Mirror Mirror

I was busy watching him, though he seemed wary enough—and that was a good thing; it suggested he hadn’t been initiated into the holy mysteries of sex by the sluts and bored soldiers’ widows in the hamlet below.

I have always liked to watch a man remove his clothes. The faint modesty that all men evince—once or twice in one’s career with them anyway—makes their bodies the more beautiful to behold, when at last the tunic is hauled over the shoulders and the loin wrapping is untucked and kicked away. I made to give him a semblance of privacy, and turned to fuss over the heating water. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don’t lie about men, only women.

It was then that I saw the mirror was gone. Michelotto’s emergence from the clothes of his childhood had distracted me. I wailed from a rage I didn’t understand. Maybe it was simply that I’d been denied the right to hear from the mirror that she was dead. It was all I would have wanted, to look at the mirror and see nothing but myself.

Michelotto worried himself over me, and came forward to calm me in my distress. I suppose I was keening, and it made him uncomfortable. He didn’t know what he was doing. Anyway, there was no mirror to see.

Vigil

HE WASout in the forest, higher up than usual, and the plains of Umbria stretched below in their pulsing washes of green and gold, brown and blue, beyond. He looked to the west, to see if he could find the roofs of Montefiore glinting in the noon sun, but the trees, on the slopes where he guessed his house should be, had come into the full leaf of late spring.

He came upon the casket first. Its top was clear as water. He looked down at it, and wiped away a scattering of spring pollen. The smeared powder gave the glass a greenish tinge, and for a minute he felt he was looking into a box of ice, or the clearest river water, for the figure inside seemed to float in a current. Then he realized this was merely a trick of the glass, the way that glass plays with and distorts light.

He wasn’t surprised to see that the figure resembled his daughter, Bianca, for in the months and years since his escape from Agion Oros, most of the people of the world reminded him of her one way or another, either by startling contrast or by painful similarity. He had never seen a corpse in a glass-topped coffin, and that was surprise enough for the day. That the corpse should imitate his daughter seemed only fitting; what other more crucial business had a corpse to attend to, when you come right down to it?

He hauled part of a fallen tree trunk to a convenient place and settled himself upon it. He had nothing better to do; he had been able to decide no other course for his life to take. He hadn’t been able to return for any length of time to a Montefiore without Bianca, and the rest of the world lacked savor. So he came and went, an itinerant on a quest without shape. He didn’t mind resting for a while, keeping an eye on the figure in a coffin.

He rested, and couldn’t decide to move on. In the hours or days that followed, he began, slowly, to realize that he wasn’t alone. Seven small men and a rather large dog began to be seen about the coffin. He couldn’t always tell when they came or went, but he had a sense that even when he couldn’t see them, one of them was always present. They didn’t talk to him, but from time to time they bowed and shuffled in his direction.

The dog came up and put its head in Vicente’s lap. He scratched it behind the ears, courteously enough, but in time he shooed the mongrel away. He had never liked dogs much.

•1519 •

Thaïs

THE YEARShad shunted past, and life had never resumed in the way it ought to have done. When she was thirty-three, Lucrezia Borgia d’Este ordered an inventory of her ornaments. Rosaries, enameled buckles, hundreds of pearls, broaches of finely wrought silver, clasps and combs beyond figuring. And a single stem as if from an apple tree, made in what appeared to be the finest silver, though in three places where rubies as large as apples might once have hung, dots of black tarnish proved resistant to any means of removal.

In 1514 Lucrezia suffered terrible wounds with the birth of Alessandro, who entered the world with a huge head. It was a mercy that he died a year or so later. Anyway, he was survived by his new sister, Eleonora, and was replaced by another son a year later. Lucrezia paid a call on one of her favorite lovers, Francesco Gonzaga, to find him supine and withered, attended by several greyhounds and a pet dwarf upholstered in brocade. She showed him her new baby—named Francesco—but she wondered if she had named the baby precipitously, for Francesco Gonzaga was troubled by the French pox. Though he was being treated with mercury, taken internally, he seemed in danger of losing his handsome nose to rot. He wasn’t interested in her new baby. She didn’t visit the sick man again.

Another new pope was elevated, in time. This one cast his lot with the resurgent Medici. The campaigns in northern and central Italy swept back and forth with the usual shifting of allegiances, granting of concessions, revocations of treaty, accusations of betrayal. The winds from the north, thetramontana and thesirocco, had anyone the nose to detect it, carried the first whiffs of Protestant objection to papal vice and corruption. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed the ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenberg Castle Church. Strong stuff.

In Lucrezia’s repose at the Belvedere on an island in the Po near the Castel Tedaldo, intimates and prospective lovers and her husband discussed these matters over the fine strong broth known as chocolate, the beans for which the Genoese navigator had discovered fifteen years earlier in the spice islands in the seas weeks west of Lisbon. The sun seemed as secure in the sky as ever. It wasn’t, though.

Lucrezia became qualmish about everlasting life, which, as her energies began to fail her, was of increasing concern. How had her obsession with an ignorant farm girl brought her to such grief? How had she squandered the very Apples of Eden—if such, indeed, they were—on an act of revenge and hatred? The convents and hospitals she had founded, the pious works tediously entered into and sometimes completed—these works of mercy seemed insufficient when posted against her crimes. Acedia chief among them.

