood, would last into the night, when a bonfire of last year’s rubbish would announce the satisfactory preparation of this year’s crops. I pulled Michelotto into the house and tutted him for the barnyard smell. You are old enough to perfume yourself with something more redolent than goose shit, I said. Oh, it falls to me, I see, to teach you how to clean yourself up for a woman. Take off those filthy clothes and throw them out the window to be burned. Your days as a gooseboy are over, my dear.