Marcus van Heller
The House of Borgia, book1
CHAPTER 1
When she was only ten years old Cardinal Roderigo had doted on the remarkable physical development of his daughter and now, at the age of eleven, he thought of her as a fresh, young woman with her breasts and buttocks as full as cannonballs.
But it was not only her voluptuous dimensions which produced the burning erection under Roderigo Borgia's robes every time he watched her playing in her little girl's shift which seemed so unsuitable. It was the deep, knowing look in those bright blue eyes, which seemed to look past his apparent paternal smile and see the incestuous desire beyond. And in the look was the hint of a smile, as if she were daring him to translate his desire to action.
Of course, Cardinal Roderigo was aware that his own feelings interfered with his objectivity of vision. It was hardly likely that his daughter, raised in a true God-fearing way, could really have the faintest inkling of the lustful labyrinths of men's minds. And yet there was a definite sexual aura about her which he could not reconcile with his imagination, nor with her youth.
He sat on a log in the grounds of their house near St. Peter's watching her playing now with her brother Cesare. Cesare pushed the swing while she, with her shift above her knees and her legs apart as she urged it to greater heights, sat on the wooden platform as if on a horse.
The paternal smile was fixed on Cardinal Roderigo's face. Any observer would have felt his heart stirred at the sight of the busiest, most important cardinal in Rome, relaxing with his children. But through that smile, the Cardinal's eyes dwelt on the uplifted breasts as she reached upwards, holding the ropes of the swing. Their outline was forceful; they seemed to spring out towards his eyes. It suddenly occurred to him that she hadn't put on her undergarments today.
“Higher, higher,” she urged her brother. Even the voice, he mused, was that of a woman; it had body and modulation. It had a soft, caressing warmth, the way her flesh would be if it nestled nakedly against one.
The swing was mounting. Back and then forward toward him. His eyes dropped to her well-formed legs. She squirmed her bottom on the swing, exhorting it with passionate fondlings to fly up and up. The Cardinal found the movement exciting. He imagined, tried to imagine, the feel of that bottom against his loins. He stared at her hips. His face colored slightly. He could see right up those delicious, milky thighs to the darkness of their junction. Oh those thighs! He raised his eyes guiltily, with an effort, and saw that hers were on him, lids slightly lowered, suggesting a smile. He started. The little minx. She was positively inviting him. He was convinced of it.
“Lucrezia, my child,” he said. “Have you no warm clothes under your shift?”
She squirmed her bottom and kicked her legs forward, urging her mount on. “No father. It's so warm, today.” “It's not a question of warmth, my sweet one. It's unladylike to be naked under such a thin garment. It shows off too much of your body.”
He enjoyed this sort of conversation. It was fatherly because he was, after all, speaking to his little daughter for her own good; it was also rousing because he was speaking to an unknown woman about her raw beauty. It could be indulged in with safety.
“I thought it wouldn't matter,” Lucrezia purred. “There is nobody to see me but you and Cesare.”
“Paternity and fraternity, my dear, do not turn men into marble statues.”
He continued to look at her, suddenly, overwhelmingly aware that he was talking to no child at all. He was talking to some strange, instinctive essence of woman which needed no experience to know about the effect of the apple. She looked back at him, unspeaking, her eyes sphinxlike, her thighs still wide, her arms relaxed a little on the ropes so that her breasts jogged slightly as she jerked forward.
Roderigo glanced past her to Cesare. His son was two years older and as beautiful as his sister. But he was not so aware. Even now, he seemed not to have followed the conversation. He concentrated, grinning, on his job of hurtling Lucrezia up to a horizontal sweep. His secret ambition was to see her swoop right up and over the bar.
“You must always wear underclothes in the Orsini Palace,” the Cardinal said, determined to keep the conversation going. “It would be unbecoming to your tutors to treat them like suitors.”
She stared at him for a few seconds as the swing flowed forward and back. He knew she was working over his words, but she was clever enough to make it appear that she understood.
“Passion is a poor accompaniment to scholarly disinterest,” he pursued, reveling in the train of his thought, the sequence of images- of tutors mixing Greek with French in confusion, while his daughter calmly surveyed their discomfiture with deep eyes and a half-shown bosom.
“Will study make me scholarly and disinterested?”
You precocious little bitch, he thought. I ought to spank you-but I should ejaculate over your flushed buttocks even as my hand lashed them.
“You are too bursting with the good things of life,” he answered.
“Cesare,” Lucrezia said, “I want to come down.”
Reluctantly Cesare caught the swing, moved back and forth with it, slowing it. With the courtesy he'd always been taught, he moved around and lifted his sister down. She slipped down him, still watching her father. Her limbs seemed to cling to her brother's like slowly relaxing rubber. As her feet reached the ground she looked up at his face suddenly and her round mouth parted in a smile to which her brother responded.
Her father saw the smile and sensed the desire behind it. But his son, he saw, was not awakened to his young sister's potentialities.
He looked at Cesare. The boy was already tall and sturdy. He must have had sexual desire, must experience it often, but it did not focus on his sister. A pity, the Cardinal decided. The little witch needed to know what it was like and she had a bit of a crush on her brother — that he had noticed in years gone by.
Cesare would be more or less of a handsome stranger to her of course, away as he was most of the time, studying at Perugia. An idea occurred to him and he smiled at it. He would open Cesare's eyes to the little fruit that his sister was. She would, surely, do the rest without any encouragement. Then, when she had been deflowered by Cesare's growing manhood, the way would be prepared for his own full organ to enjoy an hour or two of passion with her.
“Why don't you go and bathe in the pool,” he suggested. “Take off all your clothes and let the sun fill you with goodness.”
Lucrezia looked quickly at her brother. Cesare looked at his father. A number of unuttered questions clouded, uncomfortably, in his eyes.
“Oh, don't worry,” the Cardinal said paternally. “There will be nobody to see you and you are well sheltered by the pergola.”
Cesare continued to look uncomfortable and his sister caught his hand.
“Poor Cesare. I think he's embarrassed,” she said innocently. “Why are you embarrassed, my darling brother?”
Cardinal Roderigo heard the innocent-sounding words mincing provocatively from her pretty lips and smiled inwardly. He wondered just how far her mind went, how much of the next hour or two she anticipated.
“Embarrassed,” he roared, with mock impatience. “Of course Cesare's not embarrassed. He has too fine and athletic a frame to be embarrassed to let his little sister see it. Give her a spanking Cesare when there's nothing to protect her-and then duck her head in the pool.”
Cesare smiled. He was still embarrassed, but now he dared not show it. His father's praise of his body had pleased him.