Pregnant for the eleventh time in 1518, she spent her autumn nourishing the fetus with pastries, sugared fruits, honey by the spoonful, roasted nuts seasoned with salt from the Venetian suppliers at Cervia. She grew plumper than usual and feared that the next baby would have the same large head as Alessandro, or even larger, and that the force of its passage would split her asunder.

Within a matter of months she lost not only Francesco Gonzaga, as expected, but also her mother. Lucrezia had never been close to Vannozza Cattanei, and so the shock she experienced at the news of her mother’s death was unexpected. She found herself lighting candles in chapels whose adornments she had commissioned but whose doors she had seldom darkened. She remembered leaving her mawkish mother when she was only eleven, and the mean-spirited glee she’d felt about it. She recalled succumbing to the lure of Vatican Rome, the mobs, the ceremonial parades, the glints of color, the pageantry of power—how drab all that seemed, considered now against the tears her mother had bothered to shed at Lucrezia’s breezy departure.

As Lucrezia’s confinement neared the end, she removed herself to Belriguardo, one of herluoghi de delizie, pavilions of delight. It wasn’t a score of miles from Ferrara, but when she arrived and inspected the frescoed chambers, the cloistered gardens, the choice meals laid out to tempt her appetite, she turned away. She decided she would go to Montefiore instead, and settle in to give birth there, and pretend to be the widow of a farmer, with another kind of life.

She lay beneath sumptuous trappings of cobalt blue and gold, tossing and turning in her sheets of silvery silk. The physician would not allow her to travel. She was too near to term, she had had too many problems in the past.I have had problems in the past, she replied in her own mind,and they all center around my appetite to know everything.

Had she been a farmer’s wife—had she been Vicente’s wife!—instead of the daughter of a pope, she might have had humbler tastes. She dashed the wine upon the floor and asked for clear mountain water instead. She laughed at the sight of the hefty haunches of the chambermaid who had to wipe up the mess.

I saw one bite of the Apple turn a headless dog into a squat man-cub, she remembered, a creature who took the Apple when offered and left with it into the chimney wall. I nibbled one small bite myself—and it hasn’t changed me dramatically. I have had no immunity from illness or sorrow, and I hear the doctors murmur in the antechamber. Maybe I needed more of the thing—with my wretched past, one small bite was too little. I need more.

Then she raised herself up on an elbow and recalled that one Apple remained. It was in the protection of the Doge of Venice, someone who had professed, from a distance, an admiration for Lucrezia Borgia. That was sensible enough, for Venice was within striking distance of Ferrara, scarcely a day’s travel if the roads were good, the brigands busy elsewhere, and the weather helpful.

She had always meant to return to Venice, and now she realized it wasn’t Montefiore but Venice that called her. The final Apple would heal her, would kill the child within her womb if such were needed. It would grant her some measure of fuller life than she, even with all her advantages of beauty and birthright, had ever managed.

She called upon the midwives, the surgeon, her confessor, and, an afterthought, her husband, and declared her intentions to take a retinue to Venice. The heat of the summer was almost upon them, she said, and the breezes off the Adriatic would calm her, would sing her new baby through the canal on easing tides.

Yes, said Alfonso, looking down his strong hooked nose at her, eager to be elsewhere. He glanced at the confessor and made a motion: Confer the appropriate blessings and administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction. If she continues to fail, we’ll petition the Pope to send a more senior prelate, as befits her station.

She tried to flail at them, to rip the dressings of her bedstead.

Alfonso patted the pillow and blessed her mildly and without conviction, and withdrew his hand before she could bite it.

Her labor pangs began shortly thereafter, and the death knells sounded on her horizon. They weren’t immediate but they were imminent; they were nextday. She wouldn’t give in, though, until she had risen from her bed and made her way through the watery highways of Venice, to greet the Doge at his palazzo and bargain or beg or steal that Apple that rightly belonged to her.

Decades earlier, some hack of a poet seeking to make a reputation of his own by sullying hers had called her a Thaïs. He’d embellished beyond recognition her appetite for venom, lust, and vengeance. A Thaïs, a Roman harridan, a maenad, a murderess, a corrupt and unforgivable harpy. Once she had laughed in delight at the sound of her fierce reputation. But she wouldn’t be unforgivable; she would see to that. She would find the final Apple and lunge at it before it was too late. Learning all there was to know at last, she would find a good reason to forgive herself her random sins and well-cloaked crimes, and ensure she would be forgiven in the afterlife as well.

She was thirty-nine.

Fire and ivy

STUCK ASwe all are in the maw of time, the dwarves learned to age, and discovered a new variety of patience, one that required effort. Around the glass-lidded coffin they kept their vigil, even after the eyesight of Vicente de Nevada began to fail, and his memory to falter, and he returned to the hilltop bier with infrequency, and then not at all.

Springs came and went, interspersed with sequences of summer, autumn, and winter, in a regular pattern that, the dwarves decided, wasn’t all that hard to follow. Their beards grew longer and grayer, and Gimpy showed up once with a pair of black scissors.

Where did you get those? asked Deaf-to-the-World.

I bargained for them from a shoemaker, he replied. I did hard labor for a week, tanning leather in a foul warehouse, and for my efforts I was repaid with this implement.

What is it for?

Our beards are growing into the soil. Haven’t you noticed? Gimpy wandered about the clearing and snipped off the beards at waist height. Indeed, some of the dwarves had been rooting in the soil. The dog alone seemed impervious to hair growth, or maybe it was that he shed.

What else are scissors good for? asked Heartless.

Oh, well, said MuteMuteMute, looking around. I suppose we could cut back the ivy growing over the coffin.

No one could not think of a reason to protest, not even Bitter, so the dwarves, enjoying the mobility they hadn’t realized they’d been lacking, gathered about the bier. Deaf-to-the-World, Tasteless, Heartless, Blindeye, and Bitter clutched handfuls of ivy and hauled it back. Gimpy and MuteMuteMute took turns snipping. Once they’d been accustomed to breathing through solid stone, and now they found gardening strenuous work. Well, they were aging too. Tasteless was losing his black-and-gold teeth, one by one, and Blindeye complained that white smears were beginning to cloud his vision.

When they had finished, they laid to one side a pile of dead ivy the size of a small house.

Midsummer day was approaching, 1519, and more of the world’s timelessness was evaporating by the hour. MuteMuteMute fished from his pocket a tin box with a hot coal inside, and used the coal to light the older, browner parts of ivy. Within a short time the burning vines became a beacon on the hill, and they smoked all day, until by sunset they had attracted attention.

The gooseboy, Michelotto, came thrashing through the summer growth. He was still a gooseboy, though he was twenty-two now. His shoulders were less hunched. Perhaps due to having enjoyed a hearty if belated introduction to the joys of the flesh, Michelotto was pleased that his right leg no longer trailed. Indeed, he was a specimen of surprising beauty. He had Lucrezia’s aquiline nose and shapely chin, and his eyes were a liquid gray, water in a pewter goblet.

You make a fire to call me here? he asked.

Away from the farms and villages, the dwarves were rarely addressed by a human. It took their ears a short time to remember how to decipher syllables.

We make a fire to burn the ivy, said Heartless.

Oh, but look, said Michelotto. It doesn’t seem to be burning.

Michelotto seemed to be right. Anyway, he was more human than they, so the dwarves paid attention. They could see that the fire was burning. The leaves of the ivy seemed green as ever, though perhaps it was merely that they hadn’t burned long enough. Leave it to a human to fiddle over such minute distinctions asburned ornot burned in a matter of so few moments.

Michelotto went down on his knees before the coffin and leaned across it. He breathed on the glass and rubbed it with his hand.

Is the box full of someone? he asked. I can’t rub away the mist.

Stoneheart said, She waits in our time, while we have moved on into hers.

It’s a maiden, then, said Michelotto, more or less approvingly. The dwarves nodded.

Michelotto pressed his hands against the lid and felt as if for a spring lock release. But the glass is very pure, he said. I can’t see what is inside, for something like breath clouds the inside of the glass. But the breath makes a silvery beaded backing, and the oval glass does the work of a mirror. Try as I might, all I can see is myself.

That is ever the trouble with human beings, snapped Bitter. The other dwarves looked at him with surprise. Well, what of yourself do you see? he continued, if you must go on about it so?

Not very much, said Michelotto, and that’s the sorry truth. There’s not all that much of me to see. He smiled at himself, though, forgivingly, and with a touch of his mother’s self-admiration.

May I open the box and view the corpse? said Michelotto after a while. Are these the remains of a saint, like Lucy of Narni? Perhaps a necessary holiness would be conferred upon me, and my mental slowness would be corrected. I’m surer of thought than I used to be, but even so, I could do with any blessing.

She has the innocence of a saint, said Gimpy, but she’s only a young woman who has slipped sideways a few feet, into another realm.

Still, I’d like to have her blessing, even if she is dead. Will the body stink after all this time?

Little offends us, said Tasteless, shrugging.

Is it time? asked Heartless. Is it time already? We have been here only since morning, surely! I’ve hardly had a chance to contemplate.

He lifted his nose and sniffed and listened. Several tears tracked into his beard, which was now more white than red. The old threat is hearing the knell of bells calling for a funeral Mass, he said. The next danger may be kneeling here before us, for all I know. The only way to be kept from danger is to be kept dead, and all we decided to do was to try to keep her from the one who would destroy her then. Let life go ahead and destroy her now, in a new and novel way. We have no right to forbid it.

Michelotto took this as permission to continue, and with more dedicated efforts, he worked at the clasps and hasps that secured the lid to the coffin. The dwarves didn’t help. They stood back. Deaf-to-the-World backed into the fiery mountain of ivy, and yelped.

Michelotto laughed—silly little men!—and wrestled the lid, at last, away.

He leaned over and looked at Bianca de Nevada, and his breath stung in his chest.

She hasn’t changed a day, he said. And I remember her now, and the fate that befell her. She was my friend, my Bianca, my good true friend. How has she come to rest like a painted marble beauty in this box of wood and glass?

Your mother took every step she could manage to destroy her, said Blindeye. Here she lies, though, rich as rain. Isn’t she delicate?

Michelotto leaned over the box. The girl was unblemished and incorruptible. Her hair had grown in the box, and made for her a sort of black pool of netting, in which her pale face and her pale hands floated. The clothes in which she’d been put to rest may have rotted away; it was impossible to tell, for the hair covered her as respectably as a nun’s habit. Her eyes were closed, but the face appeared unsunken, unblanched. She looked as if she were asleep.

May I kiss her? he asked.

No, no. No, Michelotto.

The gooseboy turned to argue with the dwarf, who had professed to be excused from responsibility, to find that it wasn’t the dwarf speaking. It wasn’t any of them. It was someone else, pressing through a clot of undergrowth.

The dwarves thought it was Vicente, for he was the only one, besides them, who had come to sit with the girl. It had been some years since he’d shown up, and they had presumed his bad lungs, bad legs, bad eyes, had gotten the better of him at last, and death had allowed him some peace that life had withheld from him. But Vicente could only have gotten older, that much they were sure of, and this was a younger man, one they had never seen.

Michelotto had seen him before, but he couldn’t remember his name. They hadn’t known each other well. But he remembered the stride. The face was older, the beard and the temples flecked with early silver. The eyes were like knotholes into a deep and complicated tree.

I came upon her just as you did, but held back, hardly believing my eyes, he said. Neither that she was there at all, nor that you opened the casket. But in any case, she’s not there for you to kiss.

Who are you to say? asked Michelotto.

The one who put her here, he answered. Not knowing what I was doing.

I had heard you were slaughtered like a pig, said Michelotto.

I just disappeared. That’s all.

Heartless drove his thick fingers into his beard and fished out, one after the other, a stack of florins. These, he said to Ranuccio, I believe are yours.

I didn’t want them before and I don’t want them now. Give them to the poor, said Ranuccio.

Ah, I’m poor enough, said Heartless, and put them back in his beard. You were the one who brought her to us. Did you know that?

I don’t know where she’s been, nor, hardly, where I’ve been. And I’ve never seen you in my life.

Ranuccio Vecchia had confessed his deed in the forest not to Fra Tomasso, but to his grandmother, Primavera, who hadn’t been able to keep her tongue still, and for her gossip had lost it. To protect what was left of Primavera’s life, he’d disappeared from the district. He housed himself, for his penance, under the tutelage of the abbot at Cirocenia, reading what could be found of the Alexandrine and Coptic monks and the desert fathers.

The abbot has released him at last, divining that it was time for him to request forgiveness of the girl’s father. Ranuccio had been making his way to Montefiore across the spines of the hills, trying to avoid the temptation of villages and farms. The smoke on a promontory attracted his attention as he approached, though. It was in his path, so he decided to steal up and peer at what was happening.

It is hardly possible that the Signorina de Nevada lies here in perfection, he admitted. Perhaps I’ve died, and my soul makes its last perambulation about the world, to face its sins and to accept its punishment.

I might have kissed her in the forest, but she was a child, and it would have been a kiss of Judas, leaving her to her fate, said Ranuccio. And so, Michelotto, as far as I can determine, you have no right to interfere. A kiss now cannot kill her further. He knelt at the coffin’s edge and put his hands beneath Bianca’s shoulders, and pulled her up a few inches. Her head fell softly back and her mouth opened. The teeth were pearls and the breath, if breath it could be called, smelled thinly of apple blossoms. Ranuccio put his mouth to hers and apologized.

The heart of the matter

SHE WOULDhave what she wanted, at last.

She passed without impediment into the mouth of the Grand Canal, and the gondolier silently worked the boat between the cliff faces of Venetian palazzi andscuole, churches and shopfronts. The dawn sky was a clever silver, not unlike the water, and it felt as if she were slipping away between sheets of purest silver silk. She leaned back in an ecstasy of release. The fullness of knowledge she had always craved was within reach.

Rome and Ferrara had often been at war with Venice, or at least worried about Venetian interests in the north of the peninsula, but who could not love that principality built on blocks of water, its buildings fringed with Moorish fretwork and stone lace? Its marble facades had a grandeur and dignity that no duomo in Italy could imitate, streaked as they were by the reflective play of sunlight or moonlight upon the canals.

It was odd, she thought, to arrive in a busy municipality like Venice and find it empty. It must be one of the innumerable saints’ days. Or perhaps an invasion had come from the sea, and the armies and the merchants and the beggars and friars and painters had gone lurching toward the Lido to watch the battle. Uncharacteristically, the approach from the south had been left unguarded, and while dozens of gondolas tipped smilingly by, and hundreds of dark windows were unshuttered, no citizen gazed across the water at Lucrezia. No shy girl looked down from a cloistered aerie to spy the Duchessa de Ferrara. No awkward new-bearded soldier, distracted by her beauty, tripped upon his halberd and plunged into the canal, to the roaring laughter of his companions.

It was like lying between sheets of mirror, that was it: the water reflecting the high scoured-kettle gray of the sky, the sky rippling with ribbons of light tossed back by the shallow tidal canals.

She knew the city enough to recognize the gentle S curve of the Grand Canal. She recognized the Albergo del Leon Bianco, its asymmetric arched doorways at gondola level like so many separate mouths into which a corpse might slip. What did the Venetians do with their dead, when there was no place to bury them? She had known this once but couldn’t recall the answer.

Slavs, Mamluks, Levantine and Spanish Jews, Africans, Greeks—the city of a thousand nationalities, its canals like a sieve allowing Asia and Africa to flow into Europe, and Europe to flow out—how could Venice be empty today? And silent. The crash of barter, that noise louder than war, was silent today, as if it were the Nativity. But no bells tolled, and the church steps were empty of the unwashed hoping for alms.

She passed under the Rialto bridge, which was as clear of crowds as if plague had wiped its bloody bottom on both approaches. The Grand Canal made its last turn south and sliced east again, toward the Bacino di San Marco and the Doge’s palace. San Giorgio Maggiore, like a virtual headland of religious reassurance, mounted its domes in the light that seemed dustier than common sense might allow. The details were less firm, though the light was still strong.

And the gondola made its single ceaseless step beyond the Punta della Dogana, to where the water widened with the merge of the Giudecca Canal, and the greatest piazza in Europe spun wheelingly to her left, and the winged sentry opened its mouth and roared from the top of its pillar.

But we stop here, she said, or meant to say, though her words didn’t reverberate in the air. We go to the Doge, to reclaim what is ours. Have you forgotten your instruction? We are not to head toward the open water. Are you mad?

Her mind began to race, though in a slow heavy way. With effort she brought herself to an elbow and managed to turn around. The gondolier must be woolgathering; he needed a sharp reminder.

She gasped, or tried to gasp, but her lungs gave forth no air, and no sound. She clutched the hem of her robe, as if to rend her garment and her skin if necessary, to expose her lungs to air. They must need it. She couldn’t breathe without air. What nonsense was this? Her hand was caught in a rosary of grey-silver pearls.

You must deliver me to the Apple, she cried.

The gondolier paid her no mind. He kept plying the waters with his pike. In the stiffer breeze blowing in from the open sea to the southeast, the cloak that he wore against the morning chill pushed back from both sides, just as she had tried, but failed, to do with her own garment. His hood fell back.

The gondolier raised his rack of horns. The hide on his chest was sliced open, and through the aperture a small cavern was revealed, about the size of the cavity that his heart must have once required. He had no heart, though. Within his chest burned the final Apple, a delicate condensation beginning to form upon it as the cold wind strengthened off the most endless sea.

Montefiore

OFTEN Ihave traveled the road to Montefiore in memory. Today I travel it in true time, true dust, true air. When the track lends me height enough, I can glimpse the villa’s red roofs above the various ranks of poplars, cedars of Lebanon, pines, across the intervening valleys.

Ranuccio doesn’t say much. A habit of silence still obtains from his days in the abbey. But he tries to break it, naming the things of the world for me as if I have lost language. Perhaps I have. By cataloging the road we introduce the world to each other. Newborns in a new world.

But when I ask after my father—or Cesare—or Lucrezia—or garrulous Primavera—or sweet dim Michelotto, and why we left him weeping in that circle of stones on the hill—or vain and frightened Fra Ludovico—Ranuccio has no answers. He will only squeeze my hand. He will not let go—he won’t let go! Not unless I need to escape into the bushes to relieve and cleanse myself.

I won’t let go of him, either, for reasons I don’t yet understand. But there is time. Again, there is time. It rushes like a cloud of insects, an aeration of instants fluttering up from fissures in the ground, against my face; I brush them to see through them, beyond; but I try to see them as well, the instants. Each leaf, whether she be like her sister or not. Each creak of the brother timbers of the world. Each moment of rot and blossom, by turns and simultaneous, and the world in colossal panorama behind, ninety billion instants flying up like snow blown in my face.

We turn at the bottom of the final slope. The world seems emptier than it once did, as if the Four Horsemen have done their job too well, and I have lived on into an afterlife. But no afterlife could smell as sweet as goose shit, could ring with nonsense hammering as of someone most mundanely fixing a warped window casement just out of sight.

We begin to rise. I am hardly equal to the task, after my long rest. Ranuccio would carry me, but I refuse the offer. We pass a flooded field. We cross a stone bridge. We study a green lake for its secrets. I stop to rest on a rock wall I had forgotten—how dear even simple rocks can be. A bit of thornbank I remember from long ago, wilder now, overgrown, grips with all its might to its life.

I see a priest in a soutane and a straw hat against the sun, making wide gestures in the roofless chapel, preaching, for all I can tell, to a gaggle of geese. I see a stout figure on a low stool in the kitchen garden, pulling up radicchio and flecking the dirt off it with a vigorous motion. I see a figure beside her helping—man, woman, I cannot tell—who puts one hand to a hip, and straightens up.

The hand goes up to the eyes, shading them, to study me as I approach out of the shouting light. Then both hands go up, the gesture, in all the dark places that we humans live, of surrender. He suffers what is inevitable. He surrenders to the impossible. He can’t get breath at first, but then he does. He calls my name.

Note

I’ve taken certain liberties with the life stories of historical figures Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia. I’ve omitted details that didn’t serve (the other Borgia siblings, for instance). The Borgia involvement with a de Nevada family is fictional. However, I have used selected scraps of history to lend credence to the narrative.

The glamour of the Borgias rests on the rumors of incest, poisonings, adultery, conspiracy, murder, striking physical beauty, vigorous sexual appetites, hedonism, nepotism, and papal fallibility of the most egregious sort. That the Borgia family is also credited occasionally with bouts of wise and just governance, with art patronage, with interest in the scientific developments of their day, makes less good copy.

Bayezid did send the spear of Longinus, or something purported to be such, to Rome, which suggests that artifacts with biblical credentials, whatever their provenance or their imputed spiritual pizzazz, had some political value.

Prince Dschem was believed to have been murdered through a slow-acting poison administered by Cesare before the Bull of the Borgias escaped from the custody of Charles VIII.

Paracelsus spent time at the university in Ferrara while Lucrezia was Duchessa there. It’s unlikely she ever attended lectures, but she was said to have a lively mind about all manner of things and, like many highborn women of her day, took license to do as she liked whenever she could get away with it.

A bridge on an aqueduct spans the gorge beside the castle at Spoleto, where Lucrezia, at the age of nineteen and newly married for the second time, wasgovernatrice.

During the High Renaissance, the medical use of mercury (to treat syphilis among other ailments) was accompanied by the growing awareness of a side effect of what we might now call paranoia. And grand Spanish families a few generations earlier did bathe in pools coated with mercury. I have imagined the transplanted Borgias might have brought that old custom to Rome with them.

The identification of Cesare Borgia as the model for Machiavelli’sThe Prince is well known. And Lucrezia Borgia’s coloring of her hair with lemon juice was a venial sin at best. The most egregious examples of corruption in the Vatican aren’t my invention, though some of them may well have been exaggerated, the result of a public relations campaign that plagued the Borgias while they were in power and besmirched them further when they lost it.

The Borgia family reputation hasn’t been helped by Victor Hugo’s sensationalLucrèce Borgia, the basis of the Donizetti opera. However, Montserrat Caballé comes closer than anyone else to redeeming Lucrezia Borgia’s reputation as an amoral murderess simply by singing the aria Com’e bello! in a voice of silvery purity. (A recording of her 1965 performance is available on cassette or compact disc.) Recent biographies of Lucrezia and the Borgia family by Rachel Erlanger, Ivan Cloulas, and others will supply more information for readers interested in separating verifiable fact from fiction—either mine or that promulgated by the Borgias’ enemies.

May I be excused for embroidering upon the history of a dynasty whose career has already entered into legend? Cesare Borgia might have had my head for it, and Alexander VI recommended the eventual disposition of my soul, but I like to hope that Lucrezia Borgia, who commissioned Ariosto’sOrlando Furioso, would have understood some of the licenses I’ve been bold enough to take.

And wherever they are, those Borgias, may they rest in peace.

Acknowledgments

With thanks:

to Jane Langton, Jill Paton Walsh, and John Rowe Townsend; roaming about Lucignano, Arezzo, Siena, and Cortona together gave me a golden week to remember;

to Mei-Mei Ellerman for opening Il Vallone to us;

to Mary Norris for her companionship in Spoleto;

to Ann, Sid, and Heather Seamans for company in Castiglione del Lago, and to Anna Tapay for hospitality at Villa Elianna;

to Paolo Chiocchetti for help in Florence;

to Joseph Maguire for helpful conversations about the possible effects on dwarves of having an eighth sibling;

to Andy Newman for tending to the most pertinent matters at home while I traveled to the Concord Public Library and to Tuscany;

to the reliable crew at HarperCollins: Judith Regan, Cassie Jones, Jennifer Suitor, and Carl Raymond;

to William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates;

to David Groff for literary counsel;

to Douglas Smith for the particular magic of the jacket art and interior decorations.

LittleS nowW hite

by the Brothers Grimm

The original version of the classic Grimm’s Fairy TaleTranslated by L.L. Weedon

E-Book Extra: Little Snow White by the Brothers Grimm

E-Book Extra

Little Snow White: The original versionof the classic Grimm’s Fairy Tale,translated by L.L. Weedon.

LONG, LONG AGO,in the winter-time, when the snowflakes were falling like little white feathers from the sky, a beautiful Queen sat beside her window, which was framed in black ebony, and stitched. As she worked, she looked sometimes at the falling snow, and so it happened that she pricked her finger with her needle, so that three drops of blood fell upon the snow. How pretty the red blood looked upon the dazzling white! The Queen said to herself as she saw it, Ah me! If only I had a dear little child as white as the snow, as rosy as the blood, and with hair as black as the ebony window-frame.

Soon afterwards a little daughter came to her, who was white as snow, rosy as the blood, and whose hair was as black as ebony — so she was called Little Snow-White.

But alas! When the little one came, the good Queen died.

A year passed away, and the King took another wife. She was very beautiful, but so proud and haughty that she could not bear to be surpassed in beauty by anyone. She possessed a wonderful mirror which could answer her when she stood before it and said —

Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest of all?

The mirror answered —

Thou, O Queen, art the fairest of all,

and the Queen was contented, because she knew the mirror could speak nothing but the truth.

But as time passed on, Little Snow-White grew more and more beautiful, until when she was seven years old, she was as lovely as the bright day, and still more lovely than the Queen herself, so that when the lady one day asked her mirror —

Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest fair of all?

it answered —

O Lady Queen, though fair ye be, Snow-White is fairer far to see.

The Queen was horrified, and from that moment envy and pride grew in her heart like rank weeds, until one day she called a huntsman and said Take the child away into the woods and kill her, for I can no longer bear the sight of her. And when you return bring with you her heart, that I may know you have obeyed my will.

The huntsman dared not disobey, so he led Snow-White out into the woods and placed an arrow in his bow to pierce her innocent heart, but the little maid begged him to spare her life, and the child’s beauty touched his heart with pity, so that he bade her run away.

Then as a young wild boar came rushing by, he killed it, took out its heart, and carried it home to the Queen.

Poor little Snow-White was now all alone in the wild wood, and so frightened was she that she trembled at every leaf that rustled. So she began to run, and ran on and on until she came to a little house, where she went in to rest.

In the little house everything she saw was tiny, but more dainty and clean than words can tell.

Upon a white-covered table stood seven little plates and upon each plate lay a little spoon, besides which there were seven knives and forks and seven little goblets. Against the wall, and side by side, stood seven little beds covered with snow-white sheets.

Snow-White was so hungry and thirsty that she took a little food from each of the seven plates, and drank a few drops of wine from each goblet, for she did not wish to take everything away from one. Then, because she was so tired, she crept into one bed after the other, seeking for rest, but one was too long, another too short, and so on, until she came to the seventh, which suited her exactly; so she said her prayers and soon fell fast asleep.

When night fell the masters of the little house came home. They were seven dwarfs, who worked with a pick-axe and spade, searching for cooper and gold in the heart of the mountains.

They lit their seven candles and then saw that someone had been to visit them. The first said, Who has been sitting on my chair?

The second said, Who has been eating from my plate?

The third, Who has taken a piece of my bread?

The fourth, Who has taken some of my vegetables?

The fifth, Who has been using my fork?

The sixth, Who has been cutting with my knife?

The seventh, Who has been drinking out of my goblet?

The first looked round and saw that his bed was rumpled, so he said, Who has been getting into my bed?

Then the others looked round and each one cried, Someone has been on my bed too?

But the seventh saw little Snow-White lying asleep in his bed, and called the others to come and look at her; and they cried aloud with surprise, and fetched their seven little candles, so that they might see her the better, and they were so pleased with her beauty that they let her sleep on all night.

When the sun rose Snow-White awoke, and, oh! How frightened she was when she saw the seven little dwarfs. But they were very friendly, and asked what her name was. My name is Snow-White, she answered.

And how did you come to get into our house? questioned the dwarfs.

Then she told them how her cruel step-mother had intended her to be killed, but how the huntsman had spared her life and she had run on until she reached the little house. And the dwarfs said, If you will take care of our house, cook for us, and make the beds, wash, mend, and knit, and keep everything neat and clean, then you may stay with us altogether and you shall want for nothing.

With all my heart, answered Snow-White; and so she stayed.

She kept the house neat and clean for the dwarfs, who went off early in the morning to search for copper and gold in the mountains, and who expected their meal to be standing ready for them when they returned at night.

All day long Snow-White was alone, and the good little dwarfs warned her to be careful to let no one into the house. For, said they, your step-mother will soon discover that you are living here.

The Queen, believing, of course, that Snow-White was dead, and that therefore she was again the most beautiful lady in the land, went to her mirror, and said-

Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest fair of all?

Then the mirror answered —

O Lady Queen, though fair ye be, Snow-White is fairer far to see. Over the hills and far away, She dwells with seven dwarfs to-day.

How angry she was, for she knew that the mirror spoke the truth, and that the huntsman must have deceived her. She thought and thought how she might kill Snow-White, for she knew she would have neither rest nor peace until she really was the most beautiful lady in the land. At length she decided what to do. She painted her face and dressed herself like an old pedlar-woman, so that no one could recognize her, and in this disguise she climbed the seven mountains that lay between her and the dwarfs’ house, and knocked at their door and cried, Good wares to sell — very cheap to — day!

Snow-White peeped from the window and said, Good day, good-wife, and what are your wares?

All sorts of pretty things, my dear, answered the woman. Silken laces of every colour, and she held up a bright-coloured one, made of plaited silks.

Surely I might let this honest old woman come in? thought Snow-White, and unbolted the door and bought the pretty lace.

Dear, dear, what a figure you are, child, said the old woman; come, let me lace you properly for once.

Snow-White had no suspicious thoughts, so she placed herself in front of the old woman that she might fasten her dress with the new silk lace. But in less than no time the wicked creature had laced her so tightly that she could not breathe, but fell down upon the ground as though she were dead. Now, said the Queen, I am once more the most beautiful lady in the land, and she went away.

When the dwarfs came home they were very grieved to find their dear little Snow-White lying upon the ground as though she were dead. They lifted her gently and, seeing that she was too tightly laced, they cut the silken cord, when she drew a long breath and then gradually came back to life.

When the dwarfs heard all that had happened they said, The pedlar-woman was certainly the wicked Queen. Now, take care in future that you open the door to none when we are not with you.

The wicked Queen had no sooner reached home than she went to her mirror, and said-

Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest fair of all?

And the mirror answered as before —

O Lady Queen, though fair ye be, Snow-White is fairer far to see. Over the hills and far away, She dwells with seven dwarfs to-day.

The blood rushed to her face as she heard these words, for she knew that Snow-White must have come to life again.

But I will manage to put an end to her yet, she said, and then, by means of her magic, she made a poisonous comb.

Again she disguised herself, climbed the seven mountains, and knocked at the door of the seven dwarfs’ cottage, crying, Good wares to sell — very cheap today!

Snow-White looked out of the window and said, Go away, good woman, for I dare not let you in.

Surely you can look at my goods, answered the woman, and held up the poisonous comb, which pleased Snow-White so well that she opened the door and bought it.

Come, let me comb your hair in the newest way, said the woman, and the poor unsuspicious child let her have her way, but no sooner did the comb touch her hair than the poison began to work, and she fell fainting to the ground.

There, you model of beauty, said the wicked woman, as she went away, you are done for at last!

But fortunately it was almost time for the dwarfs to come home, and as soon as they came in and found Snow-White lying upon the ground they guessed that her wicked step-mother had been there again, and set to work to find out what was wrong.

They soon saw the poisonous comb, and drew it out, and almost immediately Snow-White began to recover, and told them what had happened.

Once more they warned her to be on her guard, and to open the door to no one.

When the Queen reached home, she went straight to the mirror and said —

Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who is the fairest fair of all?

And the mirror answered-

O Lady Queen, though fair ye be, Snow-White is fairer far to see. Over the hills and far away, She dwells with seven dwarfs to-day.

When the Queen heard these words she shook with rage. Snow-White shall die, she cried, even if it costs me my own life to manage it.

She went into a secret chamber, where no one else ever entered, and there she made a poisonous apple, and then she painted her face and disguised herself as a peasant woman, and climbed the seven mountains and went to the dwarfs’ house.

She knocked at the door. Snow-White put her head out of the window, and said, I must not let anyone in; the seven dwarfs have forbidden me to do so.

It’s all the same to me, answered the peasant woman; I shall soon get rid of these fine apples. But before I go I’ll make you a present of one.

Oh! No, said Snow-White, for I must not take it.

Surely you are not afraid of poison? said the woman. See, I will cut one in two: the rosy cheek you shall take, and the white cheek I will eat myself.

Now, the apple had been so cleverly made that only the rose-cheeked side contained the poison. Snow-White longed for the delicious-looking fruit, and when she saw that the woman ate half of it, she thought there could be no danger, and stretched out her hand and took the other part. But no sooner had she tasted it than she fell down dead.

The wicked Queen laughed aloud with joy as she gazed at her. White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony, she said, this time the dwarfs cannot awaken you.

And she went straight home and asked her mirror —

Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest fair of all?

And at length it answered —

Thou, O Queen, art fairest of all!

So her envious heart had peace — at least, so much peace as an envious heart can have.

When the little dwarfs came home at night they found Snow-White lying upon the ground. No breath came from her parted lips, for she was dead. They lifted her tenderly and sought for some poisonous object which might have caused the mischief, unlaced her frock, combed her hair, and washed her with wine and water, but all in vain — dead she was and dead she remained. They laid her upon a bier, and all seven of them sat round about it, and wept as though their hearts would break, for three whole days.

When the time came that she should be laid in the ground they could not bear to part from her. Her pretty cheeks were still rosy red, and she looked just as though she were still living.

We cannot hide her away in the dark earth, said the dwarfs, and so they made a transparent coffin of shining glass, and laid her in it, and wrote her name upon it in letters of gold; also they wrote that she was a King’s daughter. Then they placed the coffin upon the mountain-top, and took it in turns to watch beside it. And all the animals came and wept for Snow-White, first an owl, then a raven, and then a little dove.

For a long, long time little Snow-White lay in the coffin, but her form did not wither; she only looked as though she slept, for she was still as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony.

It chanced that a King’s son came into the wood, and went to the dwarfs’ house, meaning to spend the night there. He saw the coffin upon the mountain-top, with little Snow-White lying within it, and he read the words that were written upon it in letters of gold.

And he said to the dwarfs, If you will but let me have the coffin, you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it to you.

But the dwarfs answered, We would not sell it for all the gold in the world.

Then said the Prince, Let me have it as a gift, I pray you, for I cannot live without seeing little Snow-White, and I will prize your gift as the dearest of my possessions.

The good little dwarfs pitied him when they heard these words, and so gave him the coffin. The King’s son then bade his servants place it upon their shoulders and carry it away, but as they went they stumbled over the stump of a tree, and the violent shaking shook the piece of poisonous apple which had lodged in Snow-White’s throat out again, so that she opened her eyes, raised the lid of the coffin, and sat up, alive once more.

Where am I? she cried, and the happy Prince answered, Thou art with me, dearest.

Then he told her all that had happened, and how he loved her better than the whole world, and begged her to go with him to his father’s palace and be his wife. Snow-White consented, and went with him, and the wedding was celebrated with great splendour and magnificence.

Little Snow-White’s wicked step-mother was bidden to the feast, and when she had arrayed herself in her most beautiful garments, she stood before her mirror, and said —

Mirror, mirror upon the wall, Who is the fairest fair of all?

And the mirror answered —

O Lady Queen, though fair ye be, The young Queen is fairer to see.

Oh! How angry the wicked woman was then, and so terrified, too, that she scarcely knew what to do. At first she thought she would not go to the wedding at all, but then she felt that she could not rest until she had seen the young Queen. No sooner did she enter the palace than she recognized little Snow-White, and could not move for terror.

Then a pair of red-hot iron shoes was brought into the room with tongs and set before her, and these she was forced to put on and to dance in them until she could dance no longer, but fell down dead, and that was the end of her.

THE END